Wendel (6761.TWO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Wendel 24th Investor Day. As you can see, we have quite a nice agenda today, and we hope that these sessions will give you a better understanding of Wendel's new value creation profile. There will be Q&A sessions at the end of each presentation for Wendel, the Q&A session will take place at the very end of this event. For those who are not in the room, you can ask questions from the web, and I will read them. Given today's very rich agenda, I think it's time to start now with the first presentation by Laurent Mignon, Wendel's CEO. Jingle please.

Good -- not good morning, good afternoon to everybody. Very happy to be there with you and to share with you the transformation of Wendel and where we want to take Wendel. You'll see that we're pretty passionate about it. I think the team has been very motivated preparing this day and showing you all what we've changed and how much perspective that we have. So to start, I think it's important that we share that Wendel has a change. It has become a leading investment firm in private assets. We invest both our shareholder money and the fund of our clients with an owner-operator mindset aiming to create long-term value for all our stakeholders. We do believe in the strength of the -- and the long-term alignment among all our stakeholders. We do think that the ecosystem that we've built around Wendel today is value creating for long term and is unique. We also think that this model help us getting the best talent, and you know how much talent is important in this business and that we can generate long-term return. Lastly, and I think it's very important. We have the support of one of the oldest industrial family in Europe, the Wendel family, which with a long-term view help us taking a long-term view for our own strategy. Wendel today now operates with 2 robust and complementary value creation engines, both of them focus on private assets. The first one is Wendel investment managers. This is a unique, diversified asset managers platform which is focused on mid-market in Europe and the U.S. We do think that mid-market is the market where we can add the most value for our clients. We have critical size, EUR 46 billion of assets under management, EUR 200 million -- over EUR 200 million of fee-related earnings in 2026 on a pro forma basis with committed adviser. We've got organic growth potential with over 15% potential growth of this FRE basis. But Cyril Marie will come in more detail to explain you how. And in addition to that, we've got potential performance-related earnings that will start to fuel in the earnings of Wendel in 5 to 7 years. given the vintage of the funds, but that could generate significant value. Again, Cyril will come back to that. On the other side, we have the Wendel Principal Investment. This is the core and the starting point of Wendel. This is our DNA. But we think that we can improve our performance to be in line with buyout standard. We have EUR 5.3 billion of net asset value. We think that we've got now a much more efficient model in order to manage those assets, and David will come back to that very in detail afterwards. We think we've got great assets, fairly valued assets. We can target 12% to 16% return on those assets. And on the one, we're going to add to the platform whenever we will invest the money that has been done, thanks to a very active asset rotation policy. We are a long-term shareholder, but we're also an active manager of our assets. And I think that thanks to that, you will see we can generate significant cash flow in the years to come. So how have we achieved that change over the last 3 years. Just few words about the past and then we'll concentrate ourselves in the future. We've sold EUR 3.6 billion of assets during this period, and we have reinvested EUR 2.7 billion in new assets or companies. You have here in mind all what have been done from the sale of Constantia, some sale of BV in order to reduce our exposure. We still are a very committed shareholder of BV, but we thought it was too much exposure to our old [indiscernible] to the acquisition of Globeducate, the acquisition of Scalian. But strategically, more importantly is the acquisition of IK Partners, which was announced in October '23 the acquisition of Monroe Capital, which was announced in October '24 and the acquisition of Committed Advisor, which was announced in October '25. We've executed a major transformation. And I think we have to realize that. This transformation, you can see it here from an asset of value base, which was mostly between unlisted and listed assets. Now it's really about asset management, which account for roughly 30% of the value of Wendel and 70% now from the direct investment. And that has allowed us to deliver significant value. 20% of our current market cap have been returned to shareholders over the last 3 years, 20%. This is EUR 700 million that has been returned since '23 to our shareholders, EUR 574 million through dividend which is an increase by 51% to the same period 2022 and EUR 129 million through share buybacks. Now where do we want to go? What do we want to do? We've made the transformation. We've created the platform, and they think now from that, we can build significant value going forward. Our model will be a significant cash generation model. It will start by the asset management. Asset management will generate recurring and growing cash flows through fees streams. The second one will be the active management of our permanent capital portfolio. The third one, which is a key element, too, is to have an efficient operating model, a lean way to work, less cash burden from the management of the holding companies. And the fourth pillar is to keep a structure -- a financial structure, which is solid with an investment-grade rating. Doing all that, will allow us to generate EUR 7 billion of cash by 2030, at least EUR 7 billion. And what are we going to do with this EUR 7 billion, we're going first, invest in supporting the growth of our asset management platform over EUR 2.5 billion. We're going to keep on investing in new companies for EUR 1.7 billion. David will go back on that. We're going to give back money to our shareholders, over EUR 1.6 billion over the period. And if you make the math, there are still EUR 1.2 billion. And this EUR 1.2 billion is some flexibility to manage the balance sheet, but also to return either more money to shareholders, depending on how the value of the company evolve or invest in new companies if needed. EUR 1.6 billion back to shareholders at least during the period, just to have a nudge of magnitude, this is EUR 35 per share, which is close to 40% of the value of the company today. And this is only one part of the capital allocation, which is over EUR 7 billion, as I mentioned. Now let's look to the EUR 7 billion. This EUR 7 billion, as I said, will be generated by recurring cash flow from the asset management, which is brand new and asset rotation and we will be active in managing the portfolio, listed portfolio, but nonlisted portfolio. From that, we will paid dividend, EUR 1.3 billion over the period at least. We'll do share buyback, and you'll see that the EUR 300 million I'm putting here is the one we announced for '26, I will come back to that. We'll invest in the asset management, EUR 2.5 billion. What is the EUR 2.5 billion, SID money to support the growth of our expertise invest in new initiatives of those expertise of Monroe, I committed adviser to kick-start new products, help them grow faster. It's buying back the minority shareholders of IT of Monroe of Committed Adviser as planned. And last, additional expertise that we can add through M&A. But the last point is less important than the 2 ones. We have built our platform. We can grow from that platform. That's our #1 priority in the asset management and I think we've got a very sound base to do that. Cyril will, I think, help you understand that further. Then we've got EUR 1.7 billion that we will invest in new companies. And we'll do that with the support of the new setup that we've organized through the mandate we've given to IK, and David will come back to that. And in the middle, you've got the EUR 1.2 billion, which is really the surplus that we have here that will be split between shareholder return or investment depending on environment. We will judge whether the share price -- if the share price still stays with too much discount, obviously, we will give priority to giving shareholder return. If not, I think we will keep on investing to create superior return on these investments. Where will it lead to the company look like in 2030? A lot of you ask me what -- how do you see the company in 5 years? Well, 50% of the intrinsic value of the company, at least will be coming from the asset management. Then the rest will be the direct investment either through SID Money, sponsor money also the investment in the portfolio as we've been an investor in nonlisted assets with the aim of creating capital gain, capital appreciation. This strategy is there to generate value and to generate stronger return to shareholders, but not at the detriment of growing the company long term. We are, on one side, creating a model that is self-growing that will keep on growing and that will generate long-term value. And at the same time, we have a predictable, growing dividend policy and the ability to make share buyback if the discount in the company is too wide and it makes them sense to invest part of the money in this discount. Dividend. I think you already know the dividend policy that we've explained, I think, 2 years ago, but it's important you understand it's pretty simple. We're paying 2.5% of the investment portfolio, whether this is SID money, whether this is investment in companies, why 2.5%? Rough calculation. I say we're expecting 13% return on average, let's say, 12% to 16%, right? 16% -- 12% -- so you take 20% of that. 20% is giving back to the shareholders, 80% is reinvested. That's a way to look to the 2.5%. And the rest is we're giving 90% of the cash flow of the asset management, you don't need capital for growing asset management. That's beauty of that business, and we're giving 90% of that, which means that on average, compared to the value from the 2.5% of the net asset value at the start, it will grow to at least 3.5% of the global value of the firm. This is predictable. This is sustainable. This is growing. Yet current share price does not reflect what we think is the value of Wendel. So we have to take some action to that. And that's why we're going to do a share buyback program, we're going to buy up to 9% of the shares of the company. Technically, we will cancel some of the shares that are on our balance sheet, 3.8%. We have 4.8% today. We have to keep 1% for regulatory issues, and we use the ability to buy 9% in the market in 2026, 9% of the value of the company. Well, I want everybody to understand is that we have created now, I think a pretty unique engine where we have value creation through capital gains through our investment and we've put that in a mood and in a way to do it, to manage it, which I think give us the best possibility to create that value. But we've also created a very strong and unique asset management platform that will generate recurring, growing cash flow that will be available for shareholder return. We've worked on the cost of the holding company in order to make sure that we are lean. We've moved to close to 100 people to less than 60 people managing these assets. And we will generate at least EUR 1.6 billion to shareholders in the coming years. So that gives you a little bit of the [indiscernible] of what we're going to do. And now I will hand over to David. He will go through the Wendel Principal investment part. And then you will have Cyril, who will talk about the Wendel Investment Management part. David?

Thank you, Laurent. Good afternoon, everyone. I propose now that we talk about our portfolio of Wendel investment. Today, the portfolio is composed. The new operating model that Laurent touched upon, we announced that during our latest quarterly results, we're going to give you more details on how this is going to work. And then we are going to end this presentation on our ambition on Wendel principle. How much capital we want to deploy the return we expect. So let's start with the current portfolio. You can see here the 8 portfolio companies that we have in Wendel Principal Investments. You know them pretty well. 5 private companies, 3 listed, 1 of which is going to go private by the end of the year, Targets, the squeeze-out offer should end by December. But what is important here is the diversification. There is no company here, which is having a weight which is too excessive compared to the others. So in terms of waiting, none of them is too big. It's pretty diversified in terms of geographies, with headquarter in Europe, headquartered in the U.S. and in terms of business model as well. We have industrial companies, business services with -- and even some infra. So a very diversified portfolio with strong companies. Andee Harris and William Rozé are with us today, the CEO of CPI and Scalian. We'll talk later about those companies to give you the what we see in terms of long-term trends. But suffice to say that for these 8 companies, we see some positive growth coming. Another point we wanted to make on this slide is on valuation. Laurent mentioned that we believe that our portfolio is fairly valued. And so we wanted to give you a bit more details on how we value each of them in our portfolio because each time we sell an asset, you can see that the proceeds are higher than our NAV. So we wanted to share on how we calculate this lab, where these numbers are coming from. Usually, the preferred valuation multiple approach is the peer multiple. We select a sample of peers. That's what we do for Scalian, for Stahl, for ACAMS and CPI, and we apply those public multiples to those companies' earnings. So we don't take long-term multiples, which are flat. We revised those numbers on a quarterly basis as we do our NAV calculation. So those are fresh multiples. We do revise down when the market is down, we do revise down our valuation based on those peer multiples. This is almost market-to-market type of valuation, except it is done 4 times a year. For Globeducate, it's a bit different. We use transaction multiples because there is no actual good comparable listed peers. And at the same time, there are a lot of transactions in the K12 industries. So a lot of good data point that we're using. And usually, the buyers and sellers are disclosing some interesting information on quality information, so we can use this approach for Globeducate, which we don't do for the rest of the portfolio. And obviously, for the 2 other listed companies, BV and AHS, we use the average share price, a 20-day average share price before the end of the quarter. Tarkett, we used the EUR 17 squeeze-out price, obviously. So you can see it's a very robust methodology, which is reviewed by our board, by our Audit Committee, by our auditors. So it's a very rigorous process. And so we believe it's a strong portfolio, which is really fairly valued. And as Laurent mentioned, portfolio rotation to come, we should expect some proceeds to go beyond this EUR 5.3 billion valuation. So this is the portfolio, but I think what is probably more interesting is to talk about the way we operate. We mentioned during Q3 that we were going to change the way going forward, starting January 1. We're going to operate this Wendel principal investment. So we're going to give you more details on how this is going to work. What we realize that recently over the last few years, the industry has gone through some changes. Scale matters more and more. We need more sector understanding, sector expertise. We need to have access to a broader geographies in terms of sourcing. And we need to have some talents with very strong execution capabilities. We need to act quickly. And so we need to have a team with a lot of repetition, a lot of experience. So it's a business where scale matters more and more. And we believe that we need to reach critical scale in asset management as well in the Wendel Principal investment area. So when you consider this that you need more scale, you need to have a broader reach, you need more expertise. What we do about this? Well, we looked at our internal capabilities and in our portfolio with the IK team, we do have those capabilities. I will show you later on a broader description of IK, but you will see the reach and the pool of talent of IK is really impressive. And so we try to build with IK, an advisory mandate where we will get access to this talent to this expertise, to this reach and improve the performance of Wendel Principle further. So the way it's going to work is that Wendel Principal investment is going to be advised by partners on the current portfolio and on all future investments. They're going to advise us on how to create more value in our portfolio with their team of operating partners, with their team of debt capital market partners, equity capital markets, all the resources over 200 professionals at IK is going to help to grow the value of the current portfolio. They're going to help us to source more opportunities. They have 9 offices, 220 professional on the ground. Their access and their network is much wider than ours. And so we're going to benefit from their boots on the ground. That being said, we are not changing our strategy. We will continue to invest in the sectors that we know we will continue to deploy capital in assets which we're going to control. We are going to keep the assets on our balance sheet. So everything that you know about our investment strategy is going to be the same. But the way we're going to operate source, transact, monitor our companies is going to change quite profoundly with the help of our IK partners team. And in terms of Horizon, just in terms of strategy, we continue to look for 4 to 6 years old. But we want to have the option to keep the assets longer if we believe there is still some strong potential. So an horizon which is typical of the buyout industry, but we want to have the optionality to remain a long-term shareholder if need be because this is our DNA, and we want to keep that option. So with this change, with this advisory mandate, which is going to start on January 1, we believe we are going to have the scale that I mentioned earlier that is needed. We're going to have the state-of-the-art investment platform with the best talent that you have out there in the private equity industry. We're also going to get something very important in the ecosystem that Laurent was mentioning, the access to potential coinvestor IT Partners has a lot of clients, a lot of limited partners who invest in IK, but are looking for additional co-investment opportunities. And we're going to provide them with additional co-investment opportunities. So those clients of IK are going to become partners of us in some new investments. And what does that mean? I will come back to that later, is to make larger transaction and more transactions for the same amount of capital that Wendel will deploy. So this is a very important point. And last, Laurent mentioned it, we also want to be very cost efficient and very effective. This transition to an internal team is going to be smoothless and going to be very cost efficient as well. So what should we expect from this change going forward? We believe it's going to simplify our model the way we behave, the way we manage our business. The investment team will be 100% focused on investing surrounded by an investment team. So in the proper ecosystem without some corporate functions or some corporate needs. It allows us to operate with a leaner team as well. So simplify and leaner. It gives us also access to the IK playbook, the way they deploy capital, the buy-and-build platform that they are very keen to do. I think Chris Masek mentioned to you their strategy last year. So they do have a playbook of identifying the right opportunities, deploying capital, and we're going to benefit from that. So a leaner, simpler organization, and hopefully, some investment with better returns. So this is the IK partner ecosystem I was mentioning earlier. I has transacted over 200 operations over the last 2 decades, so they are very active. One of the most active, if not the most active GP in PE and Europe with a very successful track record, you can see here, 25% growth return over the last 20 years, so pretty impressive return. The team is, as you can see, is very strong, 15 operating partner. So you have specialists in purchasing, in pricing in AI, all that is going to be available for -- to grow the Verde assets. They also have a capital market team. So a team specialized in raising new debt, a team specialized in raising equity. So to find those co-investments I was mentioning earlier, those 7 people are going to be very helpful to syndicate some equity. They have 9 offices in Europe. You saw some nice pictures of the cities where they are implemented earlier, but they have a very, very strong footprint. Today, Wendel is present in New York, in Paris and Luxembourg. And with IK, we know have accessed the whole Scandi part of Europe and the Latin Europe as well. So it's a very different geography is coverage, and that's going to help to have higher funnel, a higher number of potential opportunities that we're going to review a better deal flow, which hopefully is going to generate better returns. So you can see very deep talent, very deep reach and very successful track record on which we are going to base our WPI investment strategy going forward. So with this new setup, what should we expect? Laurent, you mentioned it earlier, 12% to 16% return on our current portfolio and then future investments, which is, I would say, the standard of the best is in class by our teams in Europe with consistent returns. It's on average. Some of our portfolio will probably do better. Some of them could do slightly lower, but we believe in this double-digit return expectation, thanks to this new setup. We also want to remain in the strategy that we presented to you last year, EUR 600 million of equity type of investment. But Wendel will only provide roughly more than this equity commitment, like say, EUR 300 million of equity coming from our balance sheet and EUR 300 million from new partners from co-investors that we will find, thanks to the team I mentioned earlier, to help us make larger investments, so bigger assets, safer companies, companies which will be clearly bigger than the assets that are targeted by IK in its mid-cap funds. So there will not be any conflict. It will be clearly on the upper mid-cap zone where IK is not playing. And it will allow for the same amount of capital deployed, the EUR 1.7 billion that Laurent mentioned to make more investment so to have a broader portfolio, a more diversified portfolio. So this is a very important feature and one of the most exciting takeaway of this advisory mandates, the potential to raise co-investment on a regular basis for the new investments. So you can see ambitious returns, the potential to raise some additional investment to build a very diversified group of assets that we will grow with the operating partners of IK. So we are very excited, and we believe that we have a portfolio which is today really going to deliver a lot of growth in the coming years. Now that we have discussed the Wendel Principal of Portfolio, I think it's time to talk a bit more about zooming on 2 companies. We have the chance today to have William Rozé, the CEO of Scalian and Andee Harris, the new CEO of CPI. So I propose that we talk about Scalian. So Jingle. Welcome, William. Just before we talk about you and we -- I try to briefly summarize your CV, which is pretty lengthy, a quick word and a reminder on Scalian. It's an investment that we made 2 years ago in 2023. We invested around EUR 650 million as you can see on this slide. And today, we own 82% of the company alongside the management team. The management team of Scalian is a very large shareholder of Scalian. It's part of the alignment of interest. And I think it's part of the reason of the success that we see going forward on Scalian. I'm not going to spend too much time on describing the business because you're going to do a much better job than I am. But in a nutshell, Scalian's a European consulting firm, which is focusing on the digital transformation on industrial companies. A quick word on William before I leave you the floor. So William, you joined mid-September, but after a very, very long carrier, William is a veteran in the engineering industries. He looks very young, but is a veteran. He spent over like 30 years in the engineering industries. He grew up through the ranks at Altran from managing a P&L region up to the leadership and CEO of Altran. And then with the merger with Capgemini. You stayed at Capgemini, and then you led the engineering division of Capgemini as a member of the Executive Committee. So a very successful career, and we are very excited to have you at Scalian and we want to hear why you are also excited to lead this company. So the floor is yours.

Thank you, David. Thank you, everyone. As a veteran of this business, let me answer to the first question, why joining Scalian. And honestly, I decided to join Scalian because this company has an incredible potential and I want to lead this potential and make this company a leader of the market. I started my career in tools in the [indiscernible] sector and already met the team of Scalian at that time. They were in the market taking care of critical software and it was a huge potential that was already visible in this country -- in this company. So definitely, I joined because there are many good things but we have also some few changes in this company. And using my experience, I want with the leadership team, be a leader in the way we transform this company in the way we perform. And this is the journey that I want to share with you with this presentation. Let's start by speak about Scalian and who we are with a short ID card that explain first that we are a pure player in some free dominant expertise. The first one is software and system engineering. The second one is operational excellence. And the third 1 is digital solution. And it's not only the expertise that we want to push is how we grow the people inside the company. It's more than 5,000 engineers, and we have delivered in June on the fiscal year of June 2025, EUR 522 million. Now if we progress and give you more insight regarding the company, you can see that we have a quite balanced portfolio, client portfolio covering 50% of our revenue with the analytics space and defense industry and 50% with mobility. Here, we are speaking about automotive and train with energy, which is a very important sector for us but also car banking and industry and tech industry. Last but not least, we have already 2 global engineering centers, meaning areas we have organized our own factories to support the business one is in India. The other one is in Morocco. So all in all, it's a quite company that is strong in the foundation that make us very recognized in our expertise as a pure player of the market. What are the drivers of our market. And I'll share with you here a market review that was done by Zinnov and Everest, where we show that it's a growing market. And it is a combination of the physical world and the digital world. In dark blue, you see that here, we are more speaking about the core engineering. What is the core engineering is how we do a plane, a car, a train, and our company like us can help them to build that kind of complex engine. The light blue is more the digital engineering, meaning how we help them to go to the intelligent industry. Intelligent industry is a digital twin, the simulation, the virtualization of the process. And here, it's a question of 2 main drivers. The first one helps them accelerate exact time to value. The second one is to be more efficient in the way we implement software and AI at scale. We are speaking about the industry at scale is absolutely key in our industry. So after speaking about the drivers of this market that are already pivotal for most of our clients, I want to speak about the industry. And here, this industry, you can see that, as I said before, we have a quite balanced portfolio with well-known companies. If I speak about the few of the top 5 industry we are working and clients we are working with, I can speak about Airbus, the defense industry, Amazon or Volkswagen, all of them, they are in a situation with a huge transformation. I'll give you a concrete signal. Airbus, it's a backlog of 8,600 planes to deliver in the coming years. It's 10 years on backlog. This year, they will certainly lend around more than 800 planes at the end of the year. So a huge backlog and acceleration of their supply is one of the key challenges that [indiscernible] is leading for the company. I'll give you another one, Volkswagen, this company, which is the first automaker in the world. Today, they deliver a car in more than 48 months. At the same time, and you have seen that with BYD, this new Chinese company, they are able to develop a car in 20 months. So back to what I said before, one of the drivers of the market, yes, the way we help our client to accelerate the cycle of development is key in this industry. And each time we are helping them to accelerate the way they design, the way they produce, the way they support, we are helping them to move faster. If you progress in our journey, being a citizen of the industry is not only talking about the industry and how we help them on the way the dynamic because the value chain is evolving. But also it's a question of talent and a company like us is looking for the best talent in the world, whoever they are and being able to bring them at home to attract them is 1 of the key assets that we have as a company, being sharp being a pure player make us relevant in the way we attract the best and the next generation that we need to build that kind of transformation. Let's move on and speak about the global landscape that is leading the company. We are a global player. I was speaking about expertise. You can see the 3 bank domain highlighted since the start of this presentation. What is key for us is to be close and build intimacy close to our clients. You can see that we are able to support them in all their main premises. I can give you the example of Airbus that did the acquisition of Spirit recently and the company that was chosen or one of the companies that was chosen to help them to manage this industrial transfer. The day 1 was this Monday, industrial transfer of going from Spirit to Airbus plant in U.K., in France, in the U.S. is Scalian. It's one of the companies that is managing the industrial transfer, training the people to well receive that kind of transfer, but also being sure that we maintain the continuity and the project motility inside the global chain that we are there. So the Scalian is one of the company that can be very strategic in the way we support our clients. If we speak a little bit more about the expertise, I was giving the example of [indiscernible] Industrial transfer. I want to give you a few insights of what is system engineering, operational excellence, I was talking about it, but also software product engineering. System engineering I'm talking about intelligent industry, intelligent industry means how do we build the intelligence layer on top of a product or a process. And here, it requires a lot of different requirements. That is system engineering, access to that kind of requirement, being able to build the system, the model-based system engineering that will acquire and allow our clients to go to the next level of what will be in the intelligent industry and that kind of complexity. This is the background that we have and the expertise that is well recognized and make a kind of differentiator in this business. We are one of the company sharp in this expertise. I want to talk a little bit about software product engineering. I was in India 3 weeks ago, and I was very happy to see that we have that kind of background there. Software Product Engineering is a kind of software can native that is needed today in many areas. Let me give you a concrete example. A car today, it's an iPhone on wheel. It's not exactly the same car that we built 10 years ago. And being able to develop that kind of car as an iPhone on wheel, we need specific kind of cloud native background and we have that kind of expertise. What is key for us is not to have the practices is to be sure that we well understand the industry, the value chain, which is a product, a process, a program to allow our clients to well industry that kind of approach. It's a question of standards, a question of certification, a question of expertise in a dedicated environment. And we are bringing that kind of background to our clients. Operational excellence, I talked about it. I want to share one -- obviously, I had the privilege to join the [ Zozephen ] on stage. It was one month ago. Scalian was a sponsor of -- [ Zozephen ] is the organization that is supporting the nuclear industry. In that kind of area, you have all the supplier of the nuclear, but you are also the big guys like Orano, like [indiscernible], like [indiscernible] and we were on stage close to them speaking to the whole supply and about operational excellence. Why? Because the credibility that we have bringing and supporting the [indiscernible] sector and building what is called Aero excellence as one of the key suppliers. It's one of the areas that is creating a lot of value for another industry. So services company like us has to be agile, that a deep understanding of each industry to be sure that we cross-sell and leverage the powerful teams that we have in our dedicated industries. Let me give you a few examples of the areas I was highlighting. I will not cover all of them, but maybe 1 or 2 the first one. Let me speak about [ BETA ]. BETA is one of the subsidiary of Amazon that is taking care of eVTOL. eVTOL means electrical vertical takeoff and landing in simple words, the air taxi that we use tomorrow moving from New York to [indiscernible] airport with 3 or 4 people inside that kind of simple air taxi. We are part of the company, and we are the company, not sure that Laurent want to use it. Why you are going to use it? Because we are one of the companies that is helping them to develop their critical software and preparing the certification that is needed. It's becoming more and more a reality, and we are working on the battery management system that is key in that kind of environment. Critical software, it's what of the assets that we have inside Scalian. If we move forward, I could speak about mission critical software for [indiscernible] and many other ones. Operational excellence I don't want to [indiscernible] to speak about Naval here, preparing with them the digital transformation of the [indiscernible] was one of the area where we help them on the program and prepare the wound program to make that happen. Same on some marines. And we can elaborate on many other things that we have done, like Volvo Trucks, for example, to support all their different supply chain across the planet. So a job like us is definitely to be a citizen of the industry and will support our clients wherever their operations are done I can speak also about digital continuity and the way we support the CR on simulator and [indiscernible] with cements. All in all, you see that we are shaping our areas. And I want to make maybe a deep dive on AI. What is AI for a company like us. Of course, like many of our peers, we have a catalog of agents that are for dedicated use cases, supporting our clients. And we have developed a lot of different agents in many different areas. But where the way we want to make the difference and the way we are progressing in this AI embedded AI or AI by design, what we do is by industry again. Why? Because what we want to do is to be sure that software and AI at scale is really impacting the process of our clients. The key today is not only to have the data management layer or the agent is to be sure that the way we augment the engineer, the way we augment the process is creating for the industry at the end, the skills that they need in their own company. And that's why we focus on that kind of approach. Let me share one example with you that I like a lot. It was something that we shared with the Ministry of [indiscernible] during the adopt AI event that happened in Paris 2 or 3 weeks ago. Of course, there was a boost, and we were 1 of the 3 companies that were services companies that were there. We were invited by artifact, by the way. But on the first floor of this event, we had a specific cat can talk about this one because it's an asset that is coming from Scalian. We were sharing with the different people that were there. The development that we have done on swarming drone. It's a flood of drones that are operating at 5 or 6 different drones with a ground station. And the software and AI that is embedded in each of the drones is quite sharp and take a lot of expertise in software, but also in system engineering and AI. Why? Because we give to that kind of swarming drones a dedicated mission and whatever happened during the mission, they can continue to progress and to deliver the mission. They can lose the [indiscernible], lose one of the drones, they continue to product because they are intelligent, they learn from the global context and able to continue to deliver the drones. So of course, you see a few examples in the defense area, but not only talking with Total on the Metis example is one of the areas where having that pain of swarming drone is interesting, so on specifying changing infrastructure, not also easy to access or in a quite dangerous situation that we want to address. So again and again, a company like us has to be agile, sharp in what we do. strong cultural and industrial cultural and bringing to our clients the best of the experience but always taking into account what is the specific industry and the standard of the industry. If we progress in our journey, let me speak now a little bit about our performance. And back to my introduction, yes, we are facing some few changes. One of them is the pressure that we have on our top line. And yes, the market is tough. And honestly, after all the profit [indiscernible] in July 24 done by Airbus or the pressure that Volkswagen is facing against the Chinese that are entering and challenging the market. The services industry, like my peers are facing a tough period. But the way we build our residents, the way we react and the way we rebound to be back to positive is definitely an asset on services company. And here, we are a little bit [indiscernible]. And if I love to highlight 3 of the 3 changes that we have in a company like us, I want to elaborate on maybe 3 things. First, we have done as a company that is growing quite fast. More than 12 M&A and acquisitions this last 9 years. And we are still a little bit puzzled and still very localized. I have still brands in some countries, is still [indiscernible], but I have still the brands that are operating locally. So it's a way for us to move to that kind of localized expertise that is linked to we know what to something that is more efficient, more industrialized in the way we operate. And I think one strong group brings strong of all our expertise. Second one is certainly the backbone of the company again, having done that kind of acquisition is absolutely a key contribution, but it's also a quite puzzled backbone. And definitely, to be agile, follows the move. I have to have a [indiscernible] more agile, more efficient, that allows me to see the company in many different ones. Today, we are a little bit weak in this area, and we need the needed investment to be sure that we run fast and agile and be able to adapt like the services company is doing. And last but not least, I was speaking about the market and the market like us with the changes that we have not only a technology one, but also the reality has to industrialize in a better way if we want to protect the entry door of a model, which is a project margin. Industry region means also here, not having strong expertise, but being a recurrent mode, building the factories, the industrialization, the sharper that will be a game changer. AI is a contributor, but not only. The way we have reorganized our GC global engineering center. All of that is a part of the transformation that we need to manage I had the privilege to meet that kind of challenges in my previous experience as a veteran, as you said, David. But again, it's not to do the path for also be sure that we take the DNR Scalian and we elevate the team and the performance because it's already strong nature in the market. Let's move on to the next part of our changes. And I spoke about the transformation. Maybe I can speak here about -- sorry, lots of information on this slide, but let me simplify that with 6 main points. First, the transformation that I want to manage with the leadership team has to be simple, is simple and focused. I have to reason things simple and focus, 41 actions, so execution, as it was said by Laurent at the start of this presentation, is key in all industries, it's key also in our business. First thing that we have done this last few months, these last 3 months is our portfolio offer has been redefined around 3 domain expertise. I'll talk about it today. Focus on 3 industries: Aero Defense Energy. I know that I have 2 back doors. The credibility we have in core banking or being able to allow them to be more efficient in AI is something that I also want to duplicate in many other ones. I don't want to lose also the mobility. We know that in the car, in the highway industry, we have very strong assets and dedicated areas. But the focus is definitely on Aero, I spoke about the backlog of Airbus Defense. You know the reality of this industry for all of us and energy, we can elaborate on how it is on critical software and system engineering, but also the excellence operational. Third point, redesigned our target operating model let's be very simple on functions that are more focused on what they do, focus on what they do, but also review a little bit the span of control of the company. and to be sure that we are more linear in the way we enter in the game and that we protect the economic model of a company like us. Honestly, this is a part of the plan. Fourth point, full potential plan. I was talking about that. The ambition is to reach EUR 700 million organic growth in 2030. I speak about organic growth in 2030. And the full potential plan is very simple. It's 41 actions that we want to execute in due time. And to be sure that we are well following that kind of routine. We have a Chief Transformation Officer in charge and dedicated for self fusion. It was nominated. I report to [indiscernible] was dominated 1 month ago. Last but not least, pivot the execution in that kind of tough environment, no dream. We know that the market is tough that the level of expectation of our clients is still there. So let's use this period also to be lean, to be efficient, to boost a robust management system that allows us to restart the potential of this company and be sure that we become the leader that we want to be. Moving forward, I want to conclude this presentation with this final chart speaking about some key takeaways. First, the fact that we want to be at EUR 700 million in 2030. So the option is there, you can see, worldwide player, a pure player in our dedicated expertise. I spoke about the focus on aerospace, defense and energy. And of course, at the heart of what we do. I have not spoken about the Chief AI officer that will join the company next year, but it's one of the moves that we are addressing today to be sure that we are well organized and well focusing on the execution of the plan. That's it.

Thank you, William, for this presentation. So it's now time to turn on to the Q&A session. It will last around 10 minutes. I will start with 2 questions from the web to do the mic to circulate. So please don't be shy. So first question, OIA will disrupt your business?

OIA?

Yes.

How AI...

Or AI.

Honestly, for us, I spoke about AI, it's a very good question. AI is seen by us as an engine. And here, if I have to summarize what we do here, we are looking at high as something that will bring more efficiency, speed and innovation. Efficiency, speed and innovation back to what I introduced before by industry, addressing the process, understanding the value chain and how we use that kind of solution, not only to be a catalog, but to augment our engineers. This is a way to help our clients to run at scale. And this is the way we use AI as a strong accelerator in our business.

Historically, your company had a very strong M&A activity. What are your priorities now?

Back to the 3 areas I shared with you on the expertise on the geography to well follow the industry, but also industrialization. Definitely, the plan we have on M&A is seen by us as an accelerator in our dedicated area. So of course, we consider that kind of opportunity each time we have the opportunity to accelerate our industrialization speaking about India, for example, accelerate our expertise, we can speak about PLM and MES that are a very good extension of the way we support product life management or the manufacturing plant. I'm not speaking about the integration of the tool. I'm speaking about the change that is key for us close to the engineering leader, close to the manufacturing leader. This is part of the product and the process tomorrow. So we want to be part of the story in the coming years.

Question from the room?

David Cerdan of Kepler. I have a simple question. If you look at your current margin issues or low margin, I would say, do you think that it's more related to a program of pricing, occupancy rate of your employees or something different, maybe the cost organization.

The main -- obviously, I was with [indiscernible] and Airbus this week, all of them, they consider that we are #1 in what we do, but sometimes they are changing me on the fact that we can be a little bit expensive or high in the prices that we have today. So sometimes we have to be very careful on the way we fix our pricing, you're right. The margin has to increase in the coming years, depending on the way we'll be able to industrialize the company and the factory. I said it before, one of the changes we have is the fact that we are a little bit local I don't want to reinvent the wheel in Spain, in France or in Germany. I need to better use the factories that we have built here. So the entry door of our model that we call the project margin here is one of the key things that we want to address regarding the rest of the structural cost, including the level of utilization. We consider that we have a few points to gain there, but it's more on the structure of the companies and the merger.

And I have a second one, sorry. just reply regarding your balance sheet. I don't understand really your M&A strategy, is it to further leverage the balance sheet or not? Or do you need fresh money to do M&A?

Do you want to answer, David? Let me associate my action here.

No, we don't do M&A to increase the leverage for sure, David. Yes, you saw the leverage currently is close to 7x, 6.7x at the latest Q3. So we clearly need to work with our lenders to make sure that we have enough caution and the right balance sheet. So we are in a dialogue with our lender to make sure that [ leverage ] is not impairing the development. So if there is any future development, it will come for -- from potentially additional equity from [indiscernible]. You saw that we already invested in June and then earlier this year to make the acquisition of Skills and Afiniti. So we already made 2 equity injection to help the company to make acquisitions. Since we invested 2 years ago, the Scalian has made 3 acquisitions. And going forward, if the companies are small that we need to acquire, it would be thanks to the growth of EBITDA, which will bring some deliver. But if we are looking at midsize companies, then we'll probably have to invest some additional equity to make sure that the balance sheet is right for the business.

But the first driver will be EBITDA growth through improvement of margin in the years to come.

[indiscernible], DNCA. Can you share organic growth that you've achieved in 2003, we see the numbers, but we don't see what's organic and what's not. And then looking at your sector exposure, it seems we are just in a turnaround in the aerospace industry, your competitors communicate on strong change in mood from their customers with a lot of investments coming from Airbus, for example. What do you see? And on the defense, which is pretty large. What kind of trends do you see? And how credible are you to go outside of France? I see that you've got the high metal tag, but with the reality of what you're able to achieve outside of France.

So organic growth that we had this last 5, 6 years, was for the company around 10% to 12%. The organic growth of the company was around 10% to 10% to 12%. So means that we are able to run that kind of acceleration on the double-digit growth. The second question related to the competition and the market. We see exactly the same kind of back to a better perspective within Hermes. We are already working with them. I give you the example of Paris is one of the key things that is an acceleration for us. And we've seen the [indiscernible] sector, not only for Airbus by the way, but [indiscernible] continue to be also strong in the business that we have in the arctic sector and the defense industry. If we spoke about the disparate industry, obviously, it's quite strong assets for the company, mainly in France. But back to example I shared with you just before. We are growing quite fast and supporting well in Germany, the acceleration, the defense industry. It's a with [indiscernible] related with Renata's, it's related -- in this industry that we see that we are already supporting the diversification that we have seen in Germany, for example, from Volkswagen to Aeronautical & Defense is highly visible today. It's -- with Volkswagen today is 52% of the company. It was 2/3 of the company before in Germany, only speaking about Germany.

Arnaud Palliez, CIC. Still on AI, what does it mean in terms of CapEx and R&D spending for Scalian. And do you think that it will be translated into higher rates that are applied to your customers, to your clients?

It's a very interesting question. On the CapEx side, today, the company is very low. We are not doing so much CapEx. I think that is something that we need to change a little bit to support research plan and innovation plan. A company like us has to bring to our clients, not only the best expertise, but also the asset and the accelerators that are needed. And it require a kind of investment in that kind of area, not only on the infrastructure and the AI solutions that we need to have the right DMU to support calculation, for example, well more than that is to be sure that we have the right team that is working on that kind of asset. For the time being, I have that kind of asset, but it's coming from what is done on the ground. It's not yet enough industrialized and they need something that is we are able to leverage at the group level. So it requires a strategic plan for the innovation and it will be led tomorrow by the Chief AI Officer. I am not looking for a Chief Technical Officer. I'm looking for a Chief AI Officer because in everything that we do, we want to integrate AI as part of the practice that will let this business tomorrow. You have seen that many times, the mechanical engineer of tomorrow is a software guy. What I mean by that is to well integrate all the solutions that are needed in working with software but also with AI as a key change in the way we design product or we support the process. Back to [indiscernible], yes, we have decided with the Board to have a dedicated investment on our CapEx, and it's included in this plan to deliver the performance that we want in the coming years.

Nicolas Tabor, [indiscernible] Asset Management. I'd like to better understand the trajectory you're setting for Scalian. Is it more first a reset where you will decide what business needs to keep and not to keep to align with the new segmentations and therefore, the growth will not be that strong because you're getting maybe some of the bench and some of the capacities. And then we see the acceleration in the margin expansion? And will the margin expansion be front-end loaded, driven by bench adjustment or back-end loaded, driven by operating leverage. So we very understand how you set the trajectory and look at it internally.

Honestly, part of the answer is in your question. We need to do both. And not only that. It's also a level of maturity. The engineering company today, they are not only people that are delivering performance by their own. It's what I just said before, it's also the way we help our client to bring to the market that kind of asset and accelerate it. and they are part of this acceleration that is needed in our business. So of course, the excellence operation is not only for our clients. It's also the way we operate on our side. and being more integrated, well supported by the right backbone will allow us to be more agile and efficient in the way we run that definitely. But the part of the value will also come from the way we industrialize, from the way we bring to our clients more value with the asset we have. Let me share with you one concrete example. We are working in Spain in the health care industry, supporting them on a specific engine that was created to edit a specific number. That kind of number is used in Spain in the health care industry. by different region and hospital. It's a standard number that is an international one. The way we develop things created to our clients a strong outcome by reducing by 60% their own efficiency in their own operation. on our side is bringing to the company a project margin that is at 60%. So they have many game changers that are reality, not only for a company like us on the services part for globally for the sector and we are also running our approach by integrating that kind of solution.

To give further the answer because the question as precise about front end and back end for the EBITDA. It will be both. Part of it will be thanks to improvement of the operation, and that will be this year, and part of it will be thanks to the growth and the scaling, which will be the end. But it's both for that.

So no more question from the room. I have one last question from the web. Can you clarify the portion of recurring business versus onetime projects? And what is the current trend of your portfolio for the next 24 months is?

The Client portfolio, you mean, our project portfolio.

Yes.

Honestly, the rotation of our business it's quite stable. Most of the time, we are able to win a specific environment that is a preannual project, and it's a part of the resilience that is a key asset for us. But definitely, we are investing on being able to grow in that kind of area, being able to have a portion of the value chain that is key for our clients, and it will allow us to have a strong resilience on the top line. So I will say something around 2/3 of the company is embedded in the growth that we have. The acceleration will come with our ability to run faster and get more projects in the coming quarters. Back to the 24 next month, the next 8 quarters and 2 years, we consider that we should be back to growth in H2 next year. after a declining year in 2025 is time for us to be back to growth in that kind of area 2026.

One very last questions.

Just one last one. As you mentioned pricing during your presentation, and you mentioned that you'd expect to grow, I mean, quite rapidly to reach EUR 700 million by the end of the plan. Can you give us a rough idea of how much price and how much volume are you expecting in there?

No. Honestly, a little bit too difficult to say that. Happy to come back to you and report what we have done. But this market is also a lot of uncertainty what makes us strong is our ability in being able to adapt to this market, bringing -- building the residents that we need and taking care of our economic model is definitely the first thing that we want to address in the coming months. So too early to answer on the price evolution in the coming years.

So thank you. Time is over for questions. Many thanks, William. We now welcome Andee Harris, CEO of CPI, introduced by David Darmon. Jingle, please.

So thank you again, William, for sharing your views and excitement. Now turning to CPI. Just a brief reminder of our investment in CPI. We invested early 2020 just before COVID in Crisis Prevention Institute. We invested roughly $570 million. And over the years, we have paid ourselves a couple of dividends. So you can see that we did recoup probably around 25% of our initial investments through dividends already. CPI is the gold standard in training to manage episode of crisis and episode of violence mainly in health care facilities and in schools. I'm not going to give more details on what the company is doing. You're going to do it much better than I do. And I think you're familiar with the company business model. Maybe just a word on you, and then I leave the floor. So Andee is not a veteran, I hear you, William. But a very, very experienced leader, and we are very, very pleased that Andee joined the firm in August. She's coming with a very strong tech background, and you will see why this is so important for where we want to take CPI going forward. And she also had a training background because one of the companies she was leading was a Train The Trainer company. Andee, very excited to have you, and let's hear what you...

Okay. Thank you David. Good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor to be here to talk about Crisis Prevention Institute to our valued investor community. Before I jump into the main presentation, I do want to just take a moment and talk and reflect about why I joined CPI about 4 months ago. So as David mentioned, I was in the learning and training space. mostly focused on sales, training, employee engagement, training and HR trading. And although very fulfilled by the purpose and empowerment that we were giving our customer, I didn't realize how profound the impact could be when you go to a mission-driven organization. So CPI, the mission is so incredible every day globally around the world. We're training teachers and social workers and nurses and drug rehab assistance on how to best enable them to help support our most vulnerable communities. And so for me, it's really been about that personal mission. And I'm so excited to lead CPI into that next version. So I know we talked a little bit about our model. But what I think is really unique with CPI is that we really focus on the safety and compliance piece of the business. Our core markets are in education and health care. We have a high loyal customer base, and it also is hard to switch. Switching costs are pretty expensive and people don't light to switch once they have a trusted provider like CPI. What really sets CPI apart is our ability to do the train the trainer model. So we have global professionals, instructors that we employ. They go out and they train, it's what we call certified instructors, people out in the workforce. That's around 41,000 people. And then they go back to their organizations and then train about 2 million people globally. So you can imagine the reach and the scale when you're taking our stuff and taking it all the way up to 2 million people annually. So it's a really great business model and it helps us scale and have flexibility to be able to give the training that we need. So we really focus on 4 key pillars to build what we would call our leading class solution. The first pillar that we really focus on is just our incredible research and evidence fact information that we put in our content. So we're constantly updating our content so that we're giving our trainers the best possible experience. And so things like neuroscience, evidence-backed research, we're constantly using data to modify our training so that we are giving people best-in-class solutions. We have the highest satisfaction score of any of our competitors. And this really, I think, says it all. 80% of CIs said that they have avoided a dangerous situation because of the training that they received from CPI. The other piece is our certification process. We take it very seriously. We make sure that people are well equipped to train the learners that they're training because once again, we're putting people in very critical situations where there is workplace violence, and we need to make sure that they're equipped with the right skills. So our certification is very rigid. It's also the #1 standard, the gold standard in the industry. So you see that blue card in the middle. That is recognized universally. People will sometimes not always know CPI, but they'll say, "Oh, do you have a Blue Card, are you Blue Card certified? And that, once again, it just talks to the reach of our brand. So getting to our brand, we have 45 years of reputational success. So that's really critical because trust in this industry is so important. And the other piece is that 87% of our industry recognizes our brand. And if you compare that to our competitors, which are about 45%. So a very different model. And then we also are really the only training out there in our space that can scale. So we can train -- we talked about the 1.8 million to 2 million learners that we train. We are the only one that can do that in scale to like a large health care system. We have systems where we will train 11,000 people over a few week period. So we're able to really scale whereas our competitors really can't do that. So really, that's what differentiates us from the rest of our competitors. So one thing that's really interesting about CPI is when things are not going well for people and mental illness and mental illness is spiking, it's also good for our business. So it's a fortunate, unfortunate problem. It's something that we grapple with every day, like but we want to make sure we're on the front lines of helping people. So at the end of the day, we are seeing a rise in workplace violence. OSHA just did a study and hospitals and health care workers are 4x more likely to have violence in their workplace than any other industries. So we know that, that's a rising issue in health care. And then in education, since COVID, there's been more disruptive behavior in classrooms. We also have an increase in kids being diagnosed with autism and other behavior disorders. So we are seeing disruption both in the health care space as well as the education space. And what that means is that, that is very costly to employers and insurers. One of the examples I use is that we get feedback from our health care customers and our nurses saying, because we were trained, we were able to avoid the insurance claim or things that could come up. We also know that nurses leave at 24% in the U.S. That's a turnover rate for nurses. If they are trained in CPI and they feel safe at work, they're more likely to stay. Obviously, increased employee turnover is a big problem in health care, given the labor shortage for nurses. And then once again, the physical and mental issues, burn out, these people are treating our most vulnerable communities. So we really need to make sure that they're not burning a out and that we're making sure that they are still available for the communities that they serve. So really, we are trying to combat this by once again giving people safety and psychological safety as well as physically safe in their workplaces. So all of this is fueling more demand for what we do. So a few things that have been driving our industry is the mandated restraint training. So depending on the administration and depending on different states, there is a lot of regulatory compliance in both the health care space and the education space that we can really capitalize on. So there is this increased need for that workplace safety. At CPI, we spend a lot of time looking at different regulatory bodies, making sure we're tracking the most comprehensive and the most up-to-date regulatory requirements because they do change. And in the U.S., they change state by state. So we are constantly tracking that and making sure that we are in compliance and that our training is the most up to date. So really being very cognizant about that. And then also just the rising physical mental health issues and schools, we need to know now that we need to train not just -- it used to be really just a special ed classrooms, but really, it's holistically now. We're getting asked to train administrators and principles in any one, foodservice, anyone that's connected to the school because it's a global problem, even things like building classroom cultures, ADHD being a big problem in schools now. So it's not just special ed. It's really -- our expansion has been in specialty topics around education and also -- and I'll get into a little bit more about our specialty topics in health care, too. So we were used to really focus on training nurses and now we've seen that the bus drivers and the ambulance drivers and anyone connected within the hospital. Often, they are the first person that first, if you imagine that you call an ambulance, if you can keep somebody calm in the ambulance with them, they show up to the hospital they're in a much calmer state. And the idea is that we're constantly trying to de-escalate that state and make sure that they're feeling safe. So CPI is uniquely positioned to do that because we are the market leader and we are so expansive, we are able to do the research, we're able to be flexible and innovative with our products. We just released a newer product for ambulance drivers. So really thinking about what do they need? They need something that's mobile. They need something that easy for them to quickly use in the moment. They may only have 15 minutes to come someone down before they get to the hospital. That's a different type of training than a nurse who might be spending 4 or 5 hours with the patient. So really understanding our customer needs and being able to be innovative in what we think about that. The other reason is that we are 4x larger than any of our competitors. So once again, we have the ability to research. Our financial performance since Wendel's investment. So our CAGR is growing 11% on revenue. Our EBITDA is up 13%. So -- and David already talked about the dividend returns. So we did give back $134 million of dividends since the inception, since 2019. And some initiatives since the Wendel investment, the first is that we've increased the reach and penetration. So we've gone after new certified instructors so that increased from 9 to around 11 new programs. I talked about a lot of these specialty topics. So CPI used to just be one training that was only delivered 1 way. And now we have multiple ways that we deliver our trading. I'll talk about digital in a minute, but the ability to do hybrid as well as in-person training but also different topics. Like I said, the idea that you can mix and match like almost like a Lego set and you can mix and match different products so you can serve the needs of your audience and your customers. International expansion, I actually right before here, was in Manchester, meeting with our U.K. team. And we've been doing a lot around international expansion. We did our first acquisition of Berge in Norway, so that we are continuing to look at our international markets, and you'll see in the next few slides that we've had significant growth in international this year. And the last one, which is near and dear to my heart is digitization, and that is really the idea that we need to make our platforms as easy as accessible for the people we serve, especially when we think of nurses that are not always sitting at a desk, most of our workers that we serve are mobile. They're moving around time off floor is so important when you think about teachers and nurses. So we have to combat. Maybe it's a 15-minute training because that's all they can give. They're doing it on brakes or really quickly, someone's covering for them. So we do have to really think about our customers, and technology is going to be a big enabler for them. It won't replace our in-person training because we do teach hold and how to restrain some one properly without hurting them, causing harm to yourself to them. But at the same time, you're able to do some more things digitally with our product. So our 2025 performance outlook. So you can see that this year, we were a little flat. We -- our total revenue grew 4% North America was up 2%. International, like I mentioned, grew 22%. We did have some challenges in North America. Part of that had to do with the funding. So there was a lot of funding going into education post COVID. and that funding has now changed. We had a -- there's been some changes with the new administration around funding, especially for human services. And then the Medicare -- potential Medicare cuts, just causing a lot of uncertainty in the market. We're seeing consolidation within health care organizations. So just once again, when there's uncertainty in the market, people will renew, but they're not going to do massive wallet expansion at that time. But we did maintain our high 40s EBITDA margins. So -- and we did do a debt refinancing. As far as the outlook goes, I'm really optimistic that although 2025 will probably be flat. We are expecting to grow 5% to 10% in 2026. And by 2027, we will return to historical double-digit growth. So really excited about the outlook and the ability. And I do think with some new leadership and some new technology, I think that, that will be a huge impact for us. So long-term vision. This is what I get excited about being from tech. But once again, really thinking about this tech-enabled solution. I do think it will help across a lot of areas. One, we can scale to enterprise systems. So for example, we work with large hospitals. One of them has 11,000 people that were training in multiple different regional hospital models. So there's the parent hospital company, and then they have all the different regional hospitals. So being able to have a digital tech-enabled solution will allow them to get the workbooks to each of the different hospitals. It makes for a more cohesive experience for them. They can train it all at the same time. It's obviously environmentally a lot better as well. So really making sure that we're thinking about what our end customers need when we create our tech-enabled solutions. Like I said, we can expand our offering to really understand the data that we're getting back in the outcomes and measuring that outcomes from our customers. So that is going to be a big thing that we are going to be looking at is how are we driving the right outcomes and using -- and what are the right products and the right formula of products. to give our customers using more of an enterprise licensing agreement, which then allows them to mix and match certain products, which makes sense for them holistically. The other piece is, I mentioned our 2 million learners, we believe that we can create the platform where they can have their own discussions and really support each other. Right now, they're quite isolated or they're using social media or other forms to get that support because of our trust, we really believe that we can facilitate really great discussions and really know what's happening without there with our with our communities. So we're really looking at that as more of a learner engagement, community-driven portal. So -- and then lastly, a more predictive revenue model is helpful for our customers, especially when they're thinking about budgeting and know they need certainty and knowing what our prices will be, and it's good for us to understand we're able to forecast better. So it's a win-win for all of us, but it's really focused on what is the best vehicle for us to be delivering this training to our customers. And lastly, when you think about growth, we focus on kind of 3 areas. There's organic growth, there is growth through acquisition and then there's product-led growth, which is really our ability to drive growth through an incredible experience for customers through our product. So that's really our North Star on that. So key initiatives, operational and commercial rigor. We are looking at our internal processes as well, making sure that we're using best-in-class processes, thinking about how do we do things better? How do we continue to utilize the team that we have to continue to drive profitability. One area coming from sales training that is going to be quite impactful for me is just the go-to-market transformation. We are looking at restructuring our go-to-market just so that we have a better idea of understanding our customer needs and making it easier for our customers to buy and realizing that the way education buys is not the way health care buys and the way a new prospect might buy is different than a renewal and then thinking about an enterprise agreement versus a smaller school district. So really just understanding and segmenting out our customers so we understand how they buy. I talked a lot about product development delivery. Our road map will really be driven by data and what the outcomes that we are hearing from our customers that are most important to them. Technology and innovation, obviously, I actually heard a few of the questions from the previous session. AI is something that we'll be looking at something I'm passionate about. I think we are in a unique position because we can use AI to help for things like role-based training, practicing. So there are a lot of applications for AI within our product. But the other thing is we're really defensible against AI because our in-person training is you can't teach that over a computer or the best I can say is like when you go to physical therapy and they give you an exercise to do to help stretch or do a certain expertise, and you watch the video, you need the physical therapist to show you how to do it right, the first few times, and then maybe you can reinforce it with a video. But our holds, it's so nuanced as to how you might grab somebody 1 way versus the other way. And so it's really, really important that those are top properly and in person. Also when you are restraining an 8-year-old child versus a 40-year-old adult depending on the size that you are and depending on the size they are, things change and you need to know how to handle that differently. So it's really important that we keep the our hold and our in-person training for at least that part of it. We will always do a blended hybrid mix, but I actually think I look at AI and the areas we can plug it into the business, so I think that's one part where actually we won't be taken over by AI. And then we'll continue our market expansion. We still have a lot of white space. I'm really hopeful and really excited about the opportunities we have to continue to penetrate education as well as we are just starting to see our enterprise health care customers come online. So I mean we have a huge opportunity, both in North America as well as globally to start looking at those types of customers and market expansion. And lastly, international development. I talked before about we are -- our growth in international. So really looking forward to continuing that international. We do have a Middle East office in Australia office that handles APAC and Singapore as well as a U.K. and office in Ireland. So lastly, just key takeaways. I've talked a lot about our brand. Our brand is so powerful. It's really great to have a brand that people trust and recognize in the industry that gives us a lot of opportunity to grow in new markets. Our continued focus on long-term growth. There's a lot of with our digital expansion, really understanding the data and who are our best customers. As we see the behavioral changes and unfortunately, workplace violence, continuing to be a problem does help us grow. But obviously, our goal, once again, is to drive safety, not to encourage the workplace violence. And then the opportunity. I think I love coming to businesses when they're at a really cool inflection point. And I think what's so magical about CPI is that we are in this amazing inflection point. to bring the right technology, the right data to our customers and really be innovative in how we do that. And lastly, I talked about the mission right when I got up here, it is so important. Everybody at believes in our mission. Every day we wake up thinking about how can you make a nurse's life easier? How can we make a teacher's life easier. They are doing incredible work out there. And if we can support them just in a small way, it's really impactful. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Andee, for this presentation. It's now time to turn to the Q&A session. Once again, it will last around 10 minutes. Let's start with 2 questions from the web to allow the mic to circulate around the room before. So how the DOGE impacted directly or indirectly CPI's business?

Yes, yes. For those of you aren't familiar, DOGE was, I guess, the brainchild of Elon Musk, and it was really about driving government efficiencies. And so what that did was get rid of the Department of Education within the United States. And so a lot of things that were done at the federal level will then push to the state level. for us. So for us, what that means is just that we sell a little bit differently. We make sure we understand what's happening in the states, but it didn't really impact our business substantially because -- once again, we are compliance-driven, People need to use our training to keep people safe. So it didn't massively impact it. Just once again, it's more uncertainty in the market. So you always need to make sure that you're checking with customers and making sure that they're not feeling the effects and thinking, "Oh my god, this guy is following. And just once again, it's really about being in touch with your customers and supporting them.

How do you think digital and artificial intelligence could improve your business, both on cost and revenues?

Yes. Yes. So I think there's a lot of opportunity. Both -- and I also add one more customer experience because I've seen AI work really well. I mentioned role-based training being able to actually have a situation happen before it arises. And before you're faced with that to be able to practice, I think, is a big use of AI. I'm definitely being able to simulate what might happen in a classroom or in a hospital room, I think, will be really big for us and just making sure that our outcomes are better. And then on the -- internally, we are looking at AI for everything from like marketing automation, sales automation as well as using the Jira functionality to be able to help our engineers code faster, more efficiently and quicker and then using it as part of our quality assurance process within our technology back. So we will be embracing AI, but I don't I'm always cautious that AI is not just the end all be all and start slicing budgets immediately because you think AI is going to come in per magic silver bullet. So yes, cautiously optimistic about AI.

Thank you. Do we have -- yes, one question in the room.

It's Andy Lowe Lee from Citi. How should we think about the total addressable market within the U.S.? You've got those sort of 2 million people using it at the moment. Where could that get to? And then if I think internationally, what are your most exciting international markets and what those makes those markets so attractive for you versus maybe other markets, which are less interesting.

Yes, yes. So I'll start with the first question. We still have a large addressable market. We're about 1/3 penetrated within education and much less within health care. So still a lot of white space in North America for us. So there's plenty of opportunity for us to continue that growth. Internationally, One of the things that we do have a small office in Dubai and one of the things that we are excited about in the Middle East as you're seeing things. So Cleveland Clinic, one of our customers also is in Saudi Arabia. So just thinking about how some of the American health systems and education systems are going over to the Middle East, mostly Saudi Arabia and Dubai. So we are seeing an influx of opportunity there. So that is something that we're focused on for expansion.

Derek? Behind you.

Okay. I have a couple of questions. First one is regarding the M&A. Is it possible for you to grow in this market through some local acquisition? Secondly, regarding internationalization? Is it a negative or dilutive for the margin, your profitability. And when I see this kind of profitability, I suspect some new entrants into your industry. So do you see this kind of new entrant effect and notably from larger companies?

Yes. So I'll try to address those one at a time. So from an international perspective, and David, feel free to jump in as well. But from an international perspective, we don't have the same profitability at this point. Expectations on international. Our profitability is around 20% internationally versus the U.S. So we are not focused on -- we are focused on that profitability, but we understand that these are growing markets. And then the second question, I think I'll let David answer that.

[indiscernible] Do you see potential to do bolt-on acquisitions, equity that with Verge?

Yes, yes, absolutely. I think we had a great experience with Verge, and we'll continue to do bolt-ons internationally. And when we think about our acquisition strategy, we are looking at either technology applications that would help our customer experience or Internet tuck-ins that would help grow our business, either smaller players in the market or international players.

The other question is, do you see any new entrants that can come because of the high margin and how worried [indiscernible].

Yes. I mean I think it goes back to just our scalability and our research and the fact that we are releasing new products. We are -- we need to continue to be innovative. In the U.S., we always talk about the Blockbuster versus Netflix. I don't know what the equivalent to that might be in France. But we do talk a lot about you've got to keep innovating. You've got to keep thinking about what's next. And I always keep our competitors in the rearview mirror. So I'm focused on what are they doing in the market? We do want to make sure that we're delivering maximum value to our customers to make sure that we're being competitive with the other people in the market. But at this point, I'm not overly concerned about it, but we'll always keep it in the back of my mind. And I think that innovation piece and I talked about product [indiscernible] growth really making sure that our product is second to none, I think, is going to be really critical for us to maintain our position.

No question in the room. I have another one on the web. How do you manage inflation impact on your cost and revenues?

Yes. So I mean, we address inflation by looking across our company and seeing where can we work on margins, how do we internally try to make sure that we're not just passing the costs on to our customers. We are really trying to look internally at our own cost savings, using things like AI for marketing, for example, or some of the other ways that we've been able to build efficiencies within our business. We are in budget planning season. So obviously, that's really critical right now to really understand like what can we do from our own internal when your customers are nurses and teachers and especially education resources, you don't want to continue to pass on all of the price to them. So we are doing our best to maintain that.

Thank you. I have no more questions. So thank you very much for this presentation. We now welcome Cyril Marie, Wendel's Executive Vice President to make a deep die in Vended Investment Manager. Jingle, please.

Hello, and good afternoon. So I have 2 objectives for this presentation. First 1 is to give you an update on the building of the asset management platform that we started 1.5 years ago. And 2 is also to convince you that Wendel investment managers is really an interesting opportunity as a shareholder and to enjoy the development of the private market. So let's start with the update on the platform. So we are a private -- we have in mind to build a private asset management platform, as Laurent said, focused on the mid-market. We do believe that it's there. We can create value and we want to develop this platform in the U.S. and in Europe. We really want to have a global reach. So just to remind you where we are, you know you are familiar now with our target operating model. We have done the acquisition of IK in '23. Since then, they have reached EUR 6 billion. They have reached the cap of all of their funds. They have developed their business with organic initiatives. They are now above EUR 15 billion of AUM. So the dynamic is there. The performance of the fund is very good. Transaction with model was very well perceived and they have developed their franchise with new clients, mainly in Asia. Monroe, as you know, we have done the acquisition in April. Same dynamic here. They are now at EUR 25 billion. They are raising in '25 close to EUR 4 billion of equity with a very diversified range of expertise, client and geography. It's very important for development in the future because this strategy is really scalable. And then committed adviser announced very recently, we should close Committed Advisors probably January or February, EUR 6 billion. I will not comment on it because you will have a presentation by the CEO, Daniel Benin. So with those 3 acquisitions, we have now a platform, so EUR 46 billion of AUM, Laurent mentioned it, EUR 200 million of FRE. We'll see why profitability is important for us. On top of the IFRS or the recurring revenues, we have also a potential in terms of car and interest. It means that we'll share also the performance delivered to our clients over the long term. We have people dedicated to this business, half of them in the U.S. and the rest in Europe and in Asia, with 3 asset classes. And you will see that we have a global footprint. So on one side, we are a mid-market player, really focused on what we do with very local engagement, but at the same time, it's a global business. So we have been able to do that in a relatively short period of time. Why? Why we have been able to engage develop discussion with those very strong teams and developed those partnership and develop those businesses because we have built a very solid platform with a distinctive value proposition. And this is key to go back to that because that's really the starting point, the foundation of all what we do. We have a distinctive model. What does it mean? We have built a model where we maintain the entrepreneurial, the dynamic and of the company. It's the best way to attract talent and to deliver performance for all our clients over the long term. If you want to deliver performance for your clients, you need to have talent. And for that, we have a distinct in value proposition. It's not enough for sure. The second point is that with Wendel, we have a balance sheet, we have the ability to accelerate the growth through the sponsoring program. What does it mean the sponsoring? For sure, we invest money when they rate. So they can accelerate their development, but it's also a way to innovate. It's very important. I can give you one example on the retail product. If you have a balance sheet, it's more easy to create a product at the critical size they want. Then [indiscernible], and it's also important for the platform, we know that we need to work all together to be relevant in front of our clients. We have built a mid-market player. We have to compete and each of our clients, they talk to us, but they talk also with the huge player. So we need to be coordinated in front of our clients in order to be relevant in front of very big investors and also to tackle the retail market. And last thing, which is very also very important. We have a pragmatic approach to oversee our business, to protect the value of future GP and also to create operational efficiencies. For example, for the implementation of our building. We try to be all together at the same place in Paris, in London, in Luxembourg or in New York. With that, we have a very strong value proposition to attract new talents. But now let's move to the third pillar, committed editor that we announced in October. Unfortunately, the season -- CEO sorry, is not with us today, but you will have a video from Daniel Benin. Daniel is the CEO and the Founder of Committed Advisor. He's very well seasoned. He has created a Committed Advisor with 3 other partners. It's a very international team. They are French, but they have a very strong background. They were in the past altogether at AXA, and they have developed a very interesting business. So now we can launch the video. [Presentation]

Good afternoon. I'm sorry, I will not be able to be with you today. I'm Daniel Benin, the CEO of Committed Advisors. Committed Advisors was founded 15 years ago by a 4x Argen Partner after we spent 10 years with Argen launching the secondary practice back to 2000, and we became independent in 2010. Since then, we have raised EUR 7 billion dedicated to secondaries through 2 verticals, LP stakes and GPT, who operate through 3 offices, Paris, New York, Singapore, so it's a global platform with 51 professionals spread across these 3 offices. We mostly focus us on buyout and growth, meaning profitable companies with a geographic allocation, which is roughly 50% in the U.S., 1/3 in Europe and 10% to 15% in APAC. Why that? Because the U.S. market is the biggest market by a number of companies, number of pride equity funds, and number of investors who could become potential sellers because the secondary market is designed to provide liquidity to such investors. You have 2 pillars, the LP stakes, the GP [indiscernible]. LP stakes have been there forever, and it's still there today. Basically, it's an investor or a group of investors who is willing to exit a prior equity fund before its term. You cannot sell because it's an illiquid asset class, so you cannot sell a price equity interest or portfolio of interest if you don't have a buyer like a secondary market in front of you. And that's why this segment, which used to be a niche 25 years ago with a couple of hundred million switching hands in a given year is going to reach over EUR 200 billion this year. So this is a massive change in this market, driven by 2 things: the need for liquidity and also the slowdown of the distributions. The need for liquidity is impacting all kinds of investors. The slowdown of the distributions is also impacting investors, but more importantly, impacting GPs. GP who is not able to send the money back soon enough to his LPs, is going to find a solution to accelerate that distribution, and that's the genesis of the GP [ leds ] which started roughly 12, 13 years ago, and we have been actually very active in that segment as well. Again, the secondary market is no longer a niche. Over EUR 200 billion today and the expectations are a market which could double up between now and 2030. To give you also some perspective, 10 years ago, this was a EUR 40 billion market. So we've moved from EUR 40 billion to EUR 200 billion, and we could reach EUR 400 billion in 5 years. Within that segment, you have now basically 2 types of transactions. The very large transactions, which are going to be covered by very large secondary managers, raising EUR 15 billion, EUR 20 billion and up to EUR 30 billion in 1 single fund. At the other end, you get people like us raising between EUR 2 billion and EUR 3 billion per pound and operating in transactions, which are going to range between EUR 20 million, EUR 30 million and up to EUR 150 million or EUR 200 million. What does it mean? Pricing, risk return Pricing is totally different. If you are buying a portfolio of EUR 10 million, EUR 20 million, EUR 30 million, it's not systematic, but you could get an increased discount versus the same portfolio, same quality but 10x bigger. So in a nutshell, you buy a EUR 200 million portfolio you are going to be able to negotiate between 10% and 20% discount, sometimes more. You buy the same portfolio, which is a EUR 2 billion portfolio, you're going to get a pricing -- a clearing price between par and 5%, 6%, 7% discount. This year, to give you an example, we bought a portfolio in April on interest, around EUR 200 million, 27% discount. At the same time, the Yale endowment in the U.S. was selling a portfolio 25x bigger, EUR 5 billion, same kind of assets, 7% discount. This is an example of the differentiation that you have in positioning your strategy in the mid-market versus the larger market in the secondary space. Well, first of all, I think our positioning is the right one because we operate in the mid-market space where structurally, the discounts that we're able to pay are higher than what you would find in the global normalized secondary market. That's the first point. Second point, thanks to that positioning, we benefit from an increased velocity of the capital because we're not using debt. So any time there is a distribution coming back to us that goes back to our LPs. We're not using leverage which is a great advantage because we can derisk much quicker in all the transactions that we've done. In 15 years, we've closed on over 250 transactions. None of them have been done with the use of leverage. So every time we get a distribution that goes back to our LPs. What does it mean? When you're committing EUR 10 million to our funds as an LP, we are going to core 10 million from you. But at the same time, we are going to send between EUR 4 million and EUR 5 million. So net cash is going to be around EUR 5 million, EUR 5.5 million for you. So you're going to disburse million, but you have funded EUR 10 million. The multiple that you're going to achieve in our flagship funds on your EUR 10 million is around 1.8x, 1.9x. The multiple on your EUR 5.5 million of cash disbursed is going to be between 2.5x and 3x with the downside protection, which is massive because you are going to be invested by transparency in over 1,000 companies the risk of impairment is extremely limited, not to say new. With respect to GP leads, portfolios are a bit more concentrated. As I've explained, you will end up in our dedicated GP lead funds with 100, 120 companies. But the same velocity is applying. In 5 years, we have reimbursed close to 90% of the capital to our investors. So in investor committing in our funds, 5 years ago, we already get 90% of their money back. self-financing a portion of the capital calls with the distributions. The multiple that we are targeting for GP leads and that we have generated, by the way, during the past 15 years, are ranging between 2.2x and 2.4x. So similar to buyout returns. But the velocity is higher, and the cash exposure is around 60%. The multiple on your EUR 10 million in that example is 2.2x, 2.4x. The multiple on your cash is going to be between 2.7x and 3.2x. Sure. So we have 2 product ranges. One flagship fund, which has been there forever since we got started doing initially a lot of LP stakes and now being balanced between LP stakes and GP leads. Why is it balanced? Because now when we have a EUR 200 billion market again, roughly 50% of this market is actually covered by GP leads. So we replicate what the secondary market basically is offering us in these flagship plants. On the other hand, GP leads and LP stakes do not offer the exact same risk returns. So it's important to cover that as well. On LP stakes, you are going to assemble a portfolio with is going to be extremely diversified by sector, by GP, by geography, by vintage. And you could add up when you're assembling a portfolio of EUR 2.53 billion, with 60, 70, 80 transactions by transparency over 1,000 companies. On the other hand, GP led by definition, more concentrated. These transactions include 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 assets, sometimes a bit more, but the bulk is really between 1 and 5 companies per portfolio. We have actually a dedicated program to GP leads because the returns are a bit different. In GP leads, you could underwrite the transactions a bit higher. So targeting 2.2 to 2.5x your money and an IR, which is going to range at around 20%. In the LP stakes, you are going to be slightly lower, but again, much more diversified, so enjoying a stronger downside protection. So you're going to shoot for 1.8x, 1.9x and an IR, which is going quite similar at 18% to 20%. International presence is the must have. This is the global market private equity. So you could operate, if you want, in Europe or in the U.S., but you would give up on some opportunities in other regions. This is also offering a diversification of pure risk because all the regions do not necessarily perform at the same pace. The COVID was a great example. We've seen the COVID impacting several regions, but certain sectors did not get impacted the same way and the rebound did not happen at the same time. So you could play your geographic allocation and your investments depending the opportunities which were attractive enough in each region. First point. Second, when you have a seller in the private equity space and in the secondary space is not going to sell only European assets. He could sell a mixed bag of U.S., Europe, Asian assets. by being in a position to offer a global solution, you're maximizing the odds of getting the deal done and your negotiating power is higher because of that global solution that you are able to provide. It's a tough question. In 10 years, I would see Committed Advisors still operating in the same space. One of the recipe of our success is we have been extremely disciplined in remaining positioned in that mid-market space. How did we do? Our last fund was EUR 2.5 billion. We have multiplied mid-market transactions. So we have done more of the same, basically, even if the fund was 10x bigger than the first fund that we raised back to 2010. It was a EUR 250 million fund. What does it mean? Most of the deals that we're doing today would still fit into Fund 1, 2, 3, which is quite unusual. How do we see ourselves in this market in 10 years? This market is probably going to double up between now and 2030. Is it going to be a market at EUR 600 million, EUR 800 , maybe EUR 1 trillion in 10 years from now? Possibly. Frankly speaking, I don't know, but the only thing I know it's going to be bigger than now. The opportunity is great because we are still a very limited amount of players in this market. How many players are we? 150, maybe 170. That's it. How many price equity players do you have in the space, over 25,000. And that is actually a great advantage because we have room for new entrants, and we have new entrants coming in, but the growth of the market is higher then the amounts which are being collected by the new entrants and combined with the existing players. So the prospects are looking extremely good. But it's very important to remain very disciplined in the strategy that you have in place, and we are willing to keep operating in that mid-market space because the risk return are totally different versus the larger space. Well, it was, first of all, a cultural fit, an entrepreneurial fit that we found in Wendel. There was also this platform, which has been announced a few years ago and which is already active in place with best-in-class players, IK, Monroe. So we have basically a proof of this concept already in place. This is going to strengthen us over the long term. But in the meantime, this is not going to change our DNA. So Committed advisers will remain Committed advisers in the way we are going to define a and operate in the long term. So we remain independent in that point, but we will benefit very strongly from that partnership. Remaining focus obviously on secondaries, or mid-market keeping that entrepreneurial mindset that we share with Wendel and also having a massive alignment of interest that we have always had and what we're going to increase with our investors with a EUR 200 million commitment that we're going to have in the next fund being launched in January.

Okay. Thank you, Daniel. So let's pursue the presentation and the explanation of the building of this platform. So we -- this platform, I think, offers a unique set of products we see primary focus on [indiscernible]. You heard from Daniel how it is important because we do believe that it's the best way to deliver performance. But the challenge when you have mid-market positioning, this local positioning is also to create a business, able to grow and to have a global positioning. So our platform is at scale. Laurent mentioned it, we have EUR 46 billion, and we have also EUR 200 million of FRE. For us, the key -- the first KPI, AUM are important, but the key KPIs for us is the FRE. Because we are not IBM-Chaser. As Daniel said, what is important is the performance for our clients. We are not chasing huge funds. We are really focused on mid-market and we do believe that if we stay in this market, we'll be in a position to deliver performance to our clients. If you deliver performance to your clients, you can charge fees, you can grow your business and you can remain profitable and protect your business. That's exactly the way we want to build this platform. We are at scale, but at the same time, we stay where we have to stay. And with this profitability, we can attract talent, and we can also invest in our distribution to diversify our business. So that's the first let's attribute size, size in terms of AUM, size in terms of profitability. The second important point, global positioning. So mid-market, global positioning. Okay, why are we global? Let's take a step back. If you look at Tesma, you have 2 things. you have where we invest money and where we raise money. If you look at the platform today with the EUR 46 billion, our first market is the U.S. First in terms of investment, EUR 28 billion invested in the U.S. for Shorts Monroe, but you have also EUR 3 billion invested by Committed Advisor as Daniel presented, the U.S. market is key. So our first market in terms of investment is the U.S. the second market for shoes Europe with IT and also committed. And as you see also in terms of investment now, thanks to Committed adviser, we have also EUR 1 billion invested in Asia. If now we move to the other side of our business, where we raise money. First market, the U.S., EUR 21 billion. It's not only Monroe. We have EUR 3 billion raised for IK, EUR 1 billion raised for Committed Advisor. So our 3 affiliates are distributed already in the U.S. And in the U.S., we have also strong retail presence. I will come back to that. Second market, for sure, Europe. And it's not only IK and committed. We have also presence of -- a strong presence of Monroe in Europe. And the good thing also, why we are global. As you can see, we are also in Lat Am, in MENA and in Asia. We are small, but we are profitability with our growth. We want to invest there to grow our business, and we have a strong potential to develop our business. So mean market focus, focused on performance but a global position. So can attribute to scale, global. Then diversified. I will not come back on the expertise diversification. What is more interesting is the client type. For sure, we are an institutional business, but we have already a retail positioning with 13%. To be honest, it's only Monroe more today. They have a strong presence. They have started that 10 years ago. We want to expand the retail positioning also for Committed adviser. And for IK, I will come back to that later on. But you see already the diversification. And inside the institutional, we cover sovereign well sans insurers, pension fund everywhere in the world. After critical size, global positioning, diversification and what is even more important in terms of growth. Here, you have a mapping of the potential expertise. So you have in the column, the continent of Europe, U.S. and you have the, let's say, all the potential expertise in the private market. So in the color boxes, you have what we got when we have done the acquisition. So IK bring to us buyout in Europe. Committed advisers bring to a secondary in Europe and in the U.S., Monroe private credit and the full range of products in the private debt in the U.S. Then you have what can be done organically based on what we have today. We can grow Monroe in Europe as an investor, and we will launch an initiative on that. We can also diversify Committed advisers. They are on buyout, they could do also a secondary transaction in the debt on the infrastructure. And on top of that, for sure, as mentioned by Laurent, we can pursue our M&A to complement our platform. So it means that with the platform we have and also with the mindset of our CEOs because in our model, we need to have very strong investment professional and also very good business developer. And Daniel, last year, you sorted and we have also Christmas [indiscernible]. We are a very strong team with a very strong mindset in terms of development. It's very important. So critical size, global footprint, diversification. And we have a strong potential in terms of growth, organic growth and also potential for M&A. I think it's very important. Last thing for the platform, the debt on the platform, when you read the evolution of the private market, retail is key. Why? Because now the private market are a key component to fund the economy and if you have investment, it means that you need to allocate savings on the other side. And for the retail investor, everyone in the world is the beginning of the journey. Here also, we want to tackle this market. We have the experience to Monroe and we have also the products to address this market. We want to do it in a very sustainable way. We want to be very cautious in terms of fees. We want to be sure that we sell it to the right market. It's very important when you want to develop the retail business. And here, the experience of the traditional asset management is very important. Two things in this chart. The first one is that where is Monroe today? If we take the private BDC market, it's a bit technical, but it's a good way to summarize the positioning of Monroe in the retail market and private credit in U.S., you see that they are very well positioned with EUR 5.6 billion. The good thing is that on top of that, we have in mind to develop a full range of products for Monroe on the retail market. They have announced yesterday the launch of a new fund, quite different -- a bit different in terms of risk reward positioning, [indiscernible] and I think it will be very interesting. It will be also a way for them to enlarge the reach in terms of clients. It was -- they want to tackle also the wealth management in the U.S., so the potential is very important. And also in Europe with IT, I can announce that we have received the IMF approval to launch an evergreen vehicle for IK partners. We'll start the fundraising in H1 '26 and we may also launch this type of initiative for Committed Advisors. So we want to address the retail market, and it will be a new engine of growth for our platform. So critical size, global footprint, diversification, ability to grow, and we have all the means to tackle the retail markets. So really, with that, I think you have a good understanding of Wendel Investment Manager. In order to have a comprehensive view of our platform, I think we thought it could make sense to have also a view on the U.S. private credit because there was a lot of noise on newspaper, et cetera. So we thought that it could make sense to have this. It's why you will have a video now with Zia Uddin. Zia, last year, you saw [indiscernible], the CEO, the funder. Zia is the #2 is an investment professional core portfolio on the direct lending is a key contributor of the huge success of Monroe. We can launch video. [Presentation]

Capital is a leading specialty lending platform focused on inefficient segments of the U.S. private credit market. We are unique in the private credit industry and that we were founded in 2004 prior to the GFC. We have a long track record built on differentiated sourcing capabilities and strong underwriting which is consistent with our firm's guiding principles since our inception. We believe the key to long-term success in asset management is to deliver excess risk-adjusted returns to our investors which we achieved by attracting and retaining the best people and by pursuing strategies where we can deliver diversification and differentiated exposure that leverage our core capabilities. We are best known in the market as one of the largest players in the U.S. lower middle market. which we define as companies under $35 million of EBITDA. It is tempting to view the current geopolitical environment as a result of one person with a unique personality. It is not. We believe that the current macro trends, which we would oversimplify as a new era of deglobalization will outlive Donald Trump and other Western leaders currently in power. The trend of 50-plus years of globalization had a strong deflationary impact on the entire world, and it is coming to an end as Western and Eastern powers alike increasingly focus on domestic priorities, potentially even at the expense of economic growth being prioritized above all else. The net result is we are moving into a different macro regime characterized by more industrial policy, higher structural inflation and higher long-term rates. The era of free money and free trade is ending. We're now in a world of reshoring tariffs and strategic competition. This environment rewards lenders who price risk correctly and avoid businesses dependent on cheap capital or global arbitrage while unsettling for some Game Change creates opportunity for disciplined credit investors. In a geopolitical landscape that is different than almost any investor actively managing capital today has seen in recent memory, we believe investors will even prioritize assets that provide more certainty in a less certain world. Private credit is very well positioned in this environment as the asset class can deliver predictable cash yield, good downside protection and less mark-to-market volatility than experienced in public markets. In a higher inflation, higher rate world, floating rates become more valuable. But dispersion is widening. Private credit is not only one thing. Although it gets painted with a broad brush in every subsegment of private credit, manager selection and underwriting discipline matter more than ever. Our focus of senior secured covenant protected cash-generative borrowers aligns with this shift. Private credit and certain segments of direct lending has been an area that has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade with many new entrants looking to benefit from the in-favor nature of the industry. This growth has come at a unique period of time. It's been 16 years since the last real downturn which has led to returns, which have been strong across the entire industry. However, private credit is not and has never been a risk-free asset class. There have been certain players that have been more focus on asset growth, and they have been on investing in high-quality opportunities with appropriate safeguards. This has been arguably most commonly seen in the large end of the middle market where direct lenders now compete head to head with syndicated banks like JPMorgan and Bank of America. This head-to-head competition, coupled with the fact that there are only a finite number of $100 million-plus EBITDA companies getting purchased in a given year has led to a race to the bottom in terms Spreads have tightened dramatically. Leverage levels have increased. Adjustments to EBITDA have grown exponentially, and covenants and other downside protections have lost all teeth. Monroe has avoided participating in those areas of the market where the supply/demand imbalance so strongly favors borrowers and lenders expense. We're focused on smaller deals with lower leverage, higher spreads, and on sectors with recurring revenue and strong cash flow conversion. Monroe is especially well positioned for the current market conditions as we've been waiting for a market correction. It has been very difficult for investors to know which managers did things the right way and which ones we're benefiting from the strong industry trends. As equity and debt markets digest some of the excesses from the last few years, and some of the 2021 and '22 vintage deals, which were bought at peak multiples with peak leverage has come up for maturity, we believe we are going to see a period of market consolidation as the private credit firms who have done things the right way, we'll see strong outperformance and will be rewarded with accelerated fundraising success and greater market share. Private credit is currently being covered as if it's as exciting as football or cricket. While we are not intimately familiar with every headline or story that has been in recent headlines, from the situations where we do have insight we believe these have been idiosyncratic issues driven by specific business model challenges, unique funding models with off-balance sheet debt and poor documentation choices by the lenders involved but not a sign that there are significant issues across the private credit landscape. They are reminders that the underwriting quality varies widely across managers. We see isolated stress in certain sectors, but not a systematic credit cycle. Our portfolio remains healthy with leverage and interest coverage metrics built for this rate environment. While fundraising is never easy and always competitive, we are pleased with the level of trust and support we are seeing across our global investor base. Investors are increasing allocations to private credit broadly and more specifically to segments where they are adding diversification and reducing correlations such as lower middle market direct lending and asset-based finance. In 2025, we've seen continued inflows across our flagship direct lending funds. We're having our final close on our latest flagship fund, which will represent over 20% asset growth versus our last flagship fund. SMA structures with single LPs, including new SMAs over the last 12 months with a large Swiss asset management firm, a large Japanese insurance company and a partnership with a large Japanese bank and Australian asset manager as well as in our evergreen vehicles. We continue to see great momentum in the U.S. high net worth channel as our large private BDC, Monroe Capital Income Plus continues to see steady growth and we recently launched a new nontraded BDC anchored by one of the largest registered investment advisers in the U.S., which we believe will allow us to get more inflows from broker-dealers and wire houses. We continue to see a lot of opportunity to expand in the European institutional and high net worth segments, and that is an area where we are enjoying collaboration and support from the experienced team at Wendel. The pipeline for 2026 is robust and we're expanding relationships with institutions seeking long duration yield and stability. We want to continue to grow in our core segment of lower middle market lending by expanding into new channels and new fund types, more specifically, you will see us launch new evergreen fund structures for both the high net worth and institutional channels, taking advantage of growing appetite for funds that are not subject to the drawdown and wind up associated with historical closed-end funds. These funds also have the benefit of having longer lives and more predictable fee streams. We are also looking to grow in certain subsegments of private credit, where we have a strong track record as part of our broader alternative credit solution strategy. but where we can raise dedicated funds for investors seeking more tailored allocations. The partnership with Wendel has been fantastic. And truly, everything they indicated it would be during our diligence process, where we chose them over several other potential partners. The cultural fit has been excellent. We both have a shared long-term mindset and a focus on real value creation. Mendel has brought tremendous thought leadership and advice to me and Ted, in particular, as they have significant experience throughout their personal careers and through Wendel's over 300 years as a diversified asset manager. Their knowledge of best practices, their relationship with institutional LPs across the world and especially in Europe, and the way they go about their jobs have been very valuable for us, and we continue to strive to improve our firm. More specifically, Wendel's investment in Monroe has allowed us to accelerate our product development cycle as they have served as early seed capital in a number of new initiatives. Mendel has already helped us accelerate the fund raise for our new high net worth focused BDC Emlen which we believe could grow to be one of, if not the largest fund on our platform. We have a number of other new product launches coming over the next few quarters. and Wendel's early and sizable investment provides a very strong vote of confidence for third-party investors, which should allow us to grow faster than we would have been able to on our own. Some of the benefits include broader global reach, Wendell's international footprint has opened doors with sovereign wealth funds, pensions and insurers across the globe, stronger brand equity, being part of a publicly traded multigenerational investment group reinforces trust with LPs and borrowers. Collaboration with IK partners on fundraising and knowledge sharing of the European and U.S. private equity credit markets have also been invaluable. We think there is a lot of opportunity to leverage our respective blue-chip LP basis. We were especially excited about Wendel's latest acquisition of Committed advisers. The secondary market is a fascinating one and where we believe there could be a lot of opportunity to collaborate with them over time.

Thank you. Thank you, Professor Uddin. So no, so that was at the end of the first point. My second objective for today is to explain to try to convince you why when you're a shareholder of Wendel you have also the opportunity to participate in the private asset management market in a different way. You know as a shareholder of private asset management business, you have the benefit of the private asset very sticky. But on the other side, as you know, sometimes there is also volatility because those businesses are not linear. You raise capital then during 3 years, you have a sort of plateau, then you have a new vintage, et cetera. With the platform that we are building, the profile will be different because we have diversification, as I said previously, diversification in terms of asset class, but also diversification in terms of vintages, diversification in terms of fund format, as mentioned by Zia, evergreen vehicle versus [indiscernible], et cetera. So if you look at what you can see here is that the way we forecast our fundraising program for the coming years between [indiscernible] and you can see you have the orange bar for the secondary, for example, in 2016 and in '29 you have also the IG pace of fundraising. It was '24, '25. The next fundraising will be '27, '28. And then you have Monroe. Monroe is different because they have closed end fund and they have ever green vehicle. So they are always in the market. But on top of that, you have some peak '25, '28. So if you combine everything, you get something smoother, you are always relevant in front of the market. You are always something to sell to our clients, and it means that you deliver growth every year, quarter after quarter to your shareholder. And what does it mean for the shareholder? In terms of growth profile, in terms of revenue growth and FRE growth is totally different. If you look at each of our GPs or if you look at the growth profile of Wendel Investment Management, is totally different. So based on what I presented just previously, you see that there is some volatility in the growth, in the margin of each of those GPs. It's normal. That's the evolution, that's the DNA, that's the business model of what they do. If you look at the sorry, I missed the line -- brown line, sorry, you can see that it's a smoothen profile, and it's very important as a shareholder to have this type of profile. It means that you can go through different cycle, different market evolution with a permanent growth. And we hope that with this plan, we can deliver a 15% organic growth for our business with a good margin between 37% and 40%, which is, I think, a very good margin that will allow us to have a sustainable business. On top of this 15%, you have another effect on the growth, as mentioned by Laurent, we will have the opportunity between now and 2030 to buy back some of our minorities with predefined terms. It's part of the EUR 7 billion presented by Laurent. And if we do that, in this case, the growth profile, not the underlying business, but the Wendel share, it's not 15% per year, it's 20%. This is just organic growth. So 15% that's underlying organic performance. If you had the fact that we will increase our shares smoothly over time in each of our GPs, you get a 20% CAGR for Wendel for the next 5 years. That's for the FRE for the recurring revenues. But also on top of that, and for sure, we could have also M&A on top of that. But on top of the FRE growth, what I would like also to share with you as a shareholder of Wendel is that you will benefit from a share of the performance sharing with the client, what we call the PRE, performance-related earnings. And this -- it could be quite significant. As you know, when we announced the transaction for each of our transactions, sorry, we said that we will benefit -- we are entitled to 20% of all carried for future funds. So here, we try to show you what does it mean correctly for a shareholder of Wendel. So top of the slide, you have for one vintage, and then I will discuss the evolution for vintage. So what is the vintage? The vintage is for each of our GPs, every 3 years, they raise a fund. So private equity, it's IK, they raised close to EUR 6 billion. Secondary, it's committed adviser. One fund is EUR 3.7 billion. Private debt, here, I just took the closed-end fund, EUR 2.5 billion. So a vintage is EUR 11 billion. Then you go through the waterfall, assuming that you deliver the performance for sure. We put here the target in terms of performance with a range. You go through the waterfall, you split the value between the LPs and then you have the performance for the team. And then we have 20% of the carried for Wendel. And for that, so it means that for each vintage, we get potentially EUR 300 million with no additional capital. It will come on top of the 20% CAGR I've just mentioned. And then this, for sure, it takes time because you invest the money and you have the carried in year 7, year 10. But then in the future, it's what you have at the bottom of the slide, we will have those EUR 300 million potentially for each vintage every 3 years. So when we'll be full speed, it will be a very important complement in terms of revenues on top of the FRE growth. So as you can see, it's a very compelling offer for the shareholders and something that is really focused on the mid-market. So what you hear around the large cap, the pressure, et cetera, we can stay focused on the mid-market. We can deliver the performance. And at the same time, we can be ambitious, we can grow the business and we can be very profitable. I hope that with that, we can convince you that it's a very interesting opportunity as an investor. I'm a bit late. I will just go through that very quickly. So there is not so much opportunity to invest in a platform focused on mid-market with this reach, global in terms of positioning, present in the U.S., present in Europe. I think -- and supported by Wendel because it's a very interesting ecosystem. As I said at the beginning, we have been in a position to attract those guys because we are Wendel and we have a very strong ecosystem. This platform is resilient and diversified. I mentioned it already. And I think we have very strong potential in terms of size, in terms of product, we have a very strong team at the Wendel level, but also in the GPs. Those guys are very strong investment professional and also very strong entrepreneur, very strong business developers. So with that, I'm sure that we can deliver strong growth for you. Thank you.

Thank you, Cyril, for this presentation. Now it's time to turn to the wrap-up by Laurent, and then we will hold a Q&A session dedicated to Wendel.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Please come, David. Thank you very much, Cyril. I hope that has convinced you that it is a real business that we're developing and a growing business with a lot of potential. Do I have the wrap-up or no? There are slides. Yes. There are. This is one. Okay. So we've moved -- I think you've seen, we've changed a lot. We've transformed the company, and it is a true change. This has made us to have strong businesses. We have a historical business to invest money and to be a shareholder -- active shareholders of company to generate value and capital gains. I think we've taken the means in order to change it again to make it more efficient through benefiting from the IK framework, but we still invest that. We've got great companies, and we've got great prospects to that. So that is important. But it's also now that we have 2 pillars. We also have the pillars of developing an asset management, which is a true unique platform that will deliver significant growth and significant value. All of that with a lean organization in order to have as less cost potential at the holding level so that we can be the most efficient that we can. And again, I will not come back to everything, but I think now we have an absolutely unique ecosystem, private asset ecosystem that is efficient, will deliver growth, will deliver value creation and will help us generating significant shareholder return, significant shareholder return through dividend growth and through share buyback in order to take benefit of the 2 big discount that we have today, and we'll see how much we have more potential to do. So that was it. It was a little bit too I think it was a good moment to show you how much we have transformed ourselves, what potential we have and that we're not anymore only an holding company owning assets. We are a business. We are a business that also own assets and that has created a truly unique ecosystem around that. Thank you very much, and we are now both of us, but all of us at your disposal to answer to your questions.

Thank you. We will start with some questions from the web, and we'll go to the room. The first question, can you elaborate about the process of Monroe pricing risk of its portfolio? Is it a proprietary process dependent on rating agencies or an hybrid?

No, it's not. I mean, Monroe is doing -- it's not -- the way it does work is that Monroe is always looking for lower to middle market companies. So the type of rating is similar. So it's not like they are doing a AAA lending and then CCC lending. They always are looking to the same type of it. The important is that the spreads on the lower middle market is probably 75 to 100 basis points higher than on the highest -- the larger market, for the same type of risk. So we're talking about 500 to 525 today. It has gone down. It was close to 600 1.5 years ago, but it's still 500 to 525. While on the larger transaction, we're more talking about 400 basis points as a spread. So the way -- what is important is not pricing, than the selection. And the important thing for me when you assess risk is to have a double regard -- double view. I've been a banker for years and years and I've been chairing a risk committee of a bank for years, twice a week, half a day each time. So I can tell you this is something where you get. The much important thing is that you've got somebody that is there to defend the case that have made the instruction, and you've got somebody that is there to assess the risk. And the decision has to be the confrontation between the 2. Many private credit funds are doing the same way as a private equity, which is the team that is in charge of the loan, either one, that defines the case and decide. I think you need to have that double balance when you talk about risk. Because in a credit, it's not like you're buying something because it's going to double the value. No. You're only going to get the rates. So what is important is that you don't lose the capital. So that's why it's so important that the risk is debating about what is the probability that we lose the capital. It's not the question of how much -- how are we going to double the value. Are we going to protect the capital? And then earn the rates. So the risk approach is key. And that's exactly what Monroe is doing. And that's what we -- when we did the due diligence, we discussed with, they have an underwriting team that is a very seasoned team, very strong. Very strong criteria, very -- they have a funnel of decision. They look to probably 2,000 transactions a year, and they invest in less than 10% of that. And this is transaction they originate, which is very important. They're not followers. That's also the beauty of being on the lower middle market, but that's why they have also many offices throughout the U.S. Monroe is not 10% -- 10 people in Chicago. It's 325 people all across the U.S. in order to assess the quality and to originate loans, and on the other side, to assess the risk. So they have a very, very robust underwriting policy, which is key when you do credit.

Maybe just to illustrate the risk profile, we can remind the group that the average leverage of the portfolio, the underlying portfolio of the Monroe loans, is under 4x. So it's a reasonable leverage, and with a full set of covenants. They don't have covenant [indiscernible].

4x, while the larger transactions are more 5 to 6. They are covenant while the larger transactions are covenant-light. So this is very important. The other thing is that we then -- they have a portfolio surveillance and they follow the portfolio on a regular basis. We have a discussion with them. And we see and we -- which are the transactions that are in danger or not. Their rates of loss since 20 years has been 1.2% globally, 70% of recovery. So 1.2% loan that went into default and they recovered 70% of that. So that means that the total loss is 0.3 basis -- 30 basis points, 35 basis points.

Question from Geoffroy.

Geoff Michalet from ODDO BHF. Three questions for me. First question, on the EUR 7 billion of capital you want to recycle. Can you give us a more precise idea of the split between WPI and WIM? And do you need to deliver the target of IRR 12% to 16% of IRR from WPI to reach the EUR 7 billion? That's the first question. Maybe I can do the second after.

No, no. I will answer this one. So how much is coming from the recurring revenue, how much is coming from the sales? Well, if we don't give the number, it's because we don't want to be too specific. But let's say that if you do the math of our FRE, you will make -- and you do it with the 20% potential growth, you will see that it's not far from EUR 1 billion that will come from the revenues. So I've not signed anything, but you make the calculation yourself and you come to that number. And if you come to that number, I say, yes, it's not so bad. So which means that, no, you don't have to make -- I mean, hopefully, we'll do that, but we have a lot of leeway compared to the -- I mean, it's not the full portfolio that is [indiscernible]. We're talking about a portfolio that is potentially EUR 5.2 billion, EUR 5.3 billion of value. Here, if you take 7 minus 1, you see -- okay, so you make the math on your side, and you see it's not exactly that.

Second question, on capital allocation. Shall we think the dividend being linear together with the growth of the Wendel Investment Management? But can we imagine earlier step-ups due to capital rotation, for instance? And the second question on the capital allocation is on the share buyback. You have announced an important share buyback program today for next year. Do you have in mind a minimum FRE float level that you want to keep the listed company below which you don't want to go?

Well, it's a good question, so -- but [indiscernible] answer to any constraint at the same time. So your first question is dividend policy. Dividend policy, we've explained the dividend policy, and it will follow that path. So it will grow with the asset and it will grow with the flows of revenue coming from the asset management. As you've seen the flows of revenue from the asset management, will be pretty stable, thanks to the mix of business that we have which makes that the FRE growth is pretty predictable -- I mean, predictable. It's never predictable. But it's pretty -- the cycle of each of the business make that we've got a much smoother one than if we were only one category of assets. So that will rely on that. So it's not -- now as I've said, in our cash flow blocks, there's EUR 1.2 billion that is we didn't allocate to something. That is there in order to potentially increase shareholder return if we feel that we need to increase shareholder return. And I'm not stating what sort of shareholder return we will give, but there is different ways to do it. That could be a dividend, that could be share buybacks, we'll do. The more free float we have, the better. But we also have to make sure that we've got not too much discount for our shareholders. So that's why we think reinvesting today part of our money in our own assets that we know, in our own business, the great asset management platform we built, we think it's a wise decision to take today. And that's why we're taking it.

I have one question about the more than EUR 2.5 billion you're going to invest in Wendel Investment Management. I would like to know what is already linked to the earn-out, the amount you have decided also to commit to the different trends. And if there is, after this mandatory, let's say, investment, is there something left?

Well, yes, because we told you there's 3 things. There is seed money that we want to put. There's the buyout of the earnout and buyout of the minorities, which lead to the fact that the FRE will grow faster than the underlying FRE of the platform. But there's also potential M&A. As I say, potential M&A is not the top priority, but it is a possibility. But it's not the bulk of the EUR 2.5 billion. It's a reasonable amount to do a sizable transaction, but it's not the bulk of it. It's not the majority of it. So yes, there is. By the way, we have to -- here we're talking about cash. One way -- one thing I want to clarify, that when you look to our current LTV, all the commitment that we have to buy the minorities and so on is already included in the LTV, even if it's not cash out.

And maybe a second one, a follow-up question on the EUR 7 billion of cash. Have you accounted for some performance-related earnings in this front?

No. No. I think Cyril wanted to show you that there is embedded value there, that you can't see through the earnings or the cash statement today, but that will be there. However, we don't expect it to be there before 2030, so we've not taken into account, at least not in cash, by 2030. So accounting wise, maybe a small may rise, but accounting-wise. In cash, it's very small. May I just correct? Because -- and then I give you. We have 20% of some past PRE, performance-related earnings, of carried interest of Monroe. So those ones are in it, but it's a very small portion to the -- but yes, we have -- so the answer is not 0%. But it's not part of the 300 calculation that you've seen. Sorry. I wanted to be as precise as possible.

Saima Hussain from AlphaValue. So I just wanted to ask, so hybrid models, combining investment and third-party asset management tend to be structurally undervalued by the market. So is there a risk that Wendel ends up into a strategic no man's land, meaning not fully valued as a pure asset manager nor as a pure holding? And how do you actively manage this perception?

Well, first of all, remember, 3 years ago, we were purely a holding company, not an asset manager. So we are in a journey. However, I think what we wanted to explain to you, and we'll see how the market value us, is that we think this ecosystem is powerful. I think that if you have private -- you have permanent capital, you have the means to grow your asset management faster than if you don't have. By the way, all the big private asset managers are looking for permanent capital one way or the other. Some of them are buying it by buying an insurance company to fuel the policyholder money back in their funds. Some others are still having significant capital on their balance sheet. So we think that it is important to have permanent capital if you want to grow faster. I don't know the market prefer pure asset manager. We are in a growth story. And I think what we want is that the market recognize we are in a growth story. And the fact that we have a good performing engine of capital appreciation through investing in great companies and generating funds, in a powerful ecosystem, which means that it's not like we've got a small team in a way that investing. No, we have -- it's the same team that is making that. I think it's a powerful way to create permanent capital that could be invested in the growth of the asset management. And you see that over the last -- the next 5 years, the asset management portion is increasing [indiscernible]. So sometimes you have to invent your own model. And I think our model makes sense, and it will create significant value. We'll see how the market valuates our long term.

Yes. I would just mention that Apollo, KKR or ICG have -- they all have a very strong balance sheet. Maybe they don't communicate a lot of it. And they are pretty well valued.

But it depends on how fast the asset management develop. Again, we were 0. We're 46 billion. We're moving ahead. Yes.

[indiscernible]. Two questions on the investment platform. The first one is a follow-up of what has already been asked. But if everything goes to your plan, I mean, the earnout, buyouts of the minorities, how much should that be out of the 2.5? So that's my first question. And the second question is, we have seen, I mean, presentation on very good investment managers. My question is more -- I mean, where is the platform exactly? I mean, i.e., what is done in common? And what will you implement...

Great question. Great question. First of all, as I said, I don't give the detail of the 2.5. I think we've given pretty good detail already, but I don't give the detail. However, it is embedded into this number and it already is embedded into our own LTV today. So it's an [indiscernible]. Now what is important is the platform, it's not like we've got asset managers that are on their own everywhere. No, they're working together. We have had -- we had a meeting. We've got a regular meeting where we have the 2 heads of each of the platforms together, and we're working on the -- the number one thing is distribution. What we don't want is to mix investment. They are on different expertise, so we should not. So where do we take benefit distribution? We already have created a common distribution adviser in Japan. We're looking for solution in Middle East. We're looking to solution in other areas. I can't be specific to everything, but we're working on it. So we've got a working group with the head of distribution of each of the 3 companies to see how can we cross-sell on the LP base. So this is ongoing work, I mean, because we're still very new, but this is really where we want to be a superior distribution platform. We have, as you say, some small benefit like you will see that if you go in the building, you will see IK Partners is going to be joining us on the fifth floor here, we are on the sixth, so yes, we are putting together some elements of that. We have the same building now in New York. Our team is moving in the Monroe, the development of IK team distribution in the U.S. will be. But it's more the exchange and the distribution initiative that is important. So we are underway to build that. Number two, retail. Nor IK, nor Committed Advisors is doing retail in Europe. They would not be able to do it by their own because it's too expensive for them. Now we're doing it because we're putting together the efforts, and that this retail distribution channel will do IK, will do Committed Advisors and [ tomorrow ] will do Monroe also. Third, helping some of them to grow internationally. Monroe Europe is an initiative that we're taking in common to help and to grow. We will use the basis of what we have in order to be faster in doing it. So it's -- everything is not done, but it's -- we're creating a business. And I think it was a sense of that. It is a transformation. It's not finished. It's a journey, but it's well advanced.

Alexandre Gerard, CIC. Three questions, please. So the first one is related to a subject you didn't tackle today, it's Stahl, within private assets. So the disposal of the Wet-End business didn't close. Can we have an update on that? We all had in mind that the sale of Stahl in the medium term was conditional on the disposal of that bit of the company. So if we could have an update on that firstly.

The important thing for us is to make a carve-out between the new Stahl and the Wet-End, which is called [ Muno ], and that is done. That will be effective on 1st of January of 2026.

Do you still intend to sell that Muno business...

Yes. But we said it was -- the sale per se was less important than the carveout. So we did put the priority to the carveout, which will be done fully first of January, which then allow us to have 2 different company. New Stahl, which is a great company, very well positioned on the specialty coating business. And then [ Muno ], which is a cash-generating business. This is leather, so potentially less attractive than Stahl as a whole. But still, what is important is that this is a company that can generate significant cash. So we're working on the cash flow generation from Muno. Muno will be based in Italy, by the way; Stahl in Netherlands. Pretty separate.

So second question, you insisted a lot on the fact that you wanted to streamline the OpEx of the holding company, mentioning the fact that the staff would go down from 100 people to 60...

It has. It has.

Okay. Can you remind us what's going to be the, in terms of million of euros per annum, the OpEx of the company? And do you have in mind as a percentage of the global AUM of Wendel, a target that you don't want to reach in terms of OpEx divided by AUM?

I didn't make the calculation this way, but it's, let's say, 10 to 15 basis points for the global AUM probably maximum. And today, we are running -- probably we were running at -- we're running -- we're going to run below 50, and we were running above 70, to give some sort of view.

EUR 750 million per annum. And that includes the advisory business mandate that you gave to IK?

Yes.

And my last question is, on the 9% of the share that you want to buy back, what part is going to be attributed to the management of the company and what part for the remuneration of the asset management company that you realized? Direct or I saw someone who wanted to split the buyback...

What is important is that we're making that is generating higher net asset value per share. We'll see where we allocate -- I mean we'll make, sorry to call, allocation of the shares. I don't know, how -- which part, the mobile will [Foreign Language].

Not decided yet. .

Yes. What is important that we buy it back. This is not a -- it's relative to the NAV, it's relative to the dividend, relative to everything. And if we pay with that, we'll have additional position to buy back more shares. So we'll leave it to that.

We have a question there.

Yes. A rapid question regarding the U.S. private credit. So what is the current environment, the current default rate? And at which extent deterioration in the default rate could impact the value of Monroe?

Well, I don't think there's a -- I mean, default rate is not moving too much. It's slightly -- it's growing, but not that -- I think you have had a pretty good...

No, no. Globally, so the -- in Q2, Q3, the default rate has increased for the private credit industry as a whole. But one more time, the positioning of Monroe is different. And so far, if you look at the portfolio of Monroe, they have 650 loans. We don't see an increase of the default rate at this stage for Monroe. So so far, it works relatively well. As we know, the U.S. economy is very strong. You keep that in mind. They are focused on [indiscernible] on technology, et cetera. So the growth is good. So the U.S. economy is going through the longer cycle ever. So it will not last. It's [indiscernible] cycle in the economy, including in the U.S., but so far, it's going very well. So there is a huge gap between some very specific cases as explained by Zia. And what we see in the underlying economy in the U.S., and on top of that, we do believe that the policy of the new administration, the rationalization of the economy will be very positive for Monroe because they are focused on the mid-market in the U.S., so very local companies.

That's exactly Zia say. Now what -- let's say that there is a macroeconomic event that makes that [indiscernible] increase in default rate. That could happen. But it's -- how will it hurt Monroe? It doesn't hurt Monroe in direct because Monroe is not exposed by itself. Monroe clients are exposed. So it may hurt Monroe if their ability to raise new funds is impacted by the fact that the performance is less good. But it's a relative game. People have to invest money. So if the private credit of Monroe has default, the high-yield bond will have default. The equity market will have -- by the way, private credit is less risky than equity. If you've got a big hit on the private credit, probably you will have a big hit on the equity first. So the important is to know in relative term, where are you? And we don't view that the interest for the private credit market will disappear. We view it is still a market that will grow. And in fact, when you've got a crisis, it [indiscernible] highest spreads. And it means that the ability for Monroe to raise fund back after a crisis where you -- I mean, unless you are land dock, I mean you know the one that is hit compared to the rest of the market. But if you are in the market or a little bit better than the market, your ability to raise new funds will even, I think, be better. You may have 1 or 2 years of really flattish, but I think it's good. So it's not like Monroe is -- I mean, the private credit won't disappear because there's a downturn in the economy. It's not like the private credit is a niche market that will disappear. It's like you say, you don't want to have any bank loans because you've got a credit cycle. The difference is on the bank, it is their own balance sheet. Because the bank suffers because of that. Here, the Monroe doesn't suffer. What it has to make sure is that its performance relative to others is okay. But the market will stay there. And it's a big market. So what we're doing is to make sure that performance of our client is the best, that the selection, the underwriting, the positioning that we have at Monroe is protecting them from a sort of idiosyncratic position or sectorial bubble. However, long term, this is a market that will stay and will keep on growing. It's not a [indiscernible] phenomena, it is a long-standing position and change. And this is the same in Europe. And it will grow in Europe.

Thank you. I have some questions from the web. Given the regulatory limitations surrounding share repurchase as it relates to the average daily volume of the shares, have you considered all the potential mechanism to accelerate the repurchases such as privately negotiated transaction, tender offer, et cetera?

We've decided that we will make a purchase plan on the year, we, I think, have a little bit of knowledge of the environment and regulation. We decided this one was the best one to do, and that's what we're going to do.

A question about a slide shown by Cyril. With respect to the performance-related earnings, do those figures shown in the slide represent the net amounts to Wendel? In other words, is that after any [indiscernible] revenue share with the principal?

Yes. This is -- the comp and revenue share is already [indiscernible]. So this is a full value to Wendel.

No. It's okay.

Yes, it's net.

Before tax.

Before tax. What do you think would be the single most impactful future strategic action for Wendel Investment Management platform in the near future if you had to choose only one action?

Growth. The distribution. Help the distribution. Further help our asset management to work together to create that distribution channel. The retail initiative. That -- this is really my -- the #1 priority we have is this one.

How do you value Wendel Investment Manager in your [indiscernible]?

Today, we do that through comparable of listed peers, which is the same as we do for the rest of the assets.

Thank you. Maybe a question in the room?

Loco from Berenberg. LTV was at around 20% in Q3. And I guess, you don't want to increase it further to maintain your investment grade. Should we expect any disposal soon to reduce it or?

We say that we will do EUR 7 billion of asset rotation. So we will be active in managing our portfolio.

Is it Stahl or?

Come on. I've got -- leave us a little bit of...

Again, Saima Hussain from AlphaValue. As usual, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the current private market environment, especially on private equity, and notably in terms of bid and ask spread and in terms of opportunities.

Okay. We see a slowdown in terms of transaction. What should come to the market today are the 2020 and 2021 vintages. So those companies have been bought at the peak of the market. They did suffer and went through the COVID as the first year. So this is like a [ top ] vintage. And this is a natural source of the divestitures that we should see today. So those are not easy assets to sell. And so as you say, there is a mismatch between buyers and sellers, and you can read in the press a lot of [indiscernible] auctions where the sellers' expectations in terms of valuation are not met. So we see a long process. We see more negotiation in terms of valuation and more power -- more bargaining power in the hands of the buyers. By the way, our assets are based on market value.

Thank you very much. I have a lot of other questions on the web, but we will answer by e-mail or by phone call. I would like to thank you very much for being present for this presentation. See you next year.

Thank you.