Hello, and welcome to the OVHcloud third quarter fiscal year 2023 revenue call. My name is George, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. For the duration of the conference, your line will be in listen-only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to raise your question at any time. If at any point you require assistance, please press star zero, and you will be connected to an operator. Please note that this conference is being recorded. Today's speakers will be Mr. Michel Paulin, CEO, and Ms. Stéphanie Besnier, CFO. I'd like to hand the call over to the OVH team to begin today's conference. Thank you.
Hello, good morning, everyone. I am Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud. Thank you for being with us today for OVHcloud's Q3 2023 revenue publication. Q3 has been a good quarter with a sustained revenue growth of 13.2% like- for- like. In absolute terms, our revenue reached EUR 228 million and grew by 12.6% as reported. In terms of key takeaways for our third quarter, I'd like to highlight the following. First, we are growing above 20% in the public cloud and in the mid-teens in private cloud. Second, we have a continuous acceleration in Europe after an already very strong H1. Third, growing demand for sovereign solutions, quarter after quarter, acts as a catalyst for OVHcloud, and as the European leader in data sovereignty, we continue to benefit from it.
The next point is about the rollout of our product innovation, which is successful, with PaaS solutions growing very well. We are also well positioned to capture business opportunities such as AI, with high-performance new hardware. I will come back later on what we do concretely on AI. The company operates with a strong financial discipline across OpEx and CapEx, while remaining focused on supporting growth. Let me now reconfirm our guidance for fiscal year 2023. Next slide shows that we are confirming all our targets for 2023. Our like-for-like revenue growth will be between 13%-14%. Our Adjusted EBITDA margin will be above 36%, and we expect our CapEx to be in the lower range of our guidance, recurring CapEx between 16%-20%, and growth CapEx between 28%-32%.
As I said previously, we have a clear focus on financial discipline and agility while continuing to invest selectively for future growth. What I mean by financial discipline is controlling costs and improving our productivity and the return of investments. We are positioned on a fast-growing market, we remain focused on delivering profitable growth. Today, we are making selective investment by improving and expanding our infrastructure with new data centers on new GPU for AI. Now, I'd like to focus on our Q3 strategic highlights. The next slide show that we had in Q3 a continued double-digit growth in both public and private cloud, with respectively plus 20% and 14.5% like-for-like . All in all, the cloud business is growing mid-teens in the Q3.
Overall, public cloud reached EUR 39 million of revenue in Q3, private cloud reached EUR 142 million of revenues, and Web Cloud reached EUR 47 million of revenues. Stéphanie will come back with more details on the revenue performance in a few minutes. I will, on my side, give you some insights on our customer dynamic on the next slide. Our strong growth performance is driven both by high customer loyalty and by successful customer acquisition strategy. On the left-hand side, we are very proud of a high customer loyalty evidenced by a strong revenue retention rate, which reached 109% in Q3, and by a double-digit ARPU growth so far in 2023. On the right-hand side of the slide, the dynamic in terms of new customers and new contracts remains very strong as we had another good quarter of acquisition.
Overall, so far in 2023, we have acquired more than 220,000 new customers in public and private cloud, with some exciting client wins highlighted by the logos. What is interesting, very interesting, sorry, is that the business dynamic with system integrators remains strong, we continue quarter after quarter to sign new deals and to increase our share of wallets with existing customers, thanks to the strong partnership we have built. As I said at the beginning, we continue to innovate. On the PaaS product side, which enables users to develop cloud-based applications. We are happy to report that we enjoy a strong growth on the products already rollout, such as database, storage, and containers. In Q3, we also launched new storage offering named Cold Storage, we have already customers in this product for industries such as media, legal, or financial services.
There are multiple use case for this product, which allow very long-term and cost-efficient data storage. Also, over the last months, we have reinforced our AI offering to offer our customers a complete suite of tools to train, to clean, to start, and to deploy our AI models based on very large, private, and public data sets. These developments around AI require works in the infrastructure as well, which I will highlight on the next slide. The AI wave represents an incredible opportunity and requires significant hardware capabilities to give customers the ability to run the most intensive AI computes. Today, we are the only large European cloud provider able to build the right infrastructure for generative AI. We already have powerful GPU designed for AI available in our cloud solutions, and we are currently working on rolling out the new A100 and H100 from NVIDIA, one of our partner.
Our approach on AI is fundamentally different from other large players such as OpenAI or the hyperscalers. In addition to implementing new GPUs, we are integrating and improving open source private large language models. They will be white box models, as opposed to the current black box models, which are kept secret and raise critical privacy issues for the data. Our LLM will guarantee the intellectual property of our customers and the privacy of the data. Our customers will be able to use their own data set to train their private model, and be certain that the generative AI outputs won't be shared with any third party.
This will be the evolution of the B2B generative AI, giving customers the full control over the privacy of the data and much more relevant output, as customer will be able to have specialized models trained with their own internal data sets that are highly relevant for their own business. We have already customers using our GPUs for AI workloads, and we are working with some of them to improve our understanding of their need and serve them better. Quantum computing will be the next IT revolution, and it is already a reality. We have customers using our Quantum- as- a- service offering that enables them to simulate the constraints of the quantum and assess the potential opportunities of threat coming from this new paradigm. Current business opportunities on quantum are of two types.
The large corporates or system integrators wanting to get ready, and second, the startups that are developing applications running on Quantum. Our service will allow these customers to be ready and adapt quickly when Quantum supremacy happens in the coming years. Large corporates must get ready to Quantum, and we are the European cloud provider for Quantum computing. We are positioned as a supporter of the European ecosystem, and we have a unique offering of different Quantum providers available already in our cloud. This is a key differentiator versus other players. We are not developing our own Quantum technology. We are integrating partners, and we should have five to six services available in the coming months. It enables our customers to discover, and use, and train different Quantum technology easily through OVHcloud offering.
We are executing our roadmap in terms of selective investment to expand our footprint globally as part of our strategic plan. We are currently opening new data centers globally. We opened recently a new data center in India with a core and shell model, which is less capital intensive and enables us to implement and operate our own server, network, and cooling infrastructure. We will open the Indian website in the coming weeks to target local customers and increase our total addressable market, as the Indian market is one of the most dynamic markets in the world. We have a roadmap of new data centers with a focus of improved efficiency for this targeted investment. We also remain agile and opportunistic on new locations, depending on the business demand and the overall outlook.
After this update on the key highlights for this quarter, I would like to zoom out and comment on our strategy to strengthen our European leadership in a growing cloud market. The slide shows that OVHcloud operates in a fast-growing market with an expected 5 years CAGR of more than 20%. The cloud market is driven by cloud adoption for all customer segments, as it is mission-critical to their operations. Everyone is moving to the cloud. Data usage is booming, we keep seeing new usage, new habits, such as multi and hybrid cloud, accelerating global cloud adoption. More and more organizations deploy multiple cloud solutions to finally address their digital transformation needs. Even there is a short-term delay in some cloud migration projects or some optimization from customer, we are very confident in the long-term growth prospect of the cloud market.
As the European cloud leader, we are ideally positioned to continue to capture opportunities in this fast-growing market. We are very happy that renowned industry analysts, such as IDC, recognize OVHcloud as the European cloud leader. They underline our key competitive advantages. OVHcloud offers a sustainable cloud, is a leading European cloud provider for data sovereignty. It is open and reversible. It has predictable and transparent pricing and offer one of the best performance ratios. Our continued performance is fueled by innovation, as I said earlier. Another key element of success is our way of addressing our customers, how we work on our go-to-market strategy. As part of our strategic plan, we have implemented a clear strategy with dedicated channels and programs. First, on the top left of the slide, we have the enterprise channel, which is the fastest-growing channel.
It includes the direct sales from our sales teams and the indirect sales realized through our partners. Indirect sales is a quite recent at OVHcloud, and it's already very successful. As I said previously, we have been winning more and more deals with our partners, and it has been made possible thanks to our dedicated partner program. In Q3, we had more than 1,350 partners, of which more than 400 are advanced partners. This program enables our partners, mostly IT integrators such as Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra, to integrate OVHcloud in their own offering. It gives them the capability to offer to their customers their expertise, coupled with our unique cloud offering. On the top right of the slide, we have the digital channel, which is our historical go-to-market.
It represents the sales that are done directly on the website and is driven by digital marketing and e-commerce strategy. We have a good growth in this channel, even if it suffers slightly more than the enterprise channel. Our digital customers are sensitive to the macro conditions and have been looking for a few months already to optimize their spendings. The next slide shows that OVHcloud is the European leader in data sovereignty, and the global legal and regulatory framework is increasingly favorable to us. Europe is about to reach a major political agreement on the Data Act, with European institutions reinforcing freedom of choice for cloud users. The draft proposal for the new EU cybersecurity scheme incorporates in the highest level immunity to extraterritorial laws, such as the French SecNumCloud.
Recent news flows from around Microsoft, Meta, or TikTok confirm that data sovereignty is becoming a key concern for authorities and public opinion all over the world. Regarding our sovereign solutions, we continue to see a strong traction with a combined growth. The revenue from our SecNumCloud offering has been multiplied by 10 in 12 months, with a very strong growth every quarter. It confirms that data sovereignty is a strong driver for our business growth, with a lot of different market segments being more and more concerned by this issue, such as healthcare, insurance, finance, defense. If we think about data and AI, it all raise huge concern on data privacy and sovereignty around generative AI. Again, we are very well positioned by offering a generative AI that respect our values and our customers' intellectual property.
OVHcloud's leading position for sustainable cloud is recognized, and you see that in the next slide, by the analyst and by customers, and we keep innovating our offering. We are implementing a carbon calculator that will enable customer to assess our exact carbon footprint for any services that use at OVHcloud. This carbon footprint will include this three scope of calculation, which is a key in assessing your overall carbon footprint and knowing that all the large cloud provides only, most of the time, the Scope 1 in their calculation. This will be a key differentiator and will bring even more value to our cloud offering, as customers will be able to quantify how much greenhouse gas they use and save when they migrate to OVHcloud.
In May 2023, OVHcloud joined the European Code of Conduct for data centers to improve public recognition of our positioning. OVHcloud, in the next slide, is a leading pioneer in sustainable cloud on several aspects. One of the most important is our unique at-scale water cooling technology. It enables us to offer one of the best PUE and WUE ratio in the world. This water cooling technology is by design, more efficient than air conditioning. We celebrate the 20th anniversary of the invention of the water cooling technology a few months ago. It is interesting to note how we keep improving our performance in that space. Ten years ago, we were able to dissipate 60 watts of heat. Today, we are able to dissipate up to 500 watts of heat with our water cooling technology.
It is more efficient, it's cost-effective, it's scalable, even for the most advanced GPU used in AI and CPU. Now, I let the to Stéphanie.
Thank you, Michel. Good morning, everyone. I am Stéphanie Besnier. I am delighted to be with you today to present our Q3 2023 financial performance. As Michel said at the beginning, we registered in Q3 another strong revenue growth of +13.2% like-for-like and +12.6% as reported. This growth is fueled by a very strong performance in public cloud, which is growing at 20.1%. A solid growth in private cloud, which is growing at 14.5% like-for-like. We also benefit from a rebound in Web Cloud in Q3 with a good performance of domain names. This continued strong dynamic of our cloud businesses is generating a favorable mix evolution, as shown in the next slide. On this slide, we can see that we are growing quarter after quarter.
Our mix continues to evolve towards more public cloud, which is a more dynamic market, and private cloud, with a continued strong growth in this segment, thanks to the success of our go-to-market strategy and of the continued rollout of our innovations. Public cloud now represents 17% of our revenues, up 1 point versus last year, and private cloud represents 63%, up 1 point. The strong performance of our cloud businesses is driven by, A, another quarter of customer acquisition, B, a continued growth, and C, a steady ramp-up of our innovations, especially in PaaS. This strong dynamism is also true when we look at the performance by geographies on the next slide. When we look at our Q3 performance by geographies, we are very pleased with the growth in Europe, with a continued traction in the region, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe.
Europe has been accelerating since the beginning of the year, and it shows that our positioning as a Europe cloud leader is bearing fruit. In France, we also had another quarter of acceleration, with a strong performance from the enterprise segment and a double-digit growth in private and public cloud. In the rest of the world, we are facing a continued optimization from some customers, especially in North America. In addition, the comparison bases remains high in the U.S. overall. Finally, Russia kept weighing on the region in Q3. As you already know, we have increased our prices recently with the first set of price increase during the previous quarter. We've continued to benefit from the price increases in Q3.
As shown on the right-hand side of the screen, we had a price contribution to our revenue growth of around 2%-3% in the first nine months. We expect to have two to three points contribution on a full year basis. This strategy of progressive price increases, built with pedagogy with customers, has been successful and has confirmed OVH pricing power. We have not seen any change in customer behavior. We have an unchanged churn. As Michel said, we have a strong customer acquisition dynamic in the cloud businesses. We continue to have a high stickiness of our customers, with a revenue retention rate of 109% in Q3. All these indicators give us confidence in our ability to mitigate any inflation impacts today and in the future.
We've implemented last quarter a strong financial discipline on the costs at all levels of the company, while continuing to invest selectively for future growth. To execute this financial discipline in terms of OpEx, we've been limiting new hirings and implementing frugality at every level of the company. Regarding CapEx, we are improving our return on investment by tracking productivity gains. Before handing over to Michel, I'd like to repeat that while we increase our financial discipline, we remain very much focused on growth, and we keep investing in key areas such as AI for our future developments.
Thank you very much, Stéphanie. Now turning to our guidance for the year. We expect a like-for-like revenue growth between 13%-14%. In terms of margin, we expect to be above 36% on a full year basis. Finally, regarding CapEx, we expect to be in the lower end of the guidance range. Our 2023 guidance takes into account several revenues and cost drivers, including an acceleration on our revenue growth in Q4 and the benefits of our focus on financial discipline in H2, at both the EBITDA margin and the CapEx level. We remain confident that the mid and long-term growth trends of the cloud industry, and we see new usage, such as AI, ramping up. We think that our new product initiatives, our differentiated services, and our value for money proposition are even more relevant in this sort of environment.
Finally, as key takeaways, we had another quarter of sustaining growth in Q3. Our revenue reached EUR 228 million, with a like-for-like growth of 13.2%, and it's 12.6% as reported. Revenue retention reached 109%, confirming the stickiness of our customer base and our capacity to grow with them. We're executing our growth acceleration strategy quarter after quarter, with all levers confirmed, even reinforced in the current environment. As I said previously, we are confirming our financial targets for 2023, with a focus on growth and financial discipline. Thank you, and now we can open the conference to the Q&A session.
Thank you very much, Mr. Paulin. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have any questions, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our first question today is coming from Toby Ogg, calling from JPMorgan. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Hey, good morning, and thanks for the question. Couple from me, just on the AI side, so you mentioned you already have GPUs for AI workloads. Could you just talk about what the potential timeline could be from here before we start seeing this becoming a more meaningful source of growth? Just thinking about the CapEx component of that, how are you thinking about the CapEx requirements to build up your capacity of the latest GPUs for some of those more demanding AI and ML applications? Thank you.
Today we have two types of different offerings that we propose already in AI. As you say, we have GPU already available, and, yeah, available on our data centers, both in the Northern America, in Europe, for providers today, GPU. And we are rolling out A100 and H100, as I said, new capacity to provide the GPU. This is something which is rolling out, and we see that there are a lot of interest, and we are confident that we will catch the capacity to interest with this computing capacity. Moreover, we have a second product that we have introduced, which is a notebook AI products that we introduced just recently.
It's a set of, toolbox, of tools, in the box for help from, start-up, scale-up, and also, corporate companies to use more efficiently, to be able to clean, train, and, select and store the data that they are in the data set, to, help them to use more efficiently their own models. We are confident that, again, we have today a comprehensive offering that will be, interesting, and we are fully dedicated to capture this, high potential growth and strong momentum that we see already in AI. We already have some, good results because we have gained some references in some, I mean, customers, either scale-up or, corporate.
In terms of CapEx, it's a point, as we always have said, we will continue to invest to fuel growth, and it will be exactly the same for the GPU. We will have a very strong discipline to invest in this new GPU in a way which will allow us to create value long term. We have already invested in GPU in the last semesters. We will continue to do so with the new Compute A100 and H100, but we will do that in a very disciplined manner to be able completely to have a good return on investment quickly. That's why we have full confidence to maintain the confidence of the CapEx for the full year.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. Our next question is coming from Mr. Mark Hyatt of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. I've just got two, please. Firstly, on competition, over time, we've seen an increase in the number of providers offering European data sovereign solutions, you know, whether that be from the likes of T-Systems, Orange, Capgemini, IONOS, or more recently, Oracle, with the launch of their sovereign cloud offering. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you see the market for these solutions developing over the next 12, 24 months, and what differentiates OVH from the competition in a market that's becoming increasingly competitive? The second question is just on pricing. So far, you mentioned in FY 2023, price increases have contributed to about 2% to 3% of revenue growth.
What do you expect the price increase contribution to be next year in FY 2024? Thanks.
Okay. Thank you for the question. About data sovereignty, the first point I want to mention is that, as you mentioned, we were the leader. We are the initiative to provide these type of solutions, and we see that the market now is responding with new offerings. It demonstrates, I think, really that it proves that today this is becoming a rising concern everywhere, and this is a strong opportunity. We were the leader, we were the first. We will continue to be the leader and the first. If I want to see the competition dynamics of what we see, I will mention that we see two types of competition. The first one is, in reality, not real data sovereign solutions.
Oracle said that they have a sovereign solution, but it's not immune to the CLOUD Act. It means that today, we are absolutely convinced that immunity for the CLOUD Act, immunity for the extra territorial is becoming a more and more important criteria. I just want to emphasize that, for example, in the new EUCS European certification, there is a fourth level which has been introduced by the European Commission, which is that immunity of against the extra-territorial laws, as is now a criteria of selection for a cloud provider. Clearly, when you are fully American or fully, or depending on the majority on American technology, this is not the case. The second one is the answer that some European private provider, you mentioned IONOS, but there are some other.
I think today, the different competitive advantage that we have is that we have a much more comprehensive offering that today we provide to these players. We provide public cloud, private cloud, we complete a global footprint. We are able to provide that at the global level. Moreover, we have a very strong partnership program. We work already with Capgemini, Accenture, with Sopra Steria in these domains all over Europe, and we are able to be a the leader in the sovereign data.
We are very proud to have a lot of ministries in Europe, to have the European Commission as customer. We believe it will be really, something which will continue thanks to the fact that we are the first one. We are ahead of the competition. For technical reason or legal reason, I think we are very different. From the open here, we are far ahead from them. The pricing?
Yeah. With regards to pricing, we started to increase our price in Q2 this year, and we did another set of price increase in April. Plus, we have some customers that are committed, so the price increase will impact them upon renewal. These price increase, by the way, are doing well. I mean, our customers understood well the strategy, and we had no impact on our term following this these new increases. We will see the full impact of this price increase in Q4 2023, and again, in 2024, sorry, we'll have, again, the full impact of this price increase that was set in December and April.
Very clear. Thanks very much.
Thank you, sir. Our next question will be coming from Mr. Ben Castillo-Bernaus, calling from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Yeah, thanks very much. A couple from me, please. Firstly, just on AI and on the software side for large language models. Obviously, training these models should be good for you, I suppose, with the high consumption required. I know we're early here, are these large language models and training them, are they moving the needle yet for you? If not yet, when might you expect to see that? I guess, as you look at your customer base, you know, how much of your, you know, what percentage of your customers are really sophisticated enough to be using this kind of AI notebook offering? We could get a sense of this is something you think, you know, is sort of 10% of your customers or can be more than that.
Lastly, on the SecNumCloud, you mentioned the press release, it was up 10x in the last year in terms of revenues. Could you just give us an indication of the scale of what that could be? Similar on the PaaS contribution, you kindly broke that out for us on Q2. Perhaps you could give us a sense of the platform as a service contribution in Q3. Thanks.
Okay, about AI. Our strategy on AI, as I was mentioning, although AI, as I was mentioning, is two types. The first one, we want to have the capacity to provide high level performance computing, GPU-based capacity. Second, we want to give the all the toolbox to offer in any type of software which allow customers to create their own AI approach in a way which is a private data set, which is a way to protect their own data and to provide their IP and not to have that in a black box open and non, I would say, controlled model. We believe this will interest most of our customers.
Even so, as you said, you need to be a little bit sophisticated to be able to apprehend these type of things. Our convictions is like Quantum, is that this motion, this towards AI, will affect all the industries and all the factors. However, to be pragmatic and to deploy a strategy, we decided to focus on first, all the, I would say, AI companies, and we have many customers, either scaler, startup, but also companies like Sopra Steria, which are developing AI scripts and AI models, and we help them to have all the element tools, mainly based on the open source, to provide large solutions. That's the first area of focus, where we are devoting a lot of efforts to be able to propose a full set of elements to help them to develop their own AI solutions.
The second is on our tool base, as you were mentioning, we are proposing a more packaged solutions like AI Notebook, to be able to use with less, I would say, making type of thing. There, we believe that the market is very, very big. Of course, it needs a little bit of pedagogy. That's why we have also introduced some professional services to help the customers to be able to apprehend these new tools. We see that this is a huge opportunity. It will take a little bit of time to train them and to inform them, but this is very important. We already have implemented some of these tools to more, a little bit more sophisticated on things, but we see that it's very, very promising market. About SecNumCloud.
SecNumCloud is a winning, I mean, offering today in France. We are, you know, recognized today, it's public information on the public offering of SecNumCloud as the number one in France. We believe that if it would be confirmed, SecNumCloud becomes the European certification higher level, that we will be very well positioned to capture this strong momentum on data sovereignty across all the continent of Europe. We will continue to develop new services. We announced, for example, that SecNumCloud Bare Metal will be soon available in OVHcloud, and we will introduce all the PaaS, not some PaaS, because today we have a restricted offering.
We will enlarge substantially the SecNumCloud offering to all the PaaS that we have today in our product portfolio, including, because there are some restrictions in SecNumCloud, including some very sophisticated AI. Again, we go back to AI or database or containerization or virtualization tools and data analytics type of tools, which have to be, of course, go through the certification process. We are very confident today that long-term, SecNumCloud is a very strong driver for growth, both in the public sector, but now in more and more in the regulated sector, such as financial, health and the what is called in France, OIV, all the large public, I mean, sector operating companies.
We believe that SecNumCloud today is a very strong driver. We have demonstrated during the last quarter, and it will continue thanks to the market drivers.
Thanks very much.
Thank you very much, sir. Next question will be coming from Amit Harchandani from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, all. Amit Harchandani from Citi. My question is actually going back to the growth trajectory of the business. You've, of course, talked about generative AI today, but if I look at your target today versus maybe the midterm target, in the past, you have talked about the mix shift, you've talked about the move to PaaS, you've talked about international expansion and of course, market tailwinds that get you to the mid-20s target. Given where we are today, coming towards the end of FY 2023, can you share your latest thoughts on how we should think about the trajectory towards the mid-20s target in two years' time? What are the building blocks, and any thoughts around revenue margins, trajectory, and CapEx towards the medium-term target would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Okay. We are executing our growth strategy on the pillars that you mentioned, and that as planned and as presented during the IPO, based on strong pillars of growth that we believe are still very, very, I mean, important. Despite the environment, we believe that these pillars are still more than, I would say, up-to-date. Customer demand is strong in that usage, and clearly, AI will bring certainly new opportunities that was not envisioned. That's why we are in the process of fine-tuning our long-term strategic plan, including the global environment, fine-tuning our objective, and beyond 2025, and of course, we'll update you with quantitative data about that very soon.
Okay. Okay. Secondly, if I may, in terms of generative AI, you've talked about some of your offerings. In terms of positives and negatives, for example, in the past, you've talked about your sovereign offering, you've talked about your water cooling technological advantage. Would you say your ability to integrate open models is your key differentiator when it comes to generative AI, or what else would you sort of call out as your key differentiator as it relates to generative AI?
I think our key differentiator are very similar to what we have in the past. First, clearly, price and cost performance. We are, and we are recognized to have a new GPU in most of the, I would say, a benchmark, as the most competitive GPU, today, offering in, against, the upper scale. Price performance, cost is clearly a positioning where we position ourselves, especially in the simple, computing instances.
The second clear differentiator that we have, including there in the software part, the book AI, the machine learning AI solutions that we introduce, and the next generative LLM type of solutions that we are going to introduce, is the fact that we are absolutely compliant with what is our promises to provide private or public type of dataset and white box type of modeling, which are 100% compliant with the data privacy, and also allow the customers to have a complete, I would say, control of their dataset and all their IP inside this type of modeling. This is really a way to guarantee the fact that we have a sort of open, sustainable model, long term, to give them the access to the AI.
The last but not least, is that, and that has been made by one of our customers, is that, we have a green CPU, GPU. As you know, the GPU is a very high intensive, energy, consumption due to the fact that it consume a lot of energy to dissipate. Thanks to our water cooling, we have today the most appropriate, I would say, sustainable GPU, clusters, thanks to the innovation we introduced. For us, we absolutely see that today, AI is a driver based on the current pillar of our differentiator, and it gives us a new opportunity to grow and to accelerate our growth with the same type and pillars of strategy, of our strategy.
Noted. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star one at this time. Our next question is coming from Derek Barua of Société Générale. Please go ahead.
Hello, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. I've got 4, should arise me. The first one is on Q4. You reiterated, you reiterate the guidance for the year, but it leaves a large, a wide range of possibility for Q4, between 13% organic growth, and at the top of the range, 17% organic growth, if my math are correct. Can you give a little bit more color on what the exact growth rate might be in Q4, and should we extrapolate that for fiscal year 2024? That's my first question. The second question, it's about the Web Cloud business. Was the performance in Q3 a good surprise for you?
What growth trajectory do you see for the coming quarter, given the new offering that you will launch soon, if I have correctly understood your comments? Third, it's about price increase. Shouldn't price increase in 2024 be higher than in Q4 2023, given the lag linked to the annual or multi-year commitment contract that you have in your customer and server base? I was surprised by the comment made by, from Stéphanie. The last question is about OpEx. How many additional staff do you need to put in the field to support the planned data center extension? If my count is correct, it's 15 new data center that you plan to build in the coming years.
How many staff needed for that, and how long do you still think you will maintain the limitation on recruitment? Because your comment applies for H2, but should we expect that also for fiscal year 2024? Thank you.
Yes. Thank you, Derek, for your questions. What I can tell you so far for the rest of the year is that June has been trading in line with our expectations, and we have a few very good drivers. We are benefiting again from the effect of the previous price increases. We see a good ramp-up of our PaaS solution and a strong momentum also in our sovereign offering. Second, we think also that overall, our Q4 will benefit from slightly easier comps compared to Q3. All in, we're very confident in the full year guidance.
To answer about your Web Cloud, as you know, Web Cloud, we have a different set of products within the Web Cloud. They are, I mean, of course, digital-oriented type of solutions. The first one is a domain, and the second one is a Web Cloud, and for France, it's a telecom activity. I will not comment telecom activity. The first one is about domain. What we see today is that the market first is has grown. As you know, that during the COVID, there was an acceleration on domain, and after the COVID, the market slowed down a little bit. But what we see that now there is a sort of rebound on the overall market. Moreover, we are show that today we are gaining market share in these domains.
We have to receive, for example, but just recently, the Polish registry numbers, and we were in the winning players in Poland. We see that there is a rebound. How it will be for a long time is always something where we should not speculate. That's why we are very focused on the execution and to maintain our execution model, to continue to acquire new customers and to propose a really high quality of service.
As you said, the Web Cloud, which is sometimes related with domain, because when the customer asks for a domain, most of the time he wants to have a hosting Web Cloud, or it's to host a web, gets the benefit of this strong momentum that we have in domain, therefore, that's why we are very pushy to introduce a new offering, which I'm convinced will help us to have a strong momentum in this domain. For us, Web Cloud remains, especially in domain and in the web, a good way to acquire new customers, long-term customers, and to maintain a worldwide presence to continue.
That's why we see that, there is a strong commitment to execute, thanks to the new offering that we're introducing and the new evolutions of services that we are going to propose for the future.
On, on the price increase, direct to clarify, we passed the most impactful price increases in December and then again in April. We have the full impact going forward from this price increases. What remains is also the impact of the customers that were committed before these price increases, and then we will see a price increase on those customers upon their renewal. I mean, most of the impact was, again, in December and in April so far. We have the full impact, starting in Q4 2023. We'll have the full impact again in 2024 and maybe some additional effects from the end of the commitment or the renewal of the commitment.
On your last question about the staffing and the OpEx, as we were mentioning, our main line of execution is a very strong discipline in terms of cost control and CapEx efficiency. However, we do that to be able to continue to maintain a good level of growth, and we do not want to jeopardize the future of the growth. That's the reason why we are investing to open new data centers, to be able to create new opportunities and the Indian, I would say, for me, it's a very important example of what we want to achieve by expanding geographically with a very, very attractive and dynamic market, which is the Indian local market.
Clear. Therefore, we will do, of course, staffing increase in line with the projection of the growth, and this is seen as investment with a good return on investment, but we will be, on the other hand, very disciplined to maintain the highest level of productivity on the current situation. All the new initiative will, of course, introduce maybe new just staffing, but for the current, we'll be very, very cautious and very disciplined for on hiring.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Barua . Ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star one at this time. Our next question today is coming from Jan Depere Long, calling from Gilbert Dupont. Please go ahead, sir.
Hi, thank you for the presentation. I have 1 question about the workload optimization that we can see in the U.S. Maybe can you just update us on what you see and what you think will happen in the next quarter or a few quarters? Thank you.
Yeah, I think it's the workload optimization by the customers is something which has been commented by all the, I mean, analysts. We see that clearly, this is a phenomenon that we see. It's clear it's mainly in North America, but clearly very important. However, customer demand is strong, and we have seen, as I said, some customer taking a bit more time to invest and to optimize their cost by sometimes reducing or optimize their workload. I don't know how long it will take. It might last a bit or not. In any case, it's too soon to draw conclusions so far.
In the medium to long term, we are, however, very confident that the demand for cloud will be stronger and stronger than ever, especially with different trends that we mentioned about digitalization of the industry, the need for innovation, AI, Quantum. These, for us, are really very strong motions, and we believe that the workload will take I don't know how long, but clearly midterm, the perspective are very, very important in terms of cloud growth.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, as we have no further questions, I'll return the call back over to the host for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for your questions. Before we close the call, it was a pleasure to speak with you. Our Q3 is another strong quarter with a sustainable revenue growth. All of our key differentiators, such as data sovereignty, price predictability, price performance, transparency, sustainability, open and reversible cloud, and of course, best performance price ratio, are more than valued in the current environment and with the amazing wave of AI and free in future for Quantum, that opens a lot of opportunities. The cloud market is a fast-growing market, and we are very well positioned to continue to expand. Thank you very much, and have an excellent day.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that walks us through today's presentation. Thank you so much for your attendance. You may now disconnect.