JCDecaux SE (JCDXF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning to those of you in the US and welcome to our 2023 full year results conference call, which is also being webcast. The speakers on this call will be Jean-Charles Decaux, Co-CEO, David Bourg, Chief Financial Officer, IT and Administrative, and myself, Rémi Grisard, Head of Investor Relations, is also attending today's conference call. On slide four, 2003, has been a positive year for JCDecaux with a solid business momentum leading to an improved financial performance. Our revenue increased by 8.7% organically, driven by the strong growth of digital revenue above 20%. Digital revenues now represent more than a third of our business at the record 35.3% for 2023. Programmatic revenues have been especially dynamic this year, growing more than 60% year-on-year with more than 100 million euros of advertising revenue in 2023. We remain best-in-class in ESG as shown by our recent A-list inclusion by CDP Climate. We have proved that we are able to have a positive operational leverage by growing our operating margin more than our revenue at plus 10% year-on-year despite a decrease in China, given the soft revenue recovery. Our net results improved significantly by plus 58.3%. Operating cash flows go in line with our activity at plus 19.8% year-on-year. While our free cash flow was close to break even this year, it is very clearly positive when you exclude one-offs of close to 100 million euros linked to contracts and negotiations, with positive long-term benefits that we have detailed during our H1 results. So at the end of the day, as you see, a healthy business model leveraging on the recovery with a good momentum for out-of-home media with advertisers, but still affected by someone else and by the exceptional situation in China. So still...