Good morning, one and all. I'm delighted to see you back six months after our latest presentation, which took place in February. We're going to comment on our first half 2022 results. To do that, we'll have three speakers mainly, but we'll also bring on stage a number of managers to show you the highlights of the first half of the year. Jean-Louis Bouchard is honoring us with his presence. Chairman, Founder, and Majority Shareholder of the Econocom Group, and Angel Benguigui, Executive Managing Director, will also be with me on stage to talk about the financial part. You received the press release on Tuesday night, so we wanted to comment on a few things and bring a few things into relief in these results. To talk about the results and the financial situation, share with you the highlights, I'll ask Philippe Goullioud, who is the CEO of Products & Solutions, to come and talk about our Product Care know-how. I'll ask Samira Draoua, who's in charge of the leasing and financing business in France, to come and talk about an acquisition that was made in the second quarter. Long-Ly Giang, who's in charge of services in France, will come and talk about two deals that were signed in the first half. Regarding our first results, we returned to organic growth, which reflects all the work that was done in the previous quarter, so that was decent. We'll talk about acquisitions. We had a continuation of external growth, and we also maintained our profitability level in our H1 results. That is translated, in terms of figures, into EUR 1.24 billion in revenue, so that's 9% organic growth. We had an increase in revenues. In terms of ROP, our ROP was EUR 59 million, 4.7% of revenues for profitability, so we maintained our profitability level compared to the previous year. Regarding net income, we reached EUR 34 million, close to 11% in terms of improvement. That's an increase in net income compared to the same period in 2021. Our NFT, net financial debt, is 1.5 times EBITDA for the last twelve months, so our NFT was under control. I will now give the floor to Angel to talk about the financials before I take the floor again. Angel, over to you. Thank you, Laurent. Hello. Let's talk figures with the first slide, the aim of which is to try and clarify, to try and give transparent figures in our communications and explain on what basis we are communicating. You've seen that for a while, we've been referring to pro forma figures and accounting rules make it so that we have to refer to restated figures. On this slide, you've got the bridge between the revenues that were published at 30 June 2021, EUR 1,240 million, which as it happens, is exactly the same figure as we published at 30 June 2022, EUR 1,240 million. You can see between what was published at 30 June 2021 and the restated figures for 30 June 2021, we had a EUR 147 million reduction, which are the revenues of businesses that were discontinued since, and a few changes in accounting methods, but which are not very significant. A scope of discontinued operations and a few changes in non-significant accounting methods. We had EUR 1,093 million restated for 30 June 2021, which you'll find in the half year financial statements and on a few slides in the appendices for this presentation. To go to the pro forma figures, we have the revenues up and down for the companies that were sold and bought. You can see that the EUR 52 million from acquisitions, that's the revenues for H1 2021 over the same period for the acquisitions that are in our revenues for the first half 2022. When we're talking about organic growth between 1,137 pro forma and 1,240, we're talking about organic growth from the activities that we already had and organic growth from acquisitions that were carried out in the past year. Growth in revenues, overall revenues, and ROP also our profitability level. As regards revenues, the 9% increase is driven by the TMF business and to a lesser extent by Products & Solutions. ROP, however, grew by 12.6%. That's an increase across the board, Products & Solutions, services, and TMF. That leads to a profitability rate which is roughly equivalent to what we had last year. A very slight increase to 4.7% ROP versus over revenues compared to 4.6% last year. The split, revenues by region, we have kept a good balance between French revenues and international revenues. You can see the biggest areas, France 52%, EUR 643 million, Southern Europe EUR 279 million, 23% Benelux, and so on. It's worth mentioning that growth was generated mostly in the two main areas of responsibility, so France and Southern Europe. Now, business-by-business results, Products & Solutions, there was double-digit organic growth. We talked about that. We already had a high level of backlog at 31 December 2021. In revenues growth, we had a positive contribution from all regions. It's worth mentioning. However, one should point out that this growth was delivered with a high level of backlog because we had significant and persistent sourcing difficulties in the first half of 2022, as you know. We had roughly EUR 100 million in additional backlog compared to what we were used to having before these supply problems. We have a lot of backlog, mostly on P&S and TMF, for roughly EUR 200 million. Now our backlog is EUR 300 million. In spite of that, there was positive growth in all regions from products and solutions. Regarding ROP, it's on the rise compared to last year, but not enough in order to maintain the same level of profitability. One should note that there were some price tensions, which meant that we were not fully able to maintain the same margins despite very strong growth in revenues. Regarding TMF, we've achieved growth since Q3 2021. For the last three years and until Q3 2021, TMF's business had been declining, but this decline has now stopped, and we've resumed organic growth since Q3 2021 and Q4. For this half year, we had a 14% growth pro forma compared to last year. For TMF, the scope is exactly the same. There were no changes in scope, no acquisitions or disposals. For ROP, this increase in revenues was fully passed on. We had a 20.7% improvement in ROP, so the profitability rate grew by 0.2 percentage points to 4.3%. This strong increase is related mainly to the strengthening of our sales force. In May 2021, we had a plan to recruit sales reps in all TMF activities in all countries of the group. This program is now paying off. It's bearing fruit, although we are cautious. You could see that, despite the increase in revenues, we are rather cautious about H2. We prefer to be cautious. Technology Management & Financing is a highly seasonal business, where sometimes there are big major deals that are signed, and so it's not fully linear, not as much as services and to a lesser extent as Products & Solutions. We prefer to be cautious for H2, although we've got major backlog, as I said, for TMF. We also had a strong increase in a number of sales reps. Still talking about TMF, for the first time in three years, we had an increase in our leased assets by over EUR 100 million, which is a good sign, with a residual value which was at the same level as we had last year at EUR 170 million. That means that our portfolio is de-risked. That's 3% of the original price of all contracts that were signed. That accounts for about half of what we statistically cover in terms of remarketing of equipment at the end of a contract or in terms of contract rollover. For services, however, we are focusing on profitability over growth. For a while now, we've been talking about the strategy. First of all, we're trying to focus on those service businesses where we have leadership positions, especially IT management of workstations in France. We're increasing profitability quite strongly to 8.2% versus 7.1% last year, with an increase in ROP, which is double digits, but revenues were down. However, there is a certain lag between contract signature and implementation, so they will be implemented in the second half of the year. We had a dynamic business for Apps, Cloud and Data, the recent new name, and it grew by 6% over the half year. The simplified income statement, because of accounting standards compared to restated figures for H1 2021. Revenue growth was 13.4% ROP growth that we've already mentioned. Now talking about the major changes in the P&L, you can see that one-offs are growing, but we simply wanted to anticipate things, some exit costs. We anticipated them to H1 for activities that we're optimizing and reorganizing, and there was a marked increase, improvement in the tax rate. Our net profit from continuing operations is growing by over 40%, and our increase in consolidated net profit to EUR 33.6 million, the increase was 10%. Between the two, you have the result from discontinued operations. It's worth mentioning that last year we benefited from capital gains, disposal capital gains on a few businesses that were held for sale, and so we are not benefiting from that effect this year. Regarding debt on the balance sheet, EUR 217 million at 30 June 2021, EUR 272 million at 30 June 2022. There are three major elements in that that I would like to tell you about. First of all, the fact that we invested EUR 40 million in treasury shares, share buybacks. We have a EUR 60 million decrease in factoring and reverse factoring, and also we've increased our own booked lease value. Our adjusted net debt would be EUR 98 million. Talking about EBITDA and gearing, I think that we can come to the conclusion that debt, as we'd already said at the latest meeting, is no longer any issue for the group. It's fully under control. By the way, over the first half of the year, we've lengthened the maturity of our overall debt. We issued a bond, a Schuldschein for EUR 200 million for 3, 5, and 7 years, with an average maturity of over four years, with a rate that was set before the interest rate hike, which is 2%. This EUR 200 million Schuldschein will come and repay the OCEANE bond, which is currently at EUR 149 million, which is due in March 2022. 2023, I'm sorry. Here you can see the bridge between gross cash and debt. There's EUR 71 million in short-term debt, EUR 149 million for the OCEANE, due in March 2023, 208 for the new issue, plus EUR 8 million from the previous Schuldschein issuance, with over four years of average maturity and 153, our recourse financing on own booked contracts. That leads us to a net financial debt of EUR 272 million at the end of H1 2022. Now I will throw it over to Laurent for the highlights. Merci, Angel. Thank you very much for that, Angel. Now let's talk about some of the highlights as we work to round out Econocom's offering in the first half of 2022. We've taken steps towards a more European presence, and that can most visibly be seen in our ability to deploy across multiple countries where we already have presence, synergies with partners through certifications that have already been deployed across our countries with those very same partners. This is something that was done through cross-cutting meetings that we held, so coordinated meetings with Philippe Goullioud and Mr. Garcia working on the international front. This has enabled us to renew successfully our partnerships and the subsequent conditions with Lenovo and Apple in the first half. We also have European presence, which is strongly anchored in our ability to rely on these partnerships. Lenovo and Dell for our partnerships and country certifications that are providing significant added value for our business as we offer products and solutions calls for tender. I'm going to ask the Director General of Products & Solutions France, Mr. Goullioud, to come and tell us about this part of the business. If you just grab a microphone. Good morning, everyone. Product Care is a service center for repairing, and it's a premium mobility angle for working with brands such as Microsoft, Lenovo, Apple, and HP. What we do in this center is exactly what it says on the tin. We maintain, we repair, and we extend the life cycle of mobile devices. Nowadays, mobile devices are extremely important for pretty much everyone, and it's no longer acceptable to have a mobile device break down for too long. We've created this Product Care service for companies and administrations, and this has been very successful because we're able to keep smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks, and the like in operational status. Also, we're able to extend their life cycle by providing services such as repairs. We can significantly extend the life cycle of these devices, and this has been very successful in our public and private sector markets. As you can see on the slide, we had the honor and pleasure to host the French minister in charge of digital transition and telecommunications, Mr. Jean-Noël Barrot. That was last Friday. He dropped in a little bit by a surprise, in fact. It was all set up in just two days. The minister was very happy to see that we were in line with the government's targets in this field. Basically, technological sobriety with extension of life cycles of devices. I was able to underline at this occasion two main things. First of all, our ability within the center to make mobile devices available at very short notice to public and private sector clients, so a very quick response approach. Also, there's a very social side to our Product Care center, and the minister underlined that as well. This is that when you're working on mobile devices of this nature, you have to do very precise work. First of all, these are very small components that we're working on within these devices. It's almost like watchmaking, and there's a technological side to it. It's kind of like digital watchmaking, I suppose. You've got these two skill sets. You've got digital and this watchmaking, and those skills are very difficult to find on the job market. Therefore, we've created an academy to help young people, more or less young, in fact, people who are out of work or who are interested to learn a new job learning how to repair mobile devices. The first results are in. We have our first set of interns who have now been offered permanent contracts in Product Care, and that's something that the minister appreciated particularly. Thank you very much. That is the kind of know-how that we now have in Products & Solutions. As you heard, this also serves to meet some of the demands of society and French society. That's something that the minister was particularly happy to note, the Minister for Digital Transition and Telecommunications. I'd like to now call Samira Draoua, who is the head of financing in France, to tell us about another new feather in our cap. Thank you very much. The first two things that I wanted to talk about were, first of all, the market trends when it comes to reconditioned devices. Right now, there's a demand, and I say right now, but actually that demand has been around for a while. The second thing is the number of devices, the number of assets that we have in our contract that we are able to reuse, not at the end of their life cycle, but actually are able to reuse as part of a second or third life cycle. In France, we have 250,000 devices, about 500,000 worldwide. We've always had a system to refurbish them and to get them back onto the market. As our clients become more demanding for the refurbishing of devices, and within that refurbishment demand, there are three things. Clients want high-quality refurbishment, they want high availability of equipment, and also they want all of that at a competitive price. To be able to meet these three demands, we had to rethink our value chain and integrate that refurbishment value chain within TMF, within Econocom. We screened the market, we looked at what was being done in France and in Europe, and we found a little gold nugget. SOFI Group is a gold nugget in my eyes because this is a French company that finds, refurbishes and resells equipment in France and just in France. Currently, they're specialized in mobile devices of all brands, so they refurbish and resell 120,000 devices per year with two distribution channels, a B2B and a B2C channel. They have a highly skilled team. They have in-house training, working with France Travail because they train people in some difficult labor markets as there are lots in France. They find and train their own employees and teach them how to refurbish these devices. Right now, we're extremely happy to see that not only do they have a very low churn, they also have 50% women working in their plants with working hours that fully match the life of a woman or especially a mother. They have societal concerns that are forefront in their mind, and that's very important to us as well. When we purchased this company, we aimed to transform not all of their model, but to include other computers, such as computers and laptops that could get refurbished by them as well. SOFI Group can fully adapt to this. Right now, they're at 120,000, and at full capacity, they could get up to 600,000. We want to create a short circuit, circular economy, so local to local refurbishing, purchasing, refurbishing, and selling locally these devices. We want to then replicate this model in each of our European countries to become leaders in refurbishment of mobile devices and IT in Europe. Thank you very much for that, Samira. Strengthening our skill set in eco-friendly devices. We mentioned this briefly during the finances. We're also moving into Apps, Cloud and Data and strengthening our skill set there. This is a complete rework of our visual elements to support growth in that market. Right now, we're at about 6% growth, and that is a trend that is likely to strengthen over the coming months. It was important to rework our branding presence for a number of reasons. First of all, right now, there are lots of challenges in services when it comes to hiring. There really is a hiring war out there with a lot of demand over the last months. This brand platform is going to be a way for us to create more loyalty in the people who are already working with us and also a way to get more talent on board. Thanks to this new brand platform, we're therefore further able to share with prospective hires some of the key talking points and information for big data and cloud technology for our clients. To strengthen this, I created an agreement with OMNES Education. That's a group of 35 schools, 35,000 students. In a very proactive way, they are able to join us as interns, as new hires or part-time workers. They can join the services teams, but also other teams around France, depending on our need for sales people and technicians. I'd now like to ask Angel to come up to the stage to tell us about a new acquisition this week. This is part of our audiovisual vertical development, and the company is called Lydis. Can you hear me? Okay. Now, this is a piece of news hot off the press. We closed the deal two days ago. Lydis is a Dutch company specialized in audiovisual businesses. Now, in the Netherlands, we already had our presence through BIS, and now, thanks to Lydis, we are going to become the leaders in that market. This will enable us to create a European vertical on audiovisual. This is a market that is growing strongly right now and has 7.3% estimated market CAGR between 2021 and 2025, as you can see on the slide. We're very excited about this. This is a medium-sized company. They're currently at EUR 25 million revenue. We think they can push that up to EUR 30 million next year, but their EBIT is greater than 10%. Thanks to synergies with other business lines, we're not only going to be able to benefit from this acquisition, but also this acquisition is going to enable us to improve margins on existing business lines in the Netherlands. This is a great acquisition that we're very excited about, and as I said, we closed it just last Tuesday, so the day before yesterday. Thank you for that, Angel. Moving on to business development for the past half and the coming half. We can share with you some points of information. As you've seen, we put in solid performance on TMF, pretty good with double-digit growth. That was in the first half and in large part, thanks to some big contracts. We have two examples for you today. First of all, we have a car manufacturer in France. This is a sale and leaseback for industrial machinery, digital equipment for EUR 14 million in revenue, EUR 11 of which will be booked in the first half. The second example comes from Germany. We signed a EUR 33 million contract that will be booked over the coming four years with Germany, and this is on financing of e-bikes with a partner called Baron. These e-bikes will be rented to the local administrations in Germany. These are some examples of new clients, of new contracts that we were able to sign on with us in the first half. Thank you, Angel. I'd now like to call to the stage Long-Ly Giang for services in France, who's gonna tell us all about that business for the first half. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Laurent Roudil. First of all, I'd like to start with Thales. Now, we mentioned data earlier, and we are investing a lot in innovation in the workplace. Thales is an interesting case scenario. We presented this contract a year and a half ago. It's a four-year contract, 45,000 users within Thales. At the Thales Supplier Conference last March, there were 1,200 suppliers present. There were three awards handed out, and we won the innovation award. Innovation is, of course, technological in nature, first of all. We were able to provide a range of technological innovations through our partners, but we were also able to innovate on societal and ways of working concerns. We transformed the information system for our client to become an engine for acquiring and retaining talent. We made infrastructure and, services and equipment available to all of the people working at Thales. When Thales's director-general told us that we were able to be part of their talent retention and therefore part of their competitive edge, that was a significant way for them to underline the innovative nature of our business. Innovation was fully integrated with the information system's client-side and also with their users. This meant a lot of communication and serious work. If you want to be credible in innovation, you need to have high quality of service. The fundamental here, and what we've worked on over the years, is to be excellent when it comes to performance and operations, and when you are flawless in that way, you can work in an integrated way and then start to reap the fruits in ways that are noticeable to the top management of a company. Thanks to this award, we were able to pitch the same approach to another big player in the market, a French player this time, EDF. The contract was even bigger than Thales, 100,000 workstations across EDF. The tender process was long, and we were able to win it in a proactive way by taking the same innovative approach on technology, on ways of working, and on the kind of impact that we want to provide to our clients going beyond IT, improving their competitiveness. Thank you very much for that, Long, for that presentation. We've talked about products and solutions. We've talked about services. Now we're accelerating our synergies on that basis between our various businesses. For historical reasons, we had synergies between products and those solutions and the TMF business. But here, Long and Philippe just agreed, and that was in H1, and we started this process with all our operations people and our salespeople. We'll capture market share with some customers where P&S is not present, but where we have a strong presence for services. Conversely, P&S is strong with some customers where services is not big, so we could offer cross-commercial convergence by getting leads from products and services. On these activities, the One Digital Company approach that we launched a year ago is transformative in terms of value add offered to our customers with end-to-end support and the ability. We gave you examples in February when we are helping regional councils equip high schools and middle schools with PCs. You've got both businesses that have end-to-end synergies to provide all the added value, and we're now the only ones who can offer such complementarity, such positioning and services for key accounts and central and local administration and government. A year ago now, we acquired the Trams company, so with Angel Benguigui, we wanted to share a progress report on this acquisition. We are very happy with the acquisition of this company because as you can see, last week, we celebrated one year since the closing, and as you saw, there was 40% revenue growth between H1 2022 and 2021, and the ROP for the first half is now double what we had in H1 2021. Why are these results so good for the moment? Well, let's stay cautious for the moment. Well, first of all, because it's a beautiful company and a company with a lot of intrinsic potential, and also because there was brilliant integration with the TMF team. When we explain our development strategy in Europe, looking for products and solutions, companies in the countries where we already have TMF activities, I think this is a brilliant example. A good observation that such a synergy is extremely favorable, and the investments that we're making on acquiring such companies yield great returns, not just in terms of results for these companies, but also the synergies that we can achieve and deliver with our TMF team. Now I'm going to talk about another acquisition that was recently completed. This is a general distribution company in Spain with revenues in 2021 of EUR 78 million. It's multi-brand HP, Apple, Lenovo, Dell. With over 130 service points in Spain. It's a reseller on the peninsula, which is well-known and established. In Spain, they'll make sure that our revenues reach EUR 350 million-EUR 375 million next year, because this is going to be a business that is going to be integrated, and we are launching the integration plan with the Spanish Products & Solutions affiliate. Thank you, Angel. To wrap up, I'll talk about the outlook for the second half of this year. We are confirming our guidance that was shared in February. Well, revenue growth, that's 5%. We are confirming recurring earnings per share at EUR 0.50. As I said, there are a lot of challenges related to human capital and talent. Jean-Louis himself is fully involved in the recruitment of managing executives, which is essential for the good management of the company. Earlier, I talked about partnerships signed with schools or groups of schools, and also on expert communities that we're developing in order to develop notions of co-opting. We are really firing on all cylinders to really attract talents, but also with interesting projects for European development and business synergies and more mobility within the group and trying to retain all of our employees right now within the group. I suggest that we move on to the last part, which is the Q&A session. We could get questions from the floor or from the streaming room. We are here with Jean-Louis and the group managers for each business, and we're here to field all your questions. Thank you, Jean-Louis. Good morning, everyone. Who will shoot first? Well, unless there's a question from the room, I'll start with remote questions. Three questions from two on discontinued operations, especially on strategic and financial aspects. A question from our analyst, David Wegmann. On discontinued operations first, David says that they had 7% margin, and they accounted for 40% of ROP in distribution, 15% of group ROP in H1 2021. He asked why dispose of such businesses from the strategic and financial standpoints. Well, that's not a very good strategy, I'm sorry. It was started already two years ago at a time when we wanted to deleverage to restore the trust and confidence of the financial world and having zero net financial debt as a way to earn trust. We are there now, and so we started a number of actions, including this disposal. At some point, if you keep changing what you're doing halfway through, people can't understand that anymore. As we initiated this process, we saw it through. We thought that we held it for sale at 15 June. As you know, the markets have sort of turned around, and there were two phenomena. The interest rate market flipped and the private equity market flipped violently. At the same time, there was the lockdown in Shanghai and the whole region. This business worked a lot with Cisco and with China. This lockdown of the Shanghai region for four months meant that this company, which is now going to make over EUR 8 million, EUR 8.2 million, they had months of May and June, which were positive but much below what we expected. Laurent and I had dinner with the manager of this business a couple of days ago. It was very great dinner, but they confirmed that they would deliver on the budget, but there was a lag of over EUR 40 million in deliveries that were postponed to September. I'll admit that this is not a brilliant strategy, but sometimes when you have to make an overall choice, the overall choice was to significantly strengthen our financial situation. Let me tell you now, you saw the figures earlier. Although this disposal was not done, we're still in a very comfortable situation. The fact that we have EUR 45 million of our own shares puts us in a very comfortable situation. As soon as the share price comes back to better levels, although we are doing better some of the competition. When our share price is back to levels of 4 or 5 EUR per share, we can find a partner. We're looking for a banking partner that would get 20%-25% of the group. Buy these EUR 45 million in shares to strengthen our equity by EUR 250 million. That sale for roughly EUR 200 million plus EUR 250 million, that will enable us to either make an acquisition thanks to Angel's talent for roughly 10 small companies for EUR 20-25 million apiece. That would be in Northern Europe, Germany or Italy. We're in talks with potential targets in Italy or maybe a couple of big acquisitions with Laurent. We've looked at two big ones this year. At the end of the day, we decided not to follow suit, but we are preparing the roadmap for the next ten years until the end of the decade in order to have significant growth again and at least double our size by the end of the decade. Another question, maybe from the room or remotely. Yes, please. [Foreign language], Finance Connect. There were several questions. The first one, you talked about your deleveraging, which sort of suffered from the fact that you used less deconsolidating factoring or reverse factoring. Could you give us an idea of the magnitude of deconsolidating reverse factoring or products that you still have on the balance sheet? I can answer right now, and we'll take questions one after the other. I'll give you the floor immediately after. Eric. Good morning, one and all. I hope you can hear me well. The level of factoring and reverse factoring, deconsolidating factoring that we have at the end of June this year, it was roughly EUR 200 million. Down significantly compared to last year, as we said. That was your first question. There are more to come. I'm not forgetting you. Yes, I had a second question about the share buyback, but you've sort of alluded to that. It seems that in the second half, if the share price stays at the same level, there shouldn't be a big share buyback. Exactly. But if it were to go down significantly again, you saw that now we've drawn roughly EUR 17 million on our credit lines. Our lines are close to EUR 400 million. We have a reserve in case there is a market crash. Anything can happen. We could strengthen our position once again. It so happens by coincidence that when we were preparing the meeting with Laurent, I told him, "Well, you have the majority shareholder." This is the first time in 49 years that I've become majority shareholder for the group, because for a very long time, I had partners. It was between 30% and 40%. In general, I don't sell any group shares. Mechanically, with the share buybacks, gradually, we have 265 million shares, and now there are 180 left. Mechanically, I ended up and I'm very glad of that. The dividend is quite significant, so I can feed my children no worries here. I don't have to sell shares in order to maintain my indecent lifestyle, at least very luxurious. We have. My position was mechanically strengthened, but it's here to ensure a good transition. My desire is to bring useful partners in. That's why I'm talking about a financial institution in order to have a transition someday and bring some high-level candidates someday. I really want to stabilize the shareholder structure. I'm not, I don't know about the Belgian rules. Can you get to 100% treasury shares? Well, we can still buy over 40 million shares. Is that it? Nathalie's on the front row. We have an authorization. Belgian corporate law is not the same, so we have an authorization to go up to 40% of capital. It can be renewed. If we cancel these shares, we can go up 20% again, so we can almost go private, which is not the case. There are drawbacks, but a lot of benefits, so we could further strengthen our position. I would tend to go the other way. If we can find a share price around EUR 4-EUR 5, we'll actively seek a financial partner, because you know that I'm an entrepreneur, and the team that I'm leading is made up of entrepreneurs. We want to, we like entrepreneurship. We know that there are hiccups. We've just been through two years of COVID. Two years ago, we were happy with the presentation. That was the end of the first lockdown, and we thought that there we would be back to growth and another lockdown in September, and everything fell back. A more general question, a multifaceted question. The interest rate hike is a factor which now seems to be well ingrained in the minds of people for H2, that could be a big hike. What's your view on the consequences of this rate hike on your financing business and on M&A? Are M&A prices going down again? There's an Argos Index that was published recently showing that there was a decrease in multiples. Is that something that you've seen that would be favorable to your M&A business? I'll take the question the other way around. The group was created in 1973, 49 years ago. We went through both oil shocks, 1974 and 1976. We had 12% inflation and interest rates at 18%. We grew very strongly back then, because back then, in order to lock inflation in, there was a credit regulation. The ECB is not yet regulating credit, but it stopped buying some assets that it used doubling or tripling its balance sheet over the last decade. We went through that already in the 1970s. Ditto in the 1980s with François Mitterrand. Between 1980 and 1983, we had a lot of inflation again, it was a euphoric period for Econocom. If on top of that, there's an obligation to repay the state-backed loans, the COVID loans, how could that be detrimental to us? So far, free money or even negative rates, that was not good for financing activities. A lot of people told us, "Well, we love your services, we love the advice that you're giving us, we like One Digital, but the financing part, well." There are very big clients, a big French bank that works in agriculture. I won't give you the name, but you get my drift. They lent us money to fund instead of buying equipment because there's a problem with asset acquisition and so on. Now, smartphones at the end of a contract, after two years, there was a commercial by Apple saying that it's 24 months for a few EUR, and now people have stopped buying cars, they're leasing. Now the real market value of our phones at the end of contract is roughly 40%. We're not overly worried. I don't want to be overly optimistic, but we're not too worried. We used to be a bit pessimistic, and that helped us see the situation through. What was the second part of your question? I'm sorry if I forgot to answer it. No microphones in the room. Regarding M&A. Well, we've turned down a great operation in Italy because it posed a ratio of 6x EBITDA instead of the 8x that we're asking for. Because I think, well, we saw that in fintechs, they've crashed. There's quite obviously a financial bubble around a lot of businesses. NASDAQ lost about a third, 35%. We started from very low. We didn't go very high, but we didn't go very down very much. It's mostly because we've done a lot of substantive work that had to be done three or four years ago that we have done. It's never really over, but it's now well underway. We don't want. It's too easy. Signing checks to buy companies, that's not what it's about. The idea is to try and convince the people joining us about the potential synergies that we'll bring. That's why we were talking about Trams earlier. We've acquired over 20 subsidiaries that are doing very well. Three are doing badly. One filed for bankruptcy, and the others we're trying to turn around. One was discontinued, and one we're trying to turn it around. Out of 23, what matters is that these acquisitions are successful because we're always working with the founding shareholders. They are entrepreneurs. Why are they joining us? Because they can scale up. The people from Trams, we met them, they're British. It's good that I didn't invite them. They're from Liverpool. I tried to invite them to the game that took place at the Stade de France, and I couldn't get seats, but I congratulated myself for that after the fact. Anyway, when they can scale up their business, as a former entrepreneur and as still a current entrepreneur, you feel that you're on your own. I'm lucky that I have got great staff. If you're an SME and an entrepreneur, when you're welcomed into a group and you can still remain a shareholder and benefit from the group image, it's usually a very good mix. You need to write the next page because it works for four or five years, but then you need to work on a daily basis to really embark on a new adventure or ensure a successful transition, finding the right managers to succeed them. It's not always easy, but it is doable. When you succeed, it's very exciting. Do we have any other questions, maybe from the stream? Yes, this question is in line with what we just discussed. This is David Wegman asking about the discontinued businesses once again, pointing out that this led to losses of EUR 2 million, despite a good profitability in the businesses that were divested, especially ROP. Can you tell us more about that? I just mentioned one of the two businesses which is still losing money, and we're working very hard to get them back on the right track. Laurent, what are you expecting? We're expecting improvements before the end of the year. These assets are looking at positive forecasts for the first half. Yes, if I may add, as I mentioned earlier, there are capital gains from discontinued businesses from last year that we won't have this year. That was booked for the first half of 2021. Another question, Nathalie? Well, for example, the other business, if we can get the sale before the end of the year, will lead to significant capital gains. It's completely the opposite situation. Another question, Nicolas David here asking about SOFI Group. What is the expected revenue? Even though he understands that we don't give that exact information, and what kind of date should we expect for integration of SOFI Group? Okay, just getting a microphone. SOFI Group was integrated on signing. Revenue can be announced. They were making EUR 21 million. The business plan that we have is pretty ambitious. We are expecting to funnel a lot of our own equipment from our contracts towards SOFI Group, so the business plan is quite interesting. Have you heard about Back Market? The big difference between Back Market and us is that Back Market, they buy equipment that's been refurbished in China, originally from the US. We are aiming to be competitors here just in the French circuit for Back Market. This is going to be called Econocom Rehab. We have set up a refurbishing station for laptops and Macs. This new equipment, when it comes out of the plant, is normally worth EUR 1,400. We previously sold our old equipment for just 200 EUR, and right now you can buy them almost as new in a brand-new box for 700 EUR. We're nearly coming to the end of the meeting. Maybe we can take a final question. You can ask any questions you like. We're very happy to answer your questions. The trend is towards inflation. How about secondhand equipment and the residual value of your equipment? Does that have a lot of value? Right now we're looking at about EUR 300 million in latent value. We mentioned 170 million in residual value. If we sell the equipment ourself, it's about 170 million. We've got latent value of about EUR 300 million-400 million. I love questions about inflation. This reminds me of the early years back in the 1970s, even with people such as the Crédit Commercial de France that you knew back in the day. IBM back then didn't sell any machines. They would only rent them. We bought equipment and then re-rented it. As soon as we're a subsidiary for the Crédit Commercial de France, we would re-lease them back to the Crédit Commercial de France, funded by the Crédit Commercial de France. It was great. We'd have a fixed-rate three-year contract, for example, despite inflation being at 12% and rates being 18%. We'd have three-year fixed rates, and our clients would say, "Oh, we can see what you're going to be doing. Three years, you're going to push up rent," right? We'd say, "No, no, you can get a fourth year for the same price." We're not scared of inflation at all. I hope we're not going to go back to those kinds of numbers, but having experienced it was a pretty good time for us. When things are changing like that, it's the best entrepreneurs and the most active ones that win out. We have a well-known financial inspector on our board, and he keeps telling me, "Jean-Louis, your cost of carry is huge." Because we always borrowed at fixed rate. In the spring, we got that short-term bond for EUR 200 million. If we were to sell that coverage right now, it would be worth an extra EUR 20 million. My business acumen means that I'm very averse to mixing types of risk. Being an entrepreneur is a risk. Bearing risk on rates is risky, and you don't want to mix the two. Natalie, any other questions? This is David Wegman asking about the self-booked lease numbers. Why have they gone up so much, EUR 75 million? Now, in the cash situation, not debt, but cash, you will have noticed that we are in the black for a couple of hundred million EUR. We have been expecting a rate hike. Having negative rates goes against everything that I know, so we knew that the rates were gonna go up at some point. I worked with Valérie Kaelin, who's in the front row here, to work with the financial markets. We were able to get some short-term bonds and pay them back, so our credit history was good, and she told me that we could borrow a further EUR 200 million, and we wanted to borrow EUR 200 million. This put our cash position in the black with all of our bankers. Some of you are here today are wondering why we didn't borrow any more money. We've agreed to draw the factoring less until next year because deconsolidating factoring has a couple of downsides. It can be good for some things, but it shifts the risk. If analysts want to integrate this into the value of the company, well, it's up to you and your model to your own. If we're holding EUR 250 million worth of equipment on our books, then it makes sense that we could hold EUR 250 million in debt on the other side. We've bought a number of companies, four companies. That costs money. I'm almost surprised that you're surprised that our debt's going up. We bought back shares. We handed out dividends, and thank you very much for that because I benefit from that. To be honest, the increase in debt is relative to all other things. We're not going to hold EUR 300 million, EUR 400 million worth of equipment on our books. We'd rather be around zero. You know that our cash position at the end of the year is always better than at the middle of the year, but it really depends. We've got EUR 200 million out of a EUR 394 million credit line. A final question here. Again, on the divestments and the companies that you mentioned earlier. These questions make sense. We really are very open about this. I've been doing this for 50 years. We have been on the Belgian stock market since 1986, and I've always been very honest. I can look people straight in the eye and say that we've always been open about what we're doing. We never buy shares underhandedly. If I say that we're not going to buy shares in the coming months, so long as the share price remains where it is. If it goes up, we're going to find a financial partner, and if it goes down, we might buy some. I have no issue talking about the divested businesses. Now, to quote, it almost seems like you're regretting this divestment. Are you at least happy with the sale price? If ever the transaction didn't go through, would it be reintegrated into the scope of ongoing business? Yes. I regret the divestment, and yes, it would be reintegrated. If the contract goes forward, if the divestment goes forward, then we will continue with it to fully respect the other parties. Any questions in the room? Okay. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Okay, thank you very much, everyone, for being with us, both in the room and remotely. The next update will be in October. We have refreshments outside the room, and you can also ask me some more direct questions. Thank you very much, everyone, for being here.