Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Welcome to this annual appointment, because we're gonna pre-present the results for 2025 during this webinar, and it's gonna last one hour. It's primarily for institutional investors, and which is disseminated in French and in English because we have Neil, who is here to translate simultaneously into English. There are also English language PowerPoint slides. We've also got Baptiste who's there on the chat to help you. Don't hesitate to ask questions either in English or in French, and we'll try to answer those questions in the second part. You certainly receive both the letter to shareholders, number 122 in digital format and maybe even on paper, and the universal registration document which went online yesterday and is therefore available to you already.
You know, we're one of those companies that publishes the results in the same time as the AGM to give us the chance to talk to them with you about it. Nine hundred and three people in our workforce reflects stability to a constant scope even though there is an increase in numbers. We've received two new companies, QUILINOX and C2AI, that represents a difference of 72 people who've joined us. Thanks to all our employees who've worked hard in what continues to be a difficult context. We thank you to their, for their commitment and their efficiency and professionalism in their work for the group. Milestones for the year in building. You know, this is represents about 41% of our turnover overall.
We suffered from the funding of energy renovation in the market. You know, that it's funded partly by the public authorities with the MaPrimeRénov' scheme, which has been going down over recent years, particularly in nine... 2025. For a period in 2025, the actual funding was blocked for a time. It makes things very difficult for energy renovation and those companies involved in renovation to progress. In terms of new housing, which is maybe 10% of our total turnover, we have not observed any real recovery in the new housing market. We'll see what happens in 2026, which looks a little more positive. In terms of the water cycle and our businesses involved there, we've companies declined in turnover. Others are the opposite.
Jetly, which is involved in water harvesting and watering systems and the treatment of wastewater, a slight decline in turnover. DPI also saw its turnover down, its pipework for water, both in terms of reductions in volumes and reduction in prices. However, our company who works in the swimming pool market did very well, Aello, with an increase in turnover and some substantial gain to market share. For Sodeco too, which had a good year in the water cycle market, supplying Suez or Veolia, the big specialists involved in water in France. In terms of industry, all the companies that you see in the letter to our shareholders, number 122, on the first page, this is a complete table of all the companies of the group.
All the companies which are from Sodeco down, they have a level of resilience in terms of turnover, growth or slight growth or stability. You see that all our companies working in this sector have done it well again this year in 2025. Where market shares are still available, of course, to our companies. Internationally, variety again, with good achievement for companies like Syveco or Sodeco, and more difficult times for the subsidiary of Odrea in Spain, which lost quite a bit of turnover, in particular for bathroom taps, that's Rousseau. Also decline for FG INOX. Globally, internationally, growth continues because the share of international sales as a share of the group has increased from 16.3% to 17.3% this year.
The retail segment, that's where we had the most trouble with the decline in turnover for our two subsidiaries involved in those markets, but particularly Odrea, which has also faced delisting for outlets or retail outlets in Spain. Okay. The price impact is negative, slightly negative at -1.4%. We'll talk about that in outlooks, we'll talk about the outlooks later on. We've got the acquisition of two companies, C2AI and QUILINOX. This is on the commercial side on the terms of our business. So regulation of fluids, and instruments for the regulation of fluids. Specialized in temperature probes and this company in 2025 did around EUR 10 million. That's C2AI.
The other company that we acquired, QUILINOX, based in Spain, who build, who deliver, stainless steel equipment to pharmacies, pharmacy industry and agrifoods, and chemical industry and cosmetics. They do approximately EUR 15 million turnover per year. They joined us on the 1st of October. For information, more detail about those acquisitions, you'll be able to find that in our URD. In terms of governance, we've decided to, at the end of the year, and we communicated about this, at the beginning of 2026, we decided to separate the roles of chairman and CEO. The last two sections on social and environment, we'll be talking about that in more detail a little later on social and economic governance.
Overall, when we look at turnover in terms of distribution channels, so retail and pro, it's clearly in the retail channel that we've lost substantially, -10.9%, whereas in the pro channel we've showed better resilience with a drop in 1.1% to constant scope. That gives an overall decline to constant scope of 2.9%, 1.4% of which is for DPI. I'll look at turnover and profit over the next 10 years. If we look at the post-COVID period, we see that we've got good resistance in this transitional year of 2025, both for turnover and profit, you see, compared to 2024.
In terms of organic growth by quarter, we're still waiting to switch to the other side of zero, the break-even point. We were disappointed by the last quarter with -1.7%. We're hoping that for the first quarter of 2026, we'll see that go above the line, the zero line. For this volumes from 2021 to 2025, I'll at least draw your attention particularly to the orange bars. If you look at 2021, 2022, 2023, we had strong inflation, 4.3%, 10.8%, and 5.9%, and then two years of price drops. Over that whole period, however, there's an increase in 17.5%. There again, we'll be taking...
We'll be having a word, later about the price effect for 2026. Over to Patricia to talk to you about profitability.
Looking at profitability between 2024 and 2025, and we know we've got stability in terms of turnover and stability in terms of profit. At the end of the first semester of 2025, we were slightly behind, but we worked substantially in the second semester, and we were able to catch up. The commercial margin, we were able to defend that pretty well over the year, and we benefited from an dollar impact, which helped us, which represent, 30%, 32% of our sales are in dollars. That had an impact on our profit and loss account and our, of course, our commercial margin.
With the work of the salespeople and the purchasing teams, who worked very efficiently to defend our margins. Between the pro channel and the retail channel, stabilization in the pro channel, but in the retail channel, more exposed to purchases from Asia and a greater benefit from the dollar effect. Expenses as a percentage of net turnover is over now 25%, so 25.2%. The biggest expense is personnel, of course. As Guillaume said, we've maintained our headcount in 2025 compared to 2024. We increased also increased salaries by 2.4%, so that led to an increase in personal expenses, which now represents over 13% of our turnover.
In terms of operating profit, we've got the impact of QUILINOX and C2AI, who had a slightly higher level of charge, personnel expenses, as a percentage of turnover. If we look first at the five subsidiaries represent more than 83% of our total turnover, and three historic subsidiaries, Sferaco and Thermador. Now there's also Sectoriel and Syveco, who are now, have got to a critical size and levels of profitability, which are really contributing to operating profit of the group. DPI, Thermacome, Axelair and Thermacome, sorry, which are companies that are losing money. As Thermacome with the drop in new builds. Exposed to new housing market. At 9.2% decrease in turnover and charges which have been.
Were kept at the same level, that didn't, that didn't help. It didn't compensate for the drop in turnover. This is a-- there's also an effect of the of an attribution to the customer receivables which has also affected the result. DPI, turnover down also. In terms of consolidation, they were down in terms of turnover. Then C2AI and QUILINOX. Six months of results for C2AI, which was approximately the level we expected. QUILINOX, in terms of operating profit, we had to make a provision, a 100% provision for a fraud which was effected against the CEO of the company, to a total of EUR 398,000. We decided to provision that to a level of 100%.
That took away all the profit of the company. We're not sure whether we'll be able to recover those amounts. As a measure of prudence, we've decided to make a 100% provision for it, which took away all of their profitability. The difference between, w e're looking now at the operating profit from ordinary business, which is the impact can be explained the financial result, which dropped slightly compared to last year. That's mostly due to a drop in the interest rates. We got high levels of cash in 2025, but we weren't able to compensate for the financial charges and the repayments through this level of, w e also had two new loans.
The tax effect, 'cause we benefited from a tax credit linked to what we call the BERSO, which is for the families. There's an increase in products which allowed us to benefit from this credit tax, which explains the bigger drop than the operating result. Going on to the key indicators, which are return on production and return on capital used. Employed, sorry. The ROP over turnover is maintained at 11.8%. If you look at the ROCE, 16.4% compared to 16.7% last year, with the impact of CETA and the new companies C2AI and QUILINOX. In terms of assets, we recognize on the books their assets.
Because we only had part of the profits from the year, that explains this drop from 16.7 to 16.4. Financial structure, next. In terms of the, our stock is the highest value we have in our assets, EUR 175 million, which is down both in terms of value and number of days of consumption, which are now at 203 days, which is the work of our stock valuation teams and adaptation to changes to the quantities actually sold. Better management. We've got the impact of C2AI and QUILINOX. The drop would've been more without that. The picture at the end of December takes into account the supplies that we've got on the boats.
This year we've got EUR 18 million worth of stock on boats compared to EUR 24 million worth of stocks on boats coming from China. The Chinese New Year was later than the previous year, so that helped us a little bit. In terms of cash, a record year in terms of cash at 96.9%, EUR 96.9 million. We have subsidiaries who are able to invest, of course, with this cash, and that generates financial earnings. Borrowings, in terms of borrowings and financial debt, we've got two new loans for a value of EUR 20 million for C2AI and QUILINOX.
we've got fixed interest rate loans with no guarantees over a period of seven years. We're in positive debt, net debt position to equity, that's thanks to our allocation to dividends and our profits, which has allowed us to increase slightly there, as you see. The generation of cash flow, we've got the cash flow statement. We've generated EUR 36.7 million of net cash flow. That's made up of results, which of course is converted into cash excess with investments in our EUR 5.1 million. The most important impact there is the stock levels.
We used stacked our cash to fund investments to the value of EUR 5.1 million. We had announced EUR 9.1 million in investments, but because of delays to certain projects, that expenditure has been delayed to a later date. We've got EUR 17.3 million is the net cash flow from changes in the scope from the two new subsidiaries. That gives us EUR 46.9 million in free cash flow. We paid out EUR 19.1 million in dividends. We talked about the loan subscriptions for EUR 20 million that we talked about and then repayment of our existing loans for EUR 7.8 million. The DPI investment is for the first time counted over a whole of the year.
It's the first time we've paid back the DPI loan over a whole year. The other element concerns IFRS 16 financing flows. Those are IFRS financing accounting rules, which represent a cash burn for us of EUR 3.3 million. That concerns subsidiaries like Thermador because of rental activities. Moving on to investments. Over 2026, we'll be at a maximum of EUR 2.3 million, and we estimate that it'll be somewhere between EUR 9.6 million and EUR 12.3 million. We've got major real estate products for about EUR 6 million. We've already talked about Sferaco, and there's also an automatization for the logistics for an extension to an existing building for those logistics needs.
Sferaco will have the most advanced warehouse of the group. We've started to pay some of those investments in 2025, and the construction will start for good in, for real in September. This was the building we built for Sferaco in Alsace, and the works were started in the last quarter. Look at the difference between the investments and the real estate investments. The difference concerns investments which are paid for by our subsidiary directly, and there are many investments in the digitalization, and that's mostly for our warehouses and that concerns invoicing, electronic invoicing, and investments that we will need to make to be able to gain, achieve productivity gains in 2026 and 2027.
I'm gonna hand back over to Guillaume for sustainability.
We had a achievement rate of 102%, achievement rate of our 19 objectives. You'll find all those in indicators on page 21 of our URD. If any of those indicators require any more explanations, don't hesitate to ask us. For the second year ending, we put together a sustainability result for CSRD, which was read by the AMF, the financial authorities, and they made a few remarks about it. We managed to complete this, respect this requirement with great results thanks to our teams who worked on that. We hope they will continue to publish in order to conform with this regulations.
They are required for companies over 1,000 employees. We will benefit from the new simplifications brought in by the Omnibus directive. Moving on to reporting in terms of progression in this area, and particularly in terms of environment. The expenditure on salaries of people, the time dedicated to work on the sustainability questions was EUR 686,000, slightly down on the previous year, but because we've done so much work in the first year. One of our 19 objectives, a big one for us is the decrease in absenteeism. There is a correlation between absenteeism and productivity.
We've come down from a peak from 2024, but we're still a long way off our objective, which is to get below 4%. We believe that is quite possible 'cause many of our subsidiaries are under 4%, so we're gonna work with the subsidiaries which are reporting higher levels in order to meet this objectives. We, today, we believe we have all the, all the elements we need to do that. Next, on the agenda, 33% of women are on management committees, in terms of conformity, in terms of state sustainability. 32% on the extended management committee, which is represented by which is, comprises of, 34 people, so all the corporate officers of the group and the head of sustainable development.
96.4% of our emissions are due to our products. They're not products we manufacture, but the products that we distribute. You see that we have to do will be done over the long term with our suppliers. This year, we followed a very strict process to establish and materialize a carbon trajectory, this process is called ACT Step by Step. It is one that's validated by the ADEME, which is the French environment agency, which gives us a reference on this carbon trajectory, which we've modelized in a fairly precise way, that allows us to act upon it and control it and react to any drops or increases.
Finally, a drop in our carbon emissions in absolute values, 328 kilotons of equivalent CO2. This is partly due to our drop in turnover and slight drop in volumes. In terms of the indicator on page 21, you see an increase because this indicator refers to emissions, carbon emissions per ton of products sold. Because of our product mix, we have two different results on that part. We talk about active products which use energy once they've been installed, for example, heat pumps or ventilators with VMCs, mechanical ventilators. A few words about outlooks. In terms of new homes, we'll see the situation should be improving.
The French authorities have understood the challenge of new homes with an objective which is gonna be clearly difficult to achieve. Their idea is to build 2 million new homes by 2030, and even though that only represents 10% of the group's activities, that will help our subsidiaries like Thermacome in the last part of 2027, but may more likely in, sorry, 2026, but more likely in 2027. Energy renovation, MaPrimeRénov', which is reduced, with approximately EUR 1.9 billion allocated to energy renovation for 2026. In terms of the energy saving certificates, the CEEs, this could help us too. There'll be EUR 5.2 billion. That's a five-year plan. That starts in 2026. These are...
This is period phase VI of the CEE. These certificates are funded by the private sector, all of those involved in selling and producing energy, of course. It's more stable than the government mechanism, MaPrimeRénov'. As you know, the French government is seeking to achieve budget reductions. Industry, there's a new tax which will impact us substantially, and the prices that we'll be able to sell at. It's called the MATF, which in English is the CBAM, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will impact a certain number of our products, and it'll total several hundreds of thousands of EUR, and these will be passed on, of course, in prices in 2026. I don't think there should be any directly on our margins, but there will be impact on our prices.
In terms of the industry segment, we remain positive in the medium term. Market shares are low enough for us to hope to get growth in terms of market share in the future. Retail, no great positivity for 2026. On the water cycle, modestly optimistic for 2026. We talked about Aello and Sferaco. We think that we'll be able to find, recover growth in those areas. Internationally, the companies we talked about earlier, present internationally will continue to work in national industry markets, 2027, 2026, 2027. In 2026, 2027, we'll be looking to maybe add a new subsidiary in the area of water cycle, the water cycle industry, internationally.
The price impact, we believe that's gonna be between 1% and 2% in 2026. We will report on that quarter by quarter. There's a question that's been asked on the chat concerning people, our feelings about the beginning of 2026. I say that we are reasonably optimistic, which corresponds to the budgets that's been put together by the subsidiary CEOs. Except the retail sector, which we assume is gonna continue to be difficult. The second question comes recruitment. I don't think we're gonna be recruiting massively in 2026. I don't think that our subsidiaries will be in this state of mind.
We'll certainly be reinforcing our IT teams simply because we believe that if we keep our staff levels as they were in the past, that means that we'll be able to react more quickly when the recovery of the markets comes. Some market elements for new housing in France. We see that the blue curve on this chart shows building permits granted, but we see a slight increase, a slight improvement in housing starts, which is the orange line. It looks as if we've come out of the worst of that, the bottom. That obviously situation has bottomed out, and the curve is looking more positive now. Coïdis next gives us information from the distributors of sanitation, heating and equipment, so professional activity.
Good month of December at +5.1%, bad news again in January. It's around about 0, but it seems to fluctuate between positive and negative results. INOHA represents the retail market, the DIY market, and there you see that we're slightly negative at 0.4% and rather negative outlook for the year ahead. In terms of industry, we look at this PMI index in France and in Europe. It's all pretty close to 50, which means that the market is 50. We are not in markets like aviation or arms, but we do have opportunities in data centers, for example, which. There won't be major beneficial impacts for Thermador Groupe.
The market shares we have do suggest that we can grow in the future. A look into our growth targets. This concerns just turnover. I would ask you to read pages 10 and 11 of the URD, which give the 10-year objective and our strategy to achieve those objectives. You see in terms of our current turnover, we're behind. We can still make acquisitions in the future, which will help us to get closer to the top of that blue line. There will also, we're expecting slight increases in prices which have slight inflationary effect, which will of course increase the turnover as well. Looking at our capital now, the overall number of shareholders has increases.
That's great for us to see that the number of shareholders increase. It's also great to see that private shareholders are still present with a distribution between private and institutional investors, which is more or less the same. 9,817 private shareholders and institutional investors, which are private investors. The highest, the biggest shareholder of the group with 9% is a German guy who has moved out of the institutional side and into the private investor side. Amongst the institutional investors, you see Fidelity, which was present last year, has increased its share to 7.6%. Crédit Mutuel Equity, which is stable at 6.9% of capital. The pleasure to see Amundi going above the 2% holding level.
You see that the number of shareholders or those holding shares through the FCPE, Thermador Groupe Trust Fund represents 6.9%, which is a record. It's increase and increase, and that it's a long-term objective to increase employee shareholding. Share liquidity has increased. That's satisfactory. As you see on EUR 1.91-EUR 2.12. For you, it's probably doesn't look enough, but over long term, it's a progression and that's a good thing. In terms of resolutions now, the dividend, which is going up a little, we've never decreased our dividend, and we want to keep up that promise. It's reasonable distribution. 43% of dividend of the profit distributed to our shareholders.
We have decided in the board to separate the roles of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, primarily because of best practices which the proxy advisors are backing. You know them very well. We're expecting greater a high level of acceptance of our resolutions. That was the first reason that we decided on that. The second was to free up our executives for more operational work in the four years ahead. There's a question that's come on the chat. Why would we choose Olivier de Leclerger as the new Chairman of the group? We put a number of scenarios on the table to know whether we kept the same person with two different mandates or two separate roles, two separate people for the two roles.
We decided to separate those roles. That meant we needed to find somebody, and we had that person within the board, and that person was a candidate and a member among the independent board members, and he was perfect for the job, we thought, because he knows Thermador Groupe so well because he's been a board member for so long. As you know, he works for a distribution company. That's a listed company. There's lots of advantages in terms of his profile. More importantly, we get on very well with him, and I think that'll be a great pair, pairing between him and me because we do get on so well, and that will help Thermador Groupe for the next four years.
That's a few explanations, but you can of course ask him the question. Two new candidacies. Two renewals. That's Bertrand Chevalier as employee director, and a shareholder of the group, and has already been with us for four years on the board, and he wants to continue for another four years. Myself, I'm standing forward for a new mandate of four years. That's 16 years that I've been a board member in Thermador Groupe. If you decide to entrust me with your confidence, I will be a candidate for the role of CEO of the group. That will be decided on the board at a meeting which will be held the day after the AGM.
Two candidates for new mandates, Claire Sido, who would be an employee director, representing as a shareholder, replacing Marion Granger, who is stepping down, and Jean-Philippe Paul, CEO of FG Inox, who will be there to bring us some knowledge from the field. We want to keep people, CEOs from the subsidiaries so that we have a good understanding of what's going on in the field. Jean-Philippe will be accompanied by Laure Empereur, and she will take his place next year. They will alternate. The AGM will be on the seventh of April at 5:00 P.M. on EM Lyon campus. A look at the share price. There's just one more resolution, was an amendment to the company's bylaws.
You talked about the notion of representatives of shareholder employees. We have to modify our bylaws to be able to appoint these candidates. They're from the FCPE fund, and we have completed that with an election process for our shareholder employees who are direct owners of shares in the company. We have a second resolution concerning the change to the company's bylaws, where we have to ask for this. We need to we're asking for this resolution to be rejected because we're expecting to go over the 1,000 employee level in the next two years, and that will mean we will have to have a second employee shareholder on the board. Those are the changes to the bylaws.
A quick look at the share price and dividends, and then a look at the return on our share over a long period from 2016 to 2025. This was before the dip last year, and day before yesterday. But structurally, over the period, we've got a same level, slightly higher level than the CAC 40 on the return on our share. I'm going to now look at the questions that are coming in. I've answered the first three. Edward asked us if we can still improve our working capital requirement in 2026.
Possibly, yeah. We might be able to. Stock is mostly where we can act, and we still have some improvements that we can make
You have to be careful because when you have low rotation stocks, it takes a lot of time to work on those. I think we've done most of the work on managing our stocks. In our letter to shareholders, we talk about a percentage of the working capital as a proportion of turnover. We've gone down below 40%. The normative EC working capital requirement, WCR, sorry, will be 35%, so we're at 40%. That will be applied to slightly different activities. We haven't got a major change, there's no major change to our sources of supplies. There's about one third from Europe, two thirds from China, the suppliers.
It's only really the managing of our stock level, as Guillaume was saying, that could affect the working capital requirement. We've been working with some of the subsidiaries on customer payables, and we've found improvements, but we don't expect any major change to that figure. That to 35%, that 35% mark remains as achievable. The second question, what is the impact of Ukrainian and Iranian problems on the group's deliveries?
Maybe we'll have impact in terms of delivery times 'cause there are... there's traffic jams in the circuit, in the system. Containers were going all the way around Africa to get to Europe, to avoid the problems with the first, with the Ukrainian war. In general terms, there'll be...
could imagine there'll be some unsettlement in the supply chain. In terms of cost, I think we've done some good work in terms of costs. Yeah, that's what we mentioned when made the call for tenders last year. We decided to co-contract with three transporters, and we've renewed this call for tenders for 2026, and we're gonna choose two from those three. We're gonna maintain our costs, control our costs, basically. We have to be fair, we have to have good foresight in order to be able to manage our fixed costs. I think they've given the, I think we're gonna have to pilot that question very clearly. We've got well negotiated costs for containers, and that's 30% of our purchases.
Thierry asked if there is a company which is similar in Europe that with which Thermador might be able to merge. I don't think so. Certainly there are companies which may be similar to our subsidiaries, which might be able to come and join us, but certainly no group like ours. His question is, in 2026, are you noting any gains in purchasing prices from your Chinese or Indian suppliers who may be having difficulty in selling their products to the U.S. because of the tariffs? No, the answer is no, not really. The price of oil is increasing. The plastic, of course, that we purchase a lot of polyethylene, the price of oil is gonna affect that.
That's gonna lead to increases in prices. Certainly what you mentioned there was more true in 2025 than in 2026. A question from Jean-François. A word about the weather conditions in January and February in France. How does this weather impacted Thermador's business? We had a few cold days, which helped us. When it's cold, of course, we use heating units, maybe heat pumps, for example. That helps us a little bit. We didn't have sufficient a period of freezing temperatures, which meant it would have a substantial impact on equipment in the home which might need to be replaced. Not a great impact. There is one exception, is with all the floods that happened, the...
We were able to sell, a larger number of generators for pumping water and for providing electricity to these houses that were flooded. Also in those flooded areas, we have seen an increase in sales of pumps, for example, to pump water out of flooded areas. That can help Mecafer, for example, with their generators. Jean-François says he's talking about he was thinking about the substitutes, the flooding. Yes, I will give you we'll give you more detailed information on at the end of the first quarter. This Mecafer and Domac, sorry. I should apologize to our friends in Vierzon. We had a two or three-day period where it was difficult delivering product 'cause of the floods.
We managed to control that. Are there anybody else in French or in English who wants to ask us a question? The URD is online, as we mentioned, in French. It takes a bit longer in English. It's true that with automatic translation that everybody uses today, you can have access to the document in French and translate it quickly by artificial intelligence so that you can keep up to date. We will be also putting this presentation online, and you can, of course, consult us for that. Just to say that we did a letter to shareholders in Spanish, and so we have employees from QUILINOX.
We started to translate things into Spanish for our Spanish people. Any questions? Any other questions for tonight? Are we finished for today? Okay. Well, we'll close there.
Just one says Arlette. She's the CEO of Opaline. Opaline is our communications agency, and they accompany for this webinar and for the creation of the URD, so it's a collective work that we do with them. That keeps us busy in January and February. Last year it was available on March 14, 2025, and we should do better this year. That's just a message from Arlette.
Sorry, I'll just have a look at questions. Okay. Well, just I like to wish you a nice evening and see you at the AGM.
You could log in and follow it online if you're not in Lyon, and of course you can follow the AGM online. Of course, we can speak before. Brigitte and I are present on many investor forums, and we're very happy to set up meetings with you if you would like. Thank you to all of you and good evening.