Lagardere Sa (LGDDF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us this evening to Lagardère SA first half 2024 results. I am Emmanuel Rapa, head of financial communication, and I will be guiding you through this presentation. The conference is led today by Arnaud Lagardère, chairman and chief executive officer of Lagardère SA and Hachette Livre SA. Grégoire Casta, Deputy CEO of Lagardère Group in Charge of Finance, Diagra Smitsen, Chairman and CEO of Lagardère Travel Hotel, and Stéphanie Ferrand, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Hachette Livre. After the presentation, I will be reading the Q&A session from financial analysts only, and now I will leave the floor to Arnaud Lagardère. Thank you, Emmanuel, and good afternoon to everybody. Before I get to my brief introduction about H1, let me give you two quick updates. The first one is to introduce Grégoire Castin, who will cover H1 in details. You received the PR, so you know exactly who he is and where he's coming from. He will be fully operational in September. And the idea is to reinforce our financial team, while Sophie remains a CFO of the group, obviously. Grégoire will report to me, and the current team will report to him. One of the top missions Grégoire will carry is to lower the net debt amount and bring more focus to the overall company on the cash management. and so we will welcome him, and this is gonna be very, very helpful. Second, you've heard the Vivendi announcement, which is great news for the Lagarnais company. As you remember, the deal that I personally made with Vincent Bolloré and his family was based on very close relationship between both families, and at that time, Vivendi was the vehicle for that deal. So we will, once the whole deal will be accomplished, once all the agreements will be given by the extraordinar...