We start this presentation. Thanks a lot for attending this first half revenue presentation from the Cegedim Group. I will guide you through the main facts of this first half. The revenue for the first half for Cegedim was EUR 319 million, growing 6% reported and 4.6% like-for-like. As we will see later on, the main contributors have been digitization solutions, marketing, and cloud operation. It is worth noting during this first half that we integrated Visiodent. From March 1st, we will see it in our sales. This is the bridge from H1 2023 to first half 2024. Organic growth, as mentioned before, was 4.6%. Structural impact was 1.2%, so mainly Visiodent. The slight positive currency impact of EUR 0.5 million, mainly due to the sterling pound. This is the split between the various divisions that we are used to introduce to you.
So the software and services grew up reported 1%, the flow division by 5.8%, data and marketing 8%, BPO 21.6%, cloud and support 14.5%. It is also worth noting, as we mentioned during the first quarter, that we reclassified some subsidiaries to other divisions, mainly Cegedim Outsourcing and Audiprint were reclassified from the software and services division to the cloud and support division. BSV was also reclassified from the flow division to the cloud and support division. Now we'll see, we'll dive into the various divisions. The first one is the software and services division. So it represented 48% of the sales on the first half for Cegedim. It grew up on reported basis by 1% and was done like-for-like by 1.7%.
So on the subdivision composing this first division, we have Cegedim Santé, which was down like-for-like 11.5%, as we had anticipated, because last year it benefited mainly on the first half from the Ségur de la Santé investments. And the group is confident that we would be able to offset the subsidy on the first, on the full year, and we'll be confident it will catch up on the second half. There's been a positive scope effect for Cegedim Santé on the first half due to the integration of Visiodent since March 1st, showing the difference between like-for-like and reported. It is also worth noting that Cegedim Santé was down on the first quarter by 17%, and the second quarter, I would say, only 5.5% down, showing up that the group is confident to catch up on the full year basis.
The other French operation grew up by 2.7%, mainly driven by HR activities, which are still experiencing very strong growth by diversifying the client base, and also the insurance activities doing good. International business was down 1.1% on the first half. Also, this was expected, as we had mentioned at first quarter, we decided on the doctor software in the U.K. to exit England, Northern Ireland, and Wales to stay focused on Scotland. So the first, I would say, impact starting, and it's a bit less of sales, and it will be, and we'll see in September, that it will be good for better for the margin. The positive impact between like-for-like and reported is mainly due to the appreciation of the sterling pound. The second division, the flow division, which been 15% of the sales in the first half, grew up by 5.8% reported and 5.7% like-for-like.
Its two businesses experienced growth. First one, e-business, has experienced a strong growth of 7.6% reported, 7.4% like-for-like. On its two practices, the invoice digitalization and the health flows. It is worth noting that for the invoice digitalization, we experienced growth from Germany, where the reform is set to be set up on January 1st. And the health flow is still very good. And the third-party payment experienced a growth of 3.1% on this first half. It is worth remembering that the big contract with Allianz had hampered the growth on the first quarter by transferring a bit of sales from the flow division to the BPO division. And this growth in third-party payments has been very good thanks to volume on the first quarter, and especially also on the detection of fraud solution, which experienced a good growth.
All in all, as I mentioned, the reported growth on this first half has been 5.8% for the Cloud division. On the third division, data and marketing, which represented 19% of sales in the first half, experienced a growth of 8% reported in like-for-like. The data part of it has been slightly down for the first half, by 2.8%. The French operation were having a quite good momentum. International was a bit less than dynamic. On the marketing subdivision, very good growth still, 20% growth on the first half, confirming the sound strategy about this phygital strategy and offering to the pharmacies. So all in, this division grew by 8%. The fourth division, as I mentioned before, the BPO division grew up by 21.6%. The insurance BPO grew up by 29.5%.
So, as I mentioned earlier, the Allianz contract started last year on April 1st, so it means that still for the first quarter, we expect very good, very important growth due to comparison basis. But it's not the only reason for growth in the insurance BPO. Its overflow solution is also experiencing a very good growth, but it's a bit hidden between this Allianz contract impact. Also, the business services BPO has experienced growth all along the first half, a growth of 5.1%. It's mainly due to its compliance solution. All in, the BPO division experienced growth of 21.6%. Last but not least, our fifth division, the cloud and support division, which represented 6% of sales in the first half, grew by 14.5% during this half year. It confirms the good strategy and the sound strategy for sovereign cloud activity, for which it experiences a strong demand.
It's growing, as you can see, it was growing 7% on the first quarter and 23% on the second quarter. All in, it's a 14.5% growth on the first half for the cloud and support division. The outlook for the group has not changed. We still believe we'll be able to have a growth range of 5%-8% like-for-like for the year and have a recurring operating income increasing for the whole year. No change on this. We have our 2024 financial agenda, the next meetings that we'll have together. We'll have more detail on September 26th, in which we'll release our earnings for the first semester. The next morning, the next day, you will have a staff meeting. Then on October 24th, we will release our third quarter sales. Thank you for your attention.
Now I suggest that we get into questions. Please raise your hand so that I'm able to give you the floor. Gabriel, you are the first one, please.
Yes. Can you hear me?
Yes, we hear you perfectly.
Yes, thanks, Damien. Just can you give us the detail of organic growth in Q2 and the top line for Q2, please?
For the various division?
Yes, just for the group.
For the group, on the Q2, the organic growth was 4.3%. 3.3%, sorry. And you wanted some more.
No, thanks. Excellent.
Okay. Are there any questions? Okay. Eric, floor is yours.
Yes. Just a quick comment. I am surprised by the very good number of marketing. Can you give us some granularity? It should be positive or negative for the margin?
Siofran?
If you want to, yeah.
Yeah. No, it is positive because the main growth comes from the electronic distribution of the spots. We have two ways of making this business. Either we put communication, so photos, into the windows of the pharmacists, and then it means that we send people to make this manual job, or we just send spots to the screens we have installed into those pharmacists. And last year, we have invested a lot in the screens. We spent more than EUR 9 million in equipping more and more pharmacists. So this is the main reason why the revenue is growing. It is because the network is going to be bigger and bigger.
And yes?
It should be recurring growth. How it works? It's campaign or it's?
It's not recurring at all. It's campaigns, two weeks or four weeks campaigns. But what we can say is that we don't have a lot of competitors. What interests the announcer, the company which asks us to put their spots, is the fact that we have the best screens and the best windows around France. So.
It's done with a very high level of margin, this kind of business, no?
Yes, it's a very good level of margin. Since we have transferred the business, which was before made by manual installation of communication in the windows, so this electronic network, the margin has grown very positively. Now, the question is, are we at the maximum possible? This is a question because we have equipped the best pharmacists in France. We have a lot of screens. We throw a lot of spots. For the rest of the year, we are confident. We are really in our business plan. For the years after, will this business grow as fast as now? I can't tell. I can't tell because maybe we are not far from saturation of the market. Since we don't have any significant competitor, the number of pharmacists we could equip will decrease. So, but anyhow, it's a very good and profitable business.
That means that if I see a screen in a pharmacy, I can say it's probably a Cegedim?
Oh, yes.
Market share is 90% or?
There is only one competitor, Pharmaflix. You can see very they have very huge screens. Maybe I think they have 300 pharmacists, and we have 3,000. Yeah. I'm not sure of my figure. But the position is that we have a very strong market share.
That means on the price, you can do what you want?
No. No, no. We have some ratio. We know exactly what we can build to a pharmaceutical company depending on the number of screens and the duration of the campaign. And you see, we also have contracts with the groups of pharmacists. And it is the reverse. It means that we are transferring some cash to them so that they push their pharmacists in the group to accept our screens. So, okay.
You pay the pharmacy?
Yeah.
You don't use to do that.
We pay some very few pharmacists. We pay them because they have wonderful windows.
Okay. It's only in the windows or the screen or?
No, no. We have also the screen inside.
Inside, so what we see inside.
You can see them. They are smaller than the screens in the windows. It's not the same spots. The spots into the windows, they are built to push the people who are in the street to enter into the pharmacy. The spots inside the pharmacy are more on to push them to buy this product or this product, you see? It's a combination of marketing communication.
Okay. Just on your guidance, you maintain the guidance in the communiqué, quite laconic. In terms of flavor, you are more confident, less confident, and.
No, no, we are okay. The thing is that during the first semester, we have had a decrease in the software for pharmacist business. And if the decrease does not come from the software, it comes from the sale of computers to them. The reason for that is that last year, there was a Ségur de la Santé for the pharmacist during the second half. But to install our new version of the software, which is compliant with Ségur de la Santé, a lot of our clients had to change their hardware. And now they are equipped. So this reduction in terms of revenue has not a strong impact in terms of profit because the margin we are making on the hardware is not that big. But it has an impact on our revenue.
That's why we maintain the 5%-8% guidance because we feel that in the second semester, we will have the same effect: less hardware sold to pharmacists.
So you are reasonably cautious on sales, but you are quite more confident on EBITDA?
Yeah. Well, EBITDA, we are in our plan, yes.
The decline of the business in Great Britain is the decline in the loss?
Well, the problem is that not on the first half. The problem we have on the first half is that we have made a plan to reduce the number of people, but it has been made during the first half. So we will see the effect in the second half, but not on the first half.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, Eric. We have Amadou. Yes, please, Amadou.
Hello. Two for me, please. First of all, on the results of your data business, it seems it used to grow revenue in the past. Now it's lacking a little. I'd like to know why that is. And in connection to that, in the emergence of AI and data analysis, I was wondering if we could expect initiatives on your part to maybe extend the value which you might generate of your data sets. And the second question regards the BPO division. I was wondering, when you think of the growth of this division, you took over the department of Allianz, and I would expect there to be growth in earnings, but I'm not sure on the revenue side and on the incremental revenue increases from the whole division. I would expect it is people-intensive, but you might want to give me a little bit more color on that.
Thank you.
Okay. On the data side, we are late in the international development of this business. We had a business plan rather positive on Germany, and it is not starting. So the French business is still growing, but the international business is decreasing. And for this business, it is not recurring. We have pharmaceutical companies who are asking for a study. For instance, we are not sure that every semester they will repeat their need of having those kinds of studies. So in France, since we have a very strong position and we have a lot of years of experience, we know that always there are new studies, new asks, new orders coming from the pharmaceutical company. Outside France, sometimes we have a big contract, and it's good, and then we don't have. And on the first semester, we really had a decrease compared to the first semester of last year.
So this will have an impact on the EBIT because whether we have contracts or not, we have to pay for the data. In Germany, we buy the data from CompuGroup Medical. In Italy, we buy the data from a software company for doctors. So we may have, during the first semester, a decrease in the profits of this data business. The main business is to deliver data to the pharmaceutical company. And very often, the pharmaceutical companies are making the computation they need to have. So we have some artificial intelligence projects using those data, for instance, to help doctors to make diagnoses. So we use data. We can make some statistics, and it helps then the business made with the doctors on the software for doctors to propose some rules to help them to make diagnoses.
For the time being, I cannot say that it produced a lot of revenue. The main usage we have in the group for artificial intelligence is to improve the efficiency of the people who are working in the BPO organization. Because a lot of the job made by the BPO people is to answer the questions of the clients of our clients. So when a client is a client of an insurance company and he has a question on his contract or on his repayments, he asks why the repayments have been made this way or not. So we are improving the profits of this division by having some helps so that our people can answer quicker and better to those people.
We think that we will improve this profitability mainly at the beginning of the next year, 2025, because we will launch an internal project based on those techniques. So that whether the question comes from an email or comes from a letter, we will have techniques which will be able to analyze the PDF if it's an email or the document if it's a letter. This internal software will propose an answer to our people so that they can answer much quicker. On the BPO, you had a question on the BPO. The EBIT of BPO for this year will be impacted negatively by the fact that we are in the setup phase for Allianz.
So we are really now into the period where we have to transform the way the Allianz people we have hired, the way they are working, and we have to train them to use our softwares. And we know that we have increased the teams, mainly in Morocco, because for the time being, all the figures we are computing to measure the efficiency of those teams are not good enough.
Thank you, Pierre.
Have I answered your question? Okay.
Yes, absolutely. And congrats on the good results.
In fact, the results of the global BPO organization will be driven by the HR BPO and by the fact that we have improved our way of doing things for the old clients in the insurance BPO. So this will be positive, but we will have a negative impact coming from the Allianz contract.
I think we have written questions from Dr. Bessmann too regarding Cegedim Santé. Mr. Bessmann wants to know whether we have a target EBIT margin for the coming years and would like to have a bit more details on the competition with Doctolib and whether Maiia gained market share. So I don't think we gave any guidance on Cegedim Santé EBIT margin. Speak under your control, Pierre, on this. And for the Doctolib competition, so yes, Doctolib has entered the, how do you say that, the practice software management for doctors. Has Maiia gained market share? I will let you on this, Pierre. Well.
We are signing a lot of clients on Maiia and on Maiia for kinesiotherapists and for doctors. But we have a big churn. So the number of users, the net number of users is increasing, but we need to focus on the fact that we are losing too many clients. So the competition with Doctolib is a real competition because they are the leader. But we still grow. And you see the figures from Cegedim Santé. If you put apart the fact that last year, we had EUR 5 million subsidies coming from Cegedim Santé, you can see that there is growth. But our goal today is to act to keep all those clients we are, those new clients we are signing. We keep the target we have decided to reach for this year is to compensate the fact that we won't have the EUR 5 million subsidies coming today this year.
We are in the plan today. Okay, the competition is tough with Doctolib.
EUR 5 million are on the first half?
Yeah.
And on the full year, it was?
It was EUR 5 million. Everything has been.
On the first half.
Kept on the first half. So Cegedim Santé will still be a loss-making in 2024, but very less than the year before. So we are improving. We are always on the scheme where it will break even next year in 2025. If we had to Cegedim Santé, the EBIT of Visiodent and the EBIT of RESIP. RESIP is the company which sells the drug database, Claude Bernard. This is a logical group. We say it's Group Cegedim Santé. Then it will be profitable in 2024. But the acquisition of Visiodent is permitting this positive result. Aim to break even Smart Rx. Unfortunately, I must say that it will be a long process. We have lost a lot of clients during those five years. Now we are in a situation where we are losing clients, but we are gaining clients, and somehow the number of pharmacists is flat.
We are launching a new version of the software, which will be fully secure, which seems to receive good feedback from pharmacists. But it will be a long process. The Smart Rx business has a big interest for us because through our software, we are collecting data from the pharmacists to feed the databases of the data business. But anyhow, we should at least be break-even on Smart Rx and then make the profit on the database in the data business. And this is not the case today. But as we have said, we are working on the deficits we have in the U.K., and we are working on the deficit we have on Smart Rx. But we cannot say that it will be a positive EBIT during the next three years. I'm sure we won't be able to do that.
Okay. Thanks for all your answers, Pierre. Are there any other questions from the audience?
Just on BPO, the cost of Allianz, the higher cost of Allianz is going to be compensated by the work you have done on the other BPO business?
Yes.
That means that the total BPO should be flat in terms of profits, at least?
Yes. Not on the first half because Allianz, they were using people in Les Îles.
In Mauritius.
In Mauritius. But they were paying a very high price for that. And we had to go on with those people. But we are building now a big team in Agadir. The problem today we have on the first half is that we are paying the two teams because we are still paying the Mauritius team because this team is working for us. And we are paying the team we are building in Agadir because we have to train those people. And the transfer will become in September. So in September, the cost of the Mauritius team will decrease strongly. But on the first half, we are paying the two teams.
And.
So I feel confident in the fact that on the year, we will have a profit BPO equivalent to the one we had last year. But on the first half, I think it will not be the case. Sorry? You had another question?
Thank you.
I think we have one question regarding FCB. Could you indicate the percentage of share of FCB, please? Because there are a lot of biases for months. So I will give you it straight away. I don't have it under my eyes right now just to tell you right. So FCB has about 55 point, let me be clear. FCB has 55.2% of the shares from 54.9% of the shares of Cegedim.
As of today?
No, as of June 30th. So it's a bit above 55% as of today. Are there any more questions? No other questions? So yes? No? Okay. So thank you, everyone, for attending the presentation. Thank you for your question, for your interest in the Cegedim Group. So as you saw before, next meeting will happen on September 26th, for which we will have the earnings for the first half. And so we wish you a very pleasant summer and a very good August month. And we'll see you by the end of September, September 26th. Thank you, everyone. Have a good evening and see you next time.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye.