Lagardere Sa (LGDDF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining this evening to the Lagardère-ESA full year 2023 results. I'm Emmanuel Rapa, head of financial communication, and I will be engaging you through the presentation. The conference is led today by Arnaud Lagardère, chairman and chief executive officer of Lagardère-ESA and Hachette-Livre, Sophie Stabile, group CFO, Dag Rasmussen, Chairman and CEO of Lagardère Travel Retail. Stéphanie Ferrand, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Hachette Livre. After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. Please click on the Ask a Question tab on the top right of your screen. And I will be reading questions from financial analysts only. Now I leave the floor to Arnaud Lagardère. The floor is yours. Thank you so much. Let me just say a few words before leaving the floor to Sophie, just to express that we are obviously extremely happy. We have another exceptional year, setting new records for the company. But the most important, I think, is that our numbers are the exact consequence of our strategy, meaning one, that we have been taking advantage of the growth of travel retail, investing in that business unit. As you know, in 2023, with significant numbers, we want to push them as hard as we can to take advantage of this growth that is unbelievable. And the results of travel retail are extremely impressive. But at the same time, boosting also the organic growth publishing with a number of increased costs, not to mention paper and so on. And we've been able for the past year, as for the year before, to maintain the step that we've achieved after the COVID and keeping this very nice margin of 10% for us. The objective, of course, for the years to come is to keep in the double-digit operating margin and to grow it if we can. I wouldn't be surpri...