Hello, and welcome to the OVHcloud H1 FY 2024 Results. Today's speakers will be Michel Paulin, CEO, and Stéphanie Besnier, CFO. I hand you over to OVHcloud team to begin today's conference. Thank you.
Hello everyone, I'm Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud. Thank you very much for being with us today with our H1 Fiscal Year 2024 conference call. Let's start with slide 3 for the key highlights. Overall, we are very pleased to report that we have successfully executed our strategic roadmap, maintaining a disciplined focus on business development and free cash flow generation. We generated 10.8% like-for-like growth in the H1 of the year. The top-line growth was strong, especially in Q1, but a bit softer than anticipated in Q2 on the back of a surprisingly mild economic growth in Europe. But we are pleased to benefit from the pickup in the U.S. in the end of the quarter. Revenue retention remains high globally as a strong result of strong commercial executions.
Our EBITDA grew by 19.8%, and our EBITDA margin substantially increased at 39.9%, up 2.5 points, thanks to our robust operating leverage driven by tight cost control. Our plan to optimize CapEx allocation to maintain growth and to reduce capital intensity is bearing fruits, and as a result, we generated a positive unlevered free cash flow for the second semester in a row. This achievement underscores the strength of the strategic plan we presented in January, which allowed to maintain strong revenue growth and improve cash generation. As a result, our financial leverage is now stronger than ever with a level of 1.8. Moving to the next slide. Early January represented you an update of our strategic plan. Despite the current short-term challenges, when we consider the broader picture, we are delivering on our old strategic pillars, which remain at the heart of our long-term vision.
First, we are the reference for data sovereignty, and we will continue to meet customer demand for more control over the data and immunity to extraterritorial laws. We will continue to lead the way in addressing this highly critical topic of data sovereignty. Second, innovation is one of the core values of OVHcloud. We will continue to propose new products as today with, for example, our new AI solutions, and we are preparing for the next tech revolutions such as quantum. Third, our objective is to consistently deliver sustainable and profitable growth. H1 results are a good demonstration of it. We are organizing ourselves and marketing strategy and cost structure for the long-term profitable growth. Our fourth objective is to maximize cash generation. We have invested a lot in recent years, and we will continue to do so to sustain our growth momentum.
This investment will allow us to maximize cash generation as we have already demonstrated this semester. The next slide is looking at Q2 Fiscal Year 2024, where we have demonstrated the strength of our business model despite the softer momentum than expected in Europe. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see that our customers remain highly loyal. Our revenue retention rate for Q2 stood at 108%, with H1 churn around 2% in line with our historical figures. H1 was marked by the addition of several new logos in Europe with European Commission, for example, in India with ServiceNow to ensure local constraints on data sovereignty as OVHcloud is the sole provider of OpenStack in India, in the U.S. with Five Guys for the cashier system and OneNeck, which is a promising partnership already bearing fruits.
Together with OneNeck, we aim to tackle the new challenge due to the VMware acquisition by Broadcom for customers, as we can offer VMware products in the cloud for customers on-premises, but also we can provide alternative solutions with products such as Nutanix. The relatively modest growth in Q1 in Europe was below our expectation. We added fewer new customers than expected. This appears to reflect a degree of customer caution against the backdrop of very subdued economic growth in Europe. There was also a customer focus on workload optimization while we had expected an improvement in that front. And of course, we had a tougher comparison basis as a benefit from price increase annualized in Q2. Nevertheless, we see strengthening conditions in the U.S. towards the end of the quarter, and these have continued.
We also saw strong pickup in the performance of our Web Cloud division, reflecting the benefit of some changes we've made in our sales approach. Overall, H1 has confirmed the strength of our model, as we can see on the next slide. We have been able to improve significantly our profitability, reaching an EBITDA margin of 13.7%, up by 20.5 points compared to last year. It's a confirmation of our operating leverage with an unchanged execution and monitoring of our costs. On the cash flow side, as presented during our investor day, we are reducing our capital intensity as we are demonstrating the demand-based profile of our model. We are working on all aspects of our industrial model, including operational occupation rate of data center or improving demand planning.
The strategy is already bearing fruits while we were able to generate positive unlevered free cash flow as soon as H1, while we initially expected for H2. Let's now have a look with more details at our business performance by segment and geography. First of all, Public Cloud generated a revenue of EUR 88.4 million over H1 Fiscal Year 2024 and grew like-for-like by 15.8% compared to last year. Within this field, we are increasingly benefiting from AI business, and the AI business, which includes NVIDIA GPUs and solutions such as AI Notebooks, AI Training, and AI Deploy, contributed by 2 points to the growth of the Public Cloud segment this semester. Furthermore, in a highly competitive market, we deliver a resilient performance in our digital channel, where our marketing investments are starting to bear fruits.
At the same time, the impact of price increase was less insignificant in the Q2 than in the Q1 of Fiscal Year 2024, while the demand was milder than expected in Europe, with projects being postponed and ramp-ups slower than expected. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the H2 , we took initiative to boost momentum. For example, we implemented a new freemium and paid marketing strategy aimed at enhancing customer acquisition, and this is already bearing fruits since the launch of this strategy in March 2024. The number of new Public Cloud projects has tripled compared with the average number of projects generated in the H1 of 2024. Simultaneously, to attract more tech prospects, we participated in and organized sector-specific events such as PaaS Forward, KubeCon, and the World AI Cannes Festival. And lastly, we geared up to launch the 3-AZ Cloud offering.
This solution, eagerly awaited by customers, will provide a presence in three data centers in relatively close proximity within the Paris region to ensure even better data resilience and lower latency. The next slide about Private Cloud. In Private Cloud, we posted revenue of EUR 302.5 million for H1 2024, up 12% like-for-like comparison to H1 Fiscal Year 2023. This performance was notably marketed by a sustained demand in the strategic data sovereignty market. And as a leader in this field, we saw a sharp increase in our sovereign offering called SecNumCloud in France that I will describe in more details later in this presentation. The slowdown in growth, especially in Q2 Fiscal Year 2024, was due to lower-than-expected new customer acquisition through the digital channel.
At the same time, we experienced a deceleration in the enterprise channel as prospects and customers are still optimizing their workloads, and particularly in Europe. Yet at the end of the Q2, we benefited from an upturn in demand in the U.S., where the momentum is considerably stronger. From the start of H1, we set up an action plan, which included in particular a new incentive plan for partners to strengthen the indirect sales dynamic with key accounts, a new generation of entry-level Bare Metal servers in Q4 Fiscal Year 2024 to further enhance the technical performance of our Private Cloud offering. We will also adapt our hosted Private Cloud offering in line with changes linked to Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. We are a pinnacle partner of Broadcom, ready to provide our customers the best possible support over this challenging period.
The next slide is about Web Cloud and other. In our last segment, Web Cloud and other, we posted revenue of EUR 95.1 million for H1 Fiscal Year 2024, up 2.9% like-for-like compared to the previous year. In the Q2, growth was up sharply by 7.3% like-for-like. This solid performance is mainly due to the positive momentum in domain names supported by improvements in the user experience, such as the implementation of multi-year name renewal schemes. We had also successfully launched a new web hosting offering during the Q1 2024 and a stabilization in telephony segment thanks to an upgrade of product offering. In H2 2024, we plan to continue to take the benefit from the momentum of the domain name market, the ongoing development on the website builder features, and the updated telephony offering.
The next slide, as you can see, very well aware that EU macro-conditions remain difficult with recent downward revision of GDP forecast from 1.2% growth to 0.6% in March. As you know, Europe represents a significant part of our revenues. After a good Q1, we were surprised by the milder growth anticipated in Q2 in Europe. Some contracts were renegotiated by our customers, but that was expected. However, the surprise primarily came on the lower demand and the lower-than-expected value of new contracts, and the challenge is visibility remains limited. Looking at the rest of the world, we experience tougher competition in Asia, and the ramp-up of the Indian DC has been slower than expected due to some legal constraints. The issues are now solved.
Furthermore, in the rest of the world, we witnessed a rebound in the U.S. at the end of Q2 with a significant pickup, which has been confirmed in March. After this business update, let me deep dive in some of our strategic growth levers. First, data sovereignty. We have an intense focus on enhancing our sovereign offering, and the demand for customers is robust. The annual revenue interest in the products we are currently developing are Bare Metal SecNumCloud and now the full suite of the Public Cloud SecNumCloud. It's an ongoing development, and the general availability should be in Q4 fiscal year 2024 for Bare Metal and fiscal year 2025 for the Public Cloud in particular. These new products will also enable us to target specific verticals such as healthcare or the public sector.
If we take a step back, we see a global trend for data sovereignty, and this is accelerating everywhere in the world. In Europe, of course, where we have made significant progress in terms of regulations and new laws, are still under negotiation, but more locally also in France and India, for instance. We are the data sovereignty reference as the only major cloud provider being immune to any type of extraterritorial laws, and we are able to answer customer needs thanks to our dedicated products that are already available. The next slide has AI. At OVHcloud, we offer a clear and comprehensive solution based on our four pillars, providing all the necessary tools to fuel AI adoption for our customers. The first pillar, where we excel in offering one of the best technological solutions, is infrastructure.
We have been rolling out our next best-in-class GPUs from NVIDIA, and we have 100% utilization for our A100 and H100 GPUs. We are adding new H100 and also new L4 and L40S capacities this month in April to fuel the growth. Additionally, our network and storage capacities play a crucial role in supporting AI workloads, and we are very proud of having one of the best private networks and recognized high performance in terms of storage. The second pillar is true for data transformation. Customers struggle with our datasets, so we have developed products that enable customers to efficiently transform, prepare, clean, or label the datasets with full transparency control, making them usable by an AI model. All of this with very limited coding for the customer. This is an almost no-code solution.
The third pillar is the AI product layer with products already in general availability and other in beta. It's a central focus internally. We are committed to offering state-of-the-art products to our customers, enabling them to build their AI use case on our platform. This, in turn, will drive the conception of our infrastructure. The fourth pillar is expertise. We have significantly improved our customer support and our ability to better serve customers, including partnerships with startups or system integrators. We are also working on obtaining specific certifications for AI workloads. All these initiatives are integral components of our selective CapEx plan. It's supported by clear business models. Their success is already evident, as I mentioned earlier. The growth in AI facilitated by GPUs and products contributed to a 2-point increase in our H1 Fiscal Year 2024 Public Cloud revenues.
As you know, and this is the next slide, developing Public Cloud products, HPE PaaS solution is one of our key strategic drivers. We remain dedicated to enhancing our offering and commercial value proposition. We focus on seven main segments, which you can see on the left-hand side of the slide. In the middle of the slide, you have the listed numerous products for each of these segments identified by their technical names. Our offering is already extensive with particularly strong traction on compute products such as Kubernetes, databases, and AI products. All these new PaaS products reach an annual revenue rate of EUR 18 million in February 2024. Currently, our focus is on rolling out our new PaaS products that are not yet in general availability, as well as improving the first version that is already live.
This involves incorporating customer feedback, enhancing the customer experience, and ensuring scalability and the cross-sell. By doing so, we aim to facilitate the second wave of customer adoption to drive revenue growth for these SaaS products. The last, as you know, is about local zone. As you know, we have acquired Gridscale, a German company, in September 2023. We are successfully integrating Gridscale teams, and in addition, we are currently leveraging their technology. Gridscale technology enables us to deploy local zone. It means that we can easily deploy OVHcloud offerings in colocation data centers. It's part of our strategy of international expansion while reducing capital intensity. We don't have to make significant upfront infrastructure CapEx. These local zones bring Public Cloud services closer to customers.
It enables full compliance with certain local regulations and guarantees low latency and easy access to new countries for existing customers and new local customers. We have already opened two local zones in general availability, one in Madrid, one in Brussels, and we plan to open new locations in the coming weeks and months. It's just the beginning in terms of product availability and customer adoption as we only start to invoice in Q3, but we already have some good feedback from the beta testers. So now I propose that we move to the financials with Stéphanie.
Thank you, Michel. And hello, everyone. I am Stéphanie Besnier, CFO of OVHcloud. And thanks for being with us this morning. So as Michel said at the beginning, we managed to deliver in H1 a sustainable growth of 10.8% like-for-like and 10.6% as reported, despite the challenging environment, especially in Europe.
Price increases, which are not contributing significantly to revenue growth since December 23, contributed by 2.1% to H1 growth. We continue to expect a 1-2-point contribution from price increase on a full-year basis for FY 2024. Moving to the next slide, we have a detailed view on our EBITDA, which rose sharply over the semester. As you can see, in H1, we had significant improvement of our profitability. Our adjusted EBITDA grew like-for-like by 19.6% compared to last year, or 18.3% as reported, reaching EUR 184 million, giving a margin of 37.9%.
In line with what we announced during our last Capital Market Day, this significant 250 basis point improvement in our EBITDA margin is coming from a strong operating leverage with a decrease in percentage of revenue of our COGS, mostly linked to our Web Cloud business, contained operating costs, and increased productivity of our administrative and sales and marketing teams. One of the significant items of our P&L is electricity, which is stable around 6% of our revenue. During the H2 of 2024, we will continue to closely monitor our cost structure while also launching additional marketing campaigns to fuel customer acquisition. These campaigns were delayed from H1 and would slightly weigh on H2 sales and marketing costs. This cost discipline led to an improvement in net operating income, which turned positive in H1 at EUR 5.8 million versus -EUR 6.5 million last year.
It includes some non-recurring expenses such as acquisition costs for Gridscale. In our DNA, we have a ramp-up in capitalized projects and right-of-use from leased data centers amortization, combined with a depreciation of internal software and legacy COVID stock for a bit more than EUR 12 million.
Below EBIT, interest related to loans reached EUR 15.8 million due to the increase in interest rates over the period. We expect slightly lower financial interest in H2 as we have a lower all-in rate in March than the average in H1, and the rate is now almost fully fixed for H2. Let's now look at how this increase in profitability is being transformed into cash generation. So as you can see, CapEx amounted to EUR 162 million in H2 compared to EUR 194 million last year. It has been significantly optimized and represents 33.4% of sales in H1 2024 versus 44.2% in H1 2023.
With the optimization of our CapEx linked to reduced capital intensity and increased selectivity, we have generated EUR 14 million of unlevered free cash flow in H1 2024, six months ahead of our initial target.
We expect CapEx to be higher in H2 with some phasing of infrastructure and new generation launch, but we are now aiming to generate positive unlevered free cash flow for the full year 2024. Let me give you on the next slide a bigger picture of what we mean by optimization of CapEx and our flexible model use. So thanks to our integrated industrial model, we have a significant flexibility of our CapEx. For servers, CapEx amounted to 17% of our revenue, and here we have two major trends. First, we have a reduced capital intensity of our newly produced servers and then a softer demand, leading to a decrease in CapEx compared to last year.
If we look at infrastructure CapEx, which is slightly below last year, we have the last phase of our significant data centers opening program, and we continue some usual infrastructure work to prepare for the next phases of growth. Finally, looking at product and software development, as announced in January, we are stable in absolute value and slightly decreasing in percentage of revenue. We continue to develop and enhance our PaaS offerings to fuel our Public Cloud growth. In essence, we're reducing our capital intensity and we're paving the way to free cash flow generation. Since 2021, we've consistently expanded our infrastructure, network, and server capabilities. We're on track to reach 45 data centers by the end of 2024, positioning ourselves to capture a significant share of the cloud market's long-term growth.
As we explained during our Capital Market Day, it's worth noting that we've also incurred in 2021 and in 2022 some exceptional CapEx and also launched some product development initiatives that have yet to yield revenue. Regarding H1 2024, we are ahead of our initial target of generating unlevered free cash flow in the H2, and we generated positive unlevered free cash flow for the second semester in a row. Moving to the next slide, I want to insist on our sound debt profile. At the end of this semester, our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio is 1.9x , improving compared to the end of FY 2023. Our debt is at 96%, and our current average interest rate is at 3.6% all-in, so quite low. We have more than EUR 470 million of available liquidity, which gives us a strong visibility on our financing.
With no major repayment before 26 October , we are very confident in our outlook. We are already working on all our options to prepare for refinancing, including increasing the spread of the maturities of our debts. Ending on this good note, I would now like to hand over to Michel for the outlook cue.
Okay, so how does this performance translate in our financial targets? We revised on our organic growth target for the fiscal year 2024 to account for the slower growth than expected in Europe in Q2 and March and the low visibility on customer acquisition despite a rebound in the U.S. in the last month. Our adjusted EBITDA margin target is unchanged at more than 37%, which is cautious as we have taken into account the impact of a potential negative effect from Broadcom new licenses cost on our hosted private cloud offering.
Finally, we expect better than initially anticipated CapEx and free cash flow levels to account for the strong performance in H1, a direct result of our clear focus on cash generation. We now expect 12-14 for recurring CapEx and 21-23 for gross CapEx, and we expect our unlevered free cash flow to be positive on a full-year basis now as opposed to being positive in H2 as initially anticipated. Our targets for 2025 and 2026 are unchanged, and we are very focused on execution on delivering our strategic plan with a strong focus on cash generation while maintaining long-term growth potential. Last point, we have announced today the appointment of Benjamin Revcolevschi as Deputy CEO. We are very pleased to have him on board with his expertise and his IT experience to reinforce our leadership team. We can now move to Q&A.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Daria-Leona Sipos from JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question. This is regarding some of the demand comments that you mentioned. So you mentioned some continued workload optimization in Europe and project delays as well as the value of new contracts being lower than expected. Can you give us an idea whether the new Public Cloud projects that you signed in March that were kind of three times larger than the average over the quarter, have you seen any improvement there in terms of ramp speed and the size of these new contracts, or have these softer demand points continued? Thank you.
Yeah. In Public Cloud and in PaaS, we have seen a good traction from customers, especially, as I said, in the last month, in March. We have seen that we were able, with the new offering that we're preparing and especially the premium type of model that we have created, really much more projects, 3 times more projects in March than we had in the last year. However, the ramp-up of customers is slower than anticipated, especially on the cross-sell side inside the Public Cloud universe, as the ARPAC of new customers is lower than anticipated because today, our PaaS customers are using 2, 3 customers, and while we think they should use 6-7 products and solutions.
So that's why we are working very hard to really have the marketing, sales, technical approach to be able to develop the full offering, easy to use and to consume by customer because Public Cloud is a consumption mode, and also to be able to acquire the acquisition of larger customers, which are consuming more PaaS, more services, more products. That's why we have a plan to specifically work on the improvement of the existing products and also to have cross-sell and upsell marketing campaigns to be able to take the benefit of these new customer acquisitions, but unfortunately, with a lower ARPAC than we expected.
Thank you. That's very helpful.
Our next question comes from Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you for the presentation. Four questions for me. First, do you consider that the deterioration in Europe is the same situation you saw 12-18 months ago in the U.S.? It's only related to market conditions and nothing really specific to OVH. Second, do you expect a lower EBITDA margin in H2 compared to H1? Third, are you already hedged at a significant level for your electricity consumption in fiscal year 2025? If yes, is it at a much lower price per megawatt compared to the average of fiscal year 2024? And my last question, you are much more focused on cost than before. Could you tell us how many people are working at OVH in February compared to 2,900 end of August last year? Thank you.
I will answer the question one and two, and Stéphanie will answer the question two and three.
Are we considering what we see today in Europe is really similar to what we have seen in the U.S. last year? I must say that this is very similar. What we see today in Europe is very similar in the sense that we see two trends. The first one is really the focus by the customers to reallocate the workloads to be able to reduce their costs. So there is a pressure today to renegotiate contract and consolidate the workloads of the customer. Second, we've seen also a slowdown in the decision, especially in the large and medium-sized customers to develop large workloads and big projects. So it's very similar to what we have seen in the U.S.
Last months of the quarter Q2 and what we see also in March and April shows that today, in the U.S., we have seen a pickup, and that's why we are absolutely convinced that midterm, the trend for cloud migration or digital native demand will remain strong in the midterm. And that's why we are very focusing to continue to develop new products and to intensify the capacity to propose more solutions with the key distinctive attributes of OVHcloud. In terms of people, in fact, we are very stable. We just increased the number of people by, I mean, 40 people during the nine first months, improving the productivity on each unit of the company. And that's why also we are maintaining this level of EBITDA. But now I'll give the voice to Stéphanie.
Yes. Thank you for your question.
So on the EBITDA, sorry, first, like you've seen on H1, we deliver exactly what we mentioned during the Capital Market Day, meaning that we had an increase of our COGS by. And it improved the margin by 35 basis points thanks to the reduced proportion of our Web Cloud business in our revenue. Second, we contained the operating expenses, 55 basis points, and we improved the productivity of our team in the SG&A. And here, we have not any kind of impact from the electricity costs. In H2, what will we see? I mean, we want to remain very conservative on our margin for H2, and we have factored particularly two impacts. First, the fact that we want to keep investing in some marketing campaigns. Some of them were delayed from H2, and we want to fuel customer acquisition. So that's for the first impact.
The second is that we've included an estimated potential negative effect from Broadcom, our partner for the VMware products. They have changed the model of their license costs. This has been a factor in our EBITDA guidance for the full year, so that the two main areas of cautiousness. You're right, we remain very focused and very determined to maintain the cost structure as best as we can. On the electricity, we hedge, as you know, in advance our electricity purchases. We're almost fully hedged for 2024 and close to fully hedged in 2025 as well. We will see the decrease of the electricity prices in our fiscal 2025 because we hedge in advance. I mean, we don't have a significant impact. We almost have no impact in FY 2024.
You see that the cost of electricity remains stable as a percentage of revenue in 2024 compared to 2023. We should see an improvement in 2025.
Thank you very much.
As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one now. A final reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one now. We have our next question from Derric Marcon from Société Générale. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Good morning to all. I've got three questions, if I may. The first one is on the contract renegotiation with customers. Can you quantify this impact for H1, and what do you expect for H2? Can you do also a bit more comments on the favorable market trends in the domain name market that you were mentioning for H1?
Do you expect this to continue in H2, and what degree of visibility do you have on these trends? And the third question is on the delayed sales and marketing expenses. Can you quantify that? And so what will be caught up in your budget in H2 versus what you were planning to do in H1? Thank you.
I will comment the second question about the domain. What we've seen during the H1, and especially in the Q2, is, as we mentioned, a strong, I would say, growth in domain, which was mainly fueled by the fact that we have a very high renewal rate, which is among the best in the industry. And this is certainly something which shows that today, we have an appropriate offering to propose to our customers, and they remain very loyal.
However, the domain sector is a very versatile market where there is, I would say, a strong upside and downside. So that's why we are still always cautious about that. However, we are convinced that we have the right positioning today to propose in the domain and the web now with the new offering, the capacity to have, I would say, contributive positive momentum on the Web Cloud sector. About the contract renegotiation, we do not give any information about what is the impact, and the same with the delays of the development of the contracts and the operations. So this is something where we do not give information. The third question was about
sales and marketing expenses. What we plan, basically, for H2, it's mostly investment in SEO and SEA campaigns, brand awareness campaigns.
We have also a new incentive plan for our partners to strengthen the indirect sales dynamic with our key accounts. So all in, we will remain very cautious in terms of investment in people, but at the same time, we will have some additional investments. I don't give a specific number, but it's around a few million EUR of additional sales and marketing for H2, mostly on the fees.
Thank you, Stéphanie. Can you quantify also the cost of the freemium strategy and the postpaid processes that you were mentioning and that has accelerated the pace of customer acquisition in H1? Is it possible to quantify that?
The customer acquisition we were talking was freemium, mainly. So it's a way, in fact, to enlarge the prospection field in many areas and many geographies. And that's why we were able to increase that.
The reason why also we want to keep strong investment in marketing is because we've seen that the offering was very successful thanks to the fact that we will continue, and Stephanie mentioned that we will continue to invest in SEA and SEO. Why? Because we've seen that it has been successful, and we are absolutely convinced that the benefit of having new customers and more new customers will be short-term and midterm very beneficial for the global growth of the company. However, it's clear that the level of ARPAC of these new customers is lower than what we had previously. So now the challenge and the commitment that we have is to be able to increase quickly the ARPAC of all these new installed bays that we are generating.
And on the freemium, Derek, there is no specific cost related to it.
On the prepaid offer, it will have a slight impact on working capital, but nothing significant.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Yann Derocles, from Gilbert Dupont. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. I have two questions, please. The first one is on PaaS, as it is EUR 18 million, so plus EUR 1 million in one quarter. What do you expect at the end of the year in terms of ARR for this segment? And then on the EBITDA, could you explain to us what happened in the public cloud as I see a big drop in the margin? Is it only the investment that weighed on the margin? Thank you.
Okay. So on the public cloud margin, what we've done is that we have developed a better view and a more precise view of our cost allocation.
So the decrease that you see in terms of margin is mostly the effect of this new methodology. So you need to compare, and we've provided some information using the same methodology on the impact of the Public Cloud margin. On the PaaS, actually, what we see here is that we have also some delay. I mean, the customers are using, as of today, 2-3 PaaS products instead of 6 or 7. So we need to improve this consumption. And we have also a number of new PaaS products that are still in beta stage and that will further evolve and be optimized. So that explains the impact that you see in Q2 and the general impact that we have on the Public Cloud. I mean, we still see a strong growth coming up in the coming months and quarters on the PaaS.
Okay. Thank you.
No further questions in the queue. As a final reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star one on your keypad now. There are no further questions, so I will hand you back over to your host to conclude today's conference.
Okay. So thank you for attending our H1 fiscal year 2024 call. As a wrap-up, we have reached EUR 486 million revenue and an EBITDA margin of 37.9% and an elevated free cash flow of EUR 14 million. In terms of business performance, we had a softer demand in Europe than anticipated and a rebound in the US in the last months of Q2 and early Q3.
We have revised our fiscal year 2024 targets and confirmed our mid-term guidance, and we expect for fiscal year 2024 revenue growth between 9%-10%, adjusted EBITDA margin above 37%, which is cautious, recurring CapEx between 12%-14%, gross CapEx between 21%-23%, and positive unlevered free cash flow on a full year basis. So thank you very, very much, and have a very good day.
Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.