Thanks for attending the presentation. Today we have just released our H1 earnings. Let's start the presentation now. I think you are quite knowledgeable about the company, most of you. This is just a quick reminder of what Cegedim Group is about. You know we are mostly in the healthcare business. We have five more business units that you are getting accustomed to. The health and private and insurance business unit, the business services unit, the healthcare professional unit addressing doctors, pharmacists. The Data & Marketing BU, and the Cloud & S upport business units. You can see down on the right their share in our revenue in 2025. The upper corner on the right-hand side, you can see the trajectory of our profitability, and you can see that since 2022, we are improving our operational profitability.
It's been the case also for this first half, and we're going to get into details on that point. Also, it's our aim to improve it during the whole year, of course. You know we are a leading integrated player in healthcare with a unique ecosystem. We are at the center of this ecosystem, and we are mainly in Europe for our operations. Also, I think it's worth reminding that AI is embedded in our strategy. It's at the core of our strategy. We develop it through three main key areas. First one is equipping our development factory. We are equipping our collaborators in the R&D to boost productivity. We are also optimizing it through the monitoring of cost efficiency. Most of our developer are equipped right now. We are also improving our internal productivity.
We are using AI tools to improve it, especially in the case handlers, in the payroll, the insurance BPO businesses, as well as in the customer support. Last but not least, we are integrating AI into our offerings. We are enriching our client offering by rolling out some features, as we already have done in the Maiia suite, with the Claude Bernard database in the HR business and fraud detection in the third-party payer business. I think it was worth reminding where AI is for us and how important it is for us. Now, I suggest we get through the earnings of this first half. First, we had the revenue released in July. Remember, it came up to EUR 324.8 million, an increase of EUR 2.3 million, 0.7% reported, 0.8% like-for-like. As we had mentioned, remember Q1 had a revenue declining by EUR 1.7 million.
That was mainly due to the end of an important outsourcing contract and then demanding comparison basis on trading business for the Cloud & S upport BU. Which means that Q2 was very positive by EUR 4 million, benefiting from the growth at the business services BU that we will see, which is partly due to the reform of the e-invoicing in France that started in September 1st, a few weeks ago. Also on international subsidiaries that kept their trend going in Q2. Also worth reminding that over the first half, we launched our operation in Spain for the marketing business, C-MEDIA España, that generated some revenue also over first half. The adjusted operating income that you can see at the center box up there stands at EUR 19.7 million, an increase of EUR 1.2 million over the first half compared to last year.
Mainly thanks to cost control on external expenses and payroll costs. It grew by 6.9%. The margin, the adjusted operating income margin, is at 6.1% on this first half, compared with 5.7% in H1 2025. An important feature is the specific items affecting operating income, which can be seen as the non-recurring items. Remember that in H1 2025, we had a EUR 9 million non-recurring income, out of which EUR 7.4 million were attributed to the redundancy scheme at the French pharmacy software business. EUR 6 million in provision, EUR 1.4 million in other cost related. We do not have indices here, so these non-recurring items are only EUR 2.4 million this year. That impacts very positively the operating income, as we will see in the P&L. Regarding employees, we have a bit less employees than last year at the same period, 113 employees less, 1.7% in total.
Mainly in the offshore operation, but I will come back on the slide about this. The operating free cash flow is improving this year, standing at EUR 58.9 million, an improvement of EUR 2.3 million compared to last year. As you can see on the bottom right-hand side, the net debt is improving, is decreasing. It is about EUR 150 million, decreasing by 17%, EUR 31.4 million. This is mainly due to the very good cash generation in H2 2025, mainly, that allows us to have this net debt decreasing. You are now used to this slide about the impact of capitalized R&D and its amortization through time and how it impacts our P&L. You can see that we are still investing in R&D. It is a slight decrease of EUR 0.2 million. You can see a slight increase in the amortization of R&D.
We already mentioned in the previous calls that we have reduced the time for amortization of R&D, and it impacts, of course, its amount. So we have a slight negative impact on the evolution of our adjusted EBIT from 2025 to 2026. That shows how good the performance was on this side. Regarding the payroll costs, you can see that it decreased by EUR 1.5 million over the year, 0.8% improvement. You can see that we have 113 employees less in our headcounts, mainly on the offshore side, which still is about 28% of the total workforce. So it is more of them at this offshore side. It is due to various things, among which the AI development in the company. On the onshore side, despite the redundancy plan that we had in the pharmacy software in France, we had some hiring, and we will develop that later on.
Especially in Spain, you see that our subsidiary in Spain on the softwares for doctors is working very well. So we had some hiring and also internalization of some temporary workers. Now we can jump to the P&L for the first half in 2026. I think we elaborated quite on the revenue, so I will not come back on this. It is a positive change of EUR 2.3 million. You can see that the important thing is that the cost control I was talking about at the beginning of the presentation. We still have this trend on external expenses, improving each half with the internalization of external contractors. You can see also the positive impact of the payroll costs.
All of this helps the adjusted EBITDA growing by 1.3%, standing at EUR 62 million on the first half, which means that it is an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19.1% compared with 19% last year. Regarding the D&A, it is overall stable, slight decrease of 1.1%. We have a slight increase, as we have seen in the previous slides, on R&D amortization, a bit on tangible assets, and we will come back with this on the cash flow. But we have a decrease regarding IFRS 16 amortization. Overall, it is quite stable, which leads us to this adjusted operating income, benefiting from the cost control we had, the improvement of 6.9% on this H1 compared with H1 in 2025, with an adjusted EBIT margin of 6.1%, so above 6% compared with 5.7% last year.
I mentioned in one of the first slides the improvement of the specific items affecting operating income item, which is the non-recurring burdened items, improving by EUR 6.6 million. This leads to this very important increase in the operating income, which stands at EUR 17.3 million in H1 2026, compared with EUR 9.5 million last year. It is a change of EUR 7.8 million or almost 83% improvement. Thanks to the cost control and to the reduction in non-recurring items. Below that, you can see that the total tax increased this year. This is mainly due to the increase of the profit. All of this leads to an improvement in the net income group share, which stands at EUR 5.4 million this first half, compared with 1.2 million last year. It is an improvement of EUR 4.2 million in the net income group share and of course, of its profitability.
Let us jump to the free cash flow. The improvement in this net income, of course, has a direct impact on the cash flow generated from operating activities that grows from EUR 56.6 million last year to EUR 58.9 million this year. I think it is worth noting on the tax paid last year, we had a benefit from it. And this year we are, of course, negative. We have to pay EUR 4.7 million.
This is due to, as we had mentioned in our universal registration document, the final payment in first half 2026 of a EUR 4.1 million in connection with the tax audit. And also last year, we had a benefit due to a tax consolidation refund due to previous overpayment. That was about when we set up the IP Box regime that explained this improvement last year. The cash flow from operating activities, almost EUR 59 million this year.
You can see that the acquisition of intangible assets is quite stable, as we had mentioned before. The acquisition of tangible assets rise quite much this year. This is due to investments that we are doing. First, you know that we are building a new data center not far from Paris. So we had the final payment for this new data center. Also, all the equipment we need for it and for all our data centers, servers especially. We booked in advance some of them, because prices are soaring, so we wanted to be sure to have the best prices we could and buy a bit in advance. Also, we have some investment in the marketing in Spain, the C-MEDIA España that we have learned this year, and we had to buy some screens to equip the pharmacies.
The impact of changes in consolidation scope, this is due to, we had mentioned it in July, to Médoucine, that now is embedded in the group, consolidated since May 1st. Remember, it's a leading French platform for booking appointments with verified practitioners in complementary health practices such as osteopath or sophrologist. This is the impact you can see here. Overall, you can see that we have invested quite much. That's why we came from EUR 36.2 million last year to EUR 52 million this year. All in all, you can see the change in cash. That was slightly positive last year, which is negative about EUR 13 million this year. This is due to these investments in tangible assets as well as the buying of Médoucine. All of this leads to a net debt, going to about EUR 150 million, as we had mentioned earlier.
If you do the computation, you can see that a slight difference between the change in cash and the change in net debt is due to the fact that we have a bit of non-cash items in the debt, which are mainly accrued interest and capitalized interest. On the balance sheet side. Sorry, excuse me. The growth in the goodwill is due to the integration of Médoucine. The shareholder equity is improving thanks to the net profit. You can see that tangible assets also are growing due to investment. I mentioned earlier in intangible assets in the data centers. These are the main things you need to see on this side of balance sheet. On the financing side, we respect our covenant.
You can see that we had EUR 180 million at start, and now we have already reimbursed EUR 9 million on Tranche A of our financing platform. That's the main point, and we completely respect our covenant. Maybe now we can see how it goes in all of the business units, the various business units, and our five business units. First is the health and provident insurance business unit. As we had seen in July, the growth was quite stable over the first half. This was due to BPO was a bit down on the first one as our clients have less beneficiaries. However, third-party payer is still experiencing a strong growth thanks to our fraud detection and long-term illness detection solution that we have. On the software side, Q1 was negative, but Q2 was very positive.
This was due to a pickup in revenue in projects on Q2. But as you can see, the adjusted operating income is rising over the first half by EUR 1.5 million, standing at EUR 7.1 million in H1 2026 compared with EUR 5.6 million last year. Which is an adjusted EBIT margin of 8.5% compared with 6.7% last year. This is mainly due to the cost control and the decrease in external contractors, the internalization of the skills that we need. Also on the reduction of total payroll that explain this boost in adjusting operating income. The second business unit is business services. Growth was quite strong in H1, about 4% and across the three segment of it. On HR software, it was due to the impact from starting up HR contracts won in 2025.
On the e-business side, it had experienced an accelerating momentum as companies affected by the first round of e-invoicing came to us and came with project. The reform started on September 1st in France. Last but not least, BPO also won some new clients during the first half and had a 3.5% growth. The adjusted operating income is growing by EUR 2.7 million in H1, up to EUR 14.9 million, an adjusted EBIT margin of 15.6%. This is due mainly to the control of the cost structure, especially on payroll, which has been quite stable in HR and decreasing in BPO as the business is more stable. We have less temporary staff in it, so it costs us less. This offset partly the increase that we had in HR for the digitalization business a few months before the startup of the reform of the e-invoicing in France.
Our third business unit is the Healthcare Professional unit. As we had seen in July, Cegedim Santé had a decrease in revenue due to mainly its legacy solution and churn, but had a solid growth on Maiia and Claude Bernard database. Also, it is worth noting that we had integrated Médoucine on May 1st, this leading French platform. The adjusted EBIT at Cegedim Santé stands at minus EUR 5.1 million in first half due to decreasing sales, growing R&D amortization. Also, it is important to note it, we are investing for the future in this segment. We have some new products coming up in the Maiia suite in the months to come. We are integrating AI in our product. I mentioned the ED, the AI assistant that we have already in Maiia Médecin, but also in MLM and Crossway. We have also integrated Voca, an AI telephone assistant.
Claude Bernard has released its Claude Bernard IA, so it is worth noting also that on the cost regarding Cegedim Santé, we have some investment in our products for the future. Also worth noting that in H2, we should receive some Ségur subsidies around EUR 4 million. On the Doctor outside France segment, you can see that the revenue is very dynamic, especially in Spain, with the Balearic Island contract that we had, but also in the new product in Belgium, which is gaining traction. It doesn't reflect straight away into the adjusted operating income. This is due, as I mentioned earlier, to the fact that we had in our budget, and we had done it in H1, some hiring for some personnels, helping for the various project that we have over there, that should pay off in the future. Last but not least, the Pharmacy segment.
You know the redundancy plan that we had last year for the French business impacted negatively the sales, as we had less commercial traction during that time that were repost. But it had, of course, a positive impact on the adjusted operating income, thanks to a reduced payroll cost during first half compared with last year, of course. So overall, the adjusted operating business unit improved from a loss of EUR 8.7 million last year to a loss of EUR 6.8 million this year. On the Data & Marketing business unit side, as we had mentioned, Data had a stable, slightly positive by 1% reported growth on first half. That was thanks to, after first Q1, which was negative, a Q2 in which we had some improvement in international operation and still a solid business activity in France.
Regarding marketing, still positive in France during H1, even though the comparison basis is very demanding. Also we have the launch of C-MEDIA España, the marketing activity launch in Spain during H1. This launch in C-MEDIA Spain went with some costs, of course. We need to invest to tackle this market. On the data side also, we had some launch of new offering, creation also of a European data warehouse compliant with the more and more stringent regulation across Europe. So we had some costs on first half this year on this business unit, explaining the decrease of the adjusted operating income, which stands at EUR 6.1 million compared to EUR 9.2 million last year. Our Cloud & Support business unit to end with.
We had this termination of this outsourcing contract and also a demanding comparison effect on the trading business there that explain the decrease in revenue on first half, especially in Q1, as we had mentioned. As you can see, of course, it has an impact on the adjusted operating income. But thanks to a tight controlling cost structure and controlling staff costs, we are able to limit this side, and the adjusted operating income came with a slight loss of EUR 1.6 million over this first half. So we stick to our outlook that we gave since the beginning of the year, with a like-for-like growth above 2% and an increase in the recurring operating income and operating income. As you have seen in this presentation, the fact that we have less non-recurring expenses helps a lot on the operating income side.
The next release it will be our Q3 revenue. It will happen on October 22nd.