Good evening. Good evening all, and Welcome to this webinar where we will be commenting on the turnover for the third quarter and the Letter to Shareholders N° 125. As usual, start with our employees. There are now 900 of us. You can see that we are in a situation of stability in Thermador Groupe. It is pretty good news because our turnover is increasing overall with a stable number of employees, and that is an employee to turnover ratio that we keep a close eye on. Also, absenteeism is down. That is another good. Down, slightly down, which is good news. That was the end of the first half of the year. Figures that we got a bit later than the end of the semester.
We do see a drop in absenteeism, which is the result of some good work overall by all the teams, and I want to thank all those who have contributed to this good outcome. We are going to talk about some milestones and in particular prices. You know that it is an indicator that we keep a close eye on in Thermador Groupe since COVID in 2020, the COVID crisis. We are slowly moving out of this negative price zone. That is all about the price effect, the inflation rate that we pass on to our customers. We were at 0.9 at the end of the semester, and at the end of Q3, we were at minus 0.2. We are hoping that the price effect will go positive by the end of the year. Good news too for heat pumps.
Air-to-water air pumps, because public authorities have announced an objective of 55,000 air-to-water heat pumps financed by the energy saving certificates, which are financed not by the state but by the private companies involved in energy, like all the energy suppliers. That means this objective of 55,000 units mean that groups of actors working together, there are six of them altogether, are ensuring that this work is done properly and that there is no fraud in the use of those energy saving certificates. It is good news for Thermador, who sells accessories for air-to-water units, but also for Axelair too. In France, another positive event in terms of ventilation. Good performance for that sector, and we see that from our statistics. Good for Axelair who sell ventilation, so mechanical systems and ducts and so forth, and fans.
They also are involved in the air conditioning market for mobile units and wall-mounted units and fans. They can too, you can imagine that the summer we had was pretty favorable to the sale of this sort of equipment because French people, and Europeans generally, had a very hot summer. In terms of new housing, less good news. We see that housing permits and housing starts, although slightly up, but from a low base there is not very good outlook in the medium term. The weather. Talk about the heat waves, not the last one we will have, for sure. With some rather negative effects that we did not expect, particularly on the watering markets. Because as you know, we have watering pumps for the retail sector with Odrea and for the professional sector with Jetly.
When there is too much heat, the water table dries up and there is no water to water with. That has not been a good summer for those markets. You can see those in third quarter results of Jetly in particular. A look at the price effect for 2026. You see on this graph, you can see that the price effect is -0.2, so it is almost invisible. Organic growth at +4% and a return to increase in volumes after three years of negative volumes. This year we are seeing a positive change in volumes. That is good news for Thermador Groupe with certainly a positive price effect in 2026 overall. A look now at new housing starts that we mentioned earlier. Stability at around 300,000 building permits submitted, requests submitted. Positive impact for the moment for housing starts.
As that curve, that yellow curve, moves towards the green curve, we will see a plateauing of that yellow curve over the next months and maybe years even. This new housing effect, this market is obviously affected negatively by the increase in interest rates over recent months. Cowidis has showed us some very good results for industry over the summer. There are the heat pumps, for example, air-to-water heat pumps sold by Thermador. Accessories, sorry, sold by Thermador, who benefit from this increase in turnover in those markets, but also a sharp increase in air-to-air heat pumps. We sell accessories in that market as well through Axelair, who sell ducting for this type of machine. The market for ventilation is one of the three growing markets for our heating distributors to whom we sell.
On the retail side, after a good month of June, which was helped by the mobile air conditioning market, we have returned to a modest and even negative DIY market. Obviously, French people are reconsidering their positions and for buying power reasons, are hesitant to spend. This having said that, our subsidiary, Mecafer, has had a good year because it is worth mentioning. Throughout the year for their generators, gains in market share and product development, which have given a positive outlook for Mecafer Domac. Those go together, of course, Mecafer Domac. They work very closely together and they are in Vierzon and I take this opportunity to say hi. Industry trends. We have got the PMI index. In France, it is near the 50 line in France. That shows no real development. Not great news for our companies who work in the French market.
For Europe, the situation is better because that is above the 50 line and has been for a number of months and that probably explains the success of Syveco, which sells to industry throughout Europe.
I will continue with the outlook and the figures. Guillaume talked about the different prospects and the different figures on the market. Now, if we look at our retail channel, so that is Mecafer Domac and Odrea, a part of which is in Spain with Rousseau, and you will see that we are at -3.6% at the end of the quarter in terms of turnover compared to the end of the semester in June, where we were at -4.1%, which is obviously better. Odrea have halted the slide in spite of that problem with the watering market, so congratulations to them where they have improved their position. They have actually reduced the negative side of their turnover.
Mecafer Domac have a very good start to the year and have maintained their beneficial turnover benefits. Retail is down 3.6%, professional channels up 11.3%, but it is important to note that we have two companies that have joined us. C2AI who joined us at the end of June 2025. We have three months for 2026 for figures for them, for 2025 in our figures. Quilinox joined us on 30th of September 2025. If we look at the pro channel, we have 11.3% growth compared to 7.3% at the end of June. As Guillaume said, we have Jetly who has lost turnover in the third quarter and Thermacome 2 which is exposed to the new housing market and they also showed a decline in turnover and that explains why we have slipped from 14.3% - 11.3% on the pro channel in terms of growth.
The overall consolidated increase in turnover is 8.8% and to constant scope 4% taking into account the reprocessing of C2AI and Quilinox turnover. Concerning financial structure, we have some updated figures. We have in terms of equity at the end of June we are at EUR 414 million of equity. Concerning our loan and financial debt, we have EUR 38.8 million remaining to be paid. We are not affected by the volatility of the interest rates because we are on fixed rate loans and we owe money for the next six years, approximately, on those loans. In terms of stock, we have EUR 180.9 million compared to EUR 169 million last year. We are holding 171 days worth of supplies, which is an improvement on the end of June. Good management of our stocks by our subsidiaries. The impact that has on our net cash position, of course.
We had a lot of purchasing in the third quarter, making the most of a favorable euro/dollar rate and transport costs on historic negotiated rates. We benefited there as well. It was a good idea to purchase at that time, which allowed us to keep a healthy stock level at the same time. In terms of cash, an increase to EUR 113.9 million. If we look in terms of detail, there are lots of elements. We have the stock there, but we have customer payments who pay between 55 and 60 days. Mechanically for our cash for September, we have June's and July's payments. That explains the increase of EUR 9.7 million compared to the end of June. We need to talk about this share buyback program, which started in August and will end in October.
At the present time, we have bought 29,325 shares out of the 30,000 target, and that has cost us EUR 1.9 million to the end of September for the buyback of those shares. That concerns cash. In terms of capital expenditure, CapEx, we continue with our investments. A large part of it is in real estate. As we communicated previously, we have an extension to our subsidiary, Sferaco, and this was delivered at the end of September on time. We are going to be now moving on to the racks and the automated warehousing. That was a total investment of EUR 2.4 million from cash. We also started the construction of Distrilabo's building. We are also starting the move of FGinox from Brignais in the Rhône department to Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in the Isère. The decision has been taken to bring the teams together, the FGinox teams in the same building.
We will start the extension to those offices. That is for the real estate. For the rest of our investments, which have been financed by our subsidiaries. We have an IT investment in digitalization. We have three warehouses subsidiaries which are digitalized in terms of order preparation. I have also, sorry, got the digitalization of our invoicing. We are starting to invoice, starting paperless invoicing. Those investments are in man-hours and consultants for that part. That is as far as CapEx is concerned. Now I am going to talk about the share price, which has been a bit volatile, but I think that has affected many companies on the French market. In terms of reinvested dividends over a period of 10 years, we are at +8.7% with our dividend that has never fallen since our floating in 1987.
We compare ourselves to the CAC 40. We are just slightly below that because they were at 9% per year over that 10-year period. However, compared to the CAC Mid & Small market, we are doing better because they are at +4.7%.
Thank you, Patricia. I would like just to answer the question that has come up on the webinar on the chat. Why is the share price going down despite these good results? We do have an explanation for that, which is obviously partial, but which has been given us by our investors who are familiar with the group and invest elsewhere, French and international investors, that their customers are worried about France's exposure to public debt. It is considered a systemic risk.
On the one hand, we have very high level of debt in France, and the investors have not understood how we are going to actually put that right, both in terms of the politicians who are in power today or those who are standing for the election next year. There is a certain level of uncertainty, which obviously investors do not like. You can imagine that the terrible incidents that we have seen this weekend have not improved investors' perception of France.
That could explain, to some extent, this poor performance again today on the Thermador share and other shares, of course, as well, share prices as well. To reassure you, I would invite you to look at the PER compared to the past, and you will see that the stock valuation is very low compared to the past. We are on a low price trend, but our performance is good. I would like to say that as managers of the group, Patricia and myself, we have invested in Thermador shares, and some of us, a large part of our equity. We remain confident about the future, and we look at this as closely as you do.
As you have seen from the 10-year projection, the 10-year record, it is pretty good. Some employees would like to be able to buy shares, but the trends are not particularly good at the moment. That is just to talk to you about the French context. In this difficult context, there are some good news. We see in particular that some developing markets, like, for example, the market for data centers, we know that France produces low carbon electricity, decarbonated electricity, and a lot of those involved in the data center market have projects in France.
We are potentially suppliers of a certain number of equipment, particularly valves for data centers. As you see on the next item on the slide, our developing markets. We have a number of subsidiaries involved in those markets and have interesting projects for the ahead. It does not mean we will get all of them. These are mostly industry subsidiaries between air treatment, so processing of chilled water or applications for subsidiaries like Sferaco, but also subsidiaries who sell measurement equipment like Distrilabo and C2AI, piping in stainless steel, for example, with PBtub.
FGinox
And FGinox. That is a good transition there, talking about those metal tubing. We have seen PBtub over the recent months really taking off in that market, both in stainless steel and connectors for construction, but also for industry through FGinox, which has a very similar range of products. So these markets are progressing, and we are active on those markets. A market where we are also progressing, but more with market share gains, swimming pools. There is a big progression in France. France is the third biggest market in the world, and you see that French people love swimming pools. This is particularly true today because of the heat that we have had over recent summers and for the swimmers summers ahead. So great performance by Aello on that swimming pool market. The reuse of water is a real challenge.
I talk about it almost every time, but I think it is a medium-term phenomenon, and we are pretty sure that with the droughts that we are having in the countries of Northern Europe and the center of Europe, in the U.K. and France and Germany, water is increasingly rare and therefore increasingly expensive. So all equipment, particularly those sold by Jetly, which allow you to recover water, harvest water, and reuse it, are going to be successful markets in the future. In terms of organic growth, we have Axelair who are progressing. They are gaining market share, and they are in a growing market. So this company has moved well beyond.
After all these years of effort, they've moved well beyond the break-even position. We're expecting a real positive performance for 2026, which is good news for our shareholders, but also for the management and employees of Axelair who have made every effort to make a success of their company. For our, we know that next year there won't be a buoyant market. We're going to have to work on organic growth. That means gaining market share, new markets, new countries, new product ranges, but also the price effect, which will play in our favor next year. Now we've seen a question coming in, and that allows me to answer that one. Indeed, we're seeing suppliers talking about substantial price increases for 2027 because of salary costs, transport costs, et cetera. For some of our products that come from China or India are subject to the MACF tax.
It's the carbon border tax. All these additional costs will be passed on to our customers, of course. We won't be excessive in that, but it will allow us to maintain our commercial margin, and that will, of course, increase mechanically our turnover next year.
A question from Marcus. Are we talking about the inflationary trend? Concerning this carbon borders mechanism, it's already had an impact on our prices because we've got three subsidiaries involved and they started at the beginning of our year. Because we've allowed for that, we know that the final price will apply from February 2027, but we have a provision for that. That's the case of FGinox and Sferaco. They've already passed on those price increases to their customers. Sferaco was in April and June for Sferaco for this new tax.
The question was: are we able to pass on these increases to our customers? Our suppliers are talking about price increases, and that will pass by, of course, negotiations. We've also got large amounts of stock, of course. With the purchases we've made this year, we've got 171 days of stock, and our subsidiaries are already working on their prices for 2027.
Talking about our reorganization in terms of external growth, we hope to be less dependent on the French markets in the future. We've recruited somebody at the beginning of September who will be working 100% on looking for opportunities of companies that could join us, and then working on those opportunities to arrive at a deal which would allow such companies to join us. We're getting organized at the moment so as to professionalize, and industrialize, and systemize these processes, hoping to get to a level of two acquisitions per year, particularly water cycle industry in Europe.
As you saw with Patricia, we do have the cash to invest in those things. The dividend policy remains the same since we were floated. Irrespective of the share price, this dividend has never fallen in absolute values, and that's important for long-term private shareholders who don't necessarily sell, but who are expecting regular dividends, and that was confirmed at the last board meeting. We will be maintaining this policy of stability or slight increase in dividend where it's possible. A look at organic growth to make us feel better.
We showed that last year on Q4 our business was negative, our turnover was negative, so we have a favorable base, which should allow us for the final quarter of 2026 to have a positive result compared to the previous years. That means we will have four positive quarters. The success we had from the second and third quarters were mostly through customers buying ahead of time to save on future increases.
We have 0.6% growth for Q3. If you look between July, August, and September, there was not the same trend in terms of increase in turnover. More importantly, when you look at the results, we do have subsidiaries for second quarter, for example, who benefited from this good trend. In Q3, we had Jetly who lost turnover, with Thermacome too, and also Isocel who lost turnover. You see that on the third quarter we were less good, should we say. There is a negative price impact, but it is less, but it is more to do with the volume effect and for those three subsidiaries who lost business. We have a question from Marcus about this, is asking if whether the growth was reduced at the end of the third quarter.
Going to answer questions that we have. First question for Jean-Pierre. Why do we keep so many companies rather than grouping them into just a few subsidiaries? When you look at Sferaco, it is not really a small company, but the new companies that come on board are smaller and intermediate sized companies who are very specialized on their markets and on their products. Within those companies, we have experts on those products and people working there who are really responsible for their operations.
In terms of sales forces, selling this really high tech kind of equipment is obviously difficult. We need specialized salespeople for that. I think it is more advantageous to stay with very competent, highly motivated employees rather than having bigger companies with the opposite effect. We are going to stay with that model. It does not stop us in certain cases to work in grouping companies together, which was the case of Dipra and Édouard Rousseau to create Odrea. This does not prevent similar companies like PBtub and Thermacome to work very closely together or Mecafer and Domac, for example. We were able to find synergies for those subsidiaries which work on similar markets. I have talked about the share price. I will not say any more of that. I have been challenged because another question, I will look at that later and saying that shareholders may be disappointed.
Another question about the price. We note regularly a level of price share between a higher share price in the summer and at the end of the year. If you take the share price over the year and divide it by 11 and multiply by six, you get what the average is for the end of September. It is not an exact science, but it gives you an idea.
A question from Rudolph.
Okay.
Question from Thierry. Is there a pressure on prices outside the Red Sea? In terms of purchasing transport, that is what I was saying before, is that we signed contracts for the year, fixed prices for transport, and that was done last year, and we have continued to do that in 2026. When we negotiated, we negotiated well, and so we got fixed on fairly low prices, and we are not impacted.
That's not to say that we're not going to be impacted in the future. In 2027, we'll probably have price increases for transport. Downstream from our warehouses to our customers, we've got a diesel tax which is imposed on our transporters. There, there's an adjustment obviously to make. We have to follow the diesel price and that allows the transporters to pass on those costs. But we do manage to maintain our transport prices from us to our customers. In terms of raw materials, we've had, as you said, increase in raw material prices.
Rudolph asked the question, 350 yesterday and it seems like a lot, he says, in terms of the volumes of the share, sorry, about the share price. It's clear that when we see a debt, a public debt, social tensions, all these things impact Thermador Groupe's share price, but other companies too.
I would invite you to look at the expected result in relation to the actual share price, and these analyses that have been done by specialists. If you want to have an idea of what the net result for 2026 will be for Thermador, you can compare that to the share price today, and we see that we've got PER results, which for the most patient amongst you, the most optimistic among you, that's a good starting point.
A question from Florent Kieffer. How do you justify your annual growth objective of above 7%?
Just to be clear, our turnover has been stagnant for five years, 2021 and 2022 followed the COVID years, and they were absolutely fantastic years. Okay? I ask our shareholders to refer to 2019, before the COVID, to compare our results.
When you look at the turnover and what we showed at the annual general meeting, this meeting, we see that turnover since 2019, clearly, we're behind on our objective of 7% per year, but that can be made up. In particular because we've got very historically high levels of cash in the group, and so we can acquire. So we can go ahead with acquisitions. So we remain with our objective to double the size of the group every 10 years. That's 7% growth every year. Given that in that annual growth, there's a part of acquisition, approximately the half of that, and half of that is organic growth. We've had negative inflation periods and now we're on a positive inflation period.
Florent Kieffer asks a question about return on capital. The ROCE has passed from 20% in 2022, to 12% in 2025. I will send the information about again, but I think it's 16 something, around there, percent. Our profitability has fallen. Mechanically, that has an impact on the ROCE of course, but we are between 16% and 17% and we're pretty optimistic about maintaining this. That's on page 19 of the 16.4. Yeah. I just confirmed that from the annual report. Just to correct that information from Florent Kieffer.
Why does the variable earnings of the management look more at operational profit rather than indicators which include capital invested and their cost? I don't know if you looked at that information in our report. It's pretty complicated. But we wanted to have something simpler. It's obviously complicated with non-financial indicators, and we didn't want to make things even more complicated. This notion of result on capital employed is not understood by everybody.
I would like to emphasize the fact that even though the earnings of the directors of the group are high, they're pretty reasonable if you compare our overall packages with comparable companies. The variable part of our earnings is very high. What's the most important for you is the full package and ensure that there's nothing wrong ethically with those amounts. As I said before, we've got a lot of money invested in Thermador shares. I can tell you every day, we're motivated to grow the company over the long term.
Personnel costs have gone from 10.5% to 13.2% of turnover between 2022 and 2025. We've bought companies during those years, and their ratios, employee wage bill to turnover, weren't necessarily favorable in those companies. Then obviously, we understand that we need to find productivity gains.
That's something we analyzed last year, and we saw that we had increase in headcount or in wage bill to constant turnover levels. It's important to understand the complexity in terms of our purchasing operations. The Ecodesign, carbon rules that our customers demand. We had to invest in our purchasing teams and our office-based sales teams. We're kind of on niche markets and they're high-tech products, so all that has a cost. We also saw that additional services. Before we just sold a product, now we sell products with after sales, with certificates and so forth. That increases the personnel cost. We've really taken that on board and we're working on digitalization. Now we have an IT development program which will help us to answer our team's requirements.
It's 6:43 P.M., so we've got 15 minutes to finish this webinar. I'll ask you to be reasonable on the number of questions. We'll just take a break on the questions that you're asking. Those who ask a lot of questions, maybe could you leave a bit of space to other people. Florent Kieffer. Have we calculated the savings which we could make by mutualizing purchasing and administrative functions? As I said earlier on, we've got our subsidiaries which are autonomous on certain subjects, in particular human resources, customers, suppliers. It's they who are responsible for their objectives, their strategies, and all of them are autonomous in terms of their logistics because the success of our companies is their ability to deliver correctly and quickly. On those subjects, we don't want to risk reducing the commercial and logistic bonds of our companies by mutualizing their services.
But yeah, for IT and logistics perhaps, we could look at future improvements. We're also working with subsidiaries to bring on those improvements. When you say, "Why not do it?" I would say that we are doing that, and that's what we're doing in many subsidiaries. We can't do everything at the same time, of course, because of the human resources that are available to us. These projects involve changing fundamentally things, and they take a lot of accompaniment for the human resources. I would say that we've talked about transport in purchasing and sales, and those piloted by Thermador Groupe at the top. What we've been able to centralize in that field and which could bring us economies of scale, we've done. Sharing of good practices, like in digitalization.
All that we've done recently in Thermador is going to be replicated in Jetly, Syveco, and they will benefit from the testing, if you like, at Thermador Groupe at Thermador. Those learnings are passed on.
Florent Kieffer, you say maybe the shareholders are disappointed by the current variation. I can't deny that. We share that disappointment, but I would say again, our results are pretty good and we have a long-term vision. I can't say that France is responsible. The situation in France is fully responsible for the share prices, but it is substantially the case. You could see that when we published our half-year results, the share price went up.
Are we trying to cancel our shares with a buyback of shares? Let me just find. We decided to buy 30,000 shares, and that's one of the It's linked to the operations of developing employee shareholding.
These shares are not going to be canceled. They're going to be used to sell shares to our shareholders, to our employees, sorry. Thierry is worried that we might get a new tax on medium-sized companies next year. I don't think so.
We're not in fiscal integration, so we look at this subsidiary by subsidiary, in terms of thresholds, in terms of profit levels. We're below those levels. The buyback of shares, is it compatible with the purchasing of foreign companies?
I don't think it's incompatible. I think we can use these shares that we own to finance acquisitions abroad, and I think that's appealing to companies that want to join us.
Can you give us more information about your project for buyback? You'll find that in the resolutions. It's nearly finished that because it finishes in October, and we explain the use of these operations. It could either be for transactions for external growth or as motivational tools for employees and managers from the group. Thierry asks if we've had any contacts in liquids in the food market for Spain. Yeah, for Quilinox in Spain, we're working on those synergies. They haven't been deployed yet, but that's one of the subjects that we will be working on in the future, using Quilinox's knowhow in Spain and Portugal for those materials. It's more to do with special pumps for moving liquids around in the agri-food business and mixers and that kind of thing. These are produced in Italy, so in Europe.
They could be interesting to two companies in Thermador Groupe. Rudolf asks if we're buying back shares to work on the share price. We give them an objective in terms of number, a range of share price, and they act on the market independently. So that we're not intervening directly on the market. In terms of buybacks, it's limited. But in terms of quantity, so it's 20%, I think, and that limits the impact they can have on the price. Arturo's asking whether we'll be working on external growth in 2027. Yeah, we hope so. We're getting organized to do that in order to have more and more opportunities. The idea is to have a broad scope of opportunities in order to be able to really choose the best possible candidates.
Florent Kieffer says that the analysis notes are interesting, but these are sponsored activities that are paid for. It's not the case with CIC. The reality is that Thermador partially finances the work of the analysts, but we allow them to work independently, and I'm sure you will trust us with that, and you'll see in the past that they've never said anything false about Thermador Groupe. I invite you to look back to reassure about the future and the fact that these analysts are very serious. I would ask you to trust us. We're not here to.
There was a resolution to buy back the shares. It's something we put in the AGM every year, and it was planned, and it was limited to a certain amount. I think it was 3%. We also limited the price, a maximum price. That's based on the share price in December, and it's the same method every time. I will answer you that more precisely. That was your question about the shares. As we were just saying before, it could be for external growth. We do. It's EUR 107 was the maximum price, and it was 30% maximum.
Florent Kieffer comes back to me saying the indicator on the ROCE is a very good long-term indicator. I'm not saying the contrary. I'm not arguing that. That doesn't stop us being really motivated to work on our working capital requirements. Obviously very important in terms of the ROCE, and that's something that we've done in Thermador Groupe for several quarters through our stock. After the mad post-COVID years, we had to bring our stocks down to a lower level, the level of our sales. That explains the very good cash position we are in at the moment. Romain. Romain is asking about cybersecurity.
"What is your level in terms of cybersecurity investments in progress or to come?" We've two full-time staff and one person working on cybersecurity. We'll continue to invest. Do we communicate a lot on what we're doing? No, we don't. That's a choice we've made. Are we insured? No, we're not insured for that kind of risk. Could we be insured?
That's one of the questions we'll be asking ourselves for next year. In terms of cybersecurity, there's one element which is training for our employees. We've got a training program, regular training programs, so as to avoid incidents or accidents coming from human error.
Personally, I'm sure you've often been contacted by fraudulent sources, SMS, text messages, emails, trying to extort money from you. It's true for everybody. It's true for companies, of course, as well. These forces are very aware of all these tricks. We are training our employees to be careful of that. I've got no more questions from investors. It's 6:55 P.M. Our team behind the glass have done excellent work. Thank you to them. Thank you for simultaneous translation from Neil, for translation. It's a real person. It's not AI. Thank you for all your questions. You see that you're very passionate about Thermador. We will continue with the adventure, of course, and hope in the coming quarters we'll be able to present better news, give you better news about the share price.
Don't hesitate to try to get the young people in your worlds involved, neighbors and family. Please encourage everybody to vote next year in the election. That will hope will make things clearer from 2027 onwards after the general election. Goodbye to all