Hello everybody. I would like to thank you very much for attending this annual result session 2025. You will hear several things about artificial intelligence, offshore business, because it's part of our world nowadays. I would like to inform you that we are going to be three people making this presentation. Myself as chairman and not the CEO as I used to be. We have Cyril Malargé. He joined a little bit more than three months ago. He is the CEO. It is probably Cyril who's going to make the presentation next time. We have Bruno Benoliel, the Deputy Chief Executive Officer. In terms of revenues and turnover, those figures have already been announced.
We have a reduction of turnover by 1.1% compared with the year 2025, but this includes M&A and the essential activity of Worldgrid, which was achieving EUR 25 million. At a constant parameter, we would have had a decrease of 4.5%. We will come back later on those sectors which are the most concerned. This slowdown of the activity started first of all because of IT services, mainly. That started already in 2024. We had big problems by the end of 2024 in the field of aeronautics, and we had a ramping up again of aeronautics by the last quarter, 2025, and that leaves us really very optimistic for 2026.
The split up of turnover and growth between France and the rest of the world at the international level was a little bit severe at the international level, much more than for France, but quite similar. As concerns the results, because of a slight increase of the ESD and TNAs, we have 8.5% of OPA 25. We were expecting 8.1%. We ended up the year a bit a little bit better. We did not sacrifice our organization or even the investment. On the contrary, we have enormous investments which were done. We adapted our margins, increased our margins to have this result of 8.5% in an unfavorable context. It is of course going to improve during the year 2026 and 2027.
As regards the number of headcount engineers who are participating in the projects in the group, we have 51,000 by the end of December 2025. We had 51.9 all together. Well, Worldgrid started in November 2024, so it did not impact in any way, which means that in a certain way, our activity has should be presented like that, has decreased by 900 productive engineers with a ratio which is similar of 90% engineers within our headcount, overall headcount. I hope that we will catch up this number by the year 2026 and even go beyond that. I would like you to remember that we have, again, 51,000 engineers also by the end of 2023.
As regards the geographical split up of our activity, the continents who resisted very well, and this is linked to the M&A, that's Asia and Africa. You can see the numbers here of our engineers. We 13.9 in Asia and a slight decrease, which goes with North America. We moved from 51.9 to 51,000 engineers. Again, Worldgrid was already integrated in December 2024. What is interesting in this on this slide is to show the geographical allocation, so on the whole planet, it is obvious that we have to work intensively to reach a much more critical size in Africa as well as China.
As regards what happens in the automotive industry, we also have to find solutions for North America, where M&A is almost non-existent. We have a split up of many different little companies and consulting companies, and we need to accelerate the organic development and growth. This international split up and allocation is, of course, very interesting. We need to bring it to a full potential. We have customers who are split up all over the world, Asia, Europe, Americas, and Middle East and Africa. We have a lot of technical staff working on behalf of those projects which are delivered all over the world. This is really of an advantage. We have local people, we have local companies working there. It is particularly good.
As regards the allocation per sector, here we have the breakdown, according to the different activities, and then you will have a dedicated slide sector by sector delivering more information. You will have the opportunity to read it by yourself. I'm not going to comment on it. Now, in the two fundamental sectors and initial sectors are terrestrial transportation, automotive, and rail activities. On the other hand, we have aerospace, defense, and naval. They behave in a different way. Automotive did not suffer so much and represents still 15.2% of our activities compared with 16% one year ago.
This reduction of the turnover share within the global revenue share is because of the decarbonization, which is prevailing, coming and as well as the manufacturing, which is coming to low-cost countries, the manufacturing. Manufacturing is located in the U.S. or Morocco, or even in China and India. The automotive sector is decreasing in turnover, but not in terms of headcounts. You have to understand that when the cost of labor is reduced or divided by three, then obviously the revenue is also, and the turnover is diminishing.
As regards the rail part, we have a revamping of projects again by Alstom in particular, Alstom, Bombardier as well as Siemens. This brings us to be very optimistic for the year 2026. Let's go back to aerospace, defense, security, naval. Aeronautics, the civil aerospace made us suffer in 2024 because of logistics problems, deliveries, but a very strong recovery, in particular, at the for the company Airbus second half of 2025, and this led to a positive development of projects and engineering. The other sectors are stabilized. This gives a positive vision, relaunch of activities and the stop of the decrease of those activities, in particular for civil aeronautics as well as aerospace OEMs.
Of course, we have to be very careful. We have a nice visibility up to five years' time from now. We will have the arrival of a competitor from China. For the time being, we are fine. For civil aeronautics, we want to conquer Boeing and Boeing's OEMs to reach the critical size. We are very much appreciated being the major partner of Airbus, in particular in Europe. The problem that we will have is the rollout implementation of a management team and competence centers and technical management in the USA. As regards defense, obviously important budgets help us to be very confident. We have Airbus Defense, Thales, Leonardo in Italy, et cetera.
We are optimistic for a very nice development of this activity. One of the problems we might have is that we need to be accredited. We need the accreditation outside of Europe as a company, which is a European one, and even a French one. Space activities were very stable in 2024, 2025, even slightly decreasing, but we have joined forces and projects. Naval works only for defense, so it is. We are optimistic. These are the reference activities of Alten. The engineering for terrestrial transportation and aerospace, aeronautics, defense, security, naval. That's really the big chunk. Then, of course, we want to be present with a significant size on all the other industrial sectors like energy, life science, telecoms, industrial equipment.
Energy, thanks to the acquisition of Worldgrid, we could open doors, in particular for EDF as a customer. EDF has managed to define a strategic development for EPRs, and that was really the challenge that we had to face and that we wanted to achieve, by the way, the results, thanks to the acquisition of Worldgrid. We are very hopeful for all kinds of energetic partners that we might get in Europe. Obviously, we also move on with renewable energies, but there are less projects where Alten manages to integrate, like on windmills or solar energy, because the equipment is done in countries where we're not really present. We want to remain very optimistic for 2026 and even 2027 on the energy sector, in particular, nuclear energy.
As regards life science, our presence in this field, pharma industries, et cetera, consider two main activities. The first one is conception, certification, of technical equipment, scientific equipment. That's we have a lot of pressure because of new molecules and new drugs. This activity is moving over to the USA. Even Sanofi are aiming at the American market, so we need to help them and to support them for what we call the CRO activities. We need to go with our customers. In terms of certification, validation, traceability of pharmaceutical products. That's the other half of the activity, life science, and this remains very strong. In Europe, of course, we are one of the major actors, and again, we are particularly optimistic.
The balance between both won't help us to grow, but to keep up with this level of activity, in particular because the other part of life science is moving to the USA, and we will have to go with them. As regards the industrial activity, it's not really a crisis. It's a slowdown of the overall mood and activity, be it the OEMs in aerospace or the ones delivering the solution for telecom and even OEMs, they have frozen their investments a lot. Now, as regards the automobile industry, they have started offshoring. They have outsourced to India, low-cost country, all their development. Our challenge is to support them in India and other countries, like USA, also in particular.
You see that there is a shift, and again, we are confronted with what we have known in the automotive sector five years ago. Now, for telecom, we have projects of the 5G and even the upcoming 6G. We have a very strong offshore activity. We manage also to hold on to our turnover, thanks to the international situation and deployment that we have in Asia. The two sectors that we suffered most from, because we have the yellow ones, we have retail, services, media, public sector on one side, and bank, finance, insurance on the other. Those two sectors really started suffering by the end of 2023. They started freezing their investments or projects.
They slowed down the IT investments. IT services are our main spokespeople. The cloud migration, et cetera, procurement of hyperscaler, all this was considerably reduced and slowed down the development of the new releases for all the IT systems of bank finance and insurance. It was quite violent, I must say, and the decrease has been important. It used to represent 28% of our turnover, and it's only 25 which are left. I mean the both together. This is not specific to our company, Alten. It is an overall situation. All the IT service companies are at 25% with IT business. Now, of course, I'm ready to take all your questions according to those different sectors in the Q&A after this presentation.
Again, you have a lot of details if you look at the slides that come up after this one, where all the different sectors are detailed in a much more important manner. I also wanted to mention investments in AI for Alten. We started three years ago to organize ourselves to cope with this technological development as well as functional development of this world of services. The artificial intelligence is aiming at different universes. Well, first of all, everybody is concerned. Within the Alten ecosystem, priority has been given to the integration or to train all our engineers to train them with all the tools containing accelerators and leverage possibilities to work on new projects while integrating all those new tools and possibilities.
Now, since we are in competition with world actors, we have a lot of investment, in particular in information systems and in training sessions. 65% of our employees have already been trained on AI. It's a big investment. We had no spectacular announcement, but you can believe me, we are working on that, and we are not late at all. However, we are not a consulting company specialized on artificial intelligence. What we want to do is to master the tools and the accelerators which are existing and suggested in terms of AI to work on projects that we deliver to our customers, and we manage to do that. Each time we were competing and for a project we won because we were able to roll out the AI tools.
Now, of course, obviously it's easy to win, compared to small and little local companies. Not only this, also the big ones. We were rewarded for that because they appreciated the very pragmatic way of talking about those tools. We also have to adapt to the tools which are chosen by the customer. Most of the time, we manage to suggest our own tools because the customers are late in choosing their tools and processes. Sometimes we have this kind of double situation. We come up to the customer with our tools, but they have already started to implement their own tools. It's okay. We just need a very solid time management according to the kind of project we are dealing with.
On average, the efficiency that we obtain thanks to the deployment of AI is 15%. That's true for the whole Alten universe and engineering. Engineering, sorry. To reach 20% or even more percentages , it is possible, like the technical support or basic activities, but it is not the major part of our activities. For the R&D concept, we use AI and the tools for analysis. We reach those 15%.
For one project, if we have 30 engineers, it would have been up to 30% more expensive compared to what we had three years ago. Thanks to AI, we win our tenders. We are not late. We are much more proactive. We have the AI competence and all the skills which are required to make an important amount of economy, so we are cheaper. This is what we call AI for projects, and we're very performant. We have trained all our managers and the technical management on all the teams, and this is what we call the AI go-to market and partnerships. We also have the AI platforms and infrastructures which are requested.
We have set the priority on AI for our current projects, and now we would like to use AI to improve our administrative functions, recruitment, accounting, et cetera. That's being rolled out and has been now since September last year, and we hope that we'd make some savings with costs. Now, when it comes to M&A, where are we? I'm a little disappointed, I have to be honest. I'm disappointed in the volume that we were able to realize in 2025. I would say that 2024, we acquired acquisitions which were expensive, which give us long-term visibility, and that's why we did spend so much. There was also a small acquisition of 350 people in 2024.
If you look at 2025, you can see the four companies that we purchased. There's no miracle here. You've got all the consultants. It could have been one single company rather than four. We have to look at the number of consultants when we consider this purchase of any company abroad, except for one, I believe, in life science, which had about 190 consultants in life science. I mentioned that company earlier. That was the one big company. We are really highlighting specific skills in merger and acquisition. We can find them offshore, and that's why you are going to find two major structures and companies in India who have the skills specific to CRO for life science. Where you have embedded software, for example, DAF in India. You have the skills there.
They're the skills that we can offer offshore to our clients. We will come back to that in some detail later, n ow, let us look at 2026 and the current outlook. I think that we can hope, given the current climate, that we are going to be able to have access to acquisitions at normal prices. However, it's not exactly the case as yet. Now, when you look at.
This is 90% for all service and engineering companies on the market. They're having a similar experience. Except perhaps for those who are in Southeast Asia. Most of these companies are in private equity, and they have been able to pay very expensive prices, 58% more than we are ready to pay for any kind of acquisition. They were doing that as of five years ago.
These private equity companies, I'm not going to cry over them or for them. They're suffering today for their purchases of five years ago. They are suffering on a market which for Alten is very favorable. They are going to have to divest these, and they're going to have to try and compensate for what's in their portfolio. However, these are the ones who are perhaps our competition for the acquisition of companies which could be of interest to us. We are looking at companies which are fairly independent, normal price. When you look at Alten and our position today, I would love to be able to purchase the entire earth with the current ratios.
If you look at the multiples that private equity are supposed to be triple the multiples that we have and at the triple our value on the stock exchange today. Today, we are purchasing roughly 7%-8% of the operational result plus a year's revenue on a basis which is solid and fairly favorable. Well, we're suffering to find companies in that price range just now. It's problematic. We are looking at, you know, prices and the real estate valuation. Given our real estate value and the invisible cash, we are going to continue to hunt down these opportunities, even if they don't necessarily fall within our operating income purchase aspirations. Now, I hope that we're going to have some kind of participation in 2026.
Given the slight growth in our headcount in 2026, I think, we can imagine what Alstom will look like in 2026 at Christmas, M&A included. Now, if we look at capital, let's move on to shareholders. Well, I don't think there's very much to be said. It's very stable, it's flat, and has been for the last 10 years, I think. Of course, for the last few years, I've been talking about my will to transfer 5% of my assets towards charity. Now, given the value of these shares, I am waiting a few years in order to do this. Now I'm going to hand over to Bruno, who's going to talk more about the figures.
Hello, everybody. Good morning. Well, here you can see the evolution of the group between 2019 and 2022. If I go back slightly, you can see that we doubled in size when you look at pre- and post-COVID years, which is not bad. Since 2022, 2023, the group's activity has stabilized around EUR 4.5 billion in turnover. You can see the number of engineers yourself. You can see there's a slight organic degrowth. Our engineers, we have 51,000. Well, they are spread out between France and the international field, where we have roughly 39,000. In 2025, as you heard, we had to look at that. We had to face up to organic degrowth of over 800 engineers over the years, so 331 in France and the rest outside France.
We thought that by purchasing Worldgrid, we would have 966 engineers, and 650 are in France, and the rest are outside France. Spread between France and Germany, I believe. Now, there's another small change. You can see a change in France, which was a small bit of turnover. Now it's roughly 35% of turnover. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this in terms of group strategy, but this is just a technical effect linked to the organic degrowth in France over the last few years and the acquisitions that have been made, for example, which have bolstered the turnover in France. Very quickly, we can see there's a drop in 4.4%. We thought through acquisitions that 4.3% would be okay. We have a change in scope. We have FX impact, which is fairly significant.
You can see that on the slide given to the global overall depreciation or appreciation, particularly with regards Canada, USA and particularly the rupee and the Chinese currency. This has had a huge impact. 32% of the group's turnover is made abroad outside France. You can see the impact of foreign exchange if it's not constant. Now let's look at that turnover by geographical area. Now, I'm going to go over this fairly quickly because we've already spoken about the activity at some length. We did this last month through the publication of our 2025 figures. Here you are then in France. You have organic decline, about 5% in the last quarter. You have an activity which was penalized by the downsizing in the automotive industry, which was down 20% in France, and that's 20%-10% of France's turnover.
If you also look at -20% in turnover, we explained that because part of these projects are carried out in countries we call low cost or offshore countries. Therefore, turnover is obviously weaker. Telecom. Let's look at telecom. There's been a fall of 10% and in banking and financing, we're at 17% in terms of decline. However, the upside is that in aeronautics we are growing again, and it's a third of the French turnover. You can see that's a growth of 3%. Defense. Now there are some surprises there because that represents more than 12% of turnover, and we're at 15% in France. Rail has actually grown as well. You have the figures in front of you. Internationally speaking then, where are we? Well, look at Southern Europe.
South Europe is still performing very well. Satisfactory anyway. It's a geographical zone which is still showing some organic growth. If you look at the Iberian Peninsula, you've got over 85%, which consists of, you know, 85% comes from Spain and the rest from Portugal. Industry, which is 5% of the zone's turnover. All the rest are growing, particularly in the last quarter. Italy, the activity slowed down in the first quarter. You can see it growing again, roughly 3% per year, except for the telecom industry, which is quite poor turnover in Italy. But apart from them, everything else seems to be progressing fairly stably. Germany, which recruited a great deal in 2024. We're looking at the three quarters. We've been taking things slowly, carefully. We can see a slowed growth in.
We've gone from 20% to 3% in the fourth quarter. Degrowth, which has slowed down, however, because when you look at the growth in automotive industry, this has fallen due to the lack of outfitters or the disappearance of outfitters in this activity and orders from the OEMs. That is beginning to stabilize. Okay, it's a weak rate, but it's stabilizing. You can see this in the German OEMs. You can see there's a slight decline. It is stabilizing. Overall, the automotive industry, which is more than 40% of the German turnover, is representing half, pretty much half, has fallen by 25% with sequential growth, which has had a huge impact on the last quarter. Another sector which is important for Germany is the aeronautics sector. It's 20% of turnover in Germany.
An activity which had been declining right up to the third quarter, but is fighting back nicely in the fourth quarter. An activity which is growing not only sequentially, but year-on-year in Germany. Finally, in Germany, well, defense. Defense, which is a sector of activity, which is fairly anecdotal. An activity which is growing, which has developed, and has developed greatly in the last few quarters, and it's at least 97% of the turnover in Germany. In the U.K., where are we? 2%. 12% growth not been particularly marked otherwise, not within the public or the private sector. Defense represents 10% of the turnover. If you go to the Benelux countries, you can see a fall of 11%, with no improvement at the end of the year. 9% of the activity in Belgium has fallen.
Has fallen to 9%, I should say. Again, if you look at the similar in the Netherlands. In Eastern Europe, the activity is stable, with change, which is fairly contrasting between Poland, which is three-quarters of the activity in the East in Eastern Europe, up by 3%. You have Romania, which has fallen by 10%, I think linked to the bank and financing sector. In Scandinavia and the Nordic countries, most of 70%, I would say, of the turnover is carried out in Sweden. Now Sweden is very much like Germany. You've got an activity which is very much focused on the automotive industry. It's 55% of the turnover in Sweden, and this has fallen by 25%. Roughly the same as what's happened in Germany.
Without really slowing down terribly much, but you can still see it's falling back. If you look at Finland, you have a very concentrated sector in machinery, declining by 12%. In North America, the activity has fallen by 6%, a rhythm which has slowed down in the last quarter, interestingly. In the United States, it's 70% of the North American zone. The automotive, life science, and retail and services zones have fallen by a certain amount, but have stabilized. In Canada, however, you can see this is 25% of turnover. The activity has grown by 5%, thanks to the automotive finance and aerospace industry. In Asian Pacific, we have the activity, which is slightly slowing down, with changes which are different depending on where you are in Asia.
You've got China, which represents a third of the area. All sectors have grown, even automotive, except perhaps for telecom. That should be the exception. India represents 27% of the zone. We see a fall in automotive. Japan, 22% of the zone's activity. You can see it's grown 12%. That's thanks to the automotive industry and the tertiary industry. Korea, given the climate, we've just lost a major client, and this led to fairly significant degrowth, 25%. In the automotive industry, which represents half of Korean turnover. Overall, you can see there is a degrowth of 4.5% in a very organic fashion, but very heterogeneous performances across the board. We can see the real.
In the Nordic countries and Germany, there have been. That's where we see the real degrowth, and that will have an impact on the group's results. 2025 then. Let's look at that. Without any surprise, the second part of the year it was superior in terms of profitability. Obviously, the calendar was more favorable in terms of days. You can see an improvement in activity, which was much better in the last quarter, and a reduction of costs, which actually was maintained through the second half of the year. This allowed us to really be at 8.5% in terms of operating profit on activity. Better than what was anticipated. Given the current context, it's given us quite satisfactory profitability, I should say. We look at operational margin. With this was.
Already felt the size and the impact of an unfavorable calendar, less working days in the last quarter. That you can see the results here. The level of activity has been very well mastered. We are slightly above the normal rate. It's very similar to what happened in 2024. If we look at the increase of payroll taxes in France and the U.K. has to be considered in the operational margin of the group. That's had an impact. We know we've talked about Germany and the Scandinavian countries. You can see the lowering of activity in certain countries has had an impact on the gross margin, not only of Germany and the Nordic countries, but all round because it has an impact on the entire group.
However, when you look at SG&A, very well managed in 2025. This allowed us to maintain satisfactory rates of profitability because we went down by 25 bp compared to 2024. This gives us an operational margin for the group, which is down by 65 bp compared to 2024, but will be re-estimated if our turnover continues to grow. Now with operational activity, you also have some lines which you might be familiar. We look at cash EUR 21 million, which is comparable to last year. Now these asset payments are reconciled in-house, but the assets and liabilities are subject to deadlines for investment, and this has an impact on cash, overall cash. In 2026, I think we'll be roughly the same as 2025.
If you look at our non-recurring profits is slightly up. Only apparently, because the fine that we had to pay to the competition authorities, 21.5 million EUR for an appeal that was upheld in court. Well, we shall see. This has to be taken into account, and the non-recurring profit is EUR 24.8 million. It's slightly down on last year. If you look at the current context, it also includes EUR 3.7 million of acquisitions, EUR 1.4 million of complementary fiscal and social implications here and abroad. Structuring costs, EUR 12 million, which are dedicated directly to Germany. All these costs have to be borne and expressed somewhere. For the first time, you can see up here the amortization of intangible assets, which is the acquisition price for Worldgrid.
Now, usually, the company includes and reconciles this. Given the size of the targets, the difference between prepaids and intangibles with Worldgrid, when you look at with regard to the size of the operation, the intangible assets, and we registered a part of the acquisition price within the accounts. In compliance with IFRS 3. Part of what we see in the accounts is going to correspond to this amortization. Goodwill then, this brought us to a depreciation which isn't really habitual for us. We went for the first time in 10 years, from EUR 44 million last year. With goodwill in our accounts, given the pressure between IT and finance activities in France, particularly for Alten anyway.
We had to depreciate as well, amortize as an acquisition that we carried out in life science for reasons which Simon explained earlier, internationally. Again, we have acquisitions. We purchased an entity in India, and that allowed us to. That meant that we had to have an overall depreciation for the fees activity of EUR 67.4 million. That means that we have an operating result which is down 30%, as opposed to last year, because we're at EUR 200 million in 2025. Tax then, we're at over 80%. That means we have a headcount that has gone up, and that has been reflected in our payroll taxes, obviously, and our exceptional contributions to tax, fortune tax in France. Fiscal deficits, we're very active in this field, particularly abroad.
When we look at the tax that we had to pay in the U.S., all of that has to be considered. For 2026, we have an effective level of 29%, which is more coherent with the reality in which we live. For the financial income analysis, I don't think there's terribly much to say. You know, we're cash positive. Our results. We have an income analysis, which is with the IFRS 16. We're at EUR 5.9 million when it comes to negative charges linked to our exchange position and the currencies in which we work, obviously. The dollar, and in other countries that don't use the dollar, all of that has to be reflected. Other financial income, charges which correspond to charges all around the world.
You can see on this slide results. -4%, but an economic result of up 0.8%. Geography. Where are we with the different sectors? In France. Operational results, condensed income statement 16.2%. As you can see, it has to be restated because we haven't got the non-allocated costs included, the non-corporate ones anyway. We're at 9.3% in 2025, and you have to compare that to 9.4% in 2024. Of course, less working days as well, which do have an impact on our income statement. Again, the impact in France is 30 basis points. When it comes to economic performance, we can see there's an improvement of 35% thanks to the lowering of tax in France.
Internationally, however, we've seen operational result which has gone back by 60 basis points. In Germany and in the Nordic countries, we can see there's a real lowering of activity between 1%-3%. In Benelux and in North America, the APAC region, we look at activity. We're looking at 6%-10% in terms of retreat and decline. In the UK, Nordics and Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, we have a result which is above 10%. All in all for the group, we have operational profit growth of 8.5% with performances which are heterogeneous across the different geographic zones. Now the balance sheet. Again, I don't have a great deal to say. It's identical to the one that we had last year, the years before. Perhaps you should just notice one thing.
You look at intangible assets, the non-current assets. We could deduce liquidity there. We have net cash flow almost at EUR 100 million. Debt, which is EUR 7.5 million at the end of 2025. 1.5 million at more than a year. Consequently, you have gearing, which is largely negative. Here's the analysis of our cash position, and we're looking at 2025 here. Let's remember. Cash flow. Now you can see we are at EUR 300 million. We're looking at the difference between the finance and the percentage of cash flow. We have operational cash flow here. We have non-recurring elements which have not been significant, that we had to bear EUR 45 million. To the tune of EUR 45 million. We have this tax paid.
You can see the amount in front of you. You can see that the net cash of EUR 390.2. Now in France, we pay our taxes over the actual year, the year afterwards. There is a slight discrepancy with regards to other countries. You have cash generation, which can be explained. You can see there is an increase of 50%. You can also look at the organic growth of 30.7%. An improvement in DSO in days because we've gone up to 96.5 days at the end of 2025. This in spite of the favorable evolution of the country mix, because in developed countries where the tax was actually quite high.
With suppliers, this was in decline because we had less use for outsourcing. That helped us make some savings in terms of the premises. In variations, they're not very significant. Now we look at CapEx, which is still quite feeble, 0.2% in terms of the turnover. Historically, quite weak anyway. This is also linked to much of the IT in France has moved to OpEx. Pardon me. We've gone towards SaaS, and we have migrated many applications towards the cloud. Now we have a free cash flow, which has gone up to 5.9% of the turnover. In financial investment, EUR 62.9 million are largely made up of M&A. So almost EUR 63 million euros, 70.9 for EOB in 2025.
Return to shareholders, dividends, et cetera, EUR 62.2 million. With regards to the other financial flows, well, they are linked to exchanges and the translation. So what is the cash flow then? We're at EUR 390.2 million. Now, as I said, I'm giving you the follow-up of free cash flow over the current year, and we have to look at the last twelve months. It's the only way you can read the analysis. Now you've got the presentation. It's available on our site, so you'll be able to get a bit more information there.
There's a summary here of the results, the 225 results and of course, the financial results for 2026. Activity has gone down by 4.5% at a constant scope and foreign exchange, but only really went down 2.2% thanks to a revival of the aero civil aeronautic and the banking sector outside France. Energy and defense have been accelerating over the last quarter. Just by way of information, if you exclude the decline in the aeronautic world, which can be explained, our organic de-growth was limited to 1.5%-8.5%, which is actually fairly satisfactory given the current climate. This has been impacted by the calendar.
Gross margin reflects the problems in the different countries, despite the SG&A effect, which is lower than over the past years. We remain with an OPA at 8.5%, which is better than what we had anticipated. We hope to improve the cash situation by the end of the year. Despite the uncertain environment, we will have to wait for the end of the first quarter 2026 to deliver more precise information on the outlook for the global outlook for 2026. You know that the beginning, the start of the year shows a slowdown in activity, and it ramps up then later on during the year.
We will have to organize the recruitment and reorganization of projects to have a more fine-tuning presentation, and for the year 2026. I'm not going to hand over to Simon. I'm going to comment very quickly on what we did in terms of ESG performance. As you know, Alten has been acknowledged from the rating agencies as a high-performing ESG company. We started having an evaluation even long before ESG became stringent and before having to report on that specifically. The rating started already in the year 2010. Since then, we constantly improved our ratings. We are always at the top of the companies within the sector.
We are very much appreciated by our competitors, I must say, because it is a continuous policy which is reflected throughout as well as it is performant. We have the certification, which is very much appreciated. Then as regards the CO₂ footprint, we are better off than the target. We have reduced the GHG emissions by 60% compared to 2019. We even wonder if we should not reevaluate in a positive way the objectives since we are really better. I mean, to reevaluate the targets for 2030, since we are really very in a very good situation. Now, I hand over to Simon for the growth strategy for the coming years.
Thank you very much, Bruno. To conclude on this presentation before the Q&A, a few important points as regards the strategy for the three to five coming years for the Alten Group. First, Alten, as one of the top five world leaders in the consulting and engineering business, is very hopeful in consolidating this privileged situation, despite the fact that we have world actors like the big Indian companies. We are part of the top, so it's okay. The customers do appreciate our positioning. However, it does not mean that we have reached the top of our capacities, in particular as regards artificial intelligence, but not only. To keep this success, you have those two slides that you will discover, but you have to remember mainly two things.
Alten is an international structure, and it is not possible to think country by country. The strategy of Alten before COVID was to privilege country managers as well as an organization with trainings and business managers, project managers. We recruited in China the best engineers, et cetera. It is not enough any longer. On all the items that you can see on this presentation, we need. This is really our leitmotif. We need to really strive for this international organization. It's a change of mindset in terms of the organization of Alten, and it also means that competencies and skills need to be different. If you take HR, which is the first column, you need to create mobility of managers, in particular French ones, because this is our basis.
This is the solid one, and this is where the big experience is located. We need to convince them to go to Asia, other European countries, U.S., et cetera, because it is not by chasing a specialist in the U.S. that we will find managers who will know everything about our business and be very quickly efficient on the business model. We need to really to lever on mobility, which means that we have to invest massively on human resources and career development plans. In the second column, you can see that the global account managers can't remain within our countries anymore. I mean, it is not possible to service Rolls-Royce or GE while having everything concentrated in one country.
The sales organization is not bottom-up anymore, with managers trained on the spot, et cetera. It also has to be top-down because it takes global managers for the 120 most important customers all over the world. You can believe me, this is not very easy. It's particularly important even beyond growth or a slowdown, et cetera. Cyril Malargé joined us, and he will be in charge of the setting up of this international organization, which is going to help us to really very well support those 120 international customers. We have also already managed to have an international technical management, and this is done, and it's okay, which means that we manage projects at the international level.
Now we just have to consolidate this aspect, and this is the third column, to capitalize on all our offers. We have fabulous offers in China, in India, in Canada, in France obviously, and even in Spain for analytical AI. Now we need the whole group to profit from that, which means that we have to value our offers. It's an important challenge, to be honest. Without coming back on that, this is what I said at the beginning. We also need within the field of M&A to get a hold of complementary structures. We have the financial structure that it takes. We need those main and major bricks to be integrated within our international structure. We could use our cash differently, like buying up our own shares because of the value of the shares.
It's an ongoing discussions that maybe we will have with you, by the way. If we prove that we have the possibility to get a hold of very fine-targeted companies, it will be very nice to use this cash to do that. As a conclusion, the five fundamental pillars are well-defined, and we are there to challenge that. We have Cyril, who joined. We have international managers. We are very optimistic to reach this target of 70,000 engineers in two or three years' time. We will see. It will depend on the conjuncture. It was okay before COVID, and we doubled. We went from 25 to 50,000 between 2017 and 2022, and then it slowed down because of COVID, et cetera.
It's not only a figure, you know, to be successful. It's in particular we need to lean on this international organization, which is going to be our major challenge. Well, I thank you very much for your attention. It took us some time, but we are at your disposal to take your questions.
Thank you very much for this presentation. Let's move on to the question and answer session. We have a first one, which is from Aditya Buddhavarapu.
Aditya? We can't hear. Aditya?
Hi, good morning. Cyril, Bruno, can you hear me?
Yes.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Just a couple from me. Firstly, on the 2026 outlooks, as you said, visibility remains low and you want to wait for Q1 to refine the outlook. Can you just talk about how we are thinking about the development of growth during the year? Certain things you might be able to, you know, return to a positive trajectory given your conversations with key customers. Second, on the margins as well, how we should think about the different moving parts. Any impact of the number of working days and any other factors there. Finally, on AI, you mentioned on the capabilities and the investments made.
Can you share some numbers on what percentage of bookings are related to GenAI today, or what percentage of revenue, and which sectors are you actually seeing more demands for your solutions on AI? Is it more on automotive or life sciences? If you could put more color on that.
Okay. On the outlook for 2026, as I explained in January, it's too early to say, because we are in the business where many projects end at the end of each semester. Accordingly, we start the year with a lower level of business, and it takes normally one to three months to recover before we can start again. Last year in 2025, we were facing a difficult year because it took a lot of months before we recovered. In 2026, what we are seeing is that the recovery is slightly faster.
Before the end of March, to be frank, it's very difficult to have real feeling in those times because they are difficult times to have a real feeling on what could be the outlook, even though it's just the first one for 2026. We will give more precise view on the expectations in terms of revenue growth or revenue outlook, probably in April. Regarding the margins, it's exactly the same. Of course, we hope that we will get and reach a better profitability in 2026 than in 2025, but it's clearly linked to the revenue growth or evolution for 2026.
That said, you're right to mention it, we have in 2026 one day more than in 2025, so that could normally help to improve the margin by roughly 25 basis points, depending upon the geographies. For AI and our capabilities in AI, Simon explained that we are infusing AI in many projects, many geographies, and many activities. We have succeeded in experiencing a very successful PoC with many customers within many verticals. Of course, with our main customers like Airbus, Safran, Thales, Volkswagen, et cetera. So to be more precise, this is among our main customers that the AI infusion is the most advanced. That's not surprising, of course.
To tell you exactly what is the percentage of booking coming from AI, we don't have that number because we don't. We put some AI wherever it's possible. It's not possible in all the type of project because I remind you that we are not 100% dedicated to software coding or testing. This is not the main part of the business. The main part of the business today cannot be addressed by AI. Every time it's possible to, of course, we help the customer to make some productivity gains with AI.
We don't have a dedicated activity, which is AI consultancy, unlike other IT companies, like for example Accenture, Capgemini, et cetera. I suppose I would say it's a day-to-day business for our business manager and technical management to propose AI every time we think and they think that it could be helpful. Okay. In terms of revenue, what level of revenue it will bring for 2026 accordingly, I cannot tell you because we will see at the end what happens and how many projects and what percentage of projects will be managed with some AI support throughout the year.
We have a question coming from someone asking why due to our multiples, we don't launch a share buyback. I'm going to let Simon answer that question. We have every day internally some questions with Alten teams, because obviously with the value of the capitalization of Alten, we are very tempted to make some share buyback. We have obviously,
We have a balance sheet that enables us to buy up to EUR 500 million of our own shares to buy back. It would be an excellent investment. As I said before, we constantly raise the question. We are waiting to be clear on the volume of merger and acquisition that we will work on during the first half year of 2026. According to the volume, we will see whether we start a project of buyback shares or prefer to invest. We do not want to have too much debt. Sometimes it is appreciated, sometimes it is not. I mean, of course it is very tempting to do that.
We will look according to the M&A, whether we do that or not, and if we proceed to the share buyback project.
We have a few raised hands among [Ines Mao], for instance, you raised your hand. Ines, you have the floor.
Can you hear me? Two questions. I understood you want to have more offshore engineers. Is it a capacity transfer to answer or cope with the existing contract? And my second question is on costs.
Extremely difficult to understand. I'm sorry, because it's on the phone. Sorry it was difficult to hear. I can deliver an estimate of offshore engineers. What the figure we would like to have for the future according to the way we appreciate the present situation and even the future forecast.
You can very well imagine that it differs from one sector to another. We won't have any offshore on defense or even aeronautics, even if the American aeronautics had offshore to India, but this will be handled differently. The two big activities that do offshore, that's automotive, where they want to go up to 80%. There is no nationality anymore. Also, R&D can be done everywhere. Why not in China? The second sector is telecom. There is a lot of supervision of data and deployed network and grid. This is the same, it can be done everywhere in the world. On those two sectors, it's going to be important, but less on the others. We have a little bit less than 10,000 people in offshore for projects.
I go back to the definition. What is offshore? It's a project which is issued in one, let's say, Western country, USA, well, North America and Europe, that we are supposed to deliver or work on in low-cost countries like Mexico, South America for the U.S., Morocco, Senegal, where we are present for a certain number of customers now, and India and Vietnam in Asia, and Poland and Romania. They are less low cost than they used to be. It's probably going to double, which means that ideally, we are supposed to reach 20,000 engineers in low cost countries to cope with the Western demand.
It will depend on what we are going to roll out in the U.S. because the U.S. has offshored a lot, even for strategic fields like space and defense. If from tomorrow on, we have 20,000 engineers working for the U.S., it is obvious that we're going to have 10,000, if not 15,000, exclusively for the U.S. Those projects we will have only if we proceed to major acquisitions, like companies working exclusively for the U.S. Apart from this, that may happen, apart from that, we should move from 9,000 to 20,000 in five years' time with the logical development, and this means that we will altogether have 70,000-75,000 engineers.
There is no major cost linked to this kind of situation. I mean, Global costs are expected, like training, et cetera. It's not going to cost too much. It's not going to be a major investment. We just need to gain projects because then it will go along with it. It could be possible that, well, in Vietnam, we have, let's say, roughly 1,000 engineers. It's possible to go up to 3,000.
This is not going to be too expensive, you know. What is important is to win markets where we are not present today. To be more precise in our answer, there is a transformation has already started. The offshore transformation will be dedicated to 25% of VIPs on the existing, and all the rest will be how to conquer new projects that we really have to obtain in the U.S., in Asia.
Thank you very much.
We have a question from Derric Marcon.
Hello. I have several questions. I hope you can hear me well. The first one.
Yes, yes, it's perfect.
The first one is on the allocation of your activity according to the project logic. We have to go back very far, but you had a breakdown of your activities according to electronic engineering, et cetera. Is it possible today to quantify the part of your activity which is closer to engineering? And what kind of productivity gains could you expect in the field of AI? The second one is on the write-off of goodwill because it's not comparable to 2025, like automotive sector or the company in U.K. that you had bought. It's much more about activities which like life science. It is not the sector that has suffered most.
I would like to understand if it is the companies which went down. What about this, goodwill and the third one? I don't know what is impacting the cash flow of 2025, cash out, et cetera. I also understood that you can't give any precise information about the real impact of AI within the project. If we take a snapshot today, do you have statistics on the number of projects containing AI versus the one having nothing at all with AI? I would like to know the number of projects containing AI compared with the global amount of projects having none of those tools.
Thank you very much, Derric, for those questions. Well, as regards the splitting up of our activities, I can give you information about our internal cuisine, as we say. The way we do breakdown because it could take the whole day. Globally, we have what we call product engineering. We conceive and we manufacture products for the industrials. Aerospace, automobile, rail, defense, OEMs, et cetera.
They represent today 65% of our turnover. This is the very strong engineering basis. From those 65% activity, you have two big blocks. The upstream, which is development, research and development, and downstream, which is the delivery to customer, the robots, optimization, quality on the customer side, customer support. From those 65%, two-thirds, one-third. Two-thirds in research, development, so with this conception engineering, and one-third for the supervision, rolling out deployment and quality control.
I hope I'm clear. Within R&D, you have all the components of all the engineers contributing to the piece of equipment that the customer has asked for, with all the technical components, which is microelectronics, electronics, embedded software, mechanical design, and then the engineering system, which is all around, or system engineering, which means that those engineers have a global vision of the whole project, and they are quite important in terms of numbers. Now, AI within R&D activities, AI is going to account very strongly for, well, generative AI for the development of software, but we're not so much present in that. Creative AI, well, and this is because the amount of electronics design has slowed down and decreased. AI is not so much in there.
It is associated to automotive much more with a reduction, cost reduction ratio, which I mean, the cost of a labor day is not going to change, but it is more the time which is going to be dedicated by one engineer to AI and like predictive maintenance, analytics is going to decrease. We can improve the result, we can also improve the design, mechanics, et cetera. We can improve up to 20-25%. The average is 15% in the field of R&D suggested by Alten. That's the engineering work, the level of a master two, et cetera. As we've rolled this out across all our projects, not just one project, we haven't created tools or specific AI for different companies.
Beyond the how and the why, people that use ChatGPT or the other tools, now we have to look at the accelerators and those specific tools that we have implemented. We spent a great deal of money, and that concerns 25% of our projects. 25% of our R&D projects are fitted out with these accelerators, et cetera, to be more performing in order to win the projects more easily. Now, that's a response to my first question. Now I talked this figure of 65% of activity. This is R&D for product and for the design engineering, as we say in English. You have the manufacturing operation, which is a third of this 65%, and that's everything that accompanies the rollout in the factory. Now, you have your gray collar for workers and to supervise the factory.
We have Alten engineers doing that. We are talking about manufacturing in the most highly qualitative sense of the word. Now, obviously, with the tools, we're going to use AI, and using this, we have reduced the time necessary for operations. The other side of that is, and this has been happening for 35 years, it's for 35 years that I've been working in this field. We look at all the new needs that come into place with regards to regulation, certification, assessment, and all of this offsets and compensates, I suppose, for the reduction in labor demands on one side.
You also have, you know, the fact that we have to make sure that we have the right engineers in place. This is why I'm not worried at all when We're not going to have a surplus of engineers one day. We still don't have enough of them in engineering schools in France or elsewhere. We have to make sure that we capture the needs as they are expressed, and this was the case in other technological evolutions.
The 35% that remains in terms of activity is all about rolling out the networks in utilities. These are energy networks or telecom operators. That accounts for the other 35% of the 65% about which I've already spoken. There you have now 10% of activity, which needs to be increased. I'm not really going to talk about energy production because I included that in manufacturing. You've got 25% in IT services, particularly with the in IT services within the different companies. Now, I think there's going to be quite a lot of automation implemented.
We essentially we're not really developing software. We in banking and in finance, we're working with market financing. We're going to look at analytics. That's what we work on, where we can make savings of such and such %, but we want to improve the result. That's the end goal in architecture and in coordination. The overall statistic with Alten is that we're going to look at what the impact is going to be in reducing time by 15%. This is a business equivalent. If we can't conquer new markets, we can lower our costs, et cetera, by 15%. How can we win market share permanently? Well, you can see that small players are eliminated, and the major players have managed to seduce many of our clients who are coming back to us today.
They were once with others, they're returning to us, and that leads us to growth even if in difficult times. I'm coming back to your first question, but I'm going to reply to the third one, and I'll let Bruno perhaps respond to the second.
When you're talking about the fine we had to pay. This was from the competition authorities. I have to be very delicate in what I say here. It's for me, it's scandalous. There's an authority that's fined us EUR 24 million because the competitive market is a bit stressed. They say there was a long-dated agreement between some company managers. This was not true. There was no proof of this either. They decided unilaterally, this independent authority decided that we should be condemned.
We have paid EUR 24 million, but I hope that this will be considered a non-event very shortly. Have we paid the EUR 24 million? Yes, we have. Yes, well, we had to pay it. This is going to now proceed to a different tribunal and with real judges. Not the fellow, the former Bercy members, so very political in France. That's what happened, let's be honest. Again, I have to be careful in what I say.
With regards to that subject, there is an appeal underway. We don't have a timetable on us to know when that is going to be resolved, but the appeal is underway, and we have some good arguments in place. This is the reality. Now, with regards to your question regarding goodwill. Well, last year we have de...
We certainly looked at this with regards to automotive companies, particularly in the UK. This year, the evaluation was done correctly. We have depreciated the companies which are out with France, and by that, I mean companies that were acquired and merged. Enterprise services in France and perhaps internationally as well. We, however, we've seen a lowering of activity in the last few years.
You know, when you go overseas and when you look at what's happening today, as opposed to what happened a few years ago, we had to draw the conclusions that we effectively have had less substance in terms of activity compared to the acquisitions that we had made over the course of the last 10 to 15 years. That's the IT part. Now for life science, it's particular.
Slightly different because you're dealing with an activity which is very specific. This is an activity which has looked to the major players who have a large market share in the life sciences field. This very specific activity has lost market share with us over the last couple of years. I think we have to make some major investments, particularly in the software field, because the offers that, you know, go out with a software support are more interesting for investors than others.
Donc, par voie de conséquence, on a décidé. Consequently, we have decided to withdraw from that activity. These activities which we had depreciated, for which we had depreciated the goodwill.
Juste, tu peux donner une idée de la taille de cette activité ? What does this represent in terms of size? Are we looking 50% CRO, 50% quality? What is the representation in terms of share? Invité avec du logiciel et au forfait, c'est ça ? C'est ça. Ça, c'est une activité.
Well, I can give you some figures, of course. An activity which EUR 11-12 million in turnover this year, in 2025, I should say. We've depreciated a EUR 23 million, which is the price which we paid to buy it eight years ago. That's going to have an impact on 2025. When you say stop, that would mean that we've already seen a part of the lowering or the reduction. No, no.
Soit on désirera se désengager de cette activité.
Either we're going to withdraw completely from this activity, or we're going to divest of this activity. We prefer to close these activities for which we have preferred to close out goodwill. Thank you.
Merci, Derric.
Thank you, Derric.
Dernière remarque et dernière question qui vient de Laurent Daure.
We have a last question, please. Laurent Daure. Laurent Daure, over to you.
Oui, merci. Bonjour, monsieur.
Bonjour.
J'avais aussi pour, comme Derric, plusieurs questions. Très vite. La première, plutôt pour Bruno. Je pense si tu pouvais nous faire un point.
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. I had several questions, of course, four questions. The first, if you could talk to us, Bruno, about the exact performance of Worldgrid, given your expectations, if it's completely aligned, as it is an activity for which you pay quite a lot of money. Is there a risk in terms of depreciation in goodwill? Second question, the buyback, please. With a decision in the upcoming months. We're talking about several hundred million EUR. You're not going to close 10 acquisitions in a couple of months. So what's the impact? Is there a structuring deal in place? One in which a decision has to be made fairly quickly. The two last questions I have pertain to the following.
I know it's too early to have a complete vision of 2026, but at the end of February, in terms of information on activity compared to last year, which was very weak, this is more classic here. Are we looking at data which is being fed out? Is the data fairly classical, or is it coming up less quickly than a normal year? Lastly, when we look at the operational margin and the speed with which this information is coming to us, if you look at theoretical hypothesis here, in the next few quarters, if growth were to speed up to, say, 4%-5%, and it was well shared out, then how much time, in your opinion, would we need to come back to 10% EBITDA? Thank you.
Bon, je vais répondre à la question sur Worldgrid. Oui, Worldgrid répond à l'ensemble des attentes initiales. Well, with the question regarding Worldgrid, yes, it was meeting the initial expectations of the group. 25, un chiffre d'affaires de EUR 170 million, qui était celui, In 2025, they had a turnover of EUR 65 million with an operational margin, which was well within the costs, about roughly the average of the group.
Il y a pas du tout. Il y a pas de surprise. There are no real surprises. Il y a un plan de développement, comme tu le dis. There is a development plan in place which is linked to the EPRs for the future. It's not simple because we have to look at the export market that has to be considered in order to respond to any eventual kind of risk with Worldgrid. There's no risk of depreciation at the moment. Concernant ta question sur le buyback. J'ignore si Simon a vraiment spécifié ça. Ça va être décidé dans les prochains mois.
Yes, good morning Laurent. Yes, so, in fact, we have a possibility already on traditional acquisitions of 300-500 engineers. We have a volume already engaged, in the process of finalizing, and on which we are in the phase of signing letters of intent. So we have, roughly a volume of 3,000 more engineers. Roughly. We're going to look at EUR 200 million more euro. Now, we have more structural acquisitions which might come up before the signature of this, one with which I'm sure you're familiar. We don't really know where that's going to go at this stage. However, it is true we're not going to link a structural acquisition to a very expensive buyback. We can't. We're giving ourselves the time to see how things pan out.
In April, we hope to be able to reach a decision, and I hope we're not going to regret having the buyback at EUR 60. We'll wait and see. We have a very sort of prudent, cautious approach to this. We've always wanted to be around cash zero, not be in debt, because we've seen certain very poor examples with our competitors. We do not want to sink into debt and through risk. Sometimes we're accused of being too cautious. We're going to try and see the light of day behind all this very quickly and be as less indebted as possible. I'm sure we'll have some news for you fairly shortly.
When we look at activity and the return that we're getting, the feedback that we're getting, as of the end of last year, well, the information is coming back quicker than we thought, but less quickly than we would like. Less quickly than when we had a real organic growth of 5% per year, that's for sure. That's clear. If you look what happened in the fourth quarter, it was fairly positive. We had a number of engineers working on projects, where we had a great deal of feedback between September and December. There was a cut, the cut, before New Year, which was important. Not violent, but important. Much like a normal year.
In general, we make it up, the difference, at the end of January, beginning of February, when you look at the start-up of building up new products or projects. This year, it will perhaps be March. It's slightly disappointing because we're taking longer, but it will be there. That will be the start, the kicking off of the first quarter. It's encouraging all the same. I'm going to let Cyril respond to the two other questions that you asked on the evolution of operational margin and another question which is related to the following, offshore capacity. Cyril, over to you.
Thank you, Laurent. What can I say? The real subject for me is not really coming back 10, it's about regrowing. It's about getting growth started again. That's one of my priorities, to ensure that the conditions are propitious. I am convinced that the return to 10% is going to be done fairly naturally.
The company is doing very well, it's very healthy. We've got well-identified industrial processes, so the 10% is not going to be absent, but we're going to get there. I hope we're going to improve this year. If we're going to get to 27 and 28, we'll see if we have really returned to cruising speed. Once we are in a growth period, it's going to be fairly solid, and I think that operational margin at 10% is very obvious. Structurally even. Now, the other question that you have with regards AI.
Regarding AI and the catalyst for the pricing deflation, I do not consider this is the case. I consider that the pricing deflation should be catalyzed by the move to offshore than by the AI momentum, I would say. With AI, we will have, and Simon explained that previously, to generate some savings in terms of productivity. We mentioned the figure of 15%, okay? This 15%, we are organized to try to keep this profitability for us than to give it to our clients.
Besides this move, the objective that we have is to deliver more added value to our client because, besides the deployment of AI, we will have the possibility, and we already have the possibility to sell additional services and additional services with good added value. I consider that all in all, AI will not be a catalyst for the pricing deflation. I would like to add two elements. The first one is the sectors in which we are working. When you are working on sovereignty for defense, even for civil aeronautics, when you're working for the energy sector and so on, you are much less constrained by the impact of AI. This is a key point.
Coming from where I'm coming, I can see quite the same positioning in terms of sovereignty positions. Maybe the difference is the nature of activity because probably you are much more exposed when you are delivering IT services than the nature of activities that were described by Simon just before. I consider that the exposure of Alten probably is much less. We are often compared to the pure IT services companies, but honestly it's quite different I would say. I would say it's much more different. I think that the exposure is not the same.
Having said that, as you know, we are accelerating strongly the development of accelerators and also now on projects because we consider this is the best way to capture new business and because we want to keep the growth strategy as the key driver for the group. That's the principles we are working on. That's it for the answer.
Perhaps we could take a last question. There are no hands raised, so there are no more questions.
Well, thank you all for being here. I hope that we were able to respond to your questions and to any queries you may have regarding Alten. As usual, we try to be as transparent and pragmatic as is possible. We are always available to take questions outside of this meeting, and I would like to wish you all an excellent day. Thank you very much and good day. Thank you. Au revoir.