Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the VusionGroup Q3 2025 sales conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question- and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one, one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Olivier Gernandt, Investor Relations Director. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 sales presentation. With me today are Thierry Gadou, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Thierry Lemaitre, our Deputy CEO, Corporate and Finance. Thierry Gadou will make some remarks on the group's operational highlights. Thierry Lemaitre will then discuss our group's financial performance. Thierry Gadou will conclude our presentation with some remarks on our full-year outlook. After this presentation, we will be happy to take your questions. As a reminder, some of the information to be discussed on our call today is forward-looking and subject to important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For these, I refer you to the safe harbor statement included in our press release and on slide three of this presentation.
This evening's release was issued a short while ago and is available in French and English on VusionGroup's website, vusion.com. The slides of this presentation can also be found on our website in the regulated information section. A replay and a transcript will also be available on our website after the call. It is my pleasure to hand you over to Thierry Gadou for his opening remarks.
Thank you, Olivier. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining our conference call. Very pleased to present to you, along with Thierry Lemaitre, our sales figures for the third quarter. Let's start with the main highlights. VusionGroup achieved an excellent third quarter with a 59% growth in adjusted sales year on year at EUR 355 million. The nine months' adjusted sales are just above EUR 1 billion, up 54%. The nine months' VAS sales reached EUR 144 million, up 115% versus last year at the same period. We had a continued good level of order entries, which are now just below EUR 1.8 billion over 12 months, an increase of 26%. The momentum is good. We just announced an important deal this morning.
If we look at the performance by region now, the strong growth outside Europe is particularly driven by the intensive rollout of Echsence in Walmart in the U.S., which is now reaching a cruising speed and fast speed. Over nine months, Europe is still showing a small decline, but the situation is stabilized in Q3, and the order entries are good too. As I said this morning, we announced the full fleet rollout of one of the largest British retailers, Morrison’s. It's about 500 supermarkets to be deployed as soon as next year. As you know, after Asda, this is the second win in the U.K. since the beginning of the month.
We announced Asda early October, and it's the third win in the U.K. since the beginning of the year, if we include the full rollout contract for Co-op, which makes over 3,000 stores, two rollouts in the U.K. with new orders this year. The momentum is quite good in Europe in general, both in new logos. We have also a large part of our customer base who will begin to renew their infrastructure in the next year. We see the momentum very good also in Europe. Regarding VAS now, revenue more than doubled, particularly driven by vCloud and FusionCloud and FusionOS. Our cloud ESL installed base, by the way, has grown by over 200% in the last year, thanks to both new rollouts on cloud and also legacy customers' migration to cloud.
We passed the very symbolic threshold in Q3 of 50%, of more than 50% now of our total installed base in the cloud now. In Q3, there was also a significant increase in the VAS pipeline, in particular with computer vision projects and data solutions, which are both being more and more seen as a must-have technology in the future. We are very well positioned there and very optimistic to have a big part in this future big wave. We are also excited about the impact of AI in retail. You have seen a number of announcements in that area over the past few weeks. On Monday, we made an important announcement about the opening of our Echsence connected store platform to AI applications and generative models. This is really important. I mean, today, AI lives essentially online in the cloud.
Tomorrow, it will come to the physical world and in particular to the physical stores. As you know, Echsence, the infrastructure, turns the store into a smart grid, into a digital twin, where every product, every associate, shopper, are located, connected, synchronized. Just as GPS enabled the smartphones to navigate and understand digital maps, Echsence provides a store context and data layer that generative AI models, autonomous agents, and soon AI wearables such as smart glasses will need to understand and interact intelligently in the physical store. Echsence AI now is making this data infrastructure available through APIs and developer partnerships. This is the core of the announcement of Monday. Echsence gives AI the self-learning real-world context it has been missing until now. We believe this is a major step toward bridging the digital and the physical dimensions of commerce and bringing AI to physical retail.
Having said that, I hand over to Thierry for detailed comments on our figures, and I will be back for our outlook perspectives.
Thank you, Thierry. Hello, everyone. I will now go through the detail of the Q3 revenues and order entries. Q3 revenues this year stood at EUR 347.8 million in IFRS and EUR 355.3 million in adjusted terms, which is a 59% increase versus Q3 last year. You can see that the value of the adjustment in Q3 is now lower than in Q2 due to the adjustment on the selling price starting to reverse in Q3 this year, as we mentioned earlier. Over the first nine months, we are exceeding EUR 1 billion total adjusted revenues, which is close to the full year adjusted revenues last year on an increase of +54%. Within the total revenues, VAS are now accounting for 14.3% versus 10% over the first nine months last year. We see the main momentum as at the end of H1 with a strong growth of 115% versus last year.
Both the recurring and the non-recurring VAS revenues are showing strong growth of 37% and 238% respectively. Order entries, they are also solid at almost EUR 1.3 billion over the first nine months, showing an increase of 12% versus last year and 26% on a rolling 12-month basis. I will hand over to Thierry for the outlook.
Thank you, Thierry. We're expecting a big quarter in Q4, our biggest quarter ever, revenue at around EUR 500 million to reach our target of EUR 1.5 billion. We do reiterate the guidance that we raised one month ago. VusionGroup also expects to exceed its initial VAS revenue growth target of 80% for the entire year. Overall, with an excellent order book and pipeline, the visibility for next year is excellent and growth prospects are very good. We will detail all this, our 2026 guidance, in February when we report our full year 2025 results. Thank you very much. Now we can take questions, if there are.
Thank you.
Operator?
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one, one again. We will take our first question. The question comes from the line of Ben Thielmann from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Good evening. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Okay. Perfect. Hi, Olivier. Hi. To the two Thierrys, a few questions from my side. The first one would be on revenues in EMEA. It seems like revenues in Q3 are up 3%. You guys have flagged it already in Q1 and the Q2 earnings call that you expect an H2 recovery. I was just wondering if you could guide us a little bit. How shall we split the EUR 500 million in revenues in Q4 between EMEA and Americas? Is it fair to say that the slight plus we have seen in Q3 is likely to be seen in Q4 as well for EMEA? That's the first one.
Yeah. I mean, we give guidance for quarters. We don't make precise guidance by regions. I think overall, what I said is that in Europe, we see, again, we've had a decline which is partly visual because of the comparable basis. I don't want to repeat myself, but there's been much, much higher growth than expected in the past years. We have a comparable basis which is not really favorable. However, we're now back to this breakeven. We see again order entries growing because I think we mentioned that for the third consecutive quarter, we see growth in order entries in Europe. We announced several of these, including this morning, which are not in these numbers, by the way, because they would be in Q4. All this shows a good momentum.
On a quarter-by-quarter basis, we don't give those guidance numbers, but we see very good momentum in Europe, a need for our solutions. That's why we are positive. We really are very confident on our average growth guidance that we had given a number of years ago, about 20% per annum. We're still on that trend, by the way, and we will continue. There's been a little bit of a decline, as you know, but we see that more behind us now.
Okay. Perfect. Maybe another question which was related to something that you announced already a couple of weeks ago is in terms of M&A. You guys took a minority stake in a German robotics company called Ubica. There was also a majority stake that you took in another data analytics company. I was just wondering, maybe you could give us some color. What was the rationale behind it? As I understand it, it goes into the field of computer vision. Maybe what is the revenue contribution from that on your 2025 numbers?
No, I mean, again, those are relatively small entities. In one case, it's a minority investment. It's very insignificant in terms of the, but it's more to bring on board either some skills that we may lack in some very important geographies or a foot in some of the technology areas where we were absent. I'm thinking about the robotics. Those are things that are part of our, I would say, building our skills and building our portfolio of technologies, watching things. It is something that is small in size, so we don't comment about that.
Okay. The third question would be, you mentioned the outlook and visibility for 2026 are excellent. I know you're going to guide on next year officially in February, but maybe you can help us a little bit. What does that refer to? Is it revenues and earnings momentum, or is that also referring to your cash generation capabilities? Any color on that?
I think that there was a lot of color on the cash flows last time. It's not really the call to talk about financials and cash flows, but maybe, Thierry, you can repeat what you said.
I think that's what I want to elaborate on furthermore compared to what we said last time. We said that, of course, I don't want to give any color on potential guidance for 2026. That's not the right time to do it. We don't want to do that. I just reiterate that we said that in terms of cash flows, next year, there will be a reversal on the down payments. That will certainly be a negative free cash flow at the company level. That's it. There is nothing new and nothing new compared to what we said in September a few weeks ago.
I think you said that our operational, our intrinsic operational cash flow is continuing to grow.
Absolutely.
This year and next year, and that we will consume some of the down payments, but we will stay on a net positive cash, net cash positive in the medium term, which is also, I think, which is already saying a lot in terms of the positive cash flow generation of the company because it's the case. I'm not sure it's the, you know, we'll talk about that when we present our H2 and full-year results now. We've talked a lot about this, I think, in September. Regarding the, you know, you said we should help you. I mean, I think we are helping a lot already because when you say that you are confident that you are going to have robust growth next year after posting 50% growth in a year at the scale we have now, this is saying a lot already.
We will make more detailed statements on the way we see 2026. We're already saying that in spite of having very strong growth, having raised our guidance in the middle of the year, we are still seeing robust growth for next year. I think it's already a lot. I won't be more precise than that. Ben, sorry.
It is. No, it's totally, yeah, it's perfect. I'm very happy with that. Okay, that's it from my side. Thank you, guys. I'm going back into the queue.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Hugo Paternoster from . Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Good evening, Olivier and Thierry. Can you hear me well?
Yes, we can.
Yes.
Great. I would like to come back, first of all, on the deal that you announced this morning with Morrison’s. I just wanted to focus not on the hardware, but potentially on the initiative that you want to explore with Morrison’s. If you could shed some light or a concrete example of what you are expecting to do with them, I believe it's more related to AI. What could you, what potentially could you tell us from this deal?
I think there is nothing, I mean, let's say, you know, we have a customer development approach with every one of our customers, which is to, you know, develop a roadmap with them about digitalization of a number of processes. This digitalization can enable new experiences in the store with the shoppers, new relationships, new ways of delivering loyalty. We have a, let's say, a pattern of developing our customers, but it always starts with the backbone of the digitization. It always starts with putting the infrastructure first because then it becomes the backbone where we can enable a number of additional functions. In that respect, Morrison’s is not really different. We're putting first, and we need to roll it out. In the next 12, 18 months, first the infrastructure, the ESLs, the cloud also because it's going to be all cloud-based.
We will work on a number of features additionally. You need to first do the things. Now we have a portfolio of solutions. Every one of our customers that we start, it's true also with the previous deal we announced at the beginning of the year, sorry, of the month in the U.K. We have a number of solutions that after we install the first ESLs, we add to the, but you need to do things in order because first you need the backbone infrastructure, and then you can add, you know, additional services. Here, we have the right infrastructure. It's all cloud. It's all, you know, new generation of solutions. I'm sure we'll do a lot of things with Morrison’s in the future.
Okay. Got it. A question, a little bit of follow-up on this is how do you think both Asda and Morrison’s rollout will influence the discussion that you may have with other retailers in the U.K. and potentially one of the tier one retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, maybe Aldi? Do you feel that there is an impact already in the discussion?
Yes. I think Morrison’s, Asda would not be happy to hear that they are not considered as tier one by you because they are clearly all in the top five or top six, including Co-op, of the retail. When you are talking about a market of the size of the United Kingdom, the top five retailers are really big retailers. They are all tier ones. To answer your question, yes, I think the momentum in the U.K. is excellent. The pressure is high also to bring automation and to bring intelligence to the store. I think there would be, you know, in the next 12 months, there'll be a lot more announcements.
Okay. Got it. No, regarding the top tier, I wouldn't be over a top tier of.
Okay. Sorry.
Morrison. Another question on the like. It's beyond the U.K. I just wonder, apart from Walmart in North America currently, what is the lev.el of discussion that you may have with additional potential customers? Perhaps you could provide us some information on the pilot that you may have there.
We have a very, we have a big pipeline in America, in North America particularly, also a little bit in Latin America. There are a number of things going on. We don't make comments on our pipeline. This is a bit too, you know, this is confidential matters, and we are not here speaking only to our investors. I won't be very talkative about any individual deals, but we have a big pipeline in America.
Okay. I had to try again, jump back into the queue. Thank you.
Thank you, Hugo.
Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Flavien Baudemont from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hello, gentlemen. Good evening. My first question is a follow-up on Hugo's question. Last quarter, you mentioned that in terms of visibility in the U.S., you think that you can possibly sign a deal in H2 2026. Is it still the case?
Yes, I didn't remember I was that precise, but I mean, I would just follow up on the previous answer I made, which was about also the U.S. We have a very significant pipeline in the U.S. It's always uncertain which quarter you may sign, but I'm sure that in the next 12 months, there'll be deals signed, yes, including H2 2026, yes.
Okay. Thanks. I have a second question on the order book. It's still down in Q3 by approximately 5%. Maybe can we have some color on that?
You know, the color is simple. I personally think for a third quarter, it's an excellent, really excellent quarter. This number in absolute terms, it obviously is a little bit affected by a comparative basis because we were getting big multi-year orders in the previous period. It's a good absolute number, and we're happy with the level of order entries. You know, it's compatible with when I look at the level of order entries, the level of the pipeline, and our plan 27, all this is completely consistent.
Okay. Thanks. On the value-added services, your recurring VAS revenue per cloud ESL is again down quarter to quarter. I'm mainly wondering because I think that there is a volume effect with Walmart that impacted it. What is the dynamic of your recurring VAS sales excluding Walmart? What's basically the growth with this client, with this kind of clients?
Yeah. I think the dynamic of the cloud connected is, and you need to be taking into account different things. We have migrations. We did a lot of migrations, which is a very positive factor because we have this objective of being at some point very soon at 90% in the cloud. Pushing a lot of migrations, and we did huge migrations. Those things can happen. You need to look at the average level of labels, really, when you make those comparisons because here you're talking about revenues during a three-month period compared to a number of. If you look at this, you will not see that big trend. I don't want to enter into too many comparisons between customers in terms of pricing or revenue. I will leave it here. The growth of 37% is something that we feel very comfortable.
I mentioned also that we are having an increase in the pipeline of VAS recurring projects, particularly a strong increase in the pipeline of Captana computer vision projects, which I mentioned is a particular pattern of the Q3. We're very confident about the fast growth, which is quite consistent, which probably will be accelerating in our VAS recurring revenue.
Thanks. I have a last one regarding your flag growth in Europe. Is it coming from new logo or mainly from existing customers? Is it mainly due to a growth in ESL revenues or in VAS revenues?
It's really, really coming from both ESLs and VAS, definitely, first. Second, it's coming from also, I mean, we announced a number of new logos, and it's not yet coming from these new logos because the recently announced ones are going to be more feeding growth in 2026. You know, again, when we talk about our existing customers, it's always important to remind we have a very, very large base of customers, particularly in Europe, and a huge install base. Even in that base of customers, we have only partial penetration of our customers. We continue to grow the coverage, the penetration, the coverage of our customer base. That is always driving growth. We expand categories. A big part of our growth, you know, is within our customer base. We add new logos regularly, and you know, we regularly announce new ones.
A big part of our growth is also coming from customers. I mentioned also that a number of our customers who have rolled out in 2017, 2018, 2019 are going to be also upgrading, refreshing, and renewing the tech in their stores. This is also a growth driver for the next years. It is a perpetual sort of business. We have a lot of growth in the customer base. If I look at 2027, 2028, it would not be very surprising that 70% of our revenue then is actually coming from customers we already have today.
That's clear. Thank you, Thierry.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone. We will take our next question. The next question comes from the line of Laurent sivignon from ODDO BHF . Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good evening, gentlemen. Two follow-up questions from my side on the U.K. First, on the Morrison’s contract, do you expect this rollout to be completed by the end of 2026? The second one, finally, would you say the U.K. could quickly become your second largest country by revenue going forward? Maybe from 2026, I mean, adding Morrison’s to Asda and to Co-op, the numbers are getting quite significant. Thank you.
Yes, it could be. I'm not making a promise here, but let's say the intention is to go relatively fast in the rollout. Yes, it could be done by the end of 2026. Maybe it could roll over a little bit in 2027, but it's a possibility. Obviously, if you look at GDP and retail intensity of the market, the U.K. is a big market and certainly one of the top three markets in Europe. It should really catch up. I've been waiting for this moment. It should really catch up in the top three markets of Europe. Whether it's going to be the second one, I don't know because there is big competition between our markets. Germany is also a very important market. You know, it's going to be one of the top three, definitely. We are very, very excited about this market.
Thank you. Just on the Morrison’s contract, does it make sense to think that this rollout will be completed by the end of next year or maybe a little bit too short?
I think I answered, I thought I answered that question. I said, yes, it's not a promise, but it's very likely we can complete the rollout by the end of next year. Absolutely.
Okay. Thank you very much, Thierry.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take our next question. The next question comes from Flavien Baudemont from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes, sorry. I forgot one question. On the Asda deal, does the deal include any VAS sales?
Yes, of course. First, it's again, a full cloud deal plus a number of new services, which are additional services and solutions which are not in the press release, but which are being already tested in many stores and very likely to be rolled out. There will be more announcements about Asda as we go. Yes, the scope is quite significant in terms of solutions.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you. There seems to be no further questions. I would like to hand back for closing remarks.
Thank you very much, everyone. It was a pleasure to spend these minutes with you today. We will be back now in quite a while, Olivier.
26th of February.
February 26th, which is maybe late for the revenue, but early for the financial results. For the first time, it will be together. Yes, it will be the first time we do this. We inaugurate a new timing. It will be February 26th. In the meantime, I wish you a great evening. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.