Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Bureau Veritas' 2026 Capital Market Day. It's really great to see so many of you here in Paris, and a warm welcome as well to those joining us online. I think this is going to be a great day. We have a very nice venue, very nice view. You've seen it. Great weather. We are very delighted to host you at the Musée National de la Marine. That's a venue that could not be more fitting for Bureau Veritas. Our story began nearly 200 years ago, helping ships operate safely across the world's oceans. Since then, we've come a long way, evolving into a global leader in testing, inspection, and certification. Of course, while maritime is where we started, today's story is all about where we're going next. Early in 2024, we launched our LEAP | 28 strategy.
Today, we'll show you our progress reports and, of course, what's to come, what's next. You'll hear about how Bureau Veritas will enter into a new phase of growth and implementation with a stronger portfolio, expanding positions in attractive markets, accelerated M&A, AI-enabled services, and a continued focus on value creation. Before we set sail, quick safety reminder, because as you know, safety is our absolute at BV. In the unlikely event of an evacuation, please remain calm. Please smile, follow the green exit signs, and proceed to the assembly point at 17 Place du Trocadéro. Our staff and security team will be available to assist you. Please also note that this event is being webcast and recorded. If you do not wish to be filmed or photographed, please make sure to inform the IR team or communication team.
Now, let me quickly walk you through what awaits. During the morning, our leadership team will take you through the strategy of growth opportunities, our performance, people programs, our digital and AI roadmap, and of course, the financial ambition that support them. Of course, this will not be a proper CMD without your questions. We have two dedicated Q and A sessions throughout the program, so please keep them coming. This afternoon, you will have a chance to explore our technology, our tech digital corners, and join deep dives on some of the most exciting growth opportunities across the company. Before welcoming our Chief Executive Officer, Hinda Gharbi, where we share her vision for the company and the opportunities ahead, we' d like to set the stage with a short video that captures where we are today, how far we've come, and where we are heading next. Let's watch the video.
[Presentation]
Thank you, Laurent, for the introduction. I hope you enjoyed that video. Good morning to our guests in Paris. Good afternoon and good evening to those listening online from elsewhere around the world. Thank you all very much for joining us today. Two and a half years ago, I shared with you the strategy that my leadership team and I developed to drive Bureau Veritas forward to new levels of growth and performance. We are now exactly midway in our LEAP | 28 strategy. I want to share with you the execution to date, how we will amplify our programs in the next two years to deliver on our 2028 ambition. We will also explain how AI has created opportunities to drive productivity and unlock new markets, making Bureau Veritas an even more valuable company.
For nearly 200 years, Bureau Veritas has helped customers, organizations, and society navigate major technological, economic, and societal changes. Our strength is built on independence, integrity, expertise, and global reach, enabling safety, trade, integrity, product quality, sustainability, and regulatory compliance worldwide. Our mission, shaping a world of trust by ensuring responsible progress, remains timeless and guides what our people deliver every day. We are a technical knowledge company, 64,000 technical experts amongst 82,000 of our colleagues. We operate in 140 countries and serve more than 400,000 customers globally. Our experts are close to customers on the ground with deep knowledge of their industries, the risks, and the regulations that shape them. Before updating you on LEAP | 28 progress, let me briefly look back at Bureau Veritas' journey to where we are today.
Bureau Veritas' journey has moved through three clear phases: building the portfolio in the 2000s, diversifying in the 2010s to reduce cyclicality, and transforming in the last three years or so. LEAP | 28 that we have developed with our leaders in 2023 and launched in early 2024, is driving a comprehensive transformation and a step change in growth and profitability. For the last two years, the company has delivered organic growth north of 7%, steady margin improvement, earnings growth, and strong cash generation. In 2025, Bureau Veritas delivered EUR 6.5 billion in revenue and adjusted operating profits of EUR 1 billion and adjusted net earnings EUR 630 million and a free cash flow of EUR 824 million. In my presentation this morning, I will show you that Bureau Veritas today is highly cash generative, more resilient, and exposed to higher growth markets with strong barriers to entry.
Lastly, our market is fundamentally growing and resilient, supported by strong structural trends that I would like to explain now. Our markets are not only resilient, they are becoming more strategic, more technical, and more assurance intensive. This is why we are confident in the underlying growth of Bureau Veritas, and there are four powerful shifts that are reinforcing demand for independent assurance and for our services. First, technology. Digitalization, AI, data centers, and advanced infrastructure are creating new systems that need to be tested, inspected, and assured. Today, virtually all companies have started to integrate AI in core functions. Second, energy. Energy security and the energy transition are driving investments in power, grids, renewables, and industrial assets. Electrification needs are driving grids expansion CapEx at a multiple of GDP growth. Third, risk.
In a more uncertain world, clients need assurance not just for compliance, but to manage operational, supply chain, cyber, sustainability, and reputational risk. Fourth and finally, sovereignty. Supply chain management, reconfiguration, localization, and defense spending are increasing the need for trusted, independent verification. These trends are expanding our addressable markets and increasing the value of what Bureau Veritas does, bring independent technical expertise where trust matters most. Marios will be explaining more about our markets. The tailwinds are strong. The opportunity is structural. LEAP | 28 is how we turn that opportunity to growth and stronger earnings. LEAP | 28 is our transformation agenda that we unveiled in 2024. It is how we are turning Bureau Veritas into a more focused, faster-growing, and higher-performing multi-specialist.
The plan, as I said, started in 2024, and the first phase from 2024- 2026 was the execution phase, building the foundation of our transformation with a rapid ramp-up in delivery. That means combining the scale, global reach, and resilience of the company with strong leadership in our product lines. LEAP | 28 is built on three reinforcing pillars. First, the portfolio, focusing on businesses where we can build leading positions and strengthening them through organic growth and accelerated M&A. Second, performance. Modernizing how we work through technology adoption, operational excellence, and scalable processes. Third, people. Making our expertise an even stronger competitive advantage by developing leaders and building specialist capabilities. LEAP | 28 is not just about participating in attractive markets, it is about improving our ability to capture value from those markets through clearer priorities, stronger specialization, and better execution.
That is how we are transforming into a multi-specialist company. The purpose of our portfolio strategy is simple, make growth more focused, more repeatable, and more accretive. First, we have rotated the portfolio, reallocating capital and management attention towards markets where Bureau Veritas can leverage leading positions and attractive returns. Second, we have moved to a more interconnected product line centric model from six reporting lines and 21 sub-segments to four divisions and 10 product lines. Together, these actions create a new operating model that simplifies our growth algorithm. It leverages our strengths across regions, focusing on better markets, faster execution, and stronger capabilities. The result is a more repeatable growth model, a multi-specialist company with clearer priorities, stronger accountability, and higher conversion of growth into profitability. The new operating model enables us to deliver a self-sustaining dynamic of organic growth and M&A, faster-growing, more focused, and more value accretive.
This growth model, the best way to think about it is, it is two reinforcing engines. The first is organic execution. Each product line acts as a growth platform, expanding services, scaling expertise across geographies, driving cross-selling, and using targeted acquisitions to fill specific capability gaps. The second is disciplined M&A. We use acquisitions to strengthen leadership positions, add targeted capability, increase density in attractive markets, and accelerate our entry into selected high growth markets. Together, organic growth and M&A create a compounding effect, increasing our organic growth potential, strengthening our execution, and giving us the financial capacity to reinvest in the next wave of growth. I am now going to show you that our portfolio choices are already lifting the company growth profile. Acquisitions and planned divestments and exits accounted for EUR 1.2 billion, representing 21% of our revenue. This portfolio rotation is improving our growth profile.
The businesses we are keeping and strengthening are growing faster, while active portfolio management releases capital and management focus for higher growth opportunities. In 2024, our current portfolio grew 10.8% organically, versus 10.2% pre-planned divestment and exits. In 2025, it grew 7.1% versus 6.5%. The current portfolio supports our 2026 organic growth outlook, in line with the LEAP | 28 ambition of mid to high single digit organic growth. Let me now turn to the other two pillars of LEAP | 28, performance and people, and how they are strengthening the operating backbone of the company. On performance, we are creating operational leverage and functional scalability through a combination of standard processes, operational excellence, digital operation systems for the former, and shared services and disciplined overhead management for the latter. The objective is simple: higher productivity, lower cost to serve, better customer experience, and we expect to generate stronger margins.
The impact is already visible. We are on track to achieve a cumulative 110 basis point of margin improvement by end of 2026, and progressing towards our ambition of 180 basis points by 2028. We are reinvesting part of the benefits to modernize the company. These investments are in data, in technology, in governance, and digital tools that help us scale the innovations we have. On people, we are making expertise even more scalable. Our multi-specialist operating model help us build capabilities faster, deploy experts more effectively, and respond with greater focus to client needs. We are already seeing progress through stronger internal mobility and global development programs. All these achievements I have already covered are already visible in the financial results to date. The first two years of LEAP | 28 show clear delivery in line with our 2028 ambitions.
In both years, we delivered strong organic growth, improved margins, robust free cash flow, and double-digit shareholder returns. This strong performance reflects the combined effect of portfolio refocusing, disciplined organic execution, and performance programs. Our strategy is doing exactly what it was designed to do: strengthen the company, improve execution, and create financial capacity for the next phase. For our outlook for 2026, we remain committed to delivering in line with our LEAP | 28 guidance. Let me now walk you through how we will scale these achievements in 2027 and 2028. The next phase is about scaling execution and amplifying impact. The strategic architecture does not change. Portfolio, performance, and people remain the three pillars of the strategy. What changes is the level of ambition, pace, and scale of execution. On portfolio, we move from refocusing the company to scaling growth.
Deeper organic execution, continued bolt-on M&A, and selected strategic moves to expand our positions in attractive markets. On performance, we move from building the programs to rolling them out more broadly across the company so that standardization, digitalization, and operational excellence translate into stronger productivity and margins. On people, we move from capability building to an expert-first model, making specialist expertise more visible, more mobile, and more scalable across product lines and geographies. Let me start with portfolio, because this is where the scaling phase will improve the quality of the growth. We are increasingly shifting the company towards markets that offer a higher competitive moat, higher growth, and stronger margins. We're doing this by deepening specialization within each product line vertical, strengthening capabilities, and targeting geographies where Bureau Veritas can build market leadership.
The opportunity spans both large established markets and high-growth niches, including digital assurance, transition services, renewables, grids, and mission-critical infrastructure. Market attractiveness is only one part of the equation. We will prioritize where we will have the right to win, the ability to scale, and a clear path to better earnings. To deliver this market expansion, a well-defined M&A roadmap is crucial. Our M&A roadmap is disciplined and tailored to the starting point of each division. We are targeting the right M&A strategy based on market position, growth potential, capability gaps, and the ability to create value. If we go by division, in Buildings and Infrastructure, the priority is to expand leadership in buildings and to continue to develop new services in mission-critical assets. In Business Assurance, it is about rapidly acquiring digital assurance targets in cyber and AI assurance and addressing our gaps in transition services.
In Industrials and Commodities and Product Testing and Services, here we have a greater scope to diversify from mature businesses. We will be building new strongholds in energy and industrial assets and diversifying consumer and technology product lines in line with supply chain sourcing shifts. Essentially, M&A strengthens the portfolio by bringing in opportunity and growth. At the same time, the new operating model help us unlock more growth from within through cross-selling in high-growth transverse markets. As we move into this 2027, 2028 scaling and amplifying site, the new operating model becomes a stronger engine for organic growth. With four divisions and clear product line accountability, we can bring more of Bureau Veritas to each client, faster, more systematically, and with stronger commercial focus. We are concentrating this effort on four priority transverse markets: sustainability, AI-driven markets, defense, and mining.
These markets are supported by powerful structural trends and already today account for 30% of our company revenue in 2025. Our key account managers are working across regions, divisions, and client organizations to identify where one relationship can open the door to multiple services. The result is a more systematic organic growth engine, more growth from existing clients, faster expansion for our product lines, and better leverage of our global scale. This now completes the portfolio view for the amplify phase. I will now turn to performance and people, where the objective is to move to full deployment. On performance, we are confirming our 180 basis point margin improvement by 2028. We will accelerate our programs and complete the rollout of the new operation systems across the company.
Our goal is to improve productivity, service quality, customer experience, and margins by scaling what has already been proven during the first phase, and Noor will detail some of this later on in his presentation. On people, we will deepen our capability building programs and strengthen the expert-first model. We will continue to strengthen our digital innovation framework with AI as a key accelerator, modernizing operational journeys, supporting experts in their work, and helping us scale innovation faster across the company. AI is an accelerator that cuts across the full transformation of our portfolio, performance, and people pillars. This is what I would like to focus on now. Bureau Veritas' role is to turn standards, regulations, and risk requirements into independent evidence. That evidence allows products to enter markets, assets to operate safely, and organizations to make credible claims on quality, safety, sustainability, and risk.
In an AI-driven world, this role becomes even more important. First, AI creates new physical markets. The build-out of the mission-critical assets like data centers, semiconductor fabs, and power infrastructure will require testing, inspection, certification, and assurance at scale. Second, AI transforms how trust is delivered. It enables wider data collection, automated analysis, continuous monitoring, and new forms of verification. This is changing how we work and it creates a data advantage, allowing Bureau Veritas to develop new services in digital assurance, asset resilience, and performance. What differentiates Bureau Veritas remains the same: independence, technical expertise, accreditation, physical access, global reach, and very importantly, accountability and responsibility for what we deliver. AI increases Bureau Veritas relevance. It expands the markets we already serve, and it gives us new ways to deliver trust faster, more continuously, and at scale.
Let me give you the first example of how AI is already expanding the markets we serve. AI is amplifying several structural trends supporting Bureau Veritas' Buildings and Infrastructure division markets. Data centers are a first example. AI workloads today require large-scale mission-critical infrastructure. Data centers CapEx is projected to grow by about 10%-15% on an annual basis from 2025- 2030. Semiconductors are the second example. Advanced AI depends on more powerful and more specialized chips, with semiconductor CapEx expected to grow by 12% on the same period. Both markets are highly relevant for Bureau Veritas, as they have complex high performance and assurance-intensive assets. Our LotusWorks acquisition actually completes our portfolio to address this very interesting and important market. These kind of assets require lots of inspection, commissioning services, construction support, and that's what we bring in.
Our aim is to deliver EUR 800 million of revenue from these activities by 2030 from a base of EUR 300 million at this point. AI strengthens the Bureau Veritas value proposition in two ways. First, it broadens our relevance. As complexity, regulation, and data-driven risks increase, clients need more, not less, independent assurance. The combination, our combination of data and insights, experts ecosystem, our ability to invest at scale, fundamental competitive advantage to innovate and provide solutions to our clients. They also expect that the assurance to be faster, more continuous, and more insight-driven. Second, AI enhances our delivery model by automating routine work, supporting our experts, improving consistency, and strengthening the customer experience. It also brings assurance closer to clients' operations, moving from periodic checks to more embedded workflows. Very importantly, AI amplifies our foundations of independence, expertise, and accreditation that remain essential.
By scaling our trusted expertise, AI makes Bureau Veritas more relevant to the clients, more efficient in how we operate, and more differentiated in the market. How does AI transform our delivery model? Bureau Veritas has a very strong starting point, a rich data environment. We have today 8.8 pb of data accumulated across our activities over decades. We also have 64,000 experts with deep knowledge of our customers' assets, operations, industries, and regulatory environment. The opportunity is to connect these two assets, data and expertise, through AI-enabled operation systems. That will help us improve planning, automate low-value tasks, support technical decisions, accelerate reporting, and make service delivery more consistent across regions and product lines. The operational impact will be significant. A better customer experience, higher service quality, and of course, improved productivity and stronger margin profile.
By 2028, we expect a full AI integration in operations that represents 30% of our revenue by 2028, and 60% of that revenue by 2030. This will allow us to develop new services, which is the next example. The next growth opportunity lies in new AI-enabled and AI-related services. As AI adoption accelerates, our customers face new risks, model reliability, data quality, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and very importantly, responsible deployment. These challenges are a natural extension of Bureau Veritas' core role, helping clients demonstrate that complex systems are safe, compliant, resilient, and trustworthy. We will develop new services in areas such as AI insurance, cyber, data integrity, automated monitoring, and technology-enabled certification. This will build on our existing customer relationships, technical expertise, and credibility as an independent third party.
We are expecting that revenue derived from these services will reach EUR 200 million by 2030 from a baseline of EUR 70 million today. With that, let me bring the full picture together and confirm how our LEAP | 28 strategy execution supports our 2028 ambitions. We are confirming our LEAP | 28 ambitions. The first phase has made Bureau Veritas stronger, a more focused portfolio, better execution, higher margins, and robust cash generation.
This reinforces our confidence for the next phase. We confirm our organic growth guidance, and we upgrade total growth ambition at constant currency for 2027 and 2028 as we accelerate our M&A programs. We are maintaining our strong cash conversion, tightening our leverage range, and confirming our double-digit stakeholder returns ambition based on EPS CAGR and dividend yield. LEAP | 28 is positioning Bureau Veritas as a faster-growing, higher margin, always highly cash generative, and more differentiated company.
AI is a transformative technology that creates multiple opportunities for Bureau Veritas. We will continue to integrate this technology broadly into our strategic programs. Our ambition is to generate EUR 1 billion in revenue from AI-driven markets and services by 2030. Thank you for your attention. I welcome to the stage now, Marios Broustas and Emma Ritter, to take you through our portfolio progress. Marios.
I will start with a quick introduction. I am Marios Broustas. I am the EVP for Corporate Development, with responsibility to drive our M&A activities. I also work alongside Hinda, my colleagues, and our board to help define our portfolio priorities. I joined Bureau Veritas in early July and bring approximately 30 years of M&A experience. I have spent 2/3 of my career as an investment banker and 1/3 in a similar role in another global B2B business.
I am thrilled to have joined the company. We are a global leader in a phenomenal industry with multiple levers of growth. Bureau Veritas is a company with terrific colleagues that work with a collaborative team spirit. Most importantly, we have a great opportunity ahead of us to deliver meaningful value creation for our shareholders during the second half of LEAP | 28 and beyond. Joining me on stage is my colleague, Emma Ritter. Emma.
Yes. Good morning to everyone. I am Emma Ritter. I am leading Fuels, our oil, petrochemical, and coal business as president. I was previously VP M&A at Bureau Veritas, and I have close to 20 years of experience in the energy sector.
Thank you, Emma. Emma and I will cover three topics this morning. First, I will address our growing market opportunity. Second, we will present an update on our progress to date during LEAP | 28 using the KPIs we shared with you at the time we launched the strategy. Finally, I will share the key elements that support our growth ambition during the second half of LEAP | 28. Let us start with the market opportunity. We operate in a large market that has grown consistently at 4%-5% over the years. We estimate our market to be approximately EUR 350 billion today. About half of this market is addressable by TIC companies like us, with the remainder reflecting activities handled by governments, specialist organizations, or companies themselves. This results in an addressable market for us and our competitors of approximately EUR 175 billion.
Our strategy, as you have heard from Hinda, is to focus on markets with attractive growth fundamentals, strong profitability, and where we operate with a global leadership position. We have global top three positions across eight of our verticals today, representing more than EUR 85 billion of addressable market. This provides us with significant room to grow in product lines where we will continue to win. I want to share a more granular view into our business, which reflects our strategic approach. We look at our business by specialist product line. These are depicted on the bubble chart. We have rotated 20% of our portfolio during the first two years of LEAP | 28 and exited all the businesses in gray that you see at the lower left-hand side of the chart.
As you can also see from the chart, our portfolio today consists of product lines with both leadership positions and attractive growth fundamentals. This is the power of the multi-specialist model, a business with global reach where each product line has winning attributes. We address sizable markets, and the product lines grow at least in line with the average TIC market growth, and many grow well in excess of this growth rate. In addition, we prioritize sub-segments and geographies within each of these markets that have advantage growth dynamics versus the product line as a whole. I'll deep dive into this topic in the second part of my presentation. Our growth equation has a dual engine. The first engine is due to our portfolio advantage. This advantage is enabled by portfolio composition.
Our multi-specialist model means that we seek to operate with leadership on a global scale in winning product lines. Leadership enables us to continually invest behind our world-class capabilities and crucially, to drive innovation in critical areas such as AI deployment. You'll see evidence of this in the tech corners during the breaks. Our commitment to quality and to innovation builds trust with our customers, with the regulatory authorities, trade bodies, and governments. Trust is at the core of our business, and it is at the heart of our ability to deliver sustainable growth. Our second growth engine is M&A. We operate in a highly fragmented market. 75% of the market is in the hands of smaller operators. This means that we can be a global leader in a product line and still have substantial opportunities to fill in our capabilities, both with a geographic and an activities lens.
This gives us tremendous runway for organic investment, enhanced by a well-structured bolt-on M&A program. Let's turn now to the progress we've made on our commitments for LEAP | 28. You will recall this chart from our 2024 CMD. At the time, we conducted a comprehensive bottom-up review of our portfolio that has guided our journey of investment and divestment. This strategy has been predicated on executing across three dimensions. Expand our leadership position in businesses which benefit from structural growth tailwinds. Invest in new strongholds.
These are smaller businesses for us, which have attractive growth dynamics and operate in new economy segments. We are committed to strengthening our portfolio of these activities in product lines and building leadership positions. Finally, optimize value. These are also businesses where in most cases we enjoy leadership positions. These businesses operate in markets with lower structural growth, but with attractive cash flow generation profiles. My colleague, Emma, will now take you through our progress on the execution of our strategy against each of these dimension.
I am pleased to share with you our progress against the objectives we set for ourselves for delivery of the LEAP | 28 plan. As Marios outlined, our strategy has been built on three dimensions: expand leadership, new strongholds for growth, and optimize value and impact. Let us start with the numbers. At CMD in 2024, expand leadership was generating 45% of Bureau Veritas revenues. This has now increased to 52%. New strongholds has increased from 10%- 16% of revenues today. At the same time, our optimized value and impact portfolio has decreased from 45% of revenue to 33% today. At CMD in 2024, we also articulated our objectives to increase the portion of our business where we have leadership.
On the right-hand side, you can see that we have increased the share of our business where we are global leader or top three from 75% of revenue to 80% of revenue. Today, at midpoint of our plan, we are on track to deliver LEAP | 28. This achievement is a result, as stated by Hinda and Marios, of our dual growth engine, a combination of organic growth and portfolio upgrading through M&A and divestment. Moving to expand leadership. Expand leadership encompasses mainly business and Building and Infrastructure and certification. Two strongholds of BV. Expand leadership product line generate today 52% of BV revenues and has contributed 36% of BV organic growth to date.
Although this is below our target of 55% for LEAP | 28, due to the outperformance of optimized value and impact, we are positive about the growth momentum we see in expand leadership. Since 2024, we have been engaged in pivoting our B&I business to further expand our leadership in these product lines through M&A and organic growth. We have made six acquisitions, generating close to EUR 300 million of revenues. After mid-single digit growth in 2024 and 2025, B&I has enjoyed high single-digit organic growth delivered during H1 2026, as well as strong margin delivery. This is driven principally by strong organic demand trends in the mission-critical business, which has been complemented by the acquisition of LotusWorks that closed in July and will add to this momentum during H2 of 2026. Renato and Ciaran will tell you all about it later this morning.
We are also enjoying strong organic growth beyond mission-critical, driven by acceleration in our core CapEx and infrastructure business in Europe, in Asia, and in the U.S. We are also especially focused on continuing to build out our B&I footprint in North America. Moving to certification. Our certification product line has embarked on an exciting modernization journey with the development of a next-gen certification platform that we call SmartCert. Deployment is well underway, and we look forward to sharing with you the details during the deep dive session this afternoon. Moving to new strongholds. We have had a meaningful portfolio shift in favor of the new stronghold for growth. At midpoint of LEAP | 28, they represent 16% of BV revenues, but they are generating 25% of our organic growth.
This reflects that new strongholds are growing at double the rate of our other businesses, and this is in line, by the way, with our expectation for LEAP | 28 growth delivery. In M&A, in new strongholds, we executed 15 bolt-on acquisitions, generating EUR 99 million revenues. Our ambition is clearly to do even more during the second half of LEAP | 28 to continue building this portfolio.
We remain focused on building out our renewables capabilities with end-to-end solutions. We are also extending our capabilities and grid and new care that are benefiting from the broader energy trends that Hinda described earlier. We remain firmly committed to our ambition for transition services. ESG trends are less pronounced today than they were in 2024. However, our services remain very much in demand because sustainability considerations have become embedded in the risk management practices of our clients. Marios will develop that in a few minutes.
Turning to cybersecurity. We are keeping on building out our offerings with a focus on North America and addressing our clients' OT needs. Finally, we continue to see an exciting opportunity building out our testing capabilities in high-tech products such as electricals, through a combination of organic lab investment in Asia and targeted bolt-on acquisition. Last but not least, our optimized value and impact portfolio has experienced a significant step change. Starting with divestments. We have sold close to EUR 770 million of revenues with three strategic moves. The sale of the food testing business to Mérieux. We also announced late June this year the planned disposal of our oil, petrochemicals, and coal inspection and testing business to a European private equity firm. This is the business I lead, and I can tell you this major transaction is on track and expected to close in Q1 2027.
The exit of the government services sub-segment is also ongoing. Our optimized value and impact portfolio is high quality. It includes Marine & Offshore oil and gas asset services, Consumer Product Services, and Commodities. They are all cash-generative, high-margin, mature businesses. During the first two years of LEAP | 28, these businesses contributed 39% of organic growth versus our target for LEAP | 28 of 20%. This is due to the outperformance of M&O and oil and gas that have benefited from favorable dynamics that were not visible in 2024, especially with strong investments in new ships and oil and gas assets.
Turning to CPS. This business has a leadership position and plenty of white space to continue growing organically and/or via bolt-on acquisition. In commodities, we see opportunities in mining that will be covered later on in this presentation. As a conclusion, even if we see lower long-term structural growth potential for our optimized value and impact portfolio than in expand leadership or new stronghold, we love our remaining optimized value and impact businesses, and we will keep on leveraging them. Back to you, Marios.
Thank you, Emma. We have executed against the strategic priorities we set at the outset of LEAP | 28. The strategy is working. We are now well positioned to amplify our performance delivery during the second half of this strategic cycle. I want to highlight two important financial impacts enabled by the portfolio rotation. First, revenue growth. As you've heard from Hinda, portfolio rotation will provide a 60 basis point tailwind to our revenue growth delivery. François will share the analysis behind this during his presentation. On margins, our portfolio mix also provides tailwinds. This chart shows our revenue mix by profitability band. As you can see, the 20%+ band is roughly the same size as it was in 2023 when we first showed you this chart. The 15%-20% band, however, has increased significantly.
We have shifted approximately 20% of our revenue mix from the 10%-15% band to the 15%-20% band. Today, more than three-quarters of our portfolio is at or above 15%. This margin picture reflects the contribution from product lines only. This margin profile will be further enhanced by the performance measures that we have implemented. As Noor will describe during his presentation, some of these programs are already underway, and many more will scale over time. This is our portfolio today. We have four strong divisions. Industrials and Commodities is home to two market leaders with great cash flow characteristics. Our Marine & Offshore product line, as well as the oil and gas business within Energy and Industrials. The Energy and Industrials product line, of course, includes businesses where we are investing for growth, such as power and utilities.
In the Commodities product line, we are investing behind the metals and minerals business. B&I includes mission-critical, but of course, it includes a lot more than that, including especially a vast base of OpEx-driven services in Europe and several CapEx-driven activities, both in the U.S. and in emerging markets. Business momentum in B&I has picked up considerably during 2026, and we are excited about the growth momentum in this division. Business Assurance is the smallest division today as a percentage of revenues and includes our leading assurance business. It also includes new trust domains like cyber and AI assurance and will be a key contributor to group organic growth in the years to come. Finally, Product Testing and Services includes the vast majority of our testing activities in IPC. We have leadership positions in consumer and IPC and are investing to grow our technology product line.
This division has an attractive sustainable growth profile and significant opportunities for CapEx investment in addition to M&A to support growth delivery. Bottom line, our portfolio provides us with a strong foundation to deliver sustainable and profitable growth. I hope the messages are clear. We operate in markets with attractive fundamentals, and our portfolio today is well-positioned for sustainable and profitable growth. As a final chapter, I want to share with you two important amplifiers of growth that are enabled by our multi-specialist approach, our strategic market priorities, and M&A. As you heard from Hinda, we will complement our winning portfolio with strategic market priorities. We are specifically calling out these priorities for two reasons. These are attractive business segments with advantaged structural growth dynamics, global reach, and attractive profitability.
These segments have historically been challenging for us to access at scale, but which we can now access thanks to our multi-specialist approach. Why have they been so hard to access historically? The strategic market priorities are transversal, meaning that they draw on capabilities that sit across multiple businesses. For example, sustainability draws on capabilities that sit in all four divisions. A segment like defense requires capabilities that stretch across B&I and M&O. Additionally, addressing the needs of customers in this space often means drawing on resources from around the world, as is the case for some of the AI-related businesses. Specialist product lines enable us to connect the dots and to deliver a compelling and comprehensive product offer. By bringing focus and accountability on these segments, we will enhance the quality of our service for our customers and improve our ability to cross-sell.
You will recognize sustainability from the 2024 CMD, and of course, this remains a focus. I will deep dive on this on the next slide. In addition, we introduced today three additional priorities: AI-driven markets, defense, and mining. I will start with AI-related markets. This includes two areas of focus. We are supporting our clients all along the mission-critical value chain with a growing portfolio of services, starting from a strong base in commissioning. Renato and Ciaran will deep dive into this in a moment with a focus on LotusWorks. The second area of focus is AI assurance, a newly emerging market with significant potential. Bureau Veritas has been a global leader in assurance for decades. We have permission to win and lead in this space with our experts, our licenses to operate, our well-earned reputation for independence, and the trust of our clients and their stakeholders.
Our focus is to extend these capabilities into AI assurance, much as we have done in cyber. During the deep dives in the afternoon, my colleagues will share where we stand on this journey. As Chief Corporate Development Officer, I am excited to scout for new opportunities that accelerate the pace of our development in this critical area for LEAP | 28 and beyond. Defense is an area where we have meaningful capabilities and there is no established global tech leader. Today, our service offering is fragmented across our portfolio, both by geography and by product line, and it lacks critical mass. We are building a cohesive product offer in defense and extending our geographical reach to enable us to bring a compelling and complete offering to both existing and to new customers. Finally, mining.
We are in the global top three in metals and minerals with a lab network that has an attractive footprint and a well-balanced portfolio between upstream and trade. Our opportunity is to leverage this strength with a focus on minerals, especially copper and gold, which benefit from favorable structural growth dynamics. We are ramping up our go-to-market for ancillary services for mining, including assurance, inspection, and OpEx support. You'll see a tech corner that reflects this effort. I now want to spend some time on sustainability. Our focus on sustainability has evolved over the last two years together with the market. Today, sustainability is a core component of risk management for our customers. This is a EUR 27 billion market growing at mid-double digits. Two-thirds of this market is in transition services. This extends well beyond corporate reporting and includes supporting our clients across the entirety of their sustainability journey.
1/3 of this market is in green objects. We help our clients build, operate, and maintain green assets while improving their operational excellence. Two examples. We support renewable energy assets throughout their lifecycle, and we provide services for maritime decarbonization to support the deployment of green and low emission ships. Both transition services and green objects touch multiple parts of our business and are enabled by our multi-specialist approach. Our sustainability revenues reflect good progress and have grown to 8% of our group revenues versus 5% in 2023. Our target remains to increase sustainability to 15% of our revenues by 2028. We also continue to actively pursue acquisitions in this area to aid in the delivery of our growth ambition. Let me close by addressing M&A. M&A is an essential part of our growth delivery.
We have acquired in excess of EUR 400 million of revenues across more than 20 transactions during LEAP | 28 thus far. We aim to meet or exceed these levels during the second half of LEAP | 28 while laying the groundwork for continued M&A momentum beyond 2028. The primary focus of our M&A strategy is to accelerate our group revenue growth while delivering earning accretion midterm post synergies in the product line where the acquisition occurs. We are actively pursuing acquisitions across all of our divisions, while recognizing that thanks to LotusWorks, B&I has been the primary beneficiary of M&A activity during the first half of our strategy. We remain focused on active portfolio management, and we regularly assess new markets to enter, as well as potential disposals. That said, we expect that the large disposals we had anticipated have been announced.
Our focus for the second half of LEAP | 28 is acquisitions. We are committed to executing a disciplined program of bolt-on M&A, which consists of fill-in acquisitions that extend our geographic reach in segments where we are already present, as well as acquiring businesses that enhance our service offering, particularly in the new strongholds and the strategic market priorities. We aim to complement bolt-on M&A execution with the acquisition of midsize targets that bring platforms with complementary capabilities to Bureau Veritas. We will, of course, remain disciplined with respect to such targets, always with a focus on value creation. Our multi-specialist approach supports our ability to realize synergies across our portfolio of acquisitions by enabling our ability to scale acquired capabilities across our enterprise. Our commitment to strong value delivery from M&A is further enabled by a disciplined and systematic approach to integration.
I would like to leave you with three messages. Portfolio rotation is complete, providing us with growth and margin tailwinds during the second half of LEAP | 28. The multi-specialist approach underpins our ability to outperform our underlying market trends by enabling us to drive transversal initiatives like the strategic market priorities. Finally, focused execution on M&A will further amplify our revenue growth delivery. Thanks for your attention. Renato and Ciaran will now take you through our mission-critical business and how it has been enhanced by the LotusWorks transaction.
Well, thank you very much, Marios. Good morning. My name is Renato Catrib, and I am the President of Buildings and Infrastructure and Mission Critical. I joined Bureau Veritas 24 years ago, and throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles across several geographies, spanning support functions, corporate development, sales, and operations. Along this journey, I had the privilege and opportunity to grow the business, develop the portfolio, and work on the acquisition and integration of companies across different markets. Before handing over to Ciaran, I would like to briefly introduce the main topics we will cover today.
Ciaran will begin by presenting the simplified structure of Buildings and Infrastructure and explaining where our mission-critical business sits within the organization. He will then provide an overview of mission-critical assets, the strategic priorities identified by Bureau Veritas, and our existing data center business. I will then introduce LotusWorks and explain the unique platform created through the combination of our existing mission-critical business with LotusWorks. Ciaran, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Renato. Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ciaran Hyland, and I have been managing the mission-critical data center business for Bureau Veritas for the past eight years. Today, I am going to give you some insights into that mission-critical business. Before we deep dive into the mission-critical business, it is important you understand how we organize the Building and Infrastructure business and how mission critical fits within that portfolio. Building and Infrastructure is a defined division within Bureau Veritas and is organized into two product lines. One is in buildings where mission critical sits, and the other is in infrastructure. Bureau Veritas offers numerous solutions from feasibility studies through construction and asset operations across the Building and Infrastructure product line.
For buildings, we have a well-balanced portfolio between CapEx and OpEx activities, especially for mission critical. After the acquisition of LotusWorks, we operate in both phases of the asset life cycle. Infrastructure is strongly oriented for large scale projects like rail, airports and metros as examples. Buildings represent 82% and infrastructure 18% of the total business. What is a mission critical asset? A mission critical asset is an asset with a component or system whose failure would cause significant downtime, disrupting services for clients or society. These systems have high consequences of failure, which could result in shutdown of core business functions, financial loss, or even safety risks. These systems are inherently complex. Their topology incorporates numerous pieces of equipment and software that must be seamlessly integrated into one single operating system.
Our team of technical specialists collaborate closely with organizations to ensure that the design is realized and the construction adheres to all specifications. They need trusted technical assurance. Over the past eight years, we have developed longstanding partnerships with the largest data center providers, supporting all their design and delivery teams as they grow their infrastructure across the globe. For our clients, we ensure reliance and reliability. Our full life cycle commissioning services, tailored quality assurance programs support our clients at each distinct stage from the design through construction, through commissioning and into the operations. Given today's market dynamics, speed to capacity is increasingly essential. We achieve this by creating detailed milestone-based commissioning schedules, preventing rework through rigorous testing and executing parallel subsystem commissioning. Finally, we operate at scale.
Given the strength and depth of our teams, we support our global clients who need consistency in delivering projects simultaneously across their platform. We adopt a selective strategy focusing on mission critical, fast-growing complex sectors such as data centers and now semiconductor facilities and pharmaceuticals, each of which require specialized services and seasoned professionals mirroring the platform we have successfully built in data centers. I've mentioned over the past number of years we have grown significantly in the data center sector. We offer three distinct services. Firstly, quality assurance and quality control. Here we deliver end-to-end support at the design phase throughout the manufacturing of the equipment and across the construction life cycle. We leverage comprehensive process monitoring and regulatory compliance checks to ensure consistent verifiable quality. We also offer full life cycle commissioning.
This is our performance assurance, where our dedicated project specialists support all stakeholders of the project by executing commissioning ability studies, factory acceptance testing, component-level testing, and functional performance tests of each system. We complete each project with what is called an integrated system test, where we prove out all failures under multiple failure modes. Commissioning is a dedicated technical methodology to make sure that the facility will perform according to the specification and the design intent. Operations and consultancy is currently a niche market with limited scope. As Renato will explain, LotusWorks now brings significant capabilities in this area. We have over 132 global data center clients and operate in over 35 countries and have over 1,000 technical engineering specialists. We established a dedicated mission critical university to continually cultivate the expertise needed for tomorrow.
This initiative directly supports the growth strategy by ensuring that we have talent and capabilities to scale our services both across mature and emerging markets. As you can see, we've built a very successful scalable delivery platform for all mission-critical assets. I'll hand it back over to Renato, who will talk about the next phase of expansion for this mission-critical platform.
Thank you very much, Ciaran. Let me now introduce LotusWorks and explain why this acquisition is such an important milestone in the development of our mission-critical platform. LotusWorks is a highly specialized technical services company with more than 35 years of experience in advanced fabrication facilities and more than 800 qualified professionals. LotusWorks has established positions in semiconductors, pharmaceutical facilities, and data center projects. It has built a particularly strong reputation in the semiconductors industry, one of the most demanding and technically complex type of mission-critical assets. The company is widely recognized for its expertise in commissioning, quality assurance and quality control, supporting clients in bringing highly complex facilities to their expected operational performance. These capabilities are especially recognized in semiconductor manufacturing, where quality, precision, and uptime are absolutely critical. Importantly, LotusWorks brings much more than commissioning expertise.
They have also developed a meaningful portfolio of operational services, including operational support, maintenance, and calibration activities. These services allow LotusWorks to remain connected to clients and assets long after the CapEx phase has been completed, creating deeper customer relationships and more recurring revenue streams. When we combine LotusWorks with our existing mission-critical business, we create something much bigger than the sum of its parts. LotusWorks significantly strengthens our global leadership in mission-critical assets. Here, you can see a simple view of our capabilities across the asset life cycle from CapEx activities such as commissioning and construction services, through to OpEx services across our three mission-critical priorities: data centers, semiconductors and pharmaceutical facilities. The blue bubbles represents Bureau Veritas' existing capabilities, while the green bubbles show the additional capabilities brought by LotusWorks.
As you can see, our mission-critical business has historically been concentrated in commissioning and construction services for our data centers. LotusWorks meaningfully expands these platforms in two important ways. First, it strengthens our presence in operational services, extending our reach across the full life cycle of mission-critical assets. Second, it broadens our exposure beyond data centers through deep expertise and strong market recognition in semiconductors, together with established presence in pharmaceutical facilities. These are two clear and complementary expansion drivers, expanding our capabilities across the asset life cycle and expanding our presence into additional high-growth mission-critical markets. Together, Bureau Veritas' Mission Critical and LotusWorks result in a combined platform representing more than 1,800 qualified professionals, with revenues exceeding EUR 300 million in 2026 and operations in over 35 countries.
By combining Bureau Veritas' global leadership in data centers with LotusWorks' recognized expertise in semiconductors, pharmaceutical facilities and operational services, we are creating a unique mission-critical platform that is broader, more diversified, and better positioned for sustainable growth. Most importantly, we are building on a strong and complementary customer base, creating a powerful platform for our next phase of growth. Our global leadership in reinforcing our global leadership in mission-critical assets. Thank you very much for your attention.
Okay. Thank you, Hinda, Marios, Emma, Ciaran, and Renato. Hope you enjoyed the first part of this morning's plenary session. We've heard about how Bureau Veritas has transformed its portfolio, sharpened its focus, and positioned itself for the next phase of growth. Now it's your turn. We'll move to the Q and A session, and because our speakers this morning have been super efficient, we'll have a bit more time for Q and A, and I'm sure you will appreciate.
Just to give you a couple of information. We'll start with a question from the room, then we'll move to the webcast. Please focus only on the first part of this morning, so no financial question. It will be discussed later on when François will present you the financial ambition. Let's start with the first question. Annelies, the floor is yours. It's coming. Please come to the That will be much easier if the speakers are here to answer the questions. Please. Absolutely. Okay.
Thank you. Annelies from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions, please. Hello. Just firstly on the organic growth, you're still targeting mid to high single digit, but you're obviously accelerating your portfolio mix into higher growth segments and that's going to continue with the growth into AI. What do you think that implies for organic growth beyond the LEAP | 28 plan? If you think about the next two years, do you think BV could sustainably become more of a high single-digit growth, organic growth business?
Thanks, Annelies, for the question. I think what we are doing right now is we are in that process of putting together the multi-specialist model, and I think we talked about it this morning. Mid to high single digits is what we see to the horizon of 2028. Of course, a lot of what we talked about in terms of M&A between myself and Marios was gearing towards a bit higher growth. A little premature to say exactly what that will be beyond 2028. But I think what is important here is in the next two years, we will continue to work relentlessly to make sure that the product lines really upgrade their growth profile. Then in 2028, we will answer that question precisely.
Thank you. A quick follow-up on defense, which I want to delve into. I think historically, that has been quite a low outsourcing market for testing for security reasons. So what is changing here? We know about the growth in defense markets, but what is it about that market that is now perhaps more addressable to BV? I assume that will also be a target for acquisitions as well.
I will let Marios, you want to address that?
Sure. Look, I think it is an evolving market. The complexity of the defense market is significant, and the different parts of the value chain have evolved significantly. So obviously, there is a very important government component. But we are addressing the defense market today in a meaningful way, but not in many geographies. So the opportunity is to deepen that, and again, it is enabled by the multi-specialist approach and the product line focus.
I think perhaps just to add to that, Annelies, that transverse nature of the market is very important. There are services we can do, for example, now we are building an infrastructure in defense, in business assurance. I worry you are absolutely correct. When it comes to Industrials and Commodities and product testing, that is where the level of, I guess, invasiveness of an external player becomes a concern. But as Marios mentioned, we do work today for some defense projects that I cannot discuss, unfortunately. But those are the things we are looking to scale and see where can we actually expand.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Yeah.
Good morning. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. Just a couple for me as well, please. Just to follow up on defense, just trying to understand the scope for organic versus M&A opportunity here and which countries maybe in particular that you are targeting. Is it, or geographies at least, is it Europe versus the U.S. versus rest of the world? Just getting some color there, please. The EUR 1 billion revenue target by 2030, from the new areas. What is the state of the M&A pipeline today? How much do you expect to add via M&A versus organic growth? Maybe just some color there as well, please. Thank you.
Let me address the defense and then we'll tag team on the second question on AI. On defense, I think, as I said, the important thing for us is to think of the defense market as a transverse market. Our, I would say, natural inclination is to say you're going to test new weaponry, for example. That's not what we are talking about today. We're thinking about all our capabilities, and as defense spending increases, there are needs for inspection and testing and assurance. Give you an example, for example. In term of facilities, there's a lot of work in that space, right?
Because there are elements of not only security, but there is certain requirements in the defense sector that are very specific, and we have this competency in term of early, for example, support during construction phase, and then later on for facilities management support. We do some of that today and we want to expand. We have capabilities, of course, in the marine space we do today. We had multiple contracts in countries to support some national marine or navy to work on different projects. I can't really go into the details, of course, for security reasons, but we have that sort of work we do. We want to expand. Then the third one, which is participating fully into the production system. That's the part that to Annelies' earlier point, that's an area that is normally a lot more insourced.
Our intention here is to participate in any outsourcing that is coming anyway, just because of the ramp-up of the defense spending and the lack of capability. That's really, we're sitting in that phase. While we're waiting for that outsourcing to happen, anything organic in that transverse market, that's what will carry the growth. On the second question, I will start by saying that, first of all, we have made the LotusWorks acquisition in the mission-critical space. We have our existing data center that Ciaran explained earlier. We expect organic growth to continue in that area. That's really what is carrying us primarily. In term of capabilities, we're scouting for capabilities to say, what can we do beyond just the capabilities we have today?
Because we do commissioning, but there are many other things you can do in a data center, particularly in what we call the operations and maintenance phase or OpEx phase, right? That we are looking at. I'll pass it to Marios in a second here, but the second part of that EUR 1 billion is the EUR 200 million is coming from digital assurance. Digital assurance there is two parts. It's AI assurance and cybersecurity. There we will be looking to do a combination of organic and M&A, but we'll let Marios comment on the M&A piece.
Look, we have a well-defined organic roadmap across both of those dimensions. Then, particularly on the second part, the digital assurance and the cyber, but also on the first, we then scout for targets and see where we can either accelerate elements of the organic roadmap or where there are side branches of opportunity that fit that roadmap. But fundamentally, these are capabilities we need and we can build organically, and the M&A is an accelerator of that rather than a must-have.
Thank you.
The next question over there.
Hi, everyone. Ben Wild from Deutsche Bank. Three questions from me, please. Firstly, there is a persistent gap between the multiple that BV trades on and the private market transaction multiples in this sector. Today, you are outlining a plan to accelerate higher growth, higher margin, and probably higher multiple M&A growth into the future. At the same time, you described the existing portfolio as well set to benefit from higher structural growth potential. How do you think about the relative value of deploying capital into higher multiple M&A versus buying back your own stock? How can you ensure that continuing to pursue high multiple targets will result in value creation and not instead in value destruction?
I think what we have said very clearly is that we are pursuing specific markets that have high growth and high margins, very importantly, higher barriers to entry. We remain extremely disciplined in how we pursue the M&A, and we compete on multiples that make sense to us, and we are not shy, I would say, from walking away from transactions that actually don't complete that. We are very clear that whatever we buy needs to be accretive to the product line. The businesses we buy are accretive in term of growth and profitability to the division that is buying it. And we make an arbitrage on the multiples that I don't think at any time we have pursued just higher multiple for the sake of it. And it is a very competitive market, it's fair to say.
We have a lot of private equity, of course, in the space who drive things for different reasons. We remain extremely, the word is disciplined and careful, because we think we have the advantage, and we know we have the advantage of scale that gives us proximity that these other sponsors don't have. And therefore, I think Marios explained it, but he can explain again, is our capacity to leverage that presence, that proximity, and the brand that we are, I think, helps us mitigate the multiple challenge sometimes on some transactions. Do you want to add to that?
Yeah. Look, and the very high multiple transactions tend to happen in the larger for very large transactions. And we talked about having two components. One is programmatic, both on M&A, where the multiples are not at those levels. And if we were to pursue a transaction on the mid-sized or larger, again, the value creation levers would need to be there and will be there, enabled by the scalability brought by the product line approach.
The second question on the secular trends that you outlined today. They are slightly different, understandably, to the ones you highlighted two and a half years ago. Given a large part of the strategy outlined today is on continuing to deploy capital into these secular trends, how much confidence do you have in the durability of these secular trends as compared to the ones that you highlighted two and a half years ago? And a related question, over the last two and a half years, have you moved any of your businesses between the various value buckets? Do you see businesses that maybe previously were optimized value are now expand leadership, for example?
So a couple of things. Thank you for the question because I think it's an important point to clarify. We haven't really changed. What we highlighted is that the secular trends we showed in 2024 have evolved for four reasons. The first one is the technology race has accelerated, as we've explained, the digital infrastructure spent particularly to support AI. That also introduced the reindustrialization, because if you look today, the reindustrialization, if we use a very broad term, has accelerated around AI, particularly around semiconductor, and any specialized manufacturing has moved very quickly because of this whole drive. So that's a change versus what we said about urbanization, for example. Digital and AI didn't change. It's really connectivity. We moved now to full scale deployment of digital system and AI. Energy, we talked about energy demand is the big kind of new force.
But what happened here is the only thing we're saying is the energy transition alone is no longer just the driver. It's more of an energy addition, where we are seeing really all energy sources now for energy security reasons are accelerating. Which is good for us because we're well positioned in oil and gas to start with, and then we are expanding. Finally, frankly, on the rest, the only thing I would like to highlight is the risk management approach has really increased versus a regulatory compliance view in term of ESG and sustainability.
Those are the things. For me, they haven't changed. They have evolved slightly. We continue to monitor this evolution because it allow us as well to move the portfolio faster within the product lines. The second part of your question is, did we move around the buckets? We did not. That's where we sit today. Now, of course, as we move in the next couple of years and for beyond 2028, we'll have to make that assessment again.
Then just a final, very quick question. The upgraded revenue growth guidance, does that mean that looking forward to 2027 and 2028, probably we are done with disposals? Or is there still potential for further rotation through disposals in the business?
François, do you want to?
Well, I think overall, I think it's been mentioned by Marios in his presentation, the bulk, the largest ones of the disposal we had in mind have been completed. Now we're in a constant portfolio reshaping and assessing the quality of all of the business we have. The short answer is most of it is done. Some may still come, but the bulk of the effort will be in accretive M&A. You'll see that in the financial presentation.
When you de-net M&A acquisition and disposal, you have already a very different view. We would like to reinforce the M&A acquisition in the next two years in a disciplined manner. Again, going back to your point on multiples, we've seen a lot of what we would call proprietary deals, which are trading well below the type of multiples we are offering. We believe we have the firepower and the capacity to accelerate on the accretive part of M&A.
Okay, we're there.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. Victoria from JPMorgan. My first question's on the mining business. You've highlighted mining as a key growth accelerator market, along with sustainability, defense, AI, et cetera. But your metals and minerals business is still classified within the optimized value basket, despite having a top three position. Can you help bridge this difference? What other key commodities you're exposed to now, given that you've disposed of the coal testing business, and generally, what's your upstream versus trade mix, and how you expect to grow in the more complex methods that you've mentioned? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for the question. For us, the mining market, as shown by Marios, is the full exposure of our services to the mining market. It's not only the metals and minerals. It includes inspection, for example, and other services. That's how we are. We're looking at it as a transverse market again, where we go beyond what we traditionally do in that market and do other services. That's for the cross-selling space. To come back to the metals and minerals, it is true that we put it in the optimized value and impact, but there are two things we're doing today. First of all, the cycle, the super cycle is ongoing, and it's structural, and we see it in precious metals.
We see it in what we call green metals, including copper, and there is long-term trends that are very positive, and we are investing now in CapEx. We are accelerating our investment in CapEx, and we will be opportunistic for M&A. It's a space that doesn't have a lot of players. You don't have 50 players in that space. They're very few. The fact it's sitting on the optimized value impact is the capabilities to do beyond organic growth that was limited.
Now, with this market, with our decision to invest and accelerate spend in that space, I think we see more opportunities, and to the earlier question, I wouldn't be surprised in a couple of years that business moves somewhere else. But we have really changed, I would say, our approach to metals and minerals because we believe we have real opportunities, and today 2/3 of the business is upstream and a third is trade, and we intend to continue to expand in upstream. Do you want to add to that, François?
No, I think the question that keeps on coming is, what about those brackets? Do they change, not change? I think when you run the business, and I know that analysts have sometimes difficulties to get around this, is you need to adapt. I think there are some of the assumptions we've made which are proven too conservative, and then we will, typically on metals and minerals, most probably moving forward, we may reconsider, as I mentioned, in the next phase of a plan, to bucketize this a bit differently. But that's the beauty of running a business in real life.
It's bringing a smile to our presidents of commodities who are sitting just up front from here.
Yes. She already CapEx approval coming her way.
Just to follow up on the brackets again, sorry. On M&A, is that a similar situation because it also sits into your optimized value basket? What do you think are the key growth drivers here? Is it more the oil and gas, or how much is the kind of decarbonization agenda going to be in terms of materiality to growth here?
I think for marine and offshore, it is a slightly different space because the market is a good market. It is between EUR 4.5 billion and EUR 5 billion market, but the players, a lot of them have some. We talked about the navies, et cetera, before. This is not a space where things can consolidate easier. That is why we put it there. We still think it is a fantastic business, and it has delivered really above normative growth, I would say, in the last few years with the massive development. I think the key thing for Marine & Offshore is to expand their services on the asset that is a ship.
What can we do more around the ship, around the ecosystem of marine, around everything that has to do with marine? We have fantastic expertise. It is an engineering, really, product line that we have there that can expand. That is really what our chiefs there, who are sitting here as well, are working on to see how do we expand. We continue to be a core class company with capabilities to support ship owners throughout the life cycle of the ship.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next question, maybe Arnaud in the middle. You can share a mic. Okay. Let's start with the back lane.
James Rowland Clark from Barclays. Just on AI, I think you said in the presentation you target 30% integration by 2028. What is that integration today, and how much has it helped margins to this point? We will probably talk about AI more later. Then more on M&A, please, if that is all right. Could you help us with the balance of platform versus bolt-on deals? I appreciate that AI is a big focus for platform deals, potentially, but what about the rest of the business? Then finally on M&A, how is the pipeline looking today versus maybe 6-12 months ago? M&A to this point has perhaps been a bit slower than the market was expecting. So how can you reassure us that you have got the deals coming through? Thank you.
So let's, Marios, you go with the M&A. We will answer AI after. Go ahead.
Look, I think let me start with the pipeline and go to the platform versus bolt-on. Look, I think the pipeline is in good shape. We have good momentum. The market is there. There is plenty of deal activity. It is about us executing on that in the best way possible. Which is focusing on cultivating proprietary deals where we can and participating in an information advantaged way in competitive processes. So we are actively working through that. Look, we delivered more than 20 transactions in the first half of the strategy, over EUR 400 million of acquired revenues. As I said, our objective is to at least meet that and hopefully exceed that over the next two years. Now, the question is it bolt-on or the mid-size? The bolt-on, I would say, is part of the regular activity that we see.
The mid-size, we are of course working on those as well. Those are harder to predict because, to the question that was raised earlier, the value creation equation there can sometimes be more challenging to get right, and we are going to be very disciplined. When we do a platform deal, it is about bringing new capabilities into the company. As I said, it could happen across all four divisions. What we really look for is companies that bring new capabilities and that we can then create value from the product lines and the cross-selling that has been talked about. But it is harder to predict the mid-size deals in quite the same way.
On the AI piece, what we are doing today, Noor Sait, our Chief Performance Officer, is going to go through some of that, along with Philipp Karmires, our Chief Digital, will also talk about that. What we mean by full integration, meaning that the workflow itself of a particular service has been really fully re-engineered with AI. That is what we mean full integration. The reason we said 30% by 2028, because some of these are just starting. We will detail that, and those of you who have signed up for the certification session and the inspection session, those are two s essions that can show you some of the early promises of AI and how that is conducive to us to really revamp and review.
The last point I would like to make is some platforms we started them before really, I would say, fully and quite candidly grasping what AI can do. We are putting it on top, while others were really at the inception of this new operation system. There we are starting it in an experts first always, but AI really native way. We are rethinking about the journey. If you just hold that thought a little bit, I think we will address that a bit more later on. Do you want to comment on the margin or?
On the margin, I do not want to steal the thunder from our next presenters, Noor and Philipp presentation, but it is ingrained into our performance programs, that we have been starting to develop, and you will see the states by the end of 2026. That is the next level of further improvements for the next two years. If you hold on for the second half, you will get more insight, and then we can come back to this in the next Q and A if you need more.
Next, Arnaud from Oddo BHF.
Yes. Arnaud Palliez, CIC. A question on cybersecurity. It seems that two years ago it was more a development priority for Bureau Veritas. I would like to understand if there is a change in term of the development potential for business assurance in cybersecurity, or if it is because cybersecurity is everywhere in defense, in AI-driven businesses. Just to try to better understand.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Cybersecurity was sitting in our new strongholds. It remains there. Why? Because the market is double digit. It is very pervasive, to your point, it is a concern every organization have. We haven't changed our mind. I think what really was interesting to see very quickly is the cyber challenges and risks have increased dramatically, particularly with AI. The way you develop the capabilities is evolving. It is not always. We have a very nice businesses that go look at enterprise risks in general that took out some of the connected products, and then we have the operations technology, which is industrial aspects cyber, and we have really very strong expertise there.
We are now trying to reconcile that with how AI capabilities are in a way either boosting opportunities or changing the game in some of these areas. We didn't change our mind. We continue to scout for good opportunities, but with this new lens that in 2024, to be completely frank, that wasn't as understood as where we are today. We have a couple of presentations. I think we have a presentation this afternoon in the deep dive, the new trust domain, that will specifically talk about that.
Here we go. We still have time for two questions before the break.
Hi, it's Tom Horsey from Wellington. Thank you very much for inviting us here and putting the whole day on. It feels as though when you think about these verticals, or horizontals like defense and sustainability and mining, that at some stage you felt as though maybe BV was too siloed to really address them. Could you talk a bit about really how that became apparent and what you've actually changed to break down those silos to allow you to address these markets, and how you're monitoring that the people really understand what their new role is?
Yes, thank you. Good to see you, Tom, and thanks for the question. Look, I think we were very clear. The new operating model I described, and Maria will give the people lens of that later on, is really about breaking silos. When we put together the new organization, it was the first impact. The motto was divide and conquer. We really wanted to make sure that the strength of our region, which is fantastic proximity to customers, understanding deeply what's happening in the production systems and what's happening. And the economies where they sit, the regulatory landscape where they sit, was very strong. But we felt that the product lines, because they were fragmented geographically, didn't connect.
And some of these businesses require that, either because the business is really of global nature or because the customers themselves have certain needs or the industry has a certain. We talked about mining is a global sector. We realized that we needed an organization that preserves that strength of the regions and strengthens the product line so they can move quickly, replicate solutions quickly, connect accounts, and enable cross-selling. Because cross-selling is very hard when you're extremely geographical, right? You need to be geographical for the proximity of the customer and to serve, but you need to have a channel that can do that cross-selling. And that's why, for us, this strategic market priorities is all about cross-selling. It's capacity to facilitate it through the key account organization, through the product lines, and by making regions that are very similar in composition where it makes sense.
It is easy to make these decisions, right? Maria will talk about that. The key thing is, one, the organization and how it connects. Those are the things we launched in summer 2025, and now the organization has progressed. Two, the leadership traits. There is a certain leadership behaviors we expect. Then finally, the incentive system that needs to align all that. Those are the things we have been working on in the last, I would say, 12 months plus.
Okay. The last question will come from Oddo Geoffroy .
The other side.
No, on the other side. Sorry.
Thank you. Geoffroy from Oddo BHF. I think one of the most discussed topics this year was one of the largest transactions in the space over the last few years, the Intertek transaction with EQT. Were there some conclusions that you draw from this transaction, and were some of those conclusions potentially reflected in the plan you are presenting us today? Thank you.
Thank you for the question, Geoffroy. Good question. Of course, it's a defining move, right? It's such a large competitor. I think what it means is, in fact, that move reinforces our conviction that we need to advance and progress on our multi-specialist. Growth is going to require that focus. Our approach to focus. We never really talked about multi-specialist when we launched in 2024, but I can tell you that was the jargon we were thinking about and really the direction we wanted to go to, because the market of TIC, of test and testing inspection and certification has evolved and requires a lot more technology.
It requires a lot more new ways of working that we didn't have in the sector before. We were working in that direction. The fact to see one of the competitors in that position, it reinforces our conviction that the best way to grow is to do all these things so we can become a more valuable company. It's a move that, to us, reinforces our strategic direction. Does that answer your question? I don't know if anyone wants to comment.
I have just another comment, perhaps. I think it's a great move. It shows investors have an interest in this segment, and I think some of you have been following Bureau Veritas for quite long. The sector has gone through some years of less interest. I think those years are definitely gone. We've launched here at Bureau Veritas the first movement of starting to dispose some of the portfolios a couple of years back, with movements happening. Now, this movement is happening with Intertek. I think it's quite interesting. It shows that there is interest and then some of the valuation here on being questioned. All in all, the growth agenda that Hinda mentioned is the most powerful tool for Bureau Veritas to demonstrate the great value. If you consider the Intertek story, obviously, they were the least growing entities among the listed assets.
Okay, thank you all for your questions. We'll now have a 20 minutes deserved break, coffee break. Feel free to ask questions during the break. Let's be back at 11:10. We'll restart at 11:10 sharp, so let's be back at 11:05 A.M.. Thank you. We will be focusing on two key pillars of our LEAP | 28 strategy, performance on one side and people on the other side. First, Noor Sait will take us through how we are strengthening performance across the group. We then turn to our people agenda with Maria Lorente Fraguas, and because no discussion about the future will be complete without innovation, Philipp Karmires, our Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, will join us to discuss how AI is already transforming the way we work, serve our clients, and creates value. Please join me in welcoming Noor to the stage.
Good morning, and welcome to the performance-led execution presentation. My name is Noor Sait. I am the Chief Performance Officer at Bureau Veritas. I joined Bureau Veritas a year ago after spending more than 30 years in the upstream oil and gas industry. During that time, I led and grew engineering, manufacturing, and field operations businesses in several locations around the world. Improving performance has been central to all my roles, and I'm very excited to bring this experience to Bureau Veritas and to join an impressive ongoing effort to improve how we work at scale. Over the next few minutes, I will walk you through the performance-led pillar. I will share what has been delivered at the midpoint of the LEAP | 28 strategy against our commitments that we made in 2024.
I will show you that the performance agenda is a structured effort with tangible progress and results applied across a large portion of the organization. It consists of multiple programs and projects designed to improve how we operate and how we work, and how we deliver value. I will begin by reconnecting the program to our stakeholder commitments. As Hinda shared earlier, our purpose anchors our plans and vision and defines the commitments we make to all our stakeholders. For our clients, that means putting them at the center of what we do and the experience we provide them, and the novel solutions we develop. All supported by the LEAP | 28 strategy, and especially by the portfolio pillar that Marios has just covered. For our employees, it means helping them progress and develop to bring growth and impact.
This is covered in the Evolve People model, which Maria will present later. For society, it means operating transparently and contributing to a more sustainable world, as reflected in the CSR progress I will share with you. For our investors, it means stepping up our operational performance to unlock growth, improve margins, and create the capacity to reinvest in the business. Performance-led execution therefore sits at the heart of our stakeholder commitments. It is not just a financial imperative, it is how we build and sustain trust with every stakeholder that we serve. Turning to our corporate social responsibility commitments. Our CSR plan is built around our vision to shape a better world through a better environment, a better workplace, and through better business practices.
This journey started with the Bureau Veritas sustainability framework and continues through engagement with external stakeholders, our Board of Governors Committee, and our employees around the world. Our targets cover five priorities, and we are making good progress across all of them. This progress is recognized through our external ratings, such as our number one ranking from Sustainalytics, our number two sector ranking by S&P Global, and our gold rating from EcoVadis. I will now move to the performance programs that support our investor and customer commitments. Performance-led execution consists of two streams. The first is operational leverage and functional scalability, and the second is innovation. Operational leverage and functional scalability focus on improving efficiency and productivity, reducing our cost to serve, differentiating through superior customer service, and supporting growth.
The second stream, innovation, provides the digital backbone that enables our performance programs and supports new services and delivery models. Philipp will tell us more about that in the digital and AI session next. My presentation focuses on operational leverage and functional scalability, and the innovation embedded in the performance programs that I will share. As we shared in 2024, performance-led execution has one clear financial objective. It is to deliver 180 basis points of cumulative margin improvement from 2023- 2028, with half of the gains reinvested to fund modernization and growth. We will now look more closely at the operational leverage and functional scalability streams.
The slide summarizes how these streams are organized and the programs and the projects under them, as well as the commitments and progress. Under the operational leverage stream, we have three programs supported by multiple projects with an ambition to deliver up to 100 basis points of cumulative margin improvement from 2023 - 2028. The three programs under this stream are performance management, process improvement, and tech-augmented ways of working. Similar to innovation, our progress on tech-augmented ways of working will be evident in the performance programs I share. Under the functional scalability stream, we have three programs supported by projects with an ambition to deliver up to 80 basis points of cumulative margin improvement from 2023 - 2028. The three programs under this stream are shared service centers, strategic procurement, and overhead management.
From 2024 - 2026, the focus was on securing gains through optimization, and from now to 2028, the focus is on realizing the benefits from our structural investments. Moving now to the results achieved. This slide shows our margin gains to date from the programs. We have achieved approximately 110 basis points, as Hinda has already shared, towards the ambition we shared in 2024, of the 180 basis points by 2028. Of this 110 basis points, operational leverage has contributed 50 basis points, and the remaining 60 basis points have come from functional scalability. Just past the midpoint of the LEAP | 28 strategy, I can tell you delivery is on track. From 2024 - 2026, our focus was on capturing early optimization wins while laying the foundation for more structural gains in the second half of LEAP | 28.
By 2028, we will deliver the remaining 70 basis points as our optimization wins compound and our structural investments bear fruit. In the next three slides, I will step into the three programs that contribute to our current progress and to our future 180 basis points ambition. I will start with functional scalability. Functional scalability has been the largest contributor to what gains we have made so far. The program has delivered 60 basis points from the 110 achieved to date. The program combines three connected actions. First, we have maintained disciplined overhead management by ensuring functional costs grow slowly, slower than revenue. Second, we launched strategic procurement projects such as supplier base reduction and spend consolidation with suppliers. Third, we created and deployed the shared service center model starting with IT across four global hubs.
In IT, we have achieved 32% of our workforce being centralized, and we have achieved 30% reduction in our payroll costs. The structural work ahead is to complete the IT deployment and expand the finance and HR functions into the shared service center model. The model covers 43% of the workforce in the shared service workforce. I will now turn to the two programs under operational leverage, starting with performance management. The first program under operational leverage is performance management. This program contributes approximately 30% of the total cumulative 50 basis points delivered to date for operational leverage. The objective was to create a consistent data-driven operations discipline across the organization where we had inconsistent local solutions. We created standardized KPIs, a common global dashboard, and a performance methodology that has helped managers turn data into decisions. The scale is significant.
63% of the global production workforce is in the scope of the performance program. As an example, in one mid-sized business unit using the methodology, we achieved a 24% improvement in net production per FTE, per Field Technical Engineer. This is a good example of the methodology working as designed, and it continues to replicate across the globe. Scaling the program across all product lines and management layers is a key contributor to our total 180 basis point improvement ambition by 2028. The second program under operational leverage is process improvement, which contributes the remaining 70% of the total cumulative 50 basis points being achieved today for operational leverage. Process improvement is about building and deploying digital operation systems for our five key workflows across a large portion of the company. The program covers 58% of our global workforce.
These digital operation systems standardize how we work and how we reduce our costs to serve. An added benefit is that the programs create the digital landscape for an AI integration. Approximately 60% of these digital operation systems are deployed to date, and the system will be fully deployed by 2027. As deployment scales and the system enhancements compound, process improvement will continue to drive the contributions from operational leverage. I will make this program tangible by sharing an example of one digital operation system for the certification solutions workflow. SmartCert is an end-to-end digital workflow management system developed for our certification solutions product line. It is one of the clearest illustrations of what our digital operation systems deliver at scale. The system integrates the full certification solutions workflow, from sales to invoicing and everything in between, in a single integrated digital operation system.
For the clients, the system also provides live interaction and project visibility. For our teams, it reduces manual tasks by 43%, reduces by half the number of systems they previously needed to access across the workflow, and it increases our capacity by about 15%. This is exactly how process improvement and other digital operation systems create value by standardizing workflows, simplifying the employee experience, improving client deployment into measurable operational gains. At full deployment by Q2 2027, the project aims at delivering 150 basis points organic margin improvement compared through 2023 by 2028. Harmonized workflows and digital operation systems like SmartCert also enable modernizing our way of working further through AI enablement. Our digital operation systems, like SmartCert, provide the foundation for AI, which is already moving from experimentation to providing operational value. We see this happening at three levels across the company.
First, more than 22,000 AI assistants have been created by skilled employees to improve their day-to-day work. Second, more than 300 employee-created assistants have been validated and published for reuse across the organization. Third, more than 140 AI solutions are integrated directly into our workflows. At this level, AI becomes part of how we work, creating operational leverage at scale. Two examples bring this to life. In Marine & Offshore, an AI-powered knowledge management system covering approximately 15,000 pages of complex rules and standards strengthens the expertise, sharing them across 2,000 experts. In Product Certification services, an AI integrated into a digital lab operation system automates the ingestion of approximately 2 million client request forms and has saved an estimated 150,000 hours. You will see more examples of AI-enabled projects later in the digital and AI session and in the tech corners and deep dives.
This reinforces the performance story because AI is becoming the next layer of structural value creation on top of our digital operation system. As Hinda has already mentioned, our next frontier is to reimagine and re-engineer the end-to-end workflows with AI. At the midpoint of our LEAP | 28 strategy, we have delivered tangible progress at scale, including 110 basis points of margin improvement. These gains have come primarily from optimization efforts, with functional scalability making the largest contribution. At the same time, our structural projects are in process and are modernizing how we work as we move to digital workflows and begin to integrate AI-enabled operations.
We have a clear path towards 180 basis point ambition by the end of 2028. The next phase is about scaling our programs, accelerating our adoption, and extracting full value from the system's capabilities that we have built. Of course, performance excellence cannot be achieved through process, systems, and technology alone. This is why the Evolve People model is so essential. Thank you for your time. Maria, over to you.
Thank you, Noor. After so many numbers, I am going to give you a break and we are going to talk about people. I am Maria Lorente Fraguas, Chief People Officer at Bureau Veritas. I joined the company about two years ago with 25 years experience in the energy sector. I have an engineering background, and I spent half of my career in product development and operations roles internationally before transitioning to HR. This combination of operational experience and people leadership allows our people function to act as a true connector between strategy and execution. This is particularly relevant for us at Bureau Veritas because our success relies on our people and their expertise. Noor has explained how we are executing and amplifying our performance programs. What does it take to sustain this performance? It takes having the right organization, a strong leadership, and the right capabilities.
This is the role of our Evolve People model. It is a pillar that connects portfolio strategy and performance execution, ensuring we build and deploy the capabilities to win in our chosen markets, and to sustain also a performance at scale. In 2024, we made two commitments. To develop new economy skills in areas like sustainability, energy transition, and digital. To embed augmented ways of working across the organization, helping our people work more effectively and focus their expertise where it creates the greatest value. Three years on, those priorities are as relevant as ever, and we are on track with the programs well-established to deliver them. Let me share with you the progress we have made in our programs, placing the experts at the center of our people strategy and building on what makes us unique, the scale and depth of our expertise.
As Hinda mentioned earlier, we are a global multi-specialist company. More than 64,000 technical experts work across 10 product lines with a wide range of expertise distributed across more than 90 different technical domains. These figures illustrate not only our scale, but also the breadth and the depth of our expertise, the expertise that we can bring to our customers. Because our experts understand the industries in which our customers operate, the regulatory environments they must navigate, and also the technical risks they need to manage. Our opportunity is very clear: to make this expertise more visible, more connected, and easier to deploy across the organization. This becomes even more important as the world of work changes around us. In 2024, we also highlighted two major shifts, the growing scarcity of critical skills and the emergence of technology-augmented ways of working. Both shifts have now intensified.
Critical skills remain scarce and are evolving rapidly in areas like sustainability, cyber, and AI. These are not just peripheral topics to us. They are increasingly central to the services our customers require from us. Recruitment alone is not enough. We must develop these capabilities internally and at scale. At the same time, AI is changing how work gets done. It is changing the nature of the work itself, but also the technology our people use, and it is also changing the capabilities that our experts, managers, and leaders need to have. For us, as we mentioned before, there is an additional dimension. We need the AI capabilities to transform how we work internally, for sure, but we also are building the expertise to assess these technologies and give customers confidence in their use.
We have a dual responsibility to use AI effectively and to build trust in its use. Because all these changes are happening at an unprecedented pace, our ability to learn and adapt will increasingly determine our ability to lead. This is why the priorities we set in 2024 matter even more today. Over the past three years, our focus has been on putting the foundations in place. We started with the operating model because the organization and mindset had to evolve before everything else could. We began to build the capabilities we needed to support our growth priorities, including programs such as the Sustainability Graduate Program. Together, these elements provide the organizational, leadership, and capability foundations of our evolved people model. I will cover each of them, starting with the operating model.
We started with this because to become a multi-specialist company, we need an organization that makes it easier to develop, connect, and deploy expertise. As Marios explained earlier, our portfolio strategy has two priorities: focus our portfolio on the most attractive markets and extending the reach of our specialist product lines across customers and also geographies. Our operating model is enabling both, because it combines a product line-centric organization with a shared leadership framework. Put it simply, the organization provides us the structure and the leadership framework, the behaviors that make it work. We have introduced a common structure across the company built about a simple principle. Geographies own the markets. Product lines own the expertise. This makes it easier to navigate the organization, connect expertise across the group, and also deploy it where it creates the most value.
We are already seeing the benefits of this new operating model. On the business side, stronger collaboration within, but also across product lines, has contributed to a significant increase in our pipeline. On the people side, our teams are benefiting from more opportunities to learn, grow, and take on new challenges across the company. We see this reflected in our employee mobility index, for example, which has increased from 17% - 23% since 2023, and also our retention rate, which has improved by 100 basis points.
Our focus now is to deepen adoption and convert that momentum into stronger growth outcomes. Of course, a changing operating model does not happen just by changing the organization. It works in practice only if the mindset and the behaviors evolve with it. This is what our new leadership framework is all about. Instead of describing the framework in detail, let's hear it directly from our employees.
Leadership means driving the team to achieve the best they can achieve.
Leadership is about helping the people we manage to move in the right direction.
Real leadership is all data.
We anticipate the future when we innovate.
Challenging the status quo is very important because every day things change. [Non-English content].
Great leadership is working together with the employee, customer, and society to make the world better.
[Non-English content].
[Non-English content].
The team will feel alive and connected to each other when everyone believes in his capability.
If we work together, we can achieve our goals.
[Non-English content].
Delivering with purpose is not only about having good results, it is also about having a positive impact on the society.
No matter how many times I have watched this video, it still brings emotion because everyone you saw in the video is actually our employees working in our facilities in the customer premises, broadly expressing better than we could ever express the leadership behaviors that we need to embody. This brings me to the next priority of our people strategy, building the new economy skills that our portfolio requires. We have always been highly effective at recruiting technical talent. But in a market where critical capabilities are scarce and evolving rapidly, external recruiting alone is not enough, as I mentioned before. We decided to take a very different approach. We are developing those skills internally at scale. The Sustainability Graduate Program is our first proof point of this model. It is a 15-month structured program designed to attract, fast develop, and retain early career professionals.
Participants benefit from an intensive learning experience, retention stands at 97%. But the value of the program goes way beyond the individual participants because it brings together managers, mentors, and technical experts from different program lines and geographies. It mobilizes our entire network of sustainability, strengthening that capability, and it helps us connect expertise across the organization. We now have more than 3,000 sustainability experts supporting our growth in transition services, and the program gives us a repeatable blueprint that we can progressively apply to other priority areas like cyber, mission-critical, or renewables. With the organizational leadership and capability foundations of our Evolve People model now in place, the Amplify phase is about getting more value from them. This is where our experts-first approach comes central. At Bureau Veritas, expertise is our differentiator.
Rather than starting with technology and asking where we can deploy it, we start with our experts and ask different sets of questions. Where is their judgment creating the most value? What work can be simplified, automated, or supported? How can we give them more time to focus on customers, complex decisions, and technical expertise? Our goal is simple, to amplify the impact of our experts. This is why one of our key priorities in the Amplify phase is building a tech-augmented workforce. This builds directly on the work Noor described earlier. We are modernizing workflows, simplifying processes, and embedding digital tools across the company. The objective is to remove friction around our experts, improve how work flows across the company, and give people better tools to do their jobs. AI is definitely the next step in that journey.
It will allow us to go beyond digitalization and begin augmenting expertise itself. While AI is already part of how we work at Bureau Veritas, we are just at the beginning of what is possible. The opportunity is not just to give people access to AI tools, it is to build genuine capability. The confidence, the judgment, and the skills to use AI in ways that strengthen what experts can do, but also in a way that our customers can trust.
To do that at scale, we will be developing different programs for different populations. We have designed four targeted programs to address this. AI Sparks builds responsible AI adoption across the company, moving people from AI aware to AI enabled, and ultimately, AI ambassadorship. This is a program for the entire workforce, so nobody is left behind. Build the Builders equips process owners and transformation leaders to redesign workforce with AI.
AI four Developers supports our development and product teams in applying AI to their work. Last but not least, leading a tech-augmented organization prepares senior leaders to prioritize investment and also lead adoption at scale. The early results from my AI Sparks are really significant. We have 3,000 people that have completed the training. We have 10,000 weekly active AI users, and as Noor mentioned, we have also more than 22,000 AI systems that have been created in-house. Our belief is that AI will amplify expertise that differentiates us, not replace it. Let me conclude by bringing everything together. We are a global multi-specialist company across 10 product lines and more than 90 technical domains, and our differentiator comes from the scale, the depth, and our customer proximity of our expertise.
Our people model is designed to maximize the impact of that expertise, and we are doing it through three mutually reinforcing enablers. First, a new operating model, a leadership framework designed to scale expertise. It gives us the structure, the speed, the behaviors that we need to connect the expertise across the group and deploy it where it creates the greatest value. Second, building the new economy skills required for our growth priorities. We have achieved this through our Sustainability Graduate Program, and now we have the blueprint to replicate it in other growth priorities.
Third, tech-augmented workforce. We have put in place the program to modernize how work gets done, simplify workforce, and equipping our people with digital and AI capabilities that amplify what our experts can achieve. This is what we mean by an expert first company. A company that can scale expertise across multi-specialist organization, a company that can build critical capabilities required for future growth, and a company continuously increasing the value created by experts. Thank you. I will leave the floor to Philipp. He will cover digital and AI.
Thank you, Maria. Good morning. I'm Philipp Karmires, I'm the Chief Digital and Innovation Officer for Bureau Veritas. I'm responsible for group IT technology, digital AI, and innovation. I joined the company at the start of 2024. My passion is enabling productivity, growth, and innovation through technology. Over the next few minutes, I will show you how we have built the group's digital foundation, how AI is already improving our operations, and how we intend to convert these capabilities into productivity, operating leverage, and new sources of value through 2028. Our digital innovation strategy is built around three connected layers, the digital backbone. I first announced it in 2024 as part of our LEAP | 28 strategy. The goal of the strategy is to establish centralized technology standards, supporting our large global setup, as highlighted by Maria, with our 82,000 employees operating in over 100 countries.
The first is enterprise foundation. The common infrastructure, governance, data capabilities, and technology partnerships that support the entire group. The second is operation systems, the platforms embedded in the daily delivery of our services to clients. The third is innovation platform, where we integrate AI, create differentiated client experiences, and build new service capabilities. The layers reinforce one another. The foundations enable our operation systems. Those systems generate the workflows and data on which innovation can scale. Together, they support three outcomes: greater productivity and scalability, technology-augmented services that strengthen our competitive position, and new revenue opportunities. From 202- 2026, our priority has been execution, establishing the technology and operating foundations required to scale digital and AI across Bureau Veritas. At the enterprise foundation level, we built a multi-cloud architecture, group-wide governance, and shared technology capabilities deployed consistently across the business.
At the operations systems level, we are building the platforms that run our core service lines. SmartCert is the clearest example which Noor highlighted before, and I will cover with more technical details. At the innovation platform level, we built the AI integration framework that connects our operation systems to AI services in a controlled, governed, and scalable way. This execution has moved digital and AI from fragmented initiatives to an integrated group capability. We are now ready to amplify its business and financial impact. The execution phase has delivered a technology foundation operating at a significant scale. Through technology standardization as well as shared services for IT, as highlighted by Noor, we moved from decentralized environment with applications and systems redundancy to a product line centric organization. In addition, we made sure we have AI infrastructure capable to interface with our systems at any level.
Today, 95% of our applications are cloud-based, including our core enterprise platforms and operation systems. This gives us the flexibility to support growth, portfolio evolution, and acquisitions without rebuilding infrastructure each time. We are doing this through working with leading technology platforms and innovation partners in a multi-cloud architecture. Across our systems, Bureau Veritas holds 8.8 pb of proprietary data accumulated through decades of inspection, certification, testing, and assurance work. The opportunity is to progressively govern, structure, and activate the most valuable elements of this data for operational improvements and new services. The foundations we have built and as well as the operation systems are important because AI is creating opportunities on two fronts for Bureau Veritas, as outlined by Hinda this morning. To recap briefly, on one side, AI enhances how we deliver trust. On the other side, AI itself creates new trust requirements.
Let me explain the structure that we have introduced as part of our execution phase. We govern AI across the group through one framework with four connected components, deploy, modernize, activate, and assure. Deploy and modernize are our immediate priorities. Deploy is about covering the large group and number of employees, as highlighted by Maria. It means providing the technology, controls, and skills that make AI usable at group scale. Modernize means integrating AI into operation systems and transforming how core work is performed, which aims to our performance programs at 60% of our operations, as you heard from Noor before. Activate converts these capabilities into differentiated services and new client value. Assure extends our trusted third-party role to AI-related risk governance and resilience. To learn more about Activate, please visit the deep dive for modernization inspection later this afternoon with Ginger and Bertrand.
For Assure, please visit the Assure new trust domains deep dive with Vincent and Pierre. AI is deployed across Bureau Veritas today at group scale with early operational impact. Deploy is about making it available for our applications and our people. For applications, we do this through providing internally an AI API, a programmable interface for internal applications and projects to integrate with various large language models. There are currently over 140 integrations through that option. For people, more than 10,000 colleagues actively use AI personal assistants on weekly basis, including our own platform, Jules, that serves multiple large language models as well as through Microsoft Copilot. The compute capabilities for deploying AI and large language models is at enterprise scale. Our AI platforms process more than 650 million tokens every day. AI has moved beyond experimentation and is now becoming embedded in how Bureau Veritas operates.
This deployment is translating into modernization impact in specific use cases to enable operational leverage, as previously shown by Noor. We are now able to activate the data of 83,000 audits through our systems integration. Equipping our salespeople with AI-assisted Copilot show initial savings between 2.5 and 4 hours per week. In certification review, reported review time has been reduced from 90 minutes- 45 minutes. These examples demonstrate the progression from broad AI deployment to measurable operational impact. From 2027- 2028, we move into the amplifying phase. The three-layer strategy does not change. What changes is the pace, scale, and business impact of what we have built. At the enterprise foundational level, the focus shifts to sustaining, optimizing, and industrializing the platform at lower technology cost. At the operation systems level, we amplify AI integration in existing operation systems.
Embedding AI is a key element in new systems development. At the innovation platform level, we create new sources of value through AI native process transformation with inspection delivery as a primary focus. Amplifying needs visible financial results, improved operational leverage, scalable delivery, and differentiated service capabilities. Let's look at three examples for the upcoming amplify phase for 2027 and 2028, which we are currently developing. The first is about integrating AI into existing systems. The second is about embedding AI as part of systems developments. Third, how inspectors natively engage with AI. Let's move to the first one. Certification is a EUR 550 million yearly revenue base for Bureau Veritas. SmartCert is our new end-to-end digital operation system for certification delivery. It covers the full workflow, sales, auditor portal, back office, and client portal, all in a single integrated platform.
It is a key contributor to process improvement, as highlighted by Noor. It's already operating at meaningful scale. Approximately 60% of certification solutions revenue is in scope by end of 2026. More than 1,000 users are actively on the system today. More than 4,000 certificates are issued through it every month. More than 40,000 production days are scheduled through it every month. Integrating AI now into this system will support our evolution.
Please visit our deep dive in the afternoon to learn more. Inspection for industrial and energy assets represents a EUR 900 million revenue base for Bureau Veritas. Modernizing how we deliver it is a centerpiece of the amplification phase. The workflow spans five stages, configure, prepare, inspect, report, and capitalize. We are digitizing this end-to-end workflow with tools tailored to have AI embedded. By 2028, our ambition is to have more than 80% of inspection activity digitized and AI-enabled.
More efficient and consistent execution improves speed, safety, and client experience. At the same time, digital workflows create structured, validated data assets that can support recurring data-driven services beyond the individual inspection. One last example for an AI native-enabled approach. Today, more than 3,600 inspectors globally spend a significant portion of their time documenting findings and producing reports in the field. With our AI-powered voice assistant, we are fundamentally simplifying that process. Instead of typing notes after an inspection, inspectors capture observations naturally through voice during the inspection itself. The experience is seamless and unstructured, allowing them to focus on the asset, site, or customer rather than administration. The AI then transcribes the conversation, extracts key findings, and automatically matches information against our internal data structures and reporting standards. This transforms raw voice input into structured inspection content. Importantly, the inspector remains fully in control.
The final report is reviewed and validated through a human-in-the-loop process before being issued to the customer. The benefits are tangible as part of our overall performance programs. Reducing reporting effort by 10% through accelerating report turnaround times while improving consistency and data quality. As we look beyond LEAP | 28, I would like to leave you with three key messages. First, we now have the digital backbone in place. We have modernized our platform, strengthened cybersecurity, moved to the cloud, built our AI and data foundations, and standardized technology globally.
That foundation gives us scalability and productivity benefits today. Second, we are now entering the next phase, accelerating AI impact. The focus shifts to embedding AI into our core operations. Whether it is inspectors in the field, laboratory workflow certification processes, or knowledge workers, AI becomes a force multiplier. The AI enhances our expertise, improves productivity, and increases service quality.
Third, the real opportunity lies beyond efficiency. As AI strengthens and structures our data assets, it opens the door to new technology augmented services, stronger customer outcomes, and entirely new sources of revenue growth. The combination of our global expertise, trusted position, and assurance, and a fully developed digital platform create a unique advantage. We are combining it to the Bureau Veritas task operating model in creating a platform for sustainable value creation well beyond 2028. In short, the foundation is built, AI impact is accelerating, and we see a clear path to continued growth, productivity, and new revenue opportunities in the years ahead. Thanks for your attention, and I will hand over to François Chabas to update us on finance. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. I am François Chabas, Bureau Veritas Chief Financial Officer. I am very happy to stand in front of you to report on the progresses we have made since the last Capital Market Day. Before getting into the details, one figure already, which is good. We are 10% more in term of attendance compared to 2024, which shows some interest into the company. As you have seen, LEAP | 28 is an ambitious program of transformation.
It has been mentioned many times, both on the portfolio side, obviously improving performance. Maria has been very clear on transforming the people model. But this time it is not only about words, it is framed obviously by a set of clear and measurable financial commitments and a promise of value creation. So we are now two years and a half mid plan, as Hinda put it, and we will see the next few minutes, two things.
One has been delivered and how it has been delivered over 2024 and 2026. So a phase we call execute. Thereafter, I spend some time to cover the financial perspective over the next coming two years, the phase that we are going to call amplify. So for Conan, who is running the script, you can pause for a second. Because during the Q and A session, something came to my mind and with others during the coffee break phase, a thought I wanted to share with you. More than a thought, it is actually a phrase that is, a phrase from a great contributor to the theory of economy that you all know. A man called Smith. Well, not Adam Smith, but Hannibal Smith from The A-Team. L'Agence tous risques for the French audience.
A man who used to say, "I love it when plans go as planned." [Non-English content ] Beyond the joke, this phrase illustrates, I hope, one of the talent that the Bureau Veritas team you have seen here, led by Hinda, has, which is a passion for execution. We all love plans, but we value execution. Execution is about adapting to some conditions, and the discussion with the analysts were very enlightening. The boxes, I could name a trade war starting in the middle of the plan. I could name energy crises, I could name some divestment we have done sooner than expected. But what you have seen today and led by Hinda, the team has delivered, and that is what I hope I will be able to demonstrate to you in the coming page. So the next view is the one you have seen in that introduction.
It is a busy page, right? But it reflects the seriousness and the holistic approach of our plan. Bureau Veritas is delivering on every single commitment we have made in March 2024. Organic growth stayed within our mid to high single-digit ambition, 10%+ in 2024, 6%+ in 2025. Combined with the positive incrementals of acquisition, we have delivered in line with our ambition in terms of total growth at constant currency.
Margin-wise, there has been a lot of talk around the business point improvement. We have demonstrated 2024, 2025, that improvement has been delivered year on year and each year. Hinda mentioned it in our introduction speech, Bureau Veritas is a highly cash generative company, and here again, we have delivered. Our cash conversion has remained well above our 90% ambition, above 100%, actually, over the last two years, with a leverage that stay within our commitment of one to two times guidance.
Returns, which are measured as EPS increase plus dividend yields, have reached double-digit levels across the period, as promised. So again, execution is not a plan on the paper. It is already reflected in results. I will walk you through the how we got there and why we are confident in the next phase. So usual bridge on the growth. This is what has been done from 2023 onwards with a projection by the end of 2026 in terms of CAGR. I think numbers are speaking for themselves. Organic growth, we would have delivered 7%-8% CAGR over the period. But we are not simply growing. We are changing where the growth comes from.
Moving to what Marios said to you at the beginning, at the launch of the plan, we had identified these three famous boxes, portfolio categories, expand leadership, new strongholds, which we have two categories where we are expecting the bulk of the growth to come from, and optimize value and impact made of more mature businesses. What has happened? I think we hit the target totally on new strongholds. New strongholds, which accounted for 10% of the revenue at the start of the plan, has generated 25% of the growth, fully 100% in line with expectations. It is particularly remarkable coming from a business that used to represent 10% of the start. I need to use Annie Besant's sentence to say, the main difference compared to initial assumption lies in the respective contribution of our mature businesses versus our expand leadership businesses.
As you see here, with expand leadership, building an infrastructure contributed slightly less, especially at the beginning of the plan. We had B&I growing, some of you may remember, around 4% or 5% the first year and a half. Good news, over the last quarter, the last three quarters, actually, strengthened by acquisition made in infrastructure, which are now delivering on organic after the usual 12 months period, and the ramp-up of the businesses that Ciaran and Renato presented to you, the data center-driven assets. The contribution now is getting stronger and stronger. Over the last three quarters, we grew almost 9%. On the other front, the team eager to execute has saved and has been capable to leverage opportunities within oil and gas and within the second segment of this optimized value, which is marine.
We managed to recruit staff, address clients in areas which were not initially the number one in the priority of the company. We managed here to get outperformance in the first years of the plan, obviously supported by favorable investment cycle in those two markets. Looking at the inorganic revenue part of this bridge, M&A is a crucial element of our growth engine. We have gone through disciplined acquisition, which have added every year when you de-net acquisition from divestment, 2%-3% in average CAGR over the duration of the plan. The portfolio rotation, of course, has partially offset the net increase. We have targeted disposals. Some of them have been done a bit earlier than anticipated. I think we said a few times that the divestment of the food testing business was actually, in our mind, scheduled to happen in 2026.
We divested it very early because we found the right way to monetize it with the right partner. We have divested a bit ahead of plan so far. As most of the portfolio pruning is behind us, we now expect the net M&A contribution to be stronger in the coming years. Finally, FX remained a headwind, especially in 2024 and 2025. 2026 seems to be a different story. We see it to stabilize. That overall, the three years will have a bit of a headwind effect on the top line. I think it has been mentioned a few times, we are moving towards a more interconnected product line-centric model. It creates a new operating model that simplify growth algorithm, which would be music to the ears of the analysts. In simple terms, it brings more focus, better scalability, more simplicity.
So as a consequence, Bureau Veritas has changed its way of reporting. From Q3 onwards, we will publish on those lines. Instead of six reporting lines, 21 sub-segments, our performance is now articulated around four divisions and 10 product lines. No surprise here. This is what has been mentioned before. I will spend now to share with you some elements which have not been disclosed yet to the market. You will see in the press release, but historical elements regarding the performance of those four divisions. What you see here is the same growth bridge, but along those four divisions. What has not changed? Organic growth remains broad-based. It is not one single division that has growth, everything. Industrials and Commodities is our largest contributor, with roughly 45% of the organic growth, with a CAGR, which is close to 9.5%.
It has been driven by services related to investment in energy, typically renewable and gas. It has been driven as well by what we have developed throughout the very first beginning of our Buildings and Infrastructure, as I mentioned, which is the second division, started somewhat a bit soft until H1 2025. We are now posting way stronger numbers, so some catch-up to come here in the next couple of years. Business Assurance, third division, had a smaller but yet steady contribution to the top-line growth, mainly related to assessment for sustainability-driven purposes, which remain very strong. I think we are still 18 double-digit numbers on that segment, together, of course, with the cybersecurity assurance. Finally, the last division, which is Product Certification services, contributes at a steady 6.5% compound annual growth rate over the period.
We will move to the change of portfolio in a second, but as you can already see, the activities planned for exit, which is the tiny gray box on your right, which were here for the first two years of the plan, have contributed only 4% to the total growth, which means they have not been growth accretive at all, despite representing roughly 10% of the portfolio. Portfolio rotation on top of organic growth, which is the next pillar, has moved from ambition to execution.
Since the announcement of the plan, we have signed acquisition worth more than EUR 400 million of annual revenue and divested our exit or about to exit, businesses worth EUR 800+ million. Together, EUR 1.2 billion, I think you have got this number now well in mind, of rotation, which represents 21% of the total portfolio rotation from 2023 baseline, which is quite a measurable change.
Our capital allocation policy aims at redeploying cash generated by these divestments towards activity with higher growth trajectory and higher return, obviously. We will come back to that at the end. Now if we combine the simplification of the portfolio, the refocus on growth accretive segments, the M&A contribution, Bureau Veritas has changed. I think that is something that has been clearly stated by many speakers here. First, the exposure to segments where we lead or where the growth trends are stronger has moved from 55%, which is the leadership where we are strong on, to 85% as we speak. As a matter of illustration, the current Bureau Veritas portfolio, post-divestment scope, already delivered growth above historical average. Hinda mentioned in our introduction stage, roughly 60 basis points of additional growth compared to the previous portfolio.
You can measure by this that some of the segments have indeed a very accretive growth trajectory compared to the rest of the group. From a margin profile, same thing. This is the vision of Bureau Veritas by division now. Two divisions have margin ahead of the company average, business assurance, Product Certification services, while the other two are positioned at or slightly below group average. It is an average view for the last closed years 2024, 2025. However, overall, our performance improvement program applied to each of the product line within this division, irrespective of the margin level. We believe that the high margin does not represent automatically a floor or max. We have seen a good example of this with the program centered around business assurance.
Things we mentioned, we have an ambition to create margin incremental of roughly 150 basis points on a product line, which is historically already at 18%, 19% of margin. Moving now to the margin bridge. What have we done over the last two years of actual, and we took as a landing for 2026, the current consensus. Organically, Bureau Veritas has delivered under 20 basis points of margin improvement in three years. Our performance program has contributed to the tune of 110 basis points. We have implemented several restructuring on top of it, especially in 2024 and 2025, focused at underperforming units, and those restructuring are now paying off as well. At the same time, I think you got it from Philipp presentation, we have engaged into a series of digital-related projects to help streamline processes and to increase the deliverable time of our teams.
We have had, of course, along the way, our fair share of business disruption of all sorts. Naming a few that you know, the war here and there, and various disruptions. The key message here is we stick to the commitment made at the start of the plan. We are generating margin incrementals. We reinvest them into improvement of system and processes in order to transform the way Bureau Veritas operates on the long run. These are no quick fix here. I think we try and make this journey by taking them aside when they are, re-addressing them at the right time. So in each year through the plan, we are committed to deliver margin incrementals at constant currency. If we move now to the cash aspect of things and to capital allocation. Cash generation remains one of the core strengths of the company.
Cash conversion stayed well above the 90% line every year. See it on the left. Our working capital requirements has further improved from 6.3% in 2021, down to 3.7% at the end of last year. So on specific questions, I believe we will finish by reaching the floor here at some point. For those of you who have been here for long, we started at 10% first. But unfortunately or fortunately, our credit management teams are still very eager to break this floor. So we are deploying currently a renewed and digitally enhanced collection system, cash collection system, that will cover all legal entities worldwide by the end of 2027. We had one, but a bit old-fashioned, and we will see the result of this for sure in the course of the second half of 2027 and early 2028.
Leverage remain within the one times to two times guidance, so we are on the lower hand, obviously. This give us real flexibility to fund the next phase of M&A acceleration, as Marios said and mentioned previously. Capital allocation. Our global framework, perhaps we were wrong from the start, is unchanged, so that the same one you saw in March 2024. The M&A represents an important component. We have limited here on the page between M&A investment and divestment proceed. By the way, when it comes to proceed, the proceeds of divestment of our oil and petroleum activity is not yet there, and it's planned to arrive in the first quarter of 2026. CapEx remains targeted at low end of the 2.5% range. Dividend ratio remain at 65% of adjusted net income. No change on that front.
Within that framework, we have recently stepped up M&A, including the acquisition of LotusWorks. I think we've mentioned the necessity and the willingness to focus our effort the next few years on M&A, and I would like to mention that discipline and acceleration are not in conflict. The framework, this framework, is yet built from the start to allow both to happen. A good way to illustrate this is to have a look at the evolution of our return on invested capital. At Bureau Veritas, we like clear slides and simple slides to read. This one has these features. Capital discipline is translated directly into clear and visible returns. The return on invested capital of the company has risen from roughly 16% in 2017 to almost 25% in 2025, consistently above our roughly 20% through the cycle.
The beauty of this chart is that it demonstrate that the new 2028 programs are directly generating higher returns. The company goes through many transformation, many changes, but all along the way, we make sure that from the execution part of it, we keep on delivering year on year and improving the return of the company. When we look a bit ahead and what's coming next in terms of phase two. Sure, would you be kind enough to move to the next page? For the record, there is no more script, so the guy has difficulty to follow. Thank you. Coming. If you don't move the page. You need to move the page. Good. Phase two.
We now have the full picture on what has happened, where are we going, and I spend a second on the next page, which reminds, I think, what Bureau Veritas has delivered so far. Growth compounder, adjusted EPS growth, and strong free cash flow. We don't intend to depart from that vision. On the contrary, and we stick to the vision we set forth in 2024. That's why in terms of new commitments or updated commitments for the next two years of the plan, next page. Two elements here which are very important. We stick to the overall commitment of the plan.
However, we precise two elements for the next two years, 2027 and 2028. First, we upgrade the guidance in term of total organic growth at constant currency to double digit. Two, we narrow down the guidance in term of leverage. We see that more M&A will come, so we will be most probably in between the 1.5 - 2 times leverage. We have an ambition to reach by the end of 2030, EUR 1 billion revenue in AI-driven market and services from a basis of EUR 375 million by the end of 2026. Thank you for your attention. I hand over to Laurent for the next phase. Thank you, Laurent.
Okay. We have now seen the full picture, portfolio, performance, people, digital and AI, and of course, the financial ambition behind it all with a nice story on Hannibal Smith. Thank you, François. It is time for our final Q and A of the morning. All speakers are available. Please come to join me on the stage. Now that François has presented the numbers, everything is fair game. We will start with the room before moving again to our online audience. We are going to start. Rory, UBS, please.
Good afternoon, it is Rory from UBS. My first question was around, I guess, the reinvestments you have been making. If about half of the benefits of the improvement plans are going back into the group, that means each year you are spending about EUR 30 million already. Where is that going? Is that new greenfield investments? Is it new hiring plans going in to support future growth? How much of that is going back into maybe some of these transformation programs and spend that you are discussing? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for the question. I will tag team with François on this. A lot of the investments are going into this transformation. I think we were quite clear since this morning saying that the performance programs really need a complete re-engineering of our operation systems, right? That needs to be done. Our technology organization has actually realized a lot of efficiency to absorb some of the costs, but we have to be clear, we have 10 product lines to modernize, so we need to invest on that.
A lot of it, if I have to break it down, but maybe François has a bit more color on that. It is really the modernization efforts of the operation system. There are some efforts around new revenue streams. So there you are really directly investing in the growth, and development for certain skills we needed to bring into the company. That is the three kind of groups. Did you want to-
Yeah. Just really from a magnitude point of view, the bulk goes into the operation system. We are coming from a basis where all the foundation system were built now almost 10 years ago, but the operation system remains still a bit discreet. In term of magnitude, that is the bulk. Yeah.
Great. Thank you. My second question is about the productivity gains that you outlined. What do you find your employees do with the freed-up time? For example, if SmartCert freed up capacity by 15% for those engineers, do they have a backlog that they can go and work on more quickly? Do they do more time on innovation, or do they just spend more time chatting to AI agents?
Noor?
Yeah. It is a mix of things, right? The freed-up workforce gives us capacity, so we can go after and get more work completed through the backlog that we have. We can spend the time on training as well and bringing the people, the expertise up. Those are the main things that, of course, if the work is actually not there, the backlog is not there, we can save some money.
Just to add to that. Thank you, Noor. I think it's really important to understand that by freeing up time, we're actually rechallenging the workflows we have, and we're only starting, right? What we talked about so far is keeping essentially how we work. We're just making them a little faster, a little clearer, the system's more integrated, et cetera. This is step one before we go journey-centric, where we will completely redo it, meaning we won't have the same steps. We'll deliver whatever the service is for the customer, but how the inspector or the auditor is going to work is going to change. The best way to think about this is a complete change of operating model for that particular service. What work is done in the back office will be changed.
It's not only about the one person, it's about the number of people who participate in a particular operation. In the SmartCert example, it's very interesting because what you're doing, normally you do a lot of the scheduling. You have a bunch of people who sit in the background who actually do all those interactions. As you put a SmartCert system in place, that actually frees up their time because now the scheduling is becoming a lot more automated. Therefore, these people, you can do two things. You can potentially redeploy them so they can do customer care and things like that. Or you might actually decide that you're not going to replace attrition, so you start reducing some workforce there. It really goes beyond the one person, just to be clear. Thank you.
Okay.
Hello.
Okay. On this side.
Good morning. François Digard from Kepler Cheuvreux. Maybe a follow-up. Is it fair, following what you just said, that the direction is that, thanks to AI, it will allow you to grow organically at ISO FTE in the future? Connected to that, LEAP | 28 had been designed before AI, and nevertheless, targets on operating margin increment is the same. Is it because it is too early, step one, as you said, or because you are going to reinvest more than you previously thought? Or maybe that you suffer from, or you fear some pressure on price? Thank you.
Let me answer the second question. Then I will pass to Maria to answer the first one. It is really important for us to integrate AI in a deep way. Therefore, it is a bit early today to fully account for the impact of AI in our workflows. We did not revise our ambition because we are only at the start of this. You are absolutely right. When we started LEAP | 28, I think we looked, we mentioned AI once in 2024. It is a fact. I think now that we are realizing the potential of the technology, it is changing our calculus on how we re-engineer our workflows. Yes, it is not there because it is too early. We are not shy to say that beyond 2028, we see upside.
A lot of the work of the teams now in the performance team with Noor and François is really to look at that potential, beyond that. To the pricing. Look, it is early in the journey. We have not seen customers talking about pricing yet. What I see, and I see customers quite a bit, they are actually asking, "Can you adopt AI as fast as you can, so you can help us with our performance, and you can essentially move from being important, but a bit of a hindrance, to critical and a performance enabler?" Which is a completely different conversation for someone in our space. We are not there yet, but we are prepared that we need to protect the value, if that is what you were alluding to. Thank you.
Maria?
Yeah, sure. On the impact on AI on the workforce, we do not see AI as a headcount reduction story. We see it as, on one side, augmenting capabilities. On the other one, augmenting the impact of our experts. Then third, actually, it is true that we are hoping or we are seeing already that we will be decoupling, let us say, the growth from the headcount requirements, right? So it will be decoupling. We are right now looking at some modeling and assumptions. Definitely, we think that about 75% of the requirements of headcount may be absorbed by AI, but not only AI, also the performance programs that Noor explained earlier. Yeah, François?
Just on the margin discussion, it's a delicate balance between the level of investments you commit and the output you can really naturally see in your P&L. We do it a bit in a good old-fashioned way, by incrementals. We select a couple of, let's say, verticals, where here we invest and we can measure rapidly the impact, because it's been mentioned, you save time here and there. To give you an example, if you save time of an auditor for, say, three hours in a week, he will not be able to do more audits, right? Because those audits are calibrated to last at least one day. But if you free half an hour of an analyst time, because now he doesn't need to redo the report himself and he's done for something else, then he can start to prepare the next audit. It's a fine mechanic.
That's why we don't commit yet at the moment on incremental. But I think what Maria mentioned is very true. Decoupling the headcount from the top line is one of the ambition we have. That's for an inspection company like Bureau Veritas, very important. Two, let's not forget, most of the time we do not sell man-hours or man-days. We are selling an opinion. The client pay for the opinion. He doesn't pay for the volume of work. I think that's one of the critical factor Khurram, our Head of Sales, is repeating all the time, that do not sell days, guys, you are selling opinions. This is very true in terms of protecting ourselves against price erosion.
Yeah.
But we will report later on margin incrementals when we have something solid. I think the tradition is to report on stuff when we have measurable elements, and we do so most probably in the coming years.
And perhaps to wrap this up, I think to the question from that side and yours is, I think we are at the stage in this industry that the ones who invest to completely remake how we deliver services and essentially the trust that people need, needs to change. Because the technology is absolutely transformative. We have the scale to do that very quickly. It is a very fragmented market, a lot of small players, some medium ones, and very few large ones, as you know. I think we have the advantage of scale, and we need to leverage it now. That's why the investment is critical, and it needs to be done now. Thank you.
Next question is coming from Annelies or Sue, I see Annelies there.
Thank you. Annelies from Morgan Stanley. Just going back to the AI-driven markets and new services, so that bridge from the EUR 370 million to the EUR 1 billion, how much of that do you think can be delivered organically, given the growth in some of those end markets? Then how much through M&A? As related to that, I assume a lot of that work is very margin accretive. Is that also part of your margin expansion plan?
Sorry, I didn't catch the last part.
I would assume a lot of the AI-related work is margin accretive. Is that right? Is that also part of your It feeds into margin expansion.
Yeah. I will talk about that. Do you want to cover the AI-driven market?
On the component of the growth, it is primarily based on the existing set of activities we have, what we call critical assets, both data center and semiconductor, and the existing capabilities we have in cybersecurity assurance. There is a component of M&A, but I think the bulk of the plan is organic.
Yeah.
Because I think we have completed, as we have demonstrated with the combination of LotusWorks and our preexisting data center commissioning activities, that we have now good, let us say, platform here to grow. You could say there will be some M&A, but nowhere close to explaining the bulk of the growth. Not at all.
Yeah. Just to Annelies, the best way to think about this, the EUR 800 million on the AI-driven market is essentially mission critical, and we have a baseline on the growth rate. The EUR 200 million is digital assurance, and a lot of that is going to require some M&A. We have decent growth on the cyber business at double digits, but we need to really acquire some competencies in AI assurance. That is really where we are looking. Generally, just to give an idea on the market, those are small outfits. It will be things that we just need to move fast on them, but they are small bolt-ons in a way.
Okay. Thank you. My second question, which is also on the margins. You talked about continuing to roll out performance and people programs across all of your new four divisions. Across those divisions, where do you think the biggest opportunity is to expand margins? Again, thinking about your three buckets and how those feed into those four divisions.
Right. I think we talked about business assurance today. Business assurance is where we are making commitments, not because we do not want to make commitments on the rest. It is where we have advanced programs in transformation, and the SmartCert example is the operation system. What you will see then, we talked about inspection, which tends to be very large in our B&I business and very large in our Industrials and Commodities. You can think about it in that order. Business assurance is probably the first one to see the impact. Then we already are improving actually margins in B&I, and then I expect that Industrials and Commodities comes after that, because we are going really AI native in term of how we do make that change. Do you want to be more specific?
No, that was exactly what I wanted to say.
Okay.
Christine.
Hi. Thank you. Good morning. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. Just a couple of quickies. Just to follow on that margin question. Obviously, your margins at the group level are going to be a combination of mix along with the potential for incremental savings, leverage, et cetera. Looking at your mix in I&C, B&I, you do have margins which are at group average margins or below, and depending on the growth rates, that can change your group mix. How do you plan to account for that? Maybe do you need to maybe allocate capital in some of these divisions to accelerate the margin expansion potential a bit further or faster?
Thank you, Suhasini, for this simple question. Well, it has been the question in the room for ages, right? Before this presentation, we made the exercise once again within that and saying, "What is the mix impact from 2023, where we started the plan to today?" I put aside the divestment stuff. I am just taking the businesses we were here in 2023 and the businesses which are here in 2026. The answer is statistically zero. You will be surprised, but it has been zero margin impact from pure mix over the four years. No change to what you put in. Now, picking to your question moving forward, you are right, the two largest business of the company have a margin that is. Let us say one of them is below the group average, the other one is just on the group average.
I think the answer sits into, one, improving the margin of business assurance. That is a very clear commitment that has been put here. So a smaller business, but highly contributing. Two, engage into a transformation of the inspection model that is very big in B&I and quite strong in industry. So the two other buckets, the large divisions, after the fine grain, will be really impacted by this. Performance is meant as being the very first driver. I would not put M&A really as a component here because I would raise the probability of us buying a company that does, for real, not adjusted with three-year savings, but for real, more than 16% margin EBIT. I have not seen many, in all fairness.
We would more probably favor companies doing 10%, 12%, and with cost containment and cost measure that we own that can bring this company to 16%, 17% rapidly with all full control. I would not put M&A as a margin accretive component. It is more, I think, towards more scale, more growth. Margin would be a different story. Short answer, performance programs centered around inspection and business assurance.
Thank you. My next question is just on incentive program KPIs. Have you made any adjustments in the last two years to account for the differences in the portfolio, the changing portfolio structure?
Yes, absolutely. Do you want to address that, Maria? Go ahead, please.
Yeah. So definitely, I think the evolution and the operating model comes from starting with the organization, the leadership behaviors, and incentives, right? Maybe I can explain this with an example. We are talking a lot about collaboration, cross-selling, scaling, and strategizing solutions. You put the organization in place, the multi-specialist program-centric organization. Then you need to also, in the leadership behaviors, for example, we have one that is called challenges at the school, seek opportunities. Another one is rep collaboration, and they have deep meaning on what does it mean for us.
Then on the incentive, we actually define the structure of the incentives, not only to put, of course, cross-selling as a KPI, but also we now have all employees that have the annual bonus, have a part that is on what they can control, their scope. They call it My Contribution, and a part of the incentive that is on the team, the level that goes. You're basically structuring not only with the organization, but then the leadership behaviors and the incentives closing the loop to make that work.
Thank you.
We're going to take a question from the web, and that's from Peter again. I'm going to read the question. It's a very long question, so thank you for asking that way. To give a bit of context. It says, "At the last CMD, there was a discussion about shortage of skilled labor, not just across the group, but across the industry. Based on the presentation today, it appears that you are addressing that through internal training." The question is as follows: "How much of these internal measures alleviate the shortage of skilled labor, and how much of it still remains cannot be addressed that way?
Yeah. Just before I pass to Maria there, I think we need to step back. In 2024, we had still, particularly in the North American market, massive shortage of every technical capability you can think of at the engineering level. We're not seeing the same thing, Nessie. We see some shortage for certain electrical engineers, certain AI specialties, and so on. The market of skills is moving as well. In fact, the shortage today is in unskilled labor, rather, where there is a massive buildup. Just a point to say that the skills market is moving quite dynamically at the moment, and that's why we need to be in phase or rather, aligned with that. But I'll let you comment if you-
No, I would just say that we're really taking a holistic approach, meaning that we are developing the programs internally. As I mentioned with the Sustainability Graduate Program, it's not only the people that are participating in the program, how we're activating the entire ecosystem. We're also doing some acquisitions to acquire certain capabilities that we need. So we look at it holistically, and in the end, I think that, as you could see, our retention is increasing. And it's a bit of everything. It's also we are getting now our employees have better opportunities to develop.
But not only that, they're participating in projects that are challenging. So we're experts first, meaning they actually what they want to do is they use their expertise to solve technical, complex problems. So we are giving them the opportunity to really have impact in what they do. And I think it's the entire ecosystem that is allowing us also to develop, but also to retain capabilities.
Can we move to the next question from the audience?
Victoria.
Hi. Thanks. It's Karl Green from RBC. I've got two questions. Firstly, just in terms of digital assurance and the M&A strategy there, how do you go about mitigating for obsolescence risk? I mean, clearly AI safety is a super hot topic at the moment. The frontier labs can't agree on what the right move forward is. So how do you go about assessing that risk yourselves? Also, would you consider other models for delivering AI safety, partnering JVs, sell through, et cetera? That's the first question. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Karl, for the very good question, actually. Yes, I would say yes to both. One is, yes, we need to partner sometimes. To give you an example, we did actually partner with AWS, where we worked on a specific AI assurance methodology for customers of theirs that needed reassurance that as they onboard on their cloud structure, they have a way to be assured and reassured that they are in compliance, particularly with the EU AI Act. That's one example. The other example is going to be using certain accreditations. For those of you who will attend the Trust the New trend domain, we actually just received our ISO 42K accreditation. That's very specific, and we are ramping that up. I think Vincent will talk about that later on.
Then the more difficult bit is really acquiring the technical skills so you can assess, to your point, the risks associated with new agentic AI capabilities, right? That is really where we will be scouting for either, and it will be small actors. It is not going to be massive companies. It does not exist. It is people who have started putting together some structures where they can do that. Alternatively, we will have to ourselves hire these skills, and that is why the previous question is quite fitting, actually, because those skills we need to onboard to devise how we will do this kind of assurance. So it is fair to say it is a very fast-moving space, but we cannot not develop skills in AI assurance, because everything is adopting AI, and you cannot stay at the periphery of that, if that makes sense.
Very clear. Thank you. My second question for François, perhaps. Just in terms of the north of 20% ROIC target by 2028, you are clearly doing better than that already. Are you ruling out it dipping below 20% in any given year between now and then? I mean, clearly, there is only two years left, or is that just a kind of through cycle number just to clarify what you would accept in terms of potential dilution from a platform acquisition?
Well, thanks. I think the 20% is a good common sense number for a company like Bureau Veritas, and we would not wish to go below. We are not guiding on a precise number, but I think the chart is rather clear. We want to remain high in terms of return on invested capital. That is the way we manage the company. So we could foresee in the next two years that we will stay above that level, regardless of some acceleration on M&A that is usually on the very short term, slightly reduced this number. But I think we show our confidence on being very much committed to remain above 20%.
Perhaps that is an opportunity to clarify something. I had a few discussions. The M&A program, as Marios explained quite well, is we have a bolt-on high-speed fast lane. We are going to do bolt-ons to address the, and that is really the bulk of what we do. There we have a lot more control. We have proximity. We generally have the relationships. It is a size thing, so we have a capacity to have a good exchange with these sellers. Then you have the specific strategic expansion, which will be what we call mid-size, but they are not very big. In fact, you have seen it with LotusWorks, right? So we have the levers in our hands to manage how we deploy capital for M&A, which is why I am fully supportive, of course, of what François just said in terms of our capacity to protect the returns.
Okay. We still have time for one more question. I know that Victoria was looking for it. So go ahead. Coming.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. My question is back to certification. Has the rollout of the SmartCert platform actually disrupted growth at all in the short term whilst you've been rolling out the system? As first half growth here was a little bit slower. In terms of the investments you're making in certification, can you give a bit more granularity on where those investments are, whether it's AI, the production system or the specialist headcount, kind of how you're appropriating the spend there? Thank you.
Noor, do you want to address the rollout?
Yeah, I can say a few words about it. It has not affected the operations across the board. The deployment of the systems are very structured. We have teams that are supporting it globally. We have trainings that are conducted for our employees. It's a very structured program from the development to commercializing the models and then to deploying them in the field. We feel we have good, as well, feedback from the teams on the ground in terms of how they perceive the system and how they are operating. In general, I would say there isn't.
There's always, of course, opportunities to continually improve, and we do that. With every deployment, we look and see how we have performed, identify ways to get better and reestablish our deployment model and development model, and off we go. Yeah, I think it's going fairly well, but I wouldn't say it's affected the business in any way. If anything, it's starting to help, and is starting to already yield some of the gains that we have talked about.
I'll refer, if you meet an inspector of ours or auditor in certification, they'll complain initially, but after that they're very happy with it. It's just to give you the two views. Philipp, you want to address the investment from SmartCert, roughly how we are managing that?
Yeah. The SmartCert component is a component operation system which we launched with LEAP | 28. Like pre-AI, as it was highlighted. We did the initial investment in building out this global platform, which is one platform for all countries, for all inspectors around certification. That's part of the investment. Now we're basically upgrading the system through integrating AI.
But the way we're integrating AI is we have this AI platform which we built internally, where we have various large language models that fit for purpose, and we integrate them. The cost is rather the usage, optimizing the token usage against the functions that we are offering. Think about comparing documents, think about processing information faster. That's how the investments are currently split up. But the initial investment is around the platform and rolling that out globally. The AI is the upgrade for it.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. We are at the end of the Q and A, perfectly on time. Thank you for the questions, and let's welcome again, Hinda, for closing remarks.
All right. Thank you for your attention and for staying for these few minutes. You have now listened to the team's presentation. You have heard us answer some questions there on the progress of the three pillars of the strategy and how we enter the next phase of LEAP | 28. I hope we have passed the message that we have a clear portfolio, stronger operations, operating platform, and really increased capacity for us to deploy capital with discipline where it creates the most value. I will start a bit with LEAP | 28. Just briefly, if we can go to the next slide, please. Our vision is clear, and I want to pause on that because it's really critical that we explain. Customer intimacy is actually where you can get premium in this sector.
So we will continue to put the vision at the center of what we do for customer excellence and sustainability and being that preferred partner. As the risks increase, the complexity increase, the technology increase, that partnerships is very, very valuable. Increasingly, we are going to move in a less transactional role, and I will come back to that on the AI. The LEAP | 28 is making Bureau Veritas more focused in where we compete, more scalable in how, if you can move please, in how we operate, and more disciplined in how we allocate resources. We are preserving what differentiates us, though, because this is really important. The independence, the expertise, the global reach, the trust, while we are strengthening the growth and the performance profile of the company.
The model now will deliver high organic growth, will expand margins, and, of course, we will continue to pursue the strong cash conversion we talked about. We will invest in performance program. In fact, I should say we must invest in performance program in AI and technology enablement. It is really critical for us. We will also accelerate the disciplined and value creative M&A, and I hope I have convinced you that we are doing that, again, in a very thoughtful way. And we are giving ourselves specific targets on return so we make sure we stay aligned with what we achieve. As we enter the amplification phase, one accelerator is becoming critically important, and that is AI, both as a market opportunity, and we are committed to that, and as an operating lever. AI is the strategic accelerator, both commercially and operationally.
Commercially, it is increasing demand in attractive end markets we already serve. We talked about mission-critical, the data centers, the semiconductors, energy, the other critical infrastructure. Operationally, it is going to really unlock performance, a lot faster than just digitalizing and connecting networks. And that is by connecting experts, the data, and the system, so we can deliver the services in a way that becomes performance-inducing for our customers. And then strategically, and back to many of your questions, it opens new assurance opportunities.
And those are critical, because today a lot of our clients are looking for trusted partners to manage AI-related risk that they themselves are starting to understand. But they need help with governance, they need help with compliance, and that is exactly our profession. That is why AI, for us, supports both sides of the equation, the growth, the expansion of revenue, and the strengthening of our performance.
The ambition of EUR 1 billion by 2030 from a baseline of EUR 375 million is real. It has plans. We will execute, and we will report back throughout the coming years. To conclude, we can go to the next one. The starting point where we are today at this very moment is stronger organic growth driven by high-growth markets, clear product lines, and the scale of our multi-specialist model. M&A is a disciplined accelerator. It will focus on capabilities, on leadership position, and on attractive end markets. The performance-led execution program is laser-focused on productivity, on simplification, and on AI integration, so we can support margin expansion that we will prepare beyond this plan. And because the model is highly cash generative, it gives us the flexibility to reinvest and to fund these value-creative acquisitions I talked about.
But of course, we will maintain the balance sheet discipline, and we will continue to deliver the return. That is why we are confirming the mid to high single-digit organic growth guidance, and we are targeting the double-digit total revenue growth in the next two years, 2027, 2028. I believe that Bureau Veritas is entering the next phase from a position of strength with the strategy, operating model, and the financial flexibility so we can compound value over time. Thank you very much. I will now hand over to Laurent, who I think will have to go through the agenda for the rest of the day. For those of you staying, please, we have really very interesting program, and I am looking forward to continue the conversation with you later on today. Thank you very much.