Good morning. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much to the people attending online, and I know we have many of them. For those of you who are in London, I hope you all enjoyed the morning snow. It's beginning to feel a little bit like Christmas. Not mentioning about the Split project, but the snow. As you can imagine, it's a key milestone for Havas to be here with you this morning to present our Capital Markets Day. Maybe before we deep dive into Havas, I will keep my Vivendi hat. As you know, I wear two hats. One as Vivendi Chairman of the Board and one as the CEO of Havas. From the Vivendi standpoint, we believe this project makes tons of sense.
As some of you were at the Canal+ CMD yesterday, you had a clear view on the strong results of Canal+ . You will have a clear view today on the strong results of Havas and the Grace perspective. It would have been the same if you had the chance to have a look at the Lagardère results, but despite those strong results at Vivendi, the group was suffering from a huge conglomerate discount that was limiting the capabilities of Vivendi to develop or to unlock the full potential of its activities, and under the leadership of the management board of Vivendi led by Arnaud de Puyfontaine. Thank you very much, Arnaud, for being here today with us in person in London. Vivendi has contemplated the feasibility of such a split and we believe for all activities.
And I will put back my faith in Havas. It could be a fantastic opportunity for all the stakeholders, of course for the employees, of course for the clients, for the consumers, for the partners, but also for the shareholders for Havas. As for the other companies that will be listed, it will clearly accelerate the opportunity of growth by conducting some acquisition on the balance sheet or issuing some shares to do external growth. It will fully align the interest of the key leadership teams on the shareholders by being able to incentivize our key leaders on shares. And for Havas as well, it will give us some international visibility. Because one thing we didn't anticipate when we got delisted in 2017 for Havas is that we lost a bit of international visibility, which could be important in B2B businesses.
We are very happy to be back on the stock market and we believe this will accelerate the growth for all the stakeholders. Before we deep dive into Havas, it's a great pleasure to welcome a special talent of Havas. You will see in this presentation we refer a lot about talents. It's a key asset of Havas. Delphine will come back in an instant. She's an interesting talent because she has been working at Havas in our Investor Relations until the delisting, then she worked a bit at Vivendi, then she left the group and we are very happy to have her back. That's what we call a boomerang in our industry. We are very happy to have people working at the group leaving and coming back because they understand that it's a fantastic place to work. Please welcome on stage Delphine Maillet.
Good morning everyone. Welcome to Havas Capital Market Day.
Indeed.
It's a big day today for Havas and hopefully for you. I'm Delphine Maillet, Head of Investor Relations and I have the great pleasure to be your contact for further discussion or questions you may have. Thank you for joining this event both in person and online. This presentation is recorded and will be a webcast, of course, and a replay. Havas, yes, was listed until 2017 and I can recognize familiar faces. It's great to see you again. Since 2017, Havas has evolving lot and our purpose today is really to show you how where we stand with our differences and challenges and also where we want to go and to look forward together in the midterm. Before we go to the interesting part, I know you can't wait. I must invite you to read the disclaimer.
So, it's an important information. Please read it, take the time, and for all. And for risk factors, financial historical information, and also non-GAAP measures, please refer to a prospectus which was released on the website on October 30th. Thank you.
As you can see, we have.
An exciting journey and for you, what is important is you have the opportunity to hear from the top leaders of Havas and opportunity to discuss with them directly. So, Yannick Bolloré, François Laroze, Donna Murphy, Peter Mears, Dan Hagen and Patti Clarke. This presentation will last three hours and a half. We will have a break around 11 o'clock.
Clock.
We'll start at 11:30 A.M., then there will be a Q and A session. At the end, a unique Q and A session, questions from investors and analysts and both from the room and online on the platform. I will moderate the Q and A session. So it's time to begin. Yannick, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much. And just to reassure everyone, I think the three hours and a half include the Q and A. Yes, yes. So don't worry. So let me start by talking about who we are and more important, our future going forward. Havas is, I would say, a well-established company created almost 200 years ago by Charles Havas and now we operate all across the globe. We have more than 23,000 talents. We don't say employees at Havas, we believe every employee is a talent and the group has posted very strong results during the past two years. François will walk you through the results later on this presentation and we'll talk about the future. But it's important to see this map and our scale today because it's clearly the foundations on which we will be building on to get us to an even brighter future.
We operate through all the spectrum of communication, so Havas is able to answer any brief for any clients in any country. This strategy is for us very important, being able to answer every need for our clients in an integrated way. We will talk a lot about integration, which we believe is a key competitive advantage of Havas. How do we operate through three main business units? I would say two classic business units that you will find in other holding companies, our creative business unit and our media business unit, and we have created a specific business unit dedicated to health in 2016, and Donna will explain to us later why this matters and how this will make a difference. If you look at the balance of our different businesses or countries or verticals, you will see that those three divisions are pretty well balanced.
If you look on it by a geographical standpoint. For the first time, we are disclosing the revenue coming from the U.K. and the revenue coming from France. If we have had this discussion five years ago, you would have seen a bigger spread between the U.K. and France. France was more ahead, I would say, so it's a kind of healthy competition between the French and the British, and I wouldn't be surprised that one day the U.K. will overpass France. You see, North America is our first country. It's clearly a region of the world where we believe we have room to grow our presence, and please note that Latam, even if it's 7%, is a place where Havas has a market leading position, especially on the media side. If you look at our revenue coming from verticals, you will see the importance of health care.
I received some questions. We were together with François Laroze during early look meetings with investors. Is Havas overweighted in healthcare? I think being overweighted in healthcare is a good thing. I believe in the future growth of the healthcare sector and we'll explain to you why we believe so. If you look at our client chart. I don't like referring to clients as clients. I don't believe they are our clients and we are their supplier. We see ourselves as true business partners and this is a key point of differentiation for Havas. We really think like if we were working within the client structure, not just waiting for the brief and then execute the brief, but really acting as a proactive business partner. Some of our clients we just have highlighted, a few have been with us for many, many years.
This is the case for Sanofi more than 20 years. I can see Stellantis on the bottom left of the chart. It has been with us through Citroen for more than 70 years. And it's funny because the account director on Citroën who won the business, he's still working within the group 70 years after. It's Jacques Séguéla for those of you who know him. He has just received the award of Adman of the Year at Cannes Lions next year to celebrate his 90th birthday. Some clients have joined us recently. I can see Shell that has awarded Havas Media for their global media remit or Danone for creativity globally. Some of those clients will join the list next year, such as Wyndham, the great company, the great hotel chain company in North America that has been won through our new operating system.
Our new strategy Converged. We will talk about in a minute. This is for us an important foundation of Havas to be building for the future. We will talk a lot during this presentation on what we call in our business cross fertilization. We believe that when we have an existing relationship with the clients, it's easier to increase our scope of work with them because we know them. We have established a trustful relationship than just onboarding new clients. Now I'm going to talk about awards. So I'm sure you are wondering as investors, what do we care about awards? It's not just an ego trip of an ad man. We care about awards because we know that awarded campaigns are more effective than non awarded campaign. It's easy to understand when you think about it.
You remember much more a campaign that has surprised you or made you laugh or moved you than the campaign which you will forget instantly, so that's why we will talk a lot about creativity. We believe this is an asset. We believe that the most creative groups will outperform their peers in the future, and creativity not just on the creative division, also on the media division, also on the health division, on the PR, even in the consumer experience everywhere. We need to be creative to differentiate ourselves. Talking about ourselves, let's talk about the team. We have the chance at Havas to have an international team that have been here for a long time. Very multicultural, based out of Europe, Spain, France, U.K., based in the U.S.
I won't name all the people in this list and we should add many other people that are essential to the business. Talent is clearly something very important. At Havas, we have a truly different culture than the other group. We also have the chance to have a large shareholder since 2005, the Bolloré Group, which we believe is a key advantage going forward. First, it's giving us stability and help us to develop a long-term strategy while not worrying, keeping a focus on the short-term results as well. Also I think it's a magnet to attract talent to be working in a family-driven company. And I also think it's a good differentiation when it comes to clients relationship. Most of our clients, they like the fact that they know we will still be around in decades.
I'm saying decades because I committed myself to remain the CEO of Havas at least until 2035. For those of you who have paid attention, it will be the 200-year anniversary of the creation of Havas. Talking about family, I have to mention the global spirit that exists at Havas. We refer to ourselves as the Havas family for the vast majority, or the huge majority I should say, of Havasians. Havas is like a second family, a professional family. And this is really something that we are very proud of. We are all united behind a common mission around making a meaningful difference, a meaningful impact for businesses. We know for a fact that brands that are perceived to be meaningful are clearly overperforming their peers from a business standpoint. And we are here as a business partner to help them create this meaningful impact.
Talking about meaningfulness, I have to talk about CSR. CSR is not new to Havas. Even before my time, Havas started to engage in CSR around climate, around gender equality. Now we have developed many new things around CSR. We are getting ready with double materiality and CSRD, and we are very proud of what we have been doing. First, because we believe it's the right thing to do. Companies have a role to play, especially a communication company, and also we believe it's good for business because in most of the pitches our clients are asking us our CSR credentials because they need our CSR credentials for their own CSR credentials. So that's why it's very important to get those certifications that you can see on the chart, and some things are unique at Havas.
We have developed a carbon calculator under the leadership of the team at Havas and Stephanie, our head of CSR that allows clients to measure the impact, the carbon impact of their company. And in some cases we can even change the media mix to have the same kind of results with less carbon, with the campaign emitting less carbon emission. So the question you should ask is if we want to invest in communication, why choosing Havas? Is Havas a good business partner to clients? Not only I believe Havas is a good business partner to clients, I believe we are the ideal business partner. First, let's look at our industry from a number standpoint. I'm sure you know those numbers. The industry is growing a bit more than 4% year on year. Digital now is a vast majority of the spend.
You see the rise of retail marketing with plus 20% growth year on year. It has surpassed TV or it will get bigger than TV quite rapidly. If you look at our industry from a client point of view, how does it look like? It looks very complex. You remember the digital revolution 20 years ago. We had to grow through the proliferation of data, the rise of e-commerce. Now we've been talking about AI for the past two years. Now things are changing all the time. It's a rapidly changing industry, and at the same time, clients want simplicity. They want a partner that can help them navigate this very, very complex value chain. So how do we do that? First, in delivering an integrated approach that's once again a key differentiator at Havas.
Those of you who are investors at Havas since 2013 know what I'm talking about. Just to give you an anecdote, as we are in London today, the first time I visited the London office, I should say offices, was in 2011, 2012, and we were present at Havas in seven different locations. It was mainly apartments in a row, so I spent more time in the tube to go from an agency to another than with the team, and what was interesting is that some of the team were working for the same clients, but they didn't know each other, so I had a very simple idea. Why not move everyone together in the same place and create what we call at the time a village and being able to deliver a much more effective and efficient approach to clients, much more integrated.
And at the time, we were the first to pioneer the integration and it has made a huge difference. So we still have this first mover advantage. Those of you who follow advertising know that competitors are trying to catch up. But in that field, our scale is giving us a huge advantage. What are the results of this strategy? If you look at this chart, just first have a look on the right side of the chart. How many clients are using us for different expertise? When I say different expertise, it could be creative in media or media in PR or production. Creative in media. 93% of our clients, 93% of our clients are using us for multiple expertise. It's a huge number. So we can say it's a success.
If you look at geographies, you can see here the importance of being global, because you can see that at least our clients are choosing us for more than two countries. In most cases for regions like Europe or Europe plus U.S. are global. So the importance to be integrated, the importance to be global. Now, I want to play you a video. It's an interview I had the chance to make with one of our very important clients, the CEO of Sanofi, Paul Hudson, and please, in this video, listen to the im portance of the word partnership.
The relationship with Havas has been going on, as you said, for 15 years.
You know, I think our relationship has.
Gone from strength to strength since then.
Do you have any advice on how we can be better partner to Sanofi for up and for the launch of the new products?
Yeah, for sure, and you know, one of our first.
Conversations, I think it's one of the reasons things started well was we had.
A shared desire to see the pixel.
Reach as many patients who needed it as possible, and the team and everybody, you know, really stepped forward to bring advice to.
Share best practices from other industries.
Sectors and their own experiences from healthcare.
I think we shared a common interest in being disciplined.
Great partnerships grow together, I find. And that's, you know, what we've done.
We did it together.
We did it through media, through creative.
Through delivery, through execution.
We expect you to push us, you push me a lot on what we could do more with data and digital from the very beginning.
Remember, in the end, if we keep.
Pushing each other more patients who are.
Suffering have a shot at a normal life.
It's good that between the two companies, we're both excited about the partnership.
Where it goes.
I know you'll tell me if you're not happy with it and I'll tell you the same, that's how it should be.
Thank you very much, Paul, for this interview. I think it tells a lot on what we are up to at Havas. We talked a lot about digital transformation. Digital, of course, as you can imagine, is a key part of Havas. But I also have to mention the, let's say, the future segments of growth, which are very important. We are very proud to have developed those segments. First one in entertainment and it has accelerated since we joined the Vivendi Group. Havas is clearly the group, the most advanced group in terms of relationship with the entertainment world. Very proud on what we have been doing around the customer experience, production. We'll talk about e-commerce with Havas Market and of course Edelman, our international PR firm that is helping us to organize this meeting. How do we look forward in terms of tech strategy?
Clearly, tech, data, or AI now has been a huge focus at Vivendi over the past 10 years. We have invested EUR 600 million over the past 10 years. An average of EUR 60 million a year in training, developing internal tools. Talking about training, it's very important to make sure that our teams around the world are staying up to date. We have developed proprietary data and tech tools. We have conducted key partnerships with the tech giants of the world, such as Microsoft, Adobe, or Trinity. I need to mention Google, of course. All those partnerships have been playing a key role. I also have to mention what we have been doing in M and A, which has been transformative at Vivendi. M&A is a key differentiating point at Vivendi.
To walk you through a more detailed presentation on our M and A strategy, let me give the floor to François Laroze.
Hi everyone. Happy to see you. See you again for most of you, and I'm very excited to be part of this interesting. This very ambitious and exciting project of listing. I will try to remind you what we have achieved in the M and A and try to convince you that it's a real differentiator for AVAs and that this M and A will clearly be a driver of our future growth and margin expansion. If you look at this map, since the beginning of 2022 we achieved 23 acquisitions. You see it's all over the world and all type of expertise. Seven of these has been done in the U.K., four in Australia, two in India, the rest in Canada, in the Emirates or China. To make such a success, we need a clear strategy.
The strategy that we launched with Yannick more than 10 years ago now is around three pillars. The first one is clearly geography. We want to complement the geography in which we consider we are not strong enough. That can be core countries as we did for example in Ukraine or secondary countries in which we consider we are too small. The second one is business. We try to complement the business that will drive our future growth CX PR event. We have invested all types of expertise across the last years. The third one is cultural fit. Maybe the most important among the hundreds of targets we are reviewing year after year. We really focus on the one that will be perfectly in line with our strategy. We do not want to invest in agencies that will behave as silos in the organization.
The agency must project themselves as future partners of all the agencies of the Havas group. In terms of financial, we focus on accretive agency in terms of revenue, accretive agency in terms of EBIT margin. And obviously we avoid to buy at too high multiple. We do not want to pay too much for the agency. We consider we must pay the right price. Then we choose partners. The agencies that are comfortable with our system of acquisition by tranche. Most of the time we acquire a majority stake from 50%-60%. Then some buyouts in a period of from three to seven years which secure the founder of the agency and which gives the founders the opportunity to make more money. If the agency is doing well, the buyouts will be higher than the upfront. So it's clearly virtuous circle. That is thanks to this strategy.
To implement such a strategy, we need a strong team and we have a very nice team around Didier Rigal, our head of M&A. Christelle de La Baye, who is the Chief Integration Officer, and Margaux Ruyen is working in Asia for local M&A. They work on two types of deals. Some of them are dealt at global level. The negotiation, the sourcing, everything is done at global level. Some others are done at local or regional level, and in that case the central team you've got here just ensures that the strategic fit of assets is perfectly in line with the strategy. We look back earlier since the beginning of 2022. Now let's move in the past. Since 2017 we have made 50 acquisitions. It's an average of six acquisitions per year.
You see that even in 2020 year we have been active with four deals. You see also the acceleration since 2022 with a record year in 2023 and nine deals which have been closed. These acquisitions contributed to 1.5% in terms of additional organic growth and which is roughly EUR 40 million of additional revenue as a result of this. We are very proud to tell you that since we have launched this strategy, we have never recorded any goodwill impairment on our acquisition, which confirmed that the choice we've made was a good one. Let me now spend some time on three examples. The first one, Komm, which joined the Havas Group in 2023. It was one of the most talented and creative agencies in the world. Nathalie will come back later and will testify the reason why she joined Havas.
But we are very, very proud to have Uncommon on board. You see the client list and they are now thanks to the Havas Group. They are also expanding themselves now in New York and in Stockholm. The second is PivotRoots. PivotRoots is an agency in India that roughly ticks all boxes. It complements our geography in India. We were not big enough in India five years ago. We have invested and we are now almost 2,000 people working in India. It also has been a real complement to our digital media agency and performance marketing. Now we have more than 200 employees working in PivotRoots and a very nice portfolio with Amazon or Unilever. Third one is Gate One.
Remember six or seven years ago, some people were considering that the holding media companies could be under the competition of the big consulting company that were trying to enter the digital business. At that time we told ourselves it's important to launch a consulting vertical. So we decided to partner with Gate One, which was niche agency based in the U.K. and after five years they have tripled their revenue and now they're working both on their own, with their own client base, but also working with all the agencies of Havas, helping these agencies to service their clients in consulting. To conclude rapidly, we have been quite surprised, happily surprised I would say, to see that we have been ranked number one buyer two years in a row in 2022 and 2023 by the Cisco ranking and competence.
Also on the five-year period from 2019 to 2023, awarded the most active advertising with 32 acquisitions for 13 countries. You may consider this ranking as secondary, but it's very important. It reminds how active we are. And I would say also that it helps us to attract other agencies who know that Havas is really skilled to welcome this kind of agency who want to invent a new future in a big group. So thank you for your attention and I give back the floor to Yannick.
Thank you very much, and that's true that I think maybe you didn't mention, maybe you mention later, but all those acquisitions have been made without any single goodwill impairment. I don't want to rush. I don't know if you're doing it at the end, but that's a key point. I have strong M and A, no goodwill impairment. Now we've talked about the foundations of the future, so now let's talk about the future. I'm sure you heard a lot if you have read the latest Havas communication those past months about Converged. Converged clearly is a new tool for Havas. A new way of working. A new operating system that aims to create much more effectiveness and efficiency for our clients. We believe it's going to revolutionize the way our people operate and the way we interact with our clients.
One thing which is important with this tool, of course we have tech, data, AI. Of course we mentioned all the investment we have been making, but something which is very important and which we believe is making a big difference is the talents using these tools. If you go to other holding company speeches, they only talk about tools. Data tech, we talk about talents. It's key. At Havas, we like to say that talents not using AI will be replaced by talents using AI, and we also want to add that the best talents using AI will replace average talents using those machines. In a sense, thanks to Converged, we are still a people first organization, but now supercharged by data tech and AI. In terms of investment, how does it work? We were spending on average EUR 60 million a year.
We are accelerating the path of investment from EUR 60 million a year to EUR 100 million a year. We have committed to invest EUR 400 million in the next four years, which will make the total of investment in that space to EUR 1 billion in 13 years. While looking at François maintaining our trajectory to increase the profitability, this strategy will completely transform our client experience. I think it's important to spend time on how this works. There's been a huge investment of time and resources for the group, and Dan Hagen will walk you through Converged and how it works with the four different steps. What I want you to take out of this tool is really the benefits. You have benefits for talent. We are working with the team. We have weekly meetings.
Sorry again to the team for all those weekly meetings for more than a year now, but employee experience, talent experience, the tool, the way we work is very important. It's really about the convergence of the different expertise. It's a kind of acceleration of the integration and it's also an acceleration on the convergence between agencies and clients. Release this double level of convergence and for clients, more effectiveness, more efficiencies. In a nutshell, converge is the tool that we have been designing to be the best tool of the industry and to make a huge difference. Before leaving the floor to Donal, I wanted to show you a quick video, but please don't play the sound about the Olympics.
We are here in London, so I see Mark Whelan, our Chairman of the London Village, who is fighting against, competing against Raphaël, the CEO of the French Village for the silver medal. As we talk about the Olympics and we are very proud to have been the key agency to organize and to partner with the Olympics Committee to organize these great events. From the first winning bid seven years ago, when they have chosen together Paris for 2024 and Los Angeles for 2028, we have been the agency for all the communication for the design of the logo that you can see, we have been doing the activation of many sponsors. LVMH, EDF. You can see here.
Q4, we have been doing for Accor, as well as you can see, organizing the opening ceremonies for both the Olympics and Paralympics, which is by far the biggest rating ever achieved the Olympic ceremony. The marathon. We have been organizing the marathon for Orange. It was an exceptional moment. The only downside is that the team running marathon at Havas has asked me to run the marathon with them. So I had to run it. But it was a great team effort. So thank you very much, everyone. And now I leave the floor to Donna. Thank you. She's a rock star. She's a real rock star. Now the show can begin.
Wow, wow, wow. Hi, I'm Donna Murphy. I have a similar background to you guys. I actually started out in public accounting with Ernst and Young and Goldman Sachs, and then I did most of the acquisitions in North America in the early days. I've been with Havas for more than 30 years. I was actually 12. That's a joke. When I started working here, and it's been an absolute honor and privilege. One of the reasons why I've worked at Havas so many years is because of our entrepreneurial spirit, the family atmosphere, and how we deliver and build a culture together. I also took over responsibility for the creative business two years ago, and the reason why we did that, I think you heard Paul Hudson speak about the power of creativity, health and media together.
We saw that coming together very rapidly after Covid and right out of the box, we had a pitch for Harman and we pitched Harman with Health Creative, along with my partner Peter Mears for media. And it was a very interesting pitch because we were able to insert health into consumer, because every consumer brand is a health brand. We were able to talk about the effect of health on headsets and exercise. Because I'm going to talk a little bit more about the health network later on, but we have doctors, pharmacists, anthropologists on staff, which really bring a unique angle to every single brand that we work with across the globe. So here we go. We're very well positioned. We have one governance across health and creative. And as Yannick stated, we have one P and L. So there's no competition.
Unlike some of our competitors who are in silos and they're competing from PR to advertising. We don't. We deliver what's best for the client and we deliver talent to tasks across the globe unlike any of the competitors. Talking about Havas creative, we have more than 10,000 folks working across the globe, EUR 1.1 billion in net revenue and we have every single expertise. As Yannick spoke to. We're going to talk a little bit more about Dan's going to talk about pros and pixel. I'll do a shameless commercial on H/ Advisors in the end. And our events group was the group that launched the Olympics and the Paralympics, which was an unbelievable proud day for our French colleagues and for Havas. But it doesn't stop there. We push the envelope every single day. We are not static. We are looking for new offerings to differentiation.
One such is our Global Chief Music Officer. We are the only global network with a Global Chief Music Officer, Damian Escobar, who is an award-winning Grammy violinist. I'd like to share with you a video on the Damian and show you the results right out of the box when we launch the Art of Sound. Can you play the video please?
All rock stars.
Start out with a reason.
As a black kid from Queens.
Mine was to succeed by doing the unexpected. To break barriers and stereotypes, to make.
A difference.
To build a community.
To.
Build brands, to inspire change. All rock stars are the reason we rock.
Out of the box, Kenvue, which is the OTC spin-off of J and J, came to us. They have a shampoo, OGX, in the United States failing greatly. They weren't sure what to do with it. They were only dealing with TV. And we brought in Damien who crafted an original song with Demi Lovato, who's a famous American singer, launched it on TikTok across digital across the globe, turned out to be the number one song this summer. And right now OGX is the number one brand across CVS in the United States. That's just differentiation. The different thinking we bring, the innovation every single day at Havas. But why don't you hear from some of our clients? When you hear from these clients, we work with multiple disciplines across for every client you're going to hear from now.
I love the fact that my Havas team always owns the goals with me, they literally embody the goals. They immerse themselves in my brand. They bring incredible creativity. They challenge the status quo, they'll challenge.
Me and they'll push me on my thinking.
I don't view Havas as a partner. I truly view them as an extension of my team.
What I like about Havas Village is that it has a very good ethos at the heart of creativity. Creativity for me is an equation between realism, unrestricted thought process and also inclusion.
Havas has brought so much value to the Wells Fargo brand.
They are data-fueled and strategic in.
Everything that they do. They're always focused on our core business objectives.
I would describe their leadership and staff.
As intelligent, passionate, flexible and dedicated. And they care.
They care very, very deeply.
Where does that bring us to? I think you've heard Yannick say over and over again, talent. That's what's going to differentiate us, right? That's our number one asset. We bring talent in from all over the globe. A couple of wonderful people that joined this year is Carol from BETC in Brazil, brilliant mind David Shulman, our new global head of CX Worldwide. Another rock star, Artur, who joined us, who's our Chief Technology Officer. We brought in a new co-CEO for New York, Sarah Collinson. Out of the box. They just won Wyndham Hotel right across the board. Very exciting. But let's talk about creativity a minute. Creativity has never been more important. Yannick tells an interesting story that he told at Cannes that I love, I tell everybody. It's my story now. And it's.
If you think about prior to AI, when you had a picture done, what would happen with your family? An artist would come to your house. You'd all sit still and the picture would be painted. Well, what happened after the camera was developed? All the crummy artists are gone and only the brilliant artists remain. That's what's going to happen with creativity and AI. AI will deliver a sea of sameness. We need brilliant creativity to differentiate. And creativity is at the heart of Havas in everything we do and our talent. And when you speak about creative talent, talk about BETC, the most awarded creative agencies in the world, around the world. Think of all the work they've done. Remarkable. Uncommon. I'm going to speak about Uncommon for a second. So we acquired Uncommon and we invested in them almost two years ago.
And for us, when we do acquisitions, it's about culture first. If the culture does not match, it's not going to work. We're not going to integrate it. It's not going to seamlessly fold into the village. The second I met Uncommon and Janik met them, we clicked. We knew they were the right people. Janik actually came up with a pretty good idea which we use for most acquisitions now. He said, let's make sure they're aligned with our vision. Let's have them write a press release before we agree the deal to make sure we're aligned and have them do it. They did do it. The press release that they wrote about the alignment within Havas is the actual press release that was done the day the deal was done. Tells you a lot about culture and our integration. Continuing on about Uncommon, the creativity is bar none.
They just won Fast Company, most innovative agency of the year. But the most recent example, last week we were in a global converged pitch media creative across the globe. We had 60 CMOs and CEOs of a large global company on Common Leather Creative. When the pitch was over, the CEO of the U.K. stood up and said, "When I looked at that creative, I had a tingle go down my spine." Doesn't get any better than that. Certainly doesn't. So with that, I'd love to bring Natalie up to talk about why she joined Havas. Come on up, Natalie.
Thank you, Dora.
Lovely to meet you all. I'm Natalie, co-founder of Uncommon Creative Studio.
I'm delighted to be here with you today.
It's been almost two years since Uncommon partnered with Havas, as both Donna and François have said, and that deal was a reference point, as many have called it, as to.
How a deal is done in this industry.
I wanted to unpack for you.
A little bit today why we, myself and my co-founders chose to partner with Havas. Because I think it's an important story when you're thinking about investing in Havas. It really tells you a little bit.
About what is going on behind and.
Why I was so attracted to it. I have personally worked both holding companies.
Independent agencies in the past.
I can fundamentally tell you that working with companies is a fundamentally creative mindset that really permeates the whole organization.
A real understanding that the value of.
The company that we're building is the sum of the problems that we can solve for our clients, that we scale by applying valuable content to those businesses.
Those remarkable creative leaps that we take are the things that really propel the.
Businesses forward that we work with.
Why is that important?
Certainly it's the appreciation for creativity.
That the very best brands in the world have and the most remarkable talent, and that means that certainly that was.
The ethos behind Uncommon as to why we could attract better talent and work with the most phenomenal brands in the world.
And that's what attracted us to working with Donna and Yannick. And as you said, Donna, when we first met each other, really felt like.
We could become long term partners because there was that real connection right from the beginning.
Now, as founders, myself and my two co-founders, we're not done, and we didn't want to work with.
A partner that would immediately want us to move on. For us, we've got so much more to give, so we wanted to partner with people that really understood our long term vision and that we felt could help partner.
With us as we had a long.
Term trajectory, helping us scale faster, faster, further and better.
We asked a lot as to how that might be done. I think the best entrepreneurs often do, but honestly, it felt like Havas was.
The only team that really understood how to do that.
And for me, that's because there's a.
Palpable entrepreneurial spirit that runs through the.
Whole organization, an agility that portrays the scale and the impact of everything you're.
Going to see today.
For me, that was really, really attractive, a real meeting of minds as to.
How we could take this and work together to build something bigger than I could have achieved on my own with the company.
And so, if there's one thing I want to leave you with today, it's that have us not only understand how to attract the very best, but how to nurture those partners and that partnership with business so that we can go.
Further than we could have done and I could have done on our own.
And also doing it in a way.
As François says, making sure that acquisitions such as ours help raise the boats for the whole of the Havas organization. Thank you.
So I had a bright morning. When I saw Natalie this morning, she walked in and said, whoa, we just won Motorway sports in the U.K. Like, thank you, Natalie.
Good morning.
I'd love to share a piece of work with you. I think you guys would all find this and gals amusing. In the U.S., we won a bank called PNC Bank. How do you differentiate a bank in a really crowded market in the U.S.? We're going to talk about boring, brilliant boring. Not only are they brilliant boring, we have bankers at PNC proud to be boring. From the CEO down, they're wearing a badge. Take a look at our spot, which was spread on internal comms, external comms all around. I'm not a single blonde boring.
Think about it.
Boring is the unsung catalyst for bold.
What straps bold to a rocket and?
Hurdles it into space?
Boring does great job.
Astro curses over.
Boring is the jumping off point for all the unboring things we do. Boring makes vacations happen, early retirement's possible, and startups start up because it's smart, dependable and steady. All words you want from your bank.
Taking chances is for skateboarding and gas.
and sound, not bank. That's why PNC Bank strives to be boring with your money. Pragmatic, calculated, kind of boring.
Moving to Boca, boring. That was a dolphin, right? It's simple, really. For nearly 160 years, PNC Bank has had one goal. To be brilliantly boring with your money so you can be happily fulfilled with your life. Which is pretty unboring if you think about it.
Thank you.
Boring.
Proud to be boring. It's okay. I must do a shameless commercial on our strategic and financial communications group, H Advisors. So H Advisors works across public affairs, crisis M&A. They do a spectacular job and we have an unbelievable client roster with Amazon, Disney, Google, Deloitte, etc. They are 700 professionals in every major financial market and they're integrated within all of Havas's clients. They're just fantastic. I'd like to end. In every creative meeting, I actually start with a piece of creative. Everyone comes to the meeting and brings a brilliant piece of creative that they've just worked on. I'd like to share with you some of the creative work from the creative group. Play the video, please.
Every time I'm told impossible, all I.
Here is impossible.
In fainting.
We have the lucky ones.
Think of an insura nce commercial without Progressive's.
Dr. Rick,
he's created the ultimate guide to help sufferers everywhere unbecome their parents.
I'm Dr. Rick and I'm listening.
Just hit the button. It's not as easy as it used to be.
Make me feel less frustrated and less aware of my tremors, and I could definitely see myself being more connected. Now.
His beloved daughter, diagnosed with Down syndrome.
Quiet, mother's telling a story.
Let's start to make a bridge from creative to health. So how many people know what GLP-1s are in the audience? Ah, good, good. A few. Okay, so GLP-1 is the phenomenon you hear about Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, which is the miracle drug for weight loss. It's also looking at indication for Alzheimer's, stroke, addiction, you name it. It's had a huge impact. It's actually projected to be $470 billion by 2032. It's impacting every single surrounding industry you can think of. Travel, they're going to have to recalculate the fuel load because we're all going to be really thin. Entertainment, think about the dating apps, fashion. It's going to have a huge impact. So here we are. Havas uniquely positioned. We launched the first GLP-1 consultancy of its kind.
We're out there tracking data, we're speaking to our clients on how to deal with it across the creative group, the health group, how it impacts their industry, how to position and the way to go. Last week we had a GLP-1 Day in New York. We had 180 CMOs attend. This is a critical topic that you should all stay close with out of the box. We're all working across with many of our clients, helping them position them, food, nutrition, nutraceuticals, et cetera across the globe. So let's talk about the health story. So I started with health when we had 80 people. It's been an unbelievable ride. We have almost 4,000 people worldwide in health, EUR 700 million in gross income, and we handle every single discipline across the globe. You can think of.
As Janique said, in addition to what you would expect from a traditional communication agency, we also have medical affairs, medical education. We have a payers consulting group where we consult with pricing, we do launch excellence, you name it, we bring it across. But before I speak about the structure, I want to point out one of our partnerships, Trinity, which again why we are unique and how we differentiate ourselves. Trinity was a minority investment that we made along with Koberg and another PE firm. It's extremely interesting to us because they handle pre-commercial all the way up the spectrum before a drug is approved. They have unique data and analytics that because of our investment we have a unique opportunity to use this data and analytics in everything we do.
Dan Hagen is going to speak about it a little bit later on and how we integrate this into Converge, but what's really important is we look at least 50 partnerships a year across all of us because we don't need to create everything; things are moving very quickly. We can have unique partnerships that are going to accelerate it, that are exclusive to us and we've been very successful with this strategy, so the health group is structured into three global networks. First is Havas Life, which is the global powerhouse in 80 different countries. Havas Lynx, which comes from digital routes, and our newest global network, Jacques, which we launched in honor of Jacques Séguéla and his 90th birthday, which is the global disruptor. This works very well for us because of conflicts. We have no conflicts in health.
We firewall them all and move them around the globe. They're then supported by every discipline I previously described, including Gate one. Our consultancy is very important to us and is off from the front end pulling all the other disciplines across. Talent. We're going to talk about talent again. You look at the six people at the top of this box. We probably have over 100 years of expertise together, been together, built the agency along with wonderful talent who has joined us along the way. You have Anna Maria Marin who joined last week, who's an executive from Pfizer Europe. She now heads Havas Health Europe. Eric Weisberg, who was a consumer creative who oversees our creative and as I previously said, doctors, nurses, physicians, advertising people, and we have many people from the pharma side to bring the commercial strategy across. I'm really proud of this slide.
We won 16 out of the last 17 global holding company consolidations in health. Roughly 70% of the health business is global clients. I don't think any of our competitors can say this, this is real, but when you look at how these global holding companies are structured, it's important that you understand this is not one client. It's multiple brands within each client and the brands within each client. We pitched and won every single one. Take a look at Sanofi 2004. We started with two brands. We currently have 20 brands, 20 brands today. We worked with hundreds of brands over the 15 years. We launched brands, we worked on brands that didn't make data. We worked on brands that went patent, and we work on them for every single discipline across, including media, creative, media, health. We deliver on it.
You heard Paul Hudson talk about Dupixent. We launched Dupixent from zero. It is projected to do 14 billion this year with four indications. Consistency is very important in global marketing. We're the only ones that could execute flawlessly ex-U.S. in the health business. I say that with conviction. Take a look at the consistency that we deliver, which ties in the strategy of the brand, which we have proven data. When the strategy is tied in with consistency, it lifts the top of the line of the brands. There's no boundaries. There's no boundaries in this world. Cross culture. But we co-create with the countries because we have to be sensitive to local nuances. If you take a look at the lower right-hand side, that's China. China's slightly different because you can't show any skin in China.
That's the differentiation of Havas. Proud moment for Havas. We launched the Pfizer COVID vaccine. It was July. I got a phone call from Donna. We think we have a vaccine. We don't even have a brand team yet. Could you help? We assembled a team from all around the world from Havas who worked all through COVID, holidays, weekends, preparing to educate the government, the nurses, the physicians, the patients to get ready to take this vaccine. I tell you, when this vaccine rolled off the assembly line, there wasn't a dry eye in Havas. How lucky were we to have just a little impact on humanity and COVID and pull us out of the pandemic. Proud day for us. I'd be remiss if I didn't end with some more creative and this is some creative from one of our networks, Havas Life. Please enjoy. Play the video.
[audio distortion]
So with that brilliant creative needs to be amplified. Hence my partner in crime, Peter Mears.
Thank you, Donna. Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to be with you all. I'm going to walk you through the media network's transformation journey over the last few years. I'm going to talk to you about how we're unlocking value for our clients and how we've got a really strong strategy for the future. But before I do that, I just want to set a little bit of context because I think it's important, important to understand the future journey that we're on and that context is based on. Donna said she's been with Havas for 30 years. I've not been with Havas for 30 years, but I've been working inside media agencies for 30 years, and in my opinion, this is the most important moment and the most exciting moment for the media industry business and specifically for us inside Havas, so I'm going to tell you why.
Over the last few years, there have been some really interesting emerging trends which have come around. Three trends of data, commerce and content. Now, these trends have informed everything that we've looked to put together for our clients in terms of the products that we're building, the way we're engaging with our clients, and the kind of business that we're looking to build into the future. Some of these stats that I think are really interesting for you guys to think about. On the data front, we have levels and access to data, data today that were previously unimaginable. But with that comes a little risk. So 67% of our clients feel a little overwhelmed by the levels of data that they have access to. So it's a great opportunity, but there's also some risk commerce.
Of course, the explosion of e-commerce over the last few years is inarguable. All of us have changed the way that we think about commerce. The way that we purchased and our consumer journeys have completely transformed. $5.5 trillion are expected to move through the global B2C e-commerce revenue channel by 2027. That's a massive opportunity for our clients and one that we're very excited about, and thirdly, what we're calling this content-centric approach, so consumers today have a very, very different access to different channels of different entertainment. The intersection of entertainment with media and sport and all the different areas of entertainment have unlocked a wealth of new media opportunities to reach consumers. Yannick talked earlier about the Olympics. If you think about the Olympics was an amazing event for Paris, of course, but it was also an amazing media event.
We had levels of streaming access and digital access that were just not possible from a technological perspective a few years ago. And that unlocks a huge opportunity for our clients and a huge opportunity for us. So with those in mind, if you think about the way that consumers are carrying their lives through media these days, it's unlocked a whole new realm of opportunities. And our role is to build media experiences around consumers Connected Journey. And we built our strategy around those three areas that I mentioned. So we've built our future strategy around data, content and commerce. So this is kind of our business plan on a page, if you will, for the media network. As I said, we've developed some diversified services. Havas Play is our content capability, Havas Market is our e-commerce practice, and CSA is our data and tech capability.
I'll talk about those in a second. To be able to invest in these three new core capabilities. What we've been looking to do is optimize our core business. We're investing a lot of money in AI and machine learning to help optimize and make more efficient the core media planning and buying business. We're looking to leverage centers of excellence through offshoring in Latam, India and Spain. As François mentioned, we've done 50 deals in the M and A front. A number of those have been inside the media network. We've closed nine deals over the last couple of years and those are either in new geographies for us, but most of them are inside these core areas of data, tech and content. Just to take a step back, what is the media network. Our mission inside of the group is to fuel converged.
Yannick mentioned Converged previously. Converged is our new group strategy. Dan's going to talk about it in more detail after me. But know that all of the technology that we created for Converged was built inside the media network. So we are the media data tech arm of Converge. So this is the media network on a slide, if you will. We're at 8,500 a month, amazing talents. There's the T word again. You're going to hear it a lot today. We're operating in 140 countries around the world. We generated EUR 1 billion in revenue at the end of 2023, and we operate in all areas of the media landscape, from consulting strategy to investment, media performance, consumer passions, retail media and data analytics, and we work with over 3,000 clients around the world.
I just want to double click on our client list because I think you guys should take notice of it. We're very proud of it. This is a sampling of the clients that we have the pleasure and it's a moment of pride for us, for me to share this client list. We work with these clients locally, globally and regionally. The important thing to know about these clients is when we look at our global clients, a number of the largest are very long tenured. So we've worked with many of our global clients for over eight years. We run a biannual client satisfaction survey with a third party and we get consistently high average scores of over eight for net promoter scores. So our clients not only stick with us, but they're happy to be with us.
The reason they cite for sticking with us is because of our digital and data capabilities. Not only do we have sticky relationships with our current clients, but we've also been very successful in attracting new clients into the portfolio. We are active in the new business front, as you'd expect locally, regionally and globally. We're having great success. Some of those successes have already been mentioned this morning. RECMA is a third-party benchmarking service that we work with and RECMA have called us the number one network globally in growth rate for the last 10 years. We're very proud of our new business performance and we expect that that will continue given the opportunities that we're unlocking with our growth strategy. Back to our talent. We have 8,500 teammates.
I have the pleasure of working with 8,500 teammates around the world. Over 1,000 of them now are data scientists, commerce and content specialist, so that gives you more reassurance on the direction that the business is heading and that we really are investing into these key growth areas. This is the landscape, the ecosystem of the media network. On the left side of the slide you'll see our core services, which are Havas Media and Arena Media, our global media investment networks, and Havas Edge, our media performance practice. On the right side are the three areas of growth for diversified services that I mentioned earlier. Havas Play is our content and activation specialist, Havas Market, our e-commerce and retail media expertise, and CSA is our data and tech specialist.
I'm going to walk through each of those in a little more detail. Our global powerhouse brands are Havas Media and Arena Media, operating in every market around the world, unified by a common process called MX stands for Media Experience. This allows us to serve international and global clients consistently and scale opportunities very easily and very quickly. Increasingly, our clients want to talk to us about performance marketing. Our practice in the performance space is Havas Edge and Edge is active across the entire suite of performance, the performance landscape, from audience identification through to activation and measurement. We're active in every country that our clients need to be and across all channels from TV through to digital and programmatic through to our diversified services. The first one I want to talk about is Play. Play operate in the culture space.
They're experts in influencer branded content, experiential, building partnerships and sponsorships. Play is arguably the most creative of the brands that we have inside the media network. They won a lot of awards, including being voted MMG Agency of the Year for 2024. Havas Market is our e-commerce practice. We launched Havas Market in 2020 during the pandemic. It was a fun discussion with Yannick about how we were going to unlock the potential of e-commerce for our clients, and we're now active in over 20 countries around the world. We've got over 800 experts in the e-commerce and retail media space. This expertise has grown very quickly and rapidly for us. We expect that growth to continue. We have a set of performance proprietary tools and we built partnerships with Amazon, with Shopify and Mirakl.
So this is really an interesting part of our business and will continue to grow for us into the future. The third of our diversified services specialism is CSA who are data and tech specialists. Three areas inside CSA helping both on the consulting and on the execution of data and analytics for our clients. And increasingly we're getting invited into our clients to talk about their own data landscapes and how we can help them with their digital and data transformation projects. So as we have a lot of conversation around AI and machine learning, our clients are looking to us to help them understand how they should move forward. All of the talent and all of the services that I've mentioned are really designed to drive meaningful business growth for our clients.
What we look to do is put measurement frameworks in place for every single campaign that we do for our clients. Those measurement frameworks can be around increased revenue from owned media, as we did for Telefónica, or on the right side of the slide, how we help PUMA unlock not just obviously what the ad awareness was generated in the marketplace, how did that confer to consideration to sales, purchase and down into sales. These are just examples of how we put measurement frameworks around all our activity. Our work is globally recognized for creative excellence. As Yannick said, it's not just the creative group that wins awards for creativity. We win a number of awards inside the media network and the Havas network as well.
We're operating in all of the recognized industry festivals, the Cannes Festival of Creativity, the Festival of Media, and we won over a thousand awards over the last 12 months. I want to share one piece of work with you, which actually won a Grand Prix at Cannes. It's some work that we're very proud of. It appeared a couple of years ago, some work that we did for Adidas, where we actually created a new medium, so we created the Liquid Billboard, which was a new medium and is still a new medium, and this is work that won an award, won a lot of awards, but also drove business results, but probably more importantly than that, helped unlock a cultural taboo, and that's the kind of work that we're really interested in doing. That's truly meaningful work.
I'm going to play a video which will show you a little more detail on the Liquid billboard.
adidas believes that sports belongs to all. The new line of inclusive swimwear was created to give women the ability to confidently embrace water, irrespective of their shape, ethnicity, ability, or faith. But in the Middle East, 88% of women don't feel comfortable swimming in public, which is three times higher than the world's average. Because for women in MENA, water represents judgment and restrictions that are often fueled by media. Introducing Liquid Billboard, the world's first swimmable media space that became a symbol of inclusivity and liberation for women in water. Every swim was streamed live on the city's largest digital display and turned into personalized posters used to promote the new line. User-generated content on social aided in attracting other women to the beach to take a dive.
Local and international PR coverage took it upon themselves to spread the news of the new symbol of liberation across the globe. We even partnered with X for the launch of their feminine Arabic movement which challenges social media platforms, channels and brands across the region to communicate in feminine Arabic when addressing women instead of the usual masculine Arabic. And as the conversation about inclusivity and swift swimming went on across the globe, more women embraced water with confidence, benefiting Adidas too.
Yeah, great piece of work. Very proud of that work. And as I said, it won a Grand Prix at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. So to sum up, the global media network is well positioned for future growth. Firstly, we've got a very clear future forward strategy which is focused on building capabilities in content, commerce and data. We've got a very strong and long-tenured client list and the ecosystem around the network to deliver against those clients' needs. And thirdly and importantly, we've been making the right investments in data and tech not only to support the media network, but also to support the wider group Converge strategy. So now I'm going to hand it over to Dan Hagen, my colleague and friend, to talk about our data and tech capability.
Thank you, Peter.
Good morning everyone. Hope you're doing well. We've got about 15-20 minutes. I'm going to talk about data and tech and then you're going to have a break, so the more you focus on me, the better that break's going to be. As Yannick spoke about, converged is a strategy for the business. It's about a direction of travel, it's about how we work together as people. It's about the way that we work, but it's also about the data and technology that powers that work, so I'm going to spend 15 minutes talking about specifically that the data and technology. Yanni talked about the shifting trends in spend. Peter talked about a number of trends driving the way that media is working. All of those point to data.
The more digital advertising becomes, the more data it generates. The more commerce grows, as e-commerce, as retail media, the more data it generates. Data is fundamental to a huge number of the shifts that are happening across our industry right now, and it's no surprise that pretty much every organization has gone under some sort of digital transformation program over the last 10 years, but I think there's a really fundamental truth within that that we need to be cognizant of because an awful lot of those digital transformations have actually failed, but they haven't failed because there's a problem with data. They haven't failed because there's a problem with technology. Often they fail because we haven't taken into consideration culture, we haven't taken into consideration the ways of working, and we haven't taken into consideration people.
And that's very much what's driven our strategy and our approach to data and technology. So when we're talking about data and tech, we're talking about being human centric and we're talking about being client centric. Human centric means the tech is there to power the humans. And he talked about AI powered humans. A great human is going to be better than an average human because we all have the same AI. Everything we build is in service to the teams of people being brilliant at what they do, which is creating really creative, really scientific campaigns, activations for our clients to better connect them to their customers, to drive business value for their business. That's fundamentally what human centric means. From a data strategy perspective. Client centric means we wrap around our clients requirements. This is really important.
Of course we have an end to end platform to help our clients deliver a data and tech driven marketing future. Every agency group has an end to end data platform. The thing is, most of our clients also are building in end to end. What's most important is how do we work with them, how do we empower them to be able to solve the challenges they have within their business. That's very much how we think about Converge. The data as a tech platform is wrapping around being client centric. So that brings me to four pillars of that strategy, of that human and client centric strategy. The word talent, I think every single person has mentioned talent. That's good because that runs right the way through everything.
Our data and tech people are a diverse group of people located all over the world, but connected together and then bolstered through the M and A that we make. François talked earlier about the M and A. A big part of that is bringing in super talented people to be part of that network to drive forward our strategy. The way we think about data is targeted. We have very demonstrably and very purposefully not gone into the marketplace and acquired a huge mountain of data. And the reason for that is because if we do acquire a huge mountain of data that then becomes our solution to every problem. We are much more client centric. We bring in the right data in the right geography, not to carry unnecessary cost to solve the client's problems that are specific to that client in that specific geography.
The landscape is very different around the world. I already talked about being client centric in our tech, integrated tech. I'll talk about the converged operating system as an end to end operating system, but also how that is deployed on our clients in a bespoke way and then finally meaningful AI. We can't have a data in tech without talking a little bit about AI. Don't worry, I'm not going to get too deep in it. We think about it as empowering with the things we're already doing. So how can we make ourselves more efficient by automating some of what we do? How can we make ourselves more effective by putting complex math in the hands of ordinary people, allowing them to do things they could have never done before. And how can we create innovative solutions for our clients to create something new and amazing?
We also are accelerating our investment, so Yannick talked about the investment we've made so far that's gotten us to a competitive place in the marketplace, but we recognize that now, now is the time to accelerate that investment to allow us to get converged as an operating system in the hands of every single employee across Havas to allow it to power and supercharge what they do for their clients, but also allows us to create premium versions of converged high margin products that we can sell to our clients, driving our own business forward and finally investing in new technologies. I'm sure you are all looking at the marketplace, at what's going to be the new technology, the new partner we might need to partner with. I see people pretty much every day. Having that investment allows us to make targeted investments to accelerate our capabilities. So talent.
The thing here I think to remember rather than the beautiful faces is three key areas for really consultancy growth. Jenny talked about us partnering with our clients. This is a really critical place where we can partner with our clients to drive their business forward, but also create significant revenue opportunities for Havas, so measurement through people like Jamie and Claire who are helping clients to understand what drives value for their business. Data science and AI through Uday, Arthur and Gregory, building new solutions for our clients to make them more effective and more efficient, and then content supply chain through our partnership with Adobe, and I'll come back and talk about this in a little bit more depth. This is Camilla, Francesca and Steve. One of the most recent acquisitions we made.
DMPG brings a real expertise in Adobe consulting, which now is a growing area we can sell to our clients. This covers a huge spectrum of specialisms but is then delivered in an efficient way across our business, so boots on the ground in those markets where we have scaled opportunities, but then we organize our talent around centers of excellence, allowing us to grow skilled people but deliver them efficiently across the world. Pete already talked about how some of those centers of excellence are deployed and in terms of that partnership with our clients, so delivering really high-end consultancy, helping Hyundai to pull together the data challenge they have across their own business, but also the thousands of dealers each having a different relationship with a customer, pulling that together makes them a much more powerful organization. Approach to data.
The world is extremely different in different geographies. We built a deterministic data set that means that we understand who those people are. And in North America that's really, really important because the ability, the volume of data, the compliancy structure gives us the ability to one to one target with people. In the rest of the world significantly different GDPR environment, we need different sets of data. Don has already talked about the specialist health data through our partnership with Trinity, other partners and also our own originated information to really get under the skin of the huge variety of healthcare professionals and the different requirements that they have. Behavioral attitudinal data. We believe in understanding what people have done, but also how they think. So our investment in panel type data is super important to drive strategic advantage.
The behavioral data then lets us target those people really well. Finally, our proprietary data. I think you've heard the word meaningful several times today. Meaningful Brands is a study that understands why brands are meaningful to people. It's a study we've been running for over 15 years. The most recent was just launched the other day. That's another set of proprietary data that we created to help our clients understand how their brands can be better, more effective. Now all of this data is great, but if it's all over the agency, it's not very useful. That's really where Converged comes in. Converged is that technology platform that allows us to bring this data together and democratize it across all the teams, allowing non data scientists to be able to do data science type work. The platform itself is pretty simply organized.
We start in intelligence and that's really about getting all of our data in one place and allowing us to understand what our consumers doing, who do we need to target, what's their relationship with a brand, how do they operate in a category and how do they exist in what a cultural design? Is that strategic development? What is a problem we need to solve for a client and how are we going to solve that? Activation is, we bring together the right person in the right place and give them the right message to provoke an action and measure, as you would expect, is where we measure this. Now I want to show you a quick video that shows you pretty realistically how a person would actually use this as they operate their way through it.
Yeah, so you'll see us build an audience for a client, Harman, in their JBL Authentics range. You will see how that audience drives insights that allow brilliant creatives to build brilliant creative strategy. You will see how we can activate that audience into the marketplace and how we can develop production to put the right message in front of the right person. And then, finally, how we measure that campaign.
At Havas, we built Converged to help our clients grow faster and more efficiently than their competitors.
Converged unleashes the most meaningful creative ideas.
With industry-leading technology, an end-to-end platform with proprietary innovations for intelligence.
Design to activate and measure all in one place intelligence.
It all starts here with our data neutral approach.
Combining first, second and third party data, our analysis unlocks multifaceted insights that create.
Focus, precision and action.
Let's build our audience using Profile Studio.
AI instantly sifts through millions of potentials.
To find the right customers to target.
While our audience finder merges consumer market, brand category and Havas's proprietary meaningful brands.
Data to precisely identify where growth will come from.
Converged then uses AI to decode audience motivations, perceptions, brand sentiment and behaviors to.
Understand what's most meaningful in their lives.
Next comes design, where the creative ideas.
Experiences come to life.
Powered by industry-leading Adobe automation tools.
Converged instantly scales and translates hundreds of.
Assets to ensure deep personalization across desired audiences.
Now it's time to activate our Activate.
Studio uses a large language model to.
Match audience attributes with platform attributes for a privacy-first cookieless activation solution.
With seamless meta tagging and taxonomy work.
Is pushed live across platform and at record speed for maximum engagement and impact measure.
In the final phase of Converged, we.
Track effectiveness using real time data.
Here we can see a single view of truth across content, experience, audience, media and message.
Machine learning goes beyond reporting to improve.
Outcomes by analyzing the most granular elements that improve performance. Welcome to the age of Converged.
Now as much as I would like to deep dive into every facet because this is what I do every day, I just want to touch on really four key points, one in each pillar of converged intelligence. As I said, this is about understanding people. So we offer the full capability to onboard a client's data, securely understand it in depth and then activate that into the marketplace. This is growing in importance as cookies disappear and other data sets become less stable, is allowing clients to realize the assets they've invested and bring that to bear for their marketing design. The thing to remember here, and design is specifically sort of designed to be, I guess I'll call it technology light because this is where a lot of the creativity comes.
This is where we're starting to build solutions that will allow creatives to, if you like imagination, print their ideas. So using AI to speed that process up, it's not replacing it. It's not about using AI to create the idea. It's about allowing the creatives to express their creativity much faster in ways that they could have never done before. Activation. I mentioned cookies disappearing. So we've used AI, specifically a heavily augmented large language model to allow us to activate audiences. We've built in intelligence into the platforms using AI to do that matching process. From what I can understand based on the partners we speak to, this is unique because the partners have actually had to build tech on their side to allow us to create this connection. This is creating an incredibly rapid activation.
This ability to go from building an audience to having it live in a campaign in about 15 minutes, it's creating huge accuracy, providing much better business outcomes to our clients. And finally, from a measurement perspective, the one thing I want to talk about here is the ability to analyze creative using AI. So not just did this ad work really well, but did this ad work really well because the people in the ad were smiling or because the car was yellow? So the individual assets of a piece of creative, we can now analyze those using AI to drive and fuel that creative production process. Which brings me to my last point in my four points of our strategy, which is around AI. Obviously this is future fueling a huge amount of what we're doing.
But I want to talk about one critical area and that's the content production supply chain. In 2023, we pooled all of our production resources together into Prozone Pixels, a production powerhouse of 14 studios around the world powered by Adobe's AI capabilities. Three sort of critical areas to talk about. One, creativity described as I said earlier by creatives as an imagination printer. This is things like Firefly from Adobe, allowing our teams to drive creativity faster. Production led personalized content at scale, the ability to version content rapidly, transcreate, translate across the world, and then finally the overall content management actually physically getting that creative out there to efficiently, accurately, without waste. This rapid expansion of Adobe as a partnership has meant that Havas has become a top five user of Adobe Firefly over the last year. Really accelerating our capabilities in personalized content at scale.
Okay, just as a reminder, a human and client-centric approach to data and technology driven by our connected talent across the world. Driven by a selective and targeted approach to data, solving our clients' big business problems without over-investing and carrying unnecessary cost, integrated technology. Providing our teams with access, democratized access to data and technology, allowing them to do what they are brilliant at doing, which is creating amazing solutions for our clients to drive their business value, and then using AI to accelerate those capabilities as we go forward. Thank you.
It's time for the break. I ask you to come back just before half past 11. Please take the time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
[audio distortion]
Yeah. Super cool. I know when you think about what.
It was like before all the pretty.
Much the regions park all the way.
Down.
Not ringing in the center there again.
Everyone, welcome back to the market day. I think we can agree it has been a fantastic start of the session. Congrats to the amazing presenters. What a team. What a team. And it's just the tip of the iceberg. Now it's my pleasure to welcome on stage someone very, very special to Havas that have been with us for a very, very long time. As you will see from our presentation, our role is more than instrumental to the success of Havas and to the future success of Havas. Please welcome Paddy Clark. Thank you very much.
So, good morning, everyone. You've heard about talent a lot through the presentations this morning, and you know, I know many of you may be focused more, much more on the financial aspects of the CMD, but I think you've probably felt the spirit around talent from all of our leaders this morning. And it's an important component for all of you to consider. Talent is the heart and soul of our business. It's why we've been able to be successful to date. And most importantly, it's really essential for our future growth path and for what we want to do with converged. So I'm going to take you through today a bit about who we are, how we care for our people, how we help them learn, and most importantly, how we put together career paths for them so that they can stay at Havas.
I'm sure none of you are immune to kind of the demands of employees in the marketplace. Whether you're in your own company, focused on your employees or you're bringing new people in, it's really been quite a shift over the last several years, and we are doing just fine with these various factors that you have to consider when you're trying to retain your employees as well as try to bring new employees in. I think Donna, as well as have talked a little bit about our kind of unique positioning in the marketplace, the global network that has a family feel to it. This is something really appealing to people because there's an intimacy to it that's different than some of the other holding companies.
Our village model, you know, people walk into our villages in a role, but they have the opportunity to be exposed to different capabilities and different functions and work in a collaborative way that really is motivating our entrepreneurial spirit. I think you've heard a lot about that, and less complexity, less bureaucracy. Yannick has a great expression that he's only two clicks away from any employee. So all of this you heard from Natalie. It's a very attractive thing when people come to talk to us, and you saw on the various slides, we have been able to bring in some amazing talent, and we also retain some amazing talent because of the culture that we are. So I want to take you through a little bit about our people experience strategy.
About 18 months ago, we made a decision to really kind of clarify further what do we stand for with respect to our people. We did an exercise where we had a lot of roundtables, we leveraged our survey data, we went out into the marketplace and talked to experts and really kind of said, we listened also to candidates, and we basically came back and put together a full people experience strategy that's anchored on these five pillars. These pillars are the commitments that we're standing up at Havas and saying, this is what we are going to deliver for you as an employee. This is what you can expect if you're coming in from outside to join us.
And what I want to do today is kind of take you through and just highlight a couple examples under each of the pillars of some of the work that's going on so you can get a feel for what we're doing and the culture that we have here at Havas. So first is belonging. I don't know if anyone saw the recent Harvard Business Review article on loneliness at work. It's really important for people to feel that they belong, that they have relationships at work that they like the team they're with. And this is something that we have prioritized at Havas. We, in our employee survey, have consistently had in the high 70s response in terms of employees feeling like they belong at the agency, they feel like they can be their authentic self at work.
They feel respected and they feel like they belong at this agency or group. This is a powerful engine because this is something that if you don't have it, it's really hard to overcome, it's really hard to build. We've had our all in Belonging, our all in inclusion programming going on since 2018. The approach we take to this is both one that's global as well as local. So first, on the local end of things, each agency or village around the world is responsible for creating an action plan. It's different in each of them because they all have different areas that they need to focus on or things that they think are important. So we actually track these, we measure them, we follow up with them, we connect different groups who might have a strength that they can share with another village.
We also have a variety of things that are going on throughout the year with a focus on pride, disability, inclusion and women. I'm going to take a minute to talk about women because we're proud of our representation. 58.5% of the group is women. I think we all understand the benefits of having women in the workplace. Whether it's from diversity of thought or innovation, they bring a sense of quality that helps in terms of leadership, empathetic leadership. I want to point out our CEO, President, Managing Director number, because for anyone that's seen McKinsey's Workforce 2024 study, the average number for level for the CEO, President and Managing Director across other industries is ranging around 30%. We feel very good about how we've been able to promote, bring women into the organization.
In these very senior pictures, Donna talked about our creative businesses in our creative business and in the industry at that CCO, the Chief Creative Officer level. It's been a predominantly male-dominated role for a long time and we have been very focused on improving not only the number of women in our creative business, but also increasing how many of them are in the senior Chief Creative Officer, Executive Creative Director roles. And you can see the progress we've made at 25%. And this is something that we're going to continue to work on and foster within the organization. Learning is really essential. People want to be able to learn new things, take on new skills, capabilities, increase their knowledge. It's essential really for advancement and it's also essential for our performance. We can't stand still in this space.
I'm going to share with you some of the things we're doing from a learning perspective. We have a very robust online learning management system which is called Havas University. It has extensive content. The content ranges from leadership to skill to trends. It's a place where people can go for self development and where we also can send people for self development. You can see from the 2023 numbers we have really great usage in terms of how our employees go to the site. We also have some amazing partners who we bring their content onto the site as well. Most recently we've partnered with Big Think, and Big Think is micro content. These are world-renowned leaders who bring their expertise into these small, easy to digest sessions.
We recently launched this a couple weeks ago and I can't tell you how excited employees are about this because it's a different way of learning and taking in content and we're looking forward to doing a lot more with this and content. Some of the other things we have going on. NextGen is our formal executive leadership development program. This is for our high potential leaders. We bring a group together of 65 leaders from around the world. Some of them are CEOs, some of them are leading verticals for us and they go through a very intensive leadership day development program. They focus on their own leadership, how they lead teams and most importantly how they're going to lead their businesses, particularly in the state of change that exists constantly in our industry.
We've had great success in terms of people coming out of this program and being promoted and the retention rate is particularly good for folks that have been in this program. I had a woman write to me last year. She had been one of our earlier next gen programs and part of the program. They leave with an advancement plan. And she said, "Patti, I just wanted to tell you that I've been put in this role and the role was something that she had written in her advancement plan." It was not a role that existed and she had achieved it by working through that advancement plan over the couple years after NextGen and is doing quite successfully in that role in Havas Paris. Now Dan talked about the MX process and how that really is the underpinning of Converged.
This past year we had 3,200 employees go through this proprietary planning process, upskilling them in that way, and then more recently we've put together a full programming around Converged, so first of all, all employees are being trained on what is converged and helping them also identify what their role is in Converged. We also have a lot of skill training going on, particularly in the data space. How do you tell a story with data? Data storytelling, data analytics or all things that we are going to be working on upskilling the parts of our organization who may not typically work in that way every day. Yannick mentioned it's really like a cultural transformation and I think our employees are very excited about that, particularly because it's going to afford different types of career opportunities as we go forward.
Wellbeing is something we went on a journey on long before the pandemic. So we were set up very well to support our organization as we went through those challenging days. And it's now become kind of a. It's something you have to have in your business. You have to be focused on this for your employees. We're continuing to strengthen our offering here. We have over 45 wellness champions who exist in our villages around the world. They're responsible for making sure that the well-being of our employees in those villages is being looked after, helping make sure that the programming that might need to be done locally is happening. We have continuous learning opportunities going on throughout the year. So we're always offering different types of supportive seminars. You can see some of them here.
We're most proud of our Havas Minds programming, which is custom-built programming that we designed with the help of mental health experts. We have it available in a number of different languages and it's a very short two modules, total of 40 minutes. Our objectives with this were to educate people on the spectrum of mental health first of all, so that everyone has a good base understanding. More importantly to really help people navigate work in the workplace. How do you handle mental health and well-being. Then finally a plan that's embedded in this training for people to move forward with really putting together something in terms of their own well-being and how they can protect that and keep themselves healthy as they're working.
For World Mental Health Month we reached out to a bunch of leaders around the world and asked them to share their sentiments about mental health in the workplace and Havas MINDS and how that is a helpful resource and tool. We have a lot of content, but I've kind of narrowed it down to a minute. So I'm going to show you a video of some of our leaders talking about Havas MINDS.
I think in our industry specifically we can have high stress environments.
We need to talk more openly about mental health.
We need to ensure that this isn't.
An area that's got stigma associated with it.
Havas Mind is a really important resource to drive basic awareness around mental health.
But also allow us to look after ourselves and look after those around us.
There's incr edible tools and information on Havas Minds, and it only takes about 40.
Minutes.
If we want our work and our working relationships to be stronger, now at our best, we need to be a culture that supports our greatest resource.
Which is people in every way possible.
If we are more open, we talk more about this.
This becomes part of our everyday. To tackle these problems together can only.
Lead to a better environment for all of us.
Sampling of the level of engagement from our leaders around the world, and I was really proud of how they all showed up and really shared their authentic feelings around, well, being in the workplace. Career is something that we're very keenly focused on right now. This is probably the number one engagement factor for employees. They really want to know where they can go next and what the opportunities are. We have a lot of different things going on, so there's career built into some of our basic tools and processes. So our annual performance review process has a core component where there's a discussion around career. We've also gone to great lengths to do career mapping around all of our key roles.
We have a variety of mobility experiences, whether that's being able to go work in a different role in the village or even possibly going into another country. With some of our Lofts programs where you can go have that experience. We also have a mobility portal where people can go in and indicate that they might want to have some other experience beyond the location that they're currently in. We also have a variety of things in terms of different audiences, so Havas Platform is something that takes place here in Havas UK and it is to give access to the industry for people who might otherwise not be exposed or have an opportunity to learn about it. And many of those folks go on to getting roles here as well. The fellowship program is something running in North America.
It's for recent college graduates and it sets a very clear career path for them, and then we have things like Emerge, which is for our new managers, where we take them through kind of your manager now, what is that responsibility and what's the path for you going forward. This is an area we continue to invest and innovate in. We have an investment regarding our Talent Space, which is our Workday platform to even further advance the career architecture there, particularly with roles changing and things evolving with converged, and we're also using AI, so we are going to be attaching AI to Talent Space and basically be able to feed people different opportunities based on their skills, their interests, and the various things that they've shared in their profile on Talent Space. I mentioned women before.
I just wanted to touch on kind of how we've gotten some of those results. So FemForward is really our flagship women's development program. You can see the statistics again. We've got growth, promotion and retention rates coming out of this program. These are targeted for senior manager director level women. And we've had a couple spinoff programs, FemForward Academy, which is for more junior women. This is a virtual program where we start to build skills early on. And FemForward Frida specifically focused on those creative leaders that I mentioned earlier. So everything we do is about making an impact and that's part of our meaningful experience, if you will. And we also are very serious about how we measure how we're doing. We have a very robust employee survey program. It's called Havas Say. When we ran it in January 2024, we had 83% participation.
For any of you that are familiar with employee survey work, that's really kind of off the charts participation. It's an indication of our people wanting to share their feedback and knowing that it's something that we're going to take action on and do something with. You can see the different areas, the factors that are measured in this and the action planning that comes out of this is also a key component. It's something that our leaders take very seriously and we have it also embedded in their goals. Most important for us is to know what's working, keep doing that, but also know where we might need to improve and putting in place the right steps to do that. So coming back, I've shared with you kind of our unique positioning. I've shared with you how our employee experience comes to life.
Just sharing a sampling of things that we have going on. I thought for the close, it would be most helpful for you to hear from some of our other leaders as they speak about each of these different pillars and how it has impacted them in their career to date at Havas.
Thank you.
It's really wonderful to work somewhere where you can learn and grow your awareness around different people and communities. But most importantly to work somewhere where you really feel you can just be yourself.
[foreign language]
Whether I'm playing leader, team member, mom or daughter, having, well, being incorporated at each stage of my career has been so important so that I can do well in all of my roles.
Whether it's a global experience like NextGen, local agency trainings on different skills, or online courses through Havas University, we are fortunate in that Havas has a range of learning offerings for our employees. In our villages are always buzzing with new opportunities to explore.
For me, it makes all the difference to be able to show up at work and know that I'm working for a bigger cause and that I can use creativity and innovation to make a positive difference.
It's now my pleasure to introduce François and welcome him back to the stage. I have to say I'm in a very fortunate position to have a CFO who gets this space and is super supportive and really has helped partner with me and others to drive our people experience agenda. François.
Here I am again. Now let's speak about the financial performance of Havas. We start by some track record that we have achieved over the last years. Then we project ourselves on the year 2024 and to finish the year 2025 and beyond. Before starting the figures of Havas, I would like to spend some minutes on this chart. Labeled on these three different curves. The red one, which is the Havas organic growth, the black one, which is the Havas peers organic growth, and the gray one, which is the world GDP. Two important information from this chart. First of all, when you compare the black one and the gray one, you see that on a long period all these curves have been perfectly aligned, which means that the industry, the media industry, has been extremely resilient since 2016, which is the starting point of that curve.
The second information is comparing the red one with the black one, Vivendi with its peers. You see that Vivendi, being smaller than its peers, has been able on a long term to deliver the same kind of organic growth than its peers. There are some quarters in which we have been ahead of the competition, as you see in 2022-2023, some quarter where we were below the competition. But at the end we have been able to be perfectly aligned. Let's start with the revenues. The Vivendi revenue went up from EUR 2.2 billion in 2018 to EUR 2.7 billion in 2023. It's roughly EUR 500 million more in five years. It's an average of 4.5% of growth, growth which is well balanced by origin, meaning 2.1% comes from organic growth, 1.8% from scope effect that the M and A we described earlier, and 0.6% from forex impact.
It's also well balanced by geography. When you look at this map, you see that our first country, the U.S., has grown by 5.1% during the period. Our first region, which is Europe, 3.4%, but also the two smaller regions, Asia Pacific with 6% and Latin America 8.9% which has been the fast growing region during this period. 2018, 2023. Now let's move to EBIT margin and I know I will have your full attention. Let's start by defining what our new EBIT margin KPI is. We take the operating income and we restate it from goodwill impairment and earn out adjustments and restructuring. As we said earlier, we have not recorded any goodwill impairments during the last 10 years.
And concerning restructuring, let's take an average of EUR 19 million, knowing that we only consider the real one-off restructuring due to a loss of client or macro incident in one country. Our EBIT ratio moved from 10.8% in 2018 to 12.1% in 2023. It's a 130 basis point increase which represents EUR 90 million more EBIT from EUR 237 million to EUR 327 million if we move to cash now. The average operating cash flow has been EUR 309 million during the period. It has been extremely recurrent and resilient. You see that even in COVID times in year 2020, we have been able to deliver more than EUR 300 million of cash flows thanks to the low level of CapEx, which is, as you see, roughly EUR 30 million. We have cash conversion rate of roughly 89%. So what did we do of that EUR 309 million of operating cash flow?
We spent roughly EUR 30 million in CapEx. We spent EUR 80 million in acquisition, EUR 73 million in dividend pay to our shareholders and then EUR 74 million to the others, including mainly dividend, financial cost and tax. So at the end, the net net free cash flow has been EUR 49 million as an average. That's the reason why our net cash net cash position at the end of the year went up from EUR 143 million at the end of 2018 to EUR 431 million at the end of 2023. After having paid EUR 150 million of CapEx, EUR 400 million of M&A and more than EUR 300 million of dividend to the shareholders. We therefore have tripled our net cash position with EUR 280 million more in this five years period. Now let's move to 2024.
With this proof of solidity, we will guide for 2024 with an organic growth in a range of -1% to 4%, an adjusted EBIT above €330 million, and a year-end cash net position around €150 million. So let's start with the revenues. During the first nine months, Havas has grown by 2.1% as you see here. But this growth mainly comes from scope for an M&A operation at the beginning of the year. The previous year 3%. At the same time our organic growth was negative by -0.8%. The reason why you see on the chart is mainly due to North America. With the loss of a big health client at the end of the year 2023, Europe was still up by 2.8%.
It reminds how important DMLA is in this moment of slowdown of organic growth when you can mitigate the negative impact of organic growth by strong scope growth. That's why we keep on investing in new agencies. Since the beginning of the year we have already finalized six acquisitions. Three in the U.K., DMPG Wilderness, Le Gerbernet, one in Australia, Hot Glue, one in the Emirates Liquid and one in France called TED in all types of expertise. In terms of margin expansion, I think it's very important to realize that during this first half 2024, where the organic growth was stable, we have been able to keep on increasing the EBIT ratio from 9.5% to 10.2%. It's 70 basis points increase and in growth figures we have also been able to increase it from €120 million to €133 million.
On the right hand side of the slide you see that, reminding that the second half of the year is bigger in terms of revenue and EBIT than the first half. Nevertheless, we have proven that we were able to keep on increasing the margin even when the growth was very slow. In terms of net cash, we guided on this EUR 150 million net cash position at the end of the year 2024. Let's remind that we have paid EUR 235 million to our shareholder during the year 2024 including an extraordinary dividend of EUR 150 million which has been paid in September. If we add to this liquidity position to the cash and equivalent the RCF we have signed with our banks, we have a total liquidity position of around EUR 1 billion. But don't worry, we won't spend that billion in the coming days.
We still have to remain very prudent if we now turn to focus on 2025 and beyond. First of all, we would like to keep on driving profitable growth. We will also keep our very dynamic bolt-on M&A strategy and we want to grant to our shareholders sustainable dividends before starting, a word on Converge because I think you understand with the brilliant Dan's exposé that Converge is clearly key for our future. Just a figure. As Yann said, we'll spend EUR 400 million in the coming four years but be sure that these figures have been taken into account in our forecast. It's a mix of OpEx, CapEx, M&A. But all these figures have been taken into account. So if we want to keep on increasing the EBIT margin, we have to focus obviously both on revenues and cost. So let's start by the revenues.
One of the key differentiator of Havas is ability to cross sell the existing clients. Thanks to the Village strategy that Yannick described earlier, thanks to the efforts of the Chief Integration Officer, we are now able to sell to our client all types of expertise. It's what we call the In-Biz, the newbiz with existing clients. The INBIZ is clearly for us more rapid to achieve because we know the client's DNA, is for us also more profitable because we save the commercial cost, but very important as well. It's more efficient for the clients because the clients simplify his media organization and reduce his number of partners, so we consider the In-Biz as a clear key driver for our future growth.
Don't worry, we keep on working on newbies and we have a very talented team of newbies in all the business units with all the success Yannick described. But I think we have to work both on newbies every day, but also on newbies in terms of revenue optimization. Let's have a few words on the center of excellence where we gather all people of the same expertise in order to service the client on the best way. Also a few words on Pros and Pixel. If you go back two years ago, we must admit that Havas was late compared with its peers in terms of production. We decided to launch this vertical Pros and Pixel with Steve Netzley in charge, and in two years he really filled the gap with the peers.
And now we are at the level of our best peers, at the level of the pure player in production and will be able to address all our client problematics in production. After revenue, we move to cost. It's a continuous cost management spirit within AVAs. With all the team, we focus on adapting permanently the cost to the level of business. That's what we did during this first half 2024. In this slow moment of organic growth and we'll keep on. We launch a new cost reduction plan for the coming two years and all the agencies will be involved. We also will focus on our would say minor agencies, the one in tier three countries with revenue below EUR 10 million per year. We consider there is room for making savings for emerging without damaging the client experience.
And then we leverage our investment in technology and AI. I'm afraid it won't be tomorrow. Maybe it will be the day after tomorrow. But we are for sure able to reduce cost in production in some digital operation thanks to AI. Once we have finalized all our works in terms of M&A, I hope I convinced you earlier that we are on the good route with this accretive acquisition in terms of growth, accretive acquisition in terms of margin, and we still aim to do 5-10 acquisitions per year, which is an additional 40-60, 50 million revenues. Another question you may raise is what's the money I will get from my Havas shares? So let's have a few words on dividends. Havas has always had the policy of strong dividends.
Here you start with 2021, which was a post-COVID year and in which the payout ratio was at 29%. Then we went back to the level where we were before COVID times, roughly between 40%-50%. So we'll keep on maintaining this EBIT ratio. Now let's move to our midterm guidance. For 2025 we guide with a growth above 2% in terms of organic with an adjusted EBIT that will keep on increasing in a range from 12.5%-13.5% and a payout ratio of around 40%. In the midterm guidance, we intend to be in the range of 40%-50% for the EBIT margin and the payout ratio for 40%. Just before giving back the floor to Yannick, to conclude, I would like rapidly to pay tribute to my finance team. Gaëtan Durocher, Cyril Joyet, who are the global CFO of Creative and media.
Catherine François, Myriam Guillotin and Didier Regal in Paris will lead the HQ. Delphine, obviously, because with such a team that I work with for more than 15 years, I can tell you we will do everything to reach this ambitious goal, and the last word, just to tell you that I think Yannick won't dare tell you that, but he has built around him an incredible team. It's a pleasure to work with the EXCOMM every day. Pleasure to work with my friend Dona, who my friend Peter. Even if we have a long time difference, six hours. We interact daily with Peter and I think Yannick, I built an incredible team. Thank you for that and for all the other EXCOMM members who are not on stage today, but I think we can be confident. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you very much, François. And I also want to pay tribute to my fantastic CFO who has been with me for the past 12 years now and it will stay with me and with Havas for the next 12 years. I was bragging around the fact that I run the marathon with the Havas team. He could brag also that he's climbing mountains every year, like 200 km, something like that. I mean, it's too dangerous. You should stop that now. So just to wrap up, as you have seen for the different presentation, the Havas story is clearly a story. Story of growth, story of strong fundamentals. You've seen great teams all over the world. You've seen some of the leaders, some other members of the executive committee that plays a key role. Plus all the teams that you've seen in Patty's presentation and are just amazing.
We haven't mentioned all their names. Laurent, Greg, I mean everyone, those teams are all rock stars all over the world and I think it was great to see some of them. 3,000 people around the world. We believe our 23,000 people are the best in the world, so we believe we have the best foundations to build growth forward. Just in a nutshell, besides talent and culture, keep in mind that data, tech and AI is great. I mean, Dan delivered a very, very strong presentation. Congrats, Dan. It's not always, I understand tech presentation, so congrats, and it's very promising. The importance of creativity. You've seen some case studies from Donna's presentation and from Peter's presentation as well. Creativity is at its best and we believe making a difference. This is a key case for advertising in Havas.
The integration model, it is a key advantage for Havas, really. I mean those villages you see here in London, we have the same all around the world: New York, in Paris, in Boston, in Chicago, in New Delhi, in Shanghai, in Singapore, all over the world, and this is making difference, and of course the M and A strategy, which is a key differentiator, so now I'm going to call on stage to moderate a Q and A.
So, thank you for your attention. Just to remind you that the presentation will be on the website this afternoon, so you don't have to take too much photos. So, we will take questions from the room first and I will online, please two questions and one follow-up question if you can, just to make some rules. And I think we can start with Jerome, please. Yeah.
Yes, good morning. Jerome Bodin from Oddo BHF. So two questions. The first one is, could you come back on why Amsterdam listing? That's my first question. Second, it's on the share incentive. Could you come back on the philosophy regarding share incentive and should we expect a switch from cash bonus to share bonus and if that's the case, do you plan to buy back to compensate? The dilution and correlated question. So that's the third one, but actually that's the number two too. It's should we expect scrip dividend or will it be only cash? Thank you.
So, thank you very much, Jerome. So, maybe I will take the first one and you take the two follow up questions. So, maybe just to come back on before going and answering your question about Amsterdam on the philosophy of this project. And I think it's important to put the element into context, just to really understand what we heard here. The business results of Vivendi, as I said in my introduction, are fantastic. And it's not easy. I mean, we've seen Havas today evolving in a rapidly changing industry with fierce competitors. We've seen Canal yesterday evolving as well in a rapidly changing industry who have to develop a very important international strategy to be able to continue to compete with the big boys, especially in the U.S.
You know, Lagardère doing very well for the past two years after a tough Covid for the travel retail part. So despite those great results, the share price of Vivendi was not at where it was. And also, I must add, I had the opportunity to follow the calls, result calls, quarterly calls that Arnaud de Puyfontaine and François Laroze are conducting on behalf of Vivendi. We didn't have that many questions on different business activities. It was mainly questions about cash strategy buybacks. Maybe 85% of the question was not related to the different businesses. I believe this fleet project is the best answer to offset the discount of conglomerate. And let me be clear, there is no other option. I've been reading in the press that the Bolloré Group should launch a takeover on Vivendi. I mean, you follow the group, you follow the Bolloré Group.
They have clearly stated that they don't want to launch a takeover on Vivendi. They even sold some of the shares that they were owning on Vivendi. So when Vivendi has cancelled treasury shares, they would not pass the threshold of 30% of ownership in Vivendi. So the only option to offset the discount of conglomerate rapidly is the split. Also have in mind that the split has also lots of benefits for the different activities. For Canal+, for Havas or for Louis Hachette or for Lagardère. This split would really unlock the full potential of these activities. Being able to carry on an external growth strategy, paid on the balance sheet or paid in shares, giving more international visibility. We said it was important for Havas.
It's also important for Hachette and for Canal being able to incentivize the leadership in shares and thus fully aligned the interest of the key leaders and the shareholders. We believe in the trajectory of growth of all those companies. So then, once you have agreed that the split project is the only option going forward, the question is what would be the best place of listing for each of those companies for Canal+ yesterday, if you had the opportunity to follow the CMD, which was great, by the way, congrats to the Canal teams. The real paradigm for Canal is to develop their international strategy, especially in English-speaking territories, and I believe we can agree that in London. You speak good English. London Stock Exchange, so sorry, it's not a small marketplace as I could have read, as I could have read in some French article.
London is still a big city with a promising future. So I think London is a perfect fit for London. Adding to that, London is a perfect fit for Canal. Adding to that, in the process of the MultiChoice project, the option of a fast track for dual listing with a Johannesburg Stock Exchange is also a good option. And in London, the Bolloré Group, make no mistake, has no special advantage on any other shareholders. They have exactly the same rights as shareholders and any other investors. Exactly. I mean, all the shareholders of Vivendi will be treated the same way with the London Stock Exchange and they will benefit from this great place of listing for Lagardère. Then I will go to Havas. The story is a bit different.
95% of the asset of Hachette is Lagardère, which is already listed on the regulated stock market in Euronext Paris, so we thought that being listed on Euronext Growth in Paris was the best option with the less constraint, while giving the same level of regulation and control for shareholders. As Lagardère is listed on a regulated market, so it's clearly the best option, and on Havas, why Amsterdam? It's a good question and the answer is very simple. The question that has guided Arnaud de Puyfontaine, François Laroze and the management team of Vivendi, working closely with the Havas team was what is the best place of listing in the best interest of all the Havas shareholders and what is the best interest of all the Havas shareholders is to maximize the value of Havas? I think we agree on that.
What are the two key assets of Havas that you've seen through those presentations? First one is talent, every presentation, not just Patti's presentation talent. And the second asset is the client relationships, existing clients and future clients. And when Vivendi has announced that it was contemplated to split and to re-IPO Havas, it was a bit of mixed feeling, to be honest with you. First, Havas was very happy with. There's been a honeymoon period for seven years. Very happy. Second, it is true that it's a great moment in time to list Havas because the business are very robust and the projections are very bright. But still there was a bit of anxiety from talents, from clients, about the prospect of being the target, the potential target of a hostile takeover. It was everywhere on the market.
People were telling me it's hard to hire new talent for Peter, for Donna, because people are concerned that Havas would be the target of a hostile takeover from one of its peers or from any other company, and they love the culture at Havas. Same with clients. Make no mistake, when the client is choosing a business partner for his communication, it's a key choice and they keep on with partner. For more than eight years, you've seen the average tenure of a client relationship, so for them it's very important to have the ability to project themselves, so what some clients have told me is that they don't care that if we go through an M and A project, why not? At scale it could be beneficial for them as well, even for talents, but they didn't want Havas to be the target of a hostile takeover.
I'm sorry, but my role as the CEO of this company is to do everything possible to maximize the shareholder value and by doing that, to protect our people and our clients. Personally, I told Peter Dona on the radio, I don't believe Havas could be the target of a hostile takeover. I believe it would be insane. It's a talent based business with strong client relationship. It's pretty unlikely that it could happen. But still, if it's creating anxiety and less attractiveness to hire talents and to onboard new clients. That's how the idea of Amsterdam came up. Because Amsterdam offers the possibility to create a foundation which is called in Dutch stichting. This foundation does not prevent Havas to do any move, significant move with the competitor or any other company. Havas could be the target one day of a takeover.
But in order to achieve it in a smoothly way, it has to be a friendly takeover approved by the board. In that case, we believe Amsterdam was taking the best goal. Let's say was meeting best of both worlds expectations. One, being able to continue to attract the best talent, to involve the best clients, while being able to carry on one day if we want a big M and a move with the peers. So this choice of Amsterdam is clearly in the best interest of the shareholders. So when it comes to the borrowing interest, it is true that, you know, early stage process, we thought that we could give double voting rights for shareholders at the time of the listing, if shareholders can prove that they have been shareholders in Vivendi for more than two years.
And when we had the early look in London and Paris with investors, we received feedback from François and Delphine saying we don't like this idea because personally I would like to become a long-term investor in Havas, but I cannot prove that I have a two years ownership in Vivendi. So Bolloré Group will have an advantage. And we understood this comment. We don't want to give any advantage at Vivendi to any specific shareholder. So this is why we removed this option. And no one would be granted any double voting rights at Havas before two years after the listing. So in that case, again, there is no specific advantage at all to Bolloré.
Once again, I mean, I was having a discussion with some investors during the break, so I think it's my duty as a CEO to be transparent about that and to relay the discussion that we had. I cannot speak on behalf of Bolloré, but if Bolloré, just think about it, would have liked to take the control of some assets at Vivendi at a cheap price. They would not go through the split because it would be cheaper to buy Vivendi with a discount at a cheap price, and then to do whatever they want with the assets. So this split project is in the best interest for all the shareholders. Then when it comes to what's going to happen next. I had some discussion with some proxies this past week, some investors that had concern about the governance.
If you look at the governance at Havas, it is true that the future chairman of Havas is not independent. He has had a relationship with the group. Arnaud de Puyfontaine. We cannot say we are not close, okay? But what is the best choice for shareholders is to have the best chairman of the company, a chairman that knows the industry, that has some expertise and knows the company, and who has some exceptional level of relationship with clients or potential clients. We thought that Arnaud would be the best chairman. The Dutch governance code in that case asked us to appoint a lead independent director, which we have done. We will have an independent director, fully independent, a tech guru, a tech specialist, a fantastic entrepreneur that will act as a lead independent director. Sorry once again that the governance of Havas is.
Is in the best interest of the shareholders, and in the future the dialogue will continue with shareholders, will continue with proxies. The question December 9th during the shareholder meeting is not about the governance. Should we disclose the compensation of the CEO of Canal Plus?
Of course we will.
That's what I told Maxime yesterday. We had the discussion, of course we'll continuously improve the governance and the dialogue with shareholders. Our goal, whether it is at Havas, at Vivendi or in any of its activities, and even if I cannot speak on behalf of the Bolloré Group, I guess they would share the same view, is to maximize the shareholder value and adopting a great governance in the interest of all shareholders. Being transparent in what we do will increase the shareholder value. What I've been doing since the chairman of Vivendi, we have increased the level of transparency every single year and year on year, correct me if I'm wrong, year on year the governance led resolutions have had higher approval rates. So this will do. So this project, December 9, the split only option for shareholders if you want to create value.
And I believe, I strongly believe and I know that those businesses that we know well with François, with Arnaud and with all the team at Vivendi, have a great and bright future ahead of them. So sorry I was a bit long, Jerome, but I think it was important to be as transparent as possible. And I know, I'll leave the second question. So the share incentive and share buyback back to François.
The answer may be shorter, don't worry. On the share-based plan there have been some figures which has been disclosed in the prospectus, which were maximum, which is not, I would say, commitment of Havas to grant all these shares. And what I can tell you is that we will grant the level that we consider acceptable for Havas's ambitions. So we will adapt the level to our, I would say, short-term forecast in order to ensure that it won't jeopardize our EBIT margin. In terms of, will we move from cash to stocks? I think we will decide later. It's too early for us, we'll see. Maybe there will be some shift, but at the end the impact on the P and L is the same through the price too. But we will decide later.
I think it's the idea.
It's the idea, but the amount we decide in terms of dividends. I think we have not really dig into already the type of payment we consider. We do mainly dividend in cash, but we are open to consider payment in shares as well. But here again, it's too early.
I'm turning to Delphine. She's the master of ceremony.
Annick Maas from Bernstein.
So I have first a couple of.
Questions on Havas Health.
Can you tell us how much Havas Health is doing in North America? And that brings me to my second question. The new U.S. Secretary of Health has suggested or has voiced some opposition around DTC advertising. Where does that position Havas today and then just on M and A. I mean, you're spectacular in M and A. So can you just tell us a.
Bit more about how you think about.
Revenue and cost synergies per deal that you do?
That would be great.
Thank you.
Okay, so I suggest maybe François takes the third one and then during this time Donna will come on stage.
Sure.
Let's have François answer any number of questions.
Okay.
There's no question, just on M and A. What I told you is that we are in accretive project, which means that today until now the average organic growth of our acquisition in M and A and EBIT margin was higher than the average of Vivendi's. So let's be sure it's accretive in terms of percentage.
Donna. And great questions by the way.
Interesting question about RFK. Talk of the town with health. Right. Couple things. We think it's too early. It's too early to really estimate. But we looked at all the trends and if it's TV only, which is what has been said as of right now, it'll be immaterial to Havas as a whole. The third point is our clients have already shifted away from major broadcast. If you look at the trends and you look at what's coming into the market, it's all specialty care, which is about personalization and one to one communication. The trends over the last three years have dramatically shifted from DTC to more digital. So we're pretty comfortable with that. And last but not least, we've been through many changes in healthcare over the years.
If you go back, we're always in front of it and change brings new opportunities and that's how we view it. So we're really comfortable with this.
Thank you very much.
Oh yeah, good, go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, it's Adam Berlin from UBS.
I've got two questions as well.
The first is on the margin guidance. Can you just give us a bit?
Of history about why Havas has historically.
Had lower margins than peers? Because I think you're just kind of talking about catching up with the peers.
Which make sense, but can you just.
Explain why you've historically had lower margins and what's really driving the improvement in the margins? So you kind of catch up by 2028. And then a kind of more philosophical question.
You know you're talking about your convergence platform, which today seems like more of a tool for Havas employees to use.
To give great service to the clients.
But do you see a future where that is more of a tool used?
By clients directly with and you need.
Much fewer have asked employees to make.
That work, or they do something different than running those tools themselves, and you can really just give this technology platform.
To a client to use all these.
Amazing tools and then you're just kind.
Of doing a support role and you.
Can charge on the technology software fee.
Rather than kind of billable hours and changing the model.
What do you think about that kind?
On longer-term idea?
Thank you very much for your question. So maybe I'll take the second one and then you can comment on margin not so converge. And thank you for asking because it's very important milestone for Havas and it's key to the future growth of Havas. It's clearly two things. First, one is the audience experience. So you saw from Dan's presentation about the audience experience, how it works for audience segmentation, the design, the activation and the measurement. Maybe we should rework on the video because it was maybe not clear enough that it's also the tool on which clients have access to.
So clients can see on the same tool there is a kind of client version of Converge where client can see in real time what we are doing, how do we build the targeted segments, how do we decide the different creativity, the different assets. Even for the validation process, before we're sending multiple emails to different clients, can you validate the different format, blah, blah, blah. Now it's on the workflow, everything will be in the platform so they can validate the different assets, they can see the library of the different assets. When we go to the activation phase, it's the same whether it is the media part of the activation where they can validate online on the workflow, on the tool, on Converge, the different media plan with the prices, the media mix. I mean they can see everything on the tool.
Everything is validated with the people at the client side. We have to validate everything. So we get rid of hundreds, maybe thousands of emails just on the validation side, on the media part and on the production side as well. Because this tool is allowing us to create thanks to AI, thousands of different version of the ads. You seen it with Dupixent, the different ads and clients can validate all the different versioning in the tool. And then when it comes to measurement as well, clients have access to the results of the campaign and validate the fact that in real time we adjust the different campaigns.
The idea is really the convergence between our employees, let's say between our talents to change the employee experience, but the convergence as well between Havas and the clients so they can have a platform to interact and where they could find everything they need to know or to validate.
On margins. I think it was during the analysis presentation I tried to make an exercise to compare Havas margin with one of its peers. But I've been told it was too complex, maybe not enough audited by a specialist to tell that my figures were the perfect ones. I agree this was not perfect. Nevertheless, I think we are quite sure of one thing, that there is a geo mix which explains part of the variance. Havas makes 36% of his revenue in North America compared with 55%-65% for its main peers. If I was just in Havas moving the 36% to 50% or 55% with the same kind of capability, I will make an additional 100 basis points. That's roughly the, I would say the impact of the geo mix which explains part of it.
second information I tried to give at this moment is that, and we repeat that several times because maybe we are too proud of it, that we have never recorded any goodwill impairment. Some of our peers have quite a high margin before goodwill impairment. But then you got a bad line with write off of goodwill which sometimes amount to hundreds or more millions of euros. So in our case our EBIT margin, I think, is closer to the perfect one. So this explains part of the variance. But there's still some room for doing better. Obviously we are smaller than our peers, you know that. So there may be some size effect in some businesses. So we understand that there is a part which can explain; there is a part which is a room for doing better in the future.
So our ambition is to fill part of that gap, maybe not all the gap. And that's why we give you, we gave you this route to 14%-15%. That's what we think we can achieve reasonably taking into account all the actions we've described.
Julian from Barclays first que stion is on M and A. Can you remind us of all your.
M&A guidance
sales contribution expected multiple indications, so everything you ever said.
And more.
It's kind of an overall question, you know, in the past five to 10 agencies, which means they kind of are on the small side of things. While Publicis just spent EUR 1.2 billion on tourism, Omnicom spending $900 million on flywheel.
That they're going for bigger, high growth, more expensive.
So philosophically, how would you compare and contrast what your peers are doing, which are bigger, more expensive, lots of smaller agencies?
I'm not saying that one is better.
Then the other just on integration, so prospectus says you have 493 agencies.
WPP spent the last five years going from a lot to 90% of revenue on six. Publicis supposedly has one country model. Everything's internally integrated. So how do you feel compared? Lots of agencies integration.
Because.
You could have 100 agencies in one building, that does not make them integrated. So how integrated you are. Compare and contrast with others.
Yeah. So thank you. So maybe I will start with the third one and we start talking about scale and then you complement and you get to guidance with reverse. So in terms of integration, let's be clear, we are by far the most integrated group. We have different agencies, but at the end of the day, everybody works together seamlessly. I mean, what we tell to all our agencies is what comes first is the group. If there is a misalignment between the interest of the agency and the interest of the group, the interest of the group comes first.
I mean, Dona was discussing with Natalie earlier, and I think the Uncommon acquisition is a great example of the fact that they are working seamlessly with Havas. She was talking about the pitch they're coming from for a large corporation last week. Uncommon is fully integrated with Havas while retaining their specificities, their entrepreneur spirit and everything. It's not because you know by experience, it's not because you put different people in a room that they will work together. Well, it's more than that. It's about culture, talent. When Patti has described about who we are and how we work, I think it's very important our people are alike. When Pat was doing her presentation, I was thinking about football clubs for like sport athletes where they have those trainings, mental health training of people are like professional athletes. It's tough. It's a tough environment, it's a tough business.
And we need to make sure they will perform, they will thrive if we take care of them. Sometimes we have a huge workload, but at the end of the day, the culture is here and we are by far the most integrated group in terms of scale of M and A, and just to come back on integration, it's a little bit like when you go in a three-star Michelin restaurant or in a great restaurant, you don't know what's happening in the kitchen. Just expect to have a nice meal with great products, properly dressed. It's a little bit like that. At Havas, when a client calls, generally he calls Havas headquarters or he can call one of the business units if he knows who he wants to talk to, and we assemble a team, and those teams are made of people working in different agencies, different expertise.
But we select. I mean, one of our secret sauce is to select the best team members for any specific client needs, and only us can do that, because we know that for our clients, maybe Donna will be better than Lucy. For another, it's going to be Lucy. Another it's going to be Natalie, Peter, Charles, Mike, Christian, whoever, same at CEO level. Sometimes Arnaud has better relationship with CEO than I do. So that's what, once again, you will become. The chairman of Avast will be very complimentary on that. So on scale, as we said, this flotation will open up lots of opportunities. Until now, we have been doing M and A just based on the cash flow. As you presented on your slide, the idea is to be able to do some acquisition on the balance sheet of paid party in shares.
We couldn't do acquisition in shares at Vivendi for two reasons. Number one, the stock is suffering from a 45% discount, and number two, when we were looking at acquisitions that we could have paid in shares, the company was more interested in receiving Havas shares than Vivendi shares, that seemed too far away in terms of impact on their action and on the stock price, so this will open up new opportunities, but maybe you can give some more quantitative aspects to what I just said.
Yes, I think if we come back to the figures that have been disclosed earlier, we've been reminded that we have spent EUR 80 million as an average in M and A, which means this is not only the upfront, but the upfront plus the buyout of the deals, which has been done a few years ago, and as I said, it may be six or seven years ago as we finalize our deals in an average period of six years, so the EUR 80 million is what we spend both upfront and on the buyout. Then in terms of additional revenue, we take an average of EUR 40 million, and if we want a calculation, you can roughly say that it will deliver 15% of EBIT margin, which is the average. We got to tell you the amount of additional EBIT you can get from these acquisitions.
If I do answer your question, Julien.
It's okay.
Okay.
Hello.
Nicolas Inglese from BNP Paribas. Got three questions. The first one on production.
So you mentioned it a couple of times, POP. And you said you have the right capabilities. So what do you see as the revenue opportunity in the midterm for that business line?
Second question on the equity incentive plan.
That you plan to launch after the admission.
Just to be clear, the cost associated.
With that plan is already factored in the adjusted EBIT guidance of 14%-15% in the midterm.
Finally, a question for Natalie.
Since she's there, what changed since you joined Havas? What became possible compared to before and how the deployment of the converged operating system is impacting your day to day business.
Okay. Thank you for your questions. We'll take the first one and Natalie will take the third one, obviously. On production we don't give any specific figures on the production aspect. What is sure is that, I mean François mentioned it that maybe we were late to the party. What he showed that AI is changing two things. First one, AI is changing the way we produce because it's much easier to produce from what we call the versioning. I mean the producing different format is almost in an instant. Then you need to check with human supervision. Of course.
And we believe that being a bit late to the party, meaning having less legacy business in the time of changing industry is an advantage. And second thing, you hear me well. And second point. So first point, less legacy. If you didn't hear me on the production, which is an advantage in times of changing of the landscape. And number two is directly linked. Directly linked, sorry to converge to the platform being able during the activation phase to do all that. So that's why we're investing a lot in production today to build one of the best production tool of the industry.
You take equity incentive plan.
Yes. Just to answer bluntly your question. Yes, the figures are taken into account in our forecast.
Natasha, thank you.
Question.
I think the biggest change really since we've become partners is really the ability.
To score scale very fast.
So we've already, since we've become partners.
Last year we've already opened in the states, which we wouldn't have been able to do with the same ferocity if we had talent. We wouldn't be able to start working.
With some phenomenal clients over there as a result. So I think that's the first is opening in both the States and in Stockholm. In one year, there's really our fortunes and Lagardère Group and be able to expand a lot faster.
And in terms of converged, it's already.
Helping us become smarter at the front end of the process and at the back end of the process in the way that we're producing work, we're able to apply AI to the way that.
We do things, particularly in what they.
Call the mid funnel, which is a.
Lot more of the sorts of assets.
You saw to be able to deploy in a smarter way.
But I mean, the way that we.
Pitch is also now, as you've heard mentioned a couple of times, we're able to pitch with that real support of the converged platform behind us, which is really giving us and our potential clients and our existing clients the real confidence of how we can deploy these sorts of tools for them and their smarts.
Thank you very much, Natalia. Natalia has been very humble but for those of you who are not familiar with creative agencies, The Uncommon is by far the biggest success in independent creative agencies, not only in the U.K., and the fact that The Uncommon, which received propositions, as you can imagine, from every holding company, has chosen Havas was a great source of pride for us because of our capabilities to attract the best talent on the planet. We talk about creativity. It's not just creative, it's strategy, it's operational excellence. I mean, I think it's a key differentiator for Havas and after Buzzman, BETC, Arnold and many other agencies, we are the home of the best creative talents of today and tomorrow.
Thank you very much.
I think I will jump to the question from line, please, and come back to you, Tom. Thank you.
We have an interesting question on M and A, if we can follow up. It's regarding pay acquisitions with shares and will it be, you know, taking into account the valuation of Havas? Yeah, please. Could you confirm and reassure that it will depend on the valuation of Havas? You will not pay in shares, buy shares, if its valuation is too low or it's a question.
I think the only way going forward is if you pay in shares to take the valuation.
Okay, okay. But do you have in mind a valuation?
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about valuation because I read the disclaimer.
Yeah, yeah, but I have to. So that's just the question. Thank you, Yannick. Okay, Sam, if you have the question.
Thank you. Yeah, Tom here from Citi wanted to ask about scale.
I mean, you were very clear.
You've got.
There's no bit of business that you couldn't pitch for anywhere in the world.
So it's well understood that you're definitely.
Big enough, but it's an area that.
Investors are sort of concerned about.
I suppose you've got two or three or four big global agency holding groups and then this sort of group of sort of slightly smaller companies, some public, some private. I'm just interested in how you see the landscape evolving with AI. Do you think actually we're going to go into a future where actually it's much easier for slightly smaller groups to sort of disrupt those larger holding companies?
Or do you think there will be another wave of consolidation at some point? That's the first question.
The second question, has Havas clearly done really well in areas around entertainment, branding and sponsorship by being part.
Of the Vivendi Group? I know you've already done sort of.
One decoupling with UMG, but is there?
Any sort of dis-synergy from being a.
Little bit more distant from the rest.
Of the Vivendi family?
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Tom. Scale is a very important question and this is a question we received a lot during the investors meeting during the early look presentations. Is Havas under scale? Does Havas have the right size? Can new players enter the market thanks to AI or other kind of digital disruption, and the question of scale, I mean, we have been addressing this question for the past 12 years. As you can imagine, when you look at François presentation with the organic growth of Havas compared to peers, it's mostly in line. It was slightly better in some years, slightly under other years, but at the end of the day, in average it's slightly in line, which meant that.
Our.
Scale is allowing us to compete at arm's length. Then we are not a small boutique. It's 23,000 people. You've just seen the tip of the iceberg, but amazing talents everywhere in the world, at every level of the company. I think it would be hard for a newcomer to become a global player. We are talking about huge investment in data and tech. We are talking about talent management. It's not easy to grow. You can be the best CEO of one agency, you try to open up in new countries. It's not easy. I mean, we're talking about the Uncommon and you just said that without Havas it, maybe it wouldn't have happened. And the Uncommon is becoming a huge success in the US. We didn't disclose the numbers, but it's.
I mean, for U.K. agency opening up in the U.S. it might be the biggest success ever, and so it's a combination of talents and a network. So all the examples of independent agencies that have tried to grow on their own, when you go international, it's not easy. So I don't believe you.
Never.
I mean, never say never, but I think it would be a very long shot, and then more scale, I believe is a good scale because we are big enough, but we are not too big, so Paddy said that I'm two clicks away from employees, maybe three, I don't know, but close to everyone. Every talent that I've asked has access to the leadership team, the executive committee, Celine, Stephanie, Charlotte, I mean Raphael, Christian, everyone, Atavas, Mercedes, Bertille, everyone have access to a senior leader. They call him or her by her or his first name. I mean, it's like a family, so I think it's an advantage, and when it comes to change rapidly once again, it's a differentiator. We have been able to conduct the integration phase of assets in two or three years to move everyone around the world.
It was just to quote the Adidas claim, impossible is nothing. But in that case, we did it converge. We started a year ago to work on the platform, and when we look at the results that the team with Dan, Mike, Christian, Steve, everyone, Rafael has been working on, less than a year we have a robust tool, and it will continue to increase, and it will be rolled out mid-2025 all around the world. So 23,000 people will be fully trained, and we'll have access to this tool. We're already winning some new pitches, so we can move fast. So I think it's an advantage, and I think also that.
For clients.
The fact that they have access directly and very easily to senior leaders can also prove to be an advantage, so of course if we were to do a deal with one of our peers, you will have some cost synergies. You only need to have one CEO, one CFO, one media lead, one media leader, one creative, of course, one adman, one finance, but you know what I mean, so of course you have cost synergies, but I believe we can compete, and our ambition at Havas is thanks to our competitive advantages: talent, data and tech, and I put talent first. Talent, data and tech, creativity, a unique integrated approach, great new operating system and a strong M&A strategy. I believe we can outsmart the competition. That's our belief, and that's why we are so excited at Havas all over the world by the prospect of the IPO.
Yes, the dis-synergies. I was thinking that our biggest dis-synergy there is Delphi because we had no IR before and now we have been forced to hire relevant. It's acceptable, but it's certainly the biggest. No joke about we have very few dis-synergies. As in 2017 when we moved from the market, we decided to keep all our directors internal. For example, internal audit was tax department, was treasury department. We were quite able to jump from non-listed to listed company. There could even be some positive synergies on tax in France. I will create a tax group in France. It could have been positive, but I'm afraid there will be some bad news coming from French tax authority that could mitigate this positive, so let's consider it will be stable, but no dis-synergies and no major impact coming from the listing.
Andrej.
So thank you, Yannick, for the very long explanations on the reason for the Amsterdam listing. So I think all of us here listened to what you said on the issue with people inside the company and the clients and that was the reason that you put up the poison pill. I guess the question on governance here is what would happen to the management team if for a lengthy period you underperform and you just committed to stay as a manager for the next 10 years. And so this is, I would say, an answer that we would like to have from you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Andrej, in a great way of asking your questions.
No.
So what happens, I mean, if the company and the management starts to underperform? I mean, that's the responsibility of the board to appoint a new manager, to be clear. And you know, the good thing with this, I would say with this governance is that the CEO happens to be also a shareholder on the group, which I think is a positive thing. Because if I believe that one day we can have a better CEO for Havas, we'll appoint a better CEO for Havas. To be fully transparent, I'm not trying to. My only interest is the Havas people and its clients. To be clear, I have a very strong relationship with those people. It's my professional family. I've been spending the past 13 years of my career there. And I will do everything to make sure that the company is in the best hands.
Yes.
I have one question on your relationship with the big digital advertising platforms. Obviously in the past you were the gatekeepers to the old media and your customers were benefiting from the economies of scale that you generated in buying media, but now with the reverse auctions that they introduce, obviously your customers can and anyone can buy directly advertising on their platform, and that's why the group of you and your peers have underperformed the digital advertising growth in the past 10-15 years, and now with AI, if I go on all the Meta platform, I can obviously create my own advertising and with Adobe tool I can manage the entire.
Marketing plan from there.
So in the end, what's the kind of value add left where you've been completely, you were the intermediaries and you were indispensable. But now more and more all the roles you are playing are kind of being automated by the Adobe, Meta, and Google of this world. So how do you see your relationship and your role in this, in this supply chain?
Thank you very much. It's a great question, of course, I mean all those new platforms are sort of open to in-house automation, maybe Peter.
Do you.
Want to stand up?
Sure.
How do you see the advertising landscape and maybe say a word about in-housing threat?
Yeah, I mean look, we've been looking at in-housing on the client side for a number of years now, which, you know, we've embraced that for a number of our clients. We've helped them on their in-housing journeys as it relates to media buying and on the production side. I think we're embracing technologies and we're building platforms with a number of those partners that you mentioned which allow us to free up our talent to do higher value, more consultative thinking. So I don't think it necessarily replaces the humans that we have at Havas. Maybe some of the roles will change and some of that work, the transaction will be managed differently, but that will just free up our talent to do higher value work. I don't know who asked the question, so I'm looking. Okay, that answered.
Okay.
Last question because it's out of time.
Hi, Laura from Morgan Stanley.
Thank you for the presentation.
Two questions, please. Please. The first one on data, you mentioned that you have an approach to not owning data. Can you explain why you think this is a better approach?
Who's your main, like who's the?
Main provider of your data? And then second question is, I know you don't have guidance by segment.
Do you mind giving us?
A sense of whether you expect one.
Of your three segments to kind of.
Outperform in the future or another one that would potentially underperform the group growth? And also do you plan on disclosing growth by segment on a quarterly basis? That's helpful just to know how to drive the models.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. Very interesting question about the data that we have been asking ourselves a lot, especially as you can imagine, after the big acquisition from our French peer a few years back, and I will give the floor to Dan.
Sure.
Can you hear me okay? Okay, perfect. So, as I said earlier, by not owning data, that's not our solution. So we're trying to be more bespoke and the partnerships we work with tend to be quite flexible around the world. So we have some big panel partnerships from a global perspective, but many data providers don't actually have a particularly good global data footprint, and that's because the market is so different. So what we find is you may have a couple of countries where you might want to do a deal with one provider. It's very rare to do a deal with one provider and get a universal coverage across the world. So we're much more flexible and we give our countries flexibility to partner with those that are going to drive the best value for them and the best value for their clients.
I could name a whole ton of logos, but I don't think that's necessarily going to help sort of anyone. But we work with a whole bunch of different providers. So we work with partners in Paris, Sirdata, Prisa. We work with AIQ in the U.S. We work with YouGov around the world. From a panel provision provider, we work with Weborama. I can name a whole bunch of logos. It's probably not super beneficial.
If I might rephrase your question, because it's a very important question about data. Do you believe that at Havas we are missing opportunities in serving our clients by not owning a huge acquisition, in owning our own data?
No, and a couple of reasons for that. One is because the marketplace is changing incredibly quickly. So if we acquire a massive mountain of data, we then have to ensure that that data is always competitive and is always the best piece of data that's out there in the marketplace, which is an incredibly challenging thing to do. We also find ourselves in a difficult position in the same way that we don't own a whole bunch of media in Havas, because then our ownership becomes our solution. So data is operated in the same fashion, and as things change over time, so many of our peers have acquired data for the last 10 plus years, some of which is completely deprecated now because of the change in cookies, because of the change in technology.
That's something we want to avoid and be able to provide the best solution for a client for their challenge and their problem.
Thank you very much, Dan. Great. And that's true that there is an analogy with owning media and the fact that Havas was part of. Just to come back to your question about the synergies, we never, I mean the Canal+ media assets or Dailymotion or Prisa have always remained independent. And I think it's the best way that Havas people remain independent, in other words, clients to invest in media and that media people remain agnostic in terms of agency partners and so. So everyone can have access to the best data. And I think on the best media and I think it's the same on data. And the second question, maybe the guidance by growth segments.
Yes, as you said, we do not guide by segment, but we gave some clues during our presentation telling you that we have lost a client in health business. Therefore, the performance of health in 2024 was not at the level we were used to and we don't give you guidance. But at the same time media is, I would say overperforming and last year it was creative. I would say it's a mix.
And.
And we know that Havas will be back in the coming months. So I would say all the three business units are doing very well and are working together.
So, thank you very much, everyone. Before we leave, I just wanted to really thank. Of course, all the speakers have been great today. They did a great job. They deserve a round of applause. Congrats. I also want to thank Charlotte and all the amazing team at Havas London and Havas Communication for putting up all together H Advisor, everyone. So, thank you, everyone, and everyone that has participated in this show. And most importantly, thank you for your attention for being present in London or following online. Thank you very much. Your support is very precious.
Thank you.
Bankers that I can see that are with us since the beginning of this deal, thank you very much.