Hello, and welcome to the 30th Deutsche Bank Depositary Receipts Virtual Investor Conference, DBVIC. My name is Zafar Aziz from the DR Investor Relations Advisory team at Deutsche Bank. I'm pleased to announce that our next presentation will be from Carrefour. Before handing over to our presenter, some points to note. adr.db.com. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome our speaker from Carrefour. Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be with you. Thank you for your interest in Carrefour. We're gonna cover the major parts of the strategic plan that was presented by the company a couple of months ago, which has kept us quite busy over the recent weeks, meeting with a lot of investors. It's a new strategic plan which comes in the frame of the re-election of our new Chairman and CEO, which will be proposed to our next general meeting that comes at the end of May. In a nutshell, a few words about Carrefour. Obviously, we are a very large food retailer, the eighth largest food retailer worldwide when it comes to sales. We are number three in terms of stores with 15,000 stores across the world, leading positions in Brazil, France and Spain. One specificity of Carrefour is that we cover all formats. We have obviously a large number of hypermarkets, but we also operate supermarkets, convenience stores, and in total, again, that gets close to 16,000 stores. We franchise a lot of our stores and typically convenience and supermarket stores. In total 80 million customers for the group. A very, very large footprint and obviously quite a critical element when it comes to data and digital. Carrefour has positioned itself as a digital leader in the industry. We rely on 10 billion transactions. That's one of the largest data lake in Europe, which combines 80% of all transactions over the past five years. There are 500,000 people working under the Carrefour banners, including the franchisees. That's 350,000 direct employees, which makes Carrefour the largest private employer in countries like France and Brazil. Obviously, we live by our purpose, which is food transition for all, which is to bring affordable food to everyone in these countries where we operate. The story of Carrefour has been quite of a recovery story since the new management team came in place back in 2018. The company was struggling, the brand was losing brand equity, the company was losing market share. As a consequence, the financial performance was not there. That has been vastly improved since then. We've doubled ROI, which is recurring operating income, in France since 2018. We've generated EUR 8 billion combined over the past five years of net free cash flow, most of which has been returned to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks. We bought back about 30% of the share capital since 2020. With that, we have one of the very strongest balance sheets in the industry with a triple B rating by Standard & Poor's with a stable outlook. If we look for a second at the ESG ratings, we are also one of the best-rated companies. Part of all the key indices with a A grade on CDP. It's very solid rating on Sustainalytics, and you can see that we are pretty much again seen as a best performer on SRI topics in the industry. One of the key elements of the Carrefour 2030 plan was to concentrate and focus the group's efforts, time, and capital allocation around our three core markets, which are France, Spain, and Brazil. Together, based on 2025 results, they represented 85% of turnover and 99% of the recurring operating income. We decided that we should focus very, very clearly on these core markets, by definition, the other countries, which include today, Belgium, Poland and Argentina, have become non-core. We still operate these countries. We've seen interest from some potential buyers to take over these activities. For the moment, we decided that there was not any interesting offer, but it's a topic that remains that remains open, even though at present, we're not actively negotiating any sale of one of these non-core countries. We started with this refocusing on our core markets since 2025, and that has started with the acquisition of the entire share capital of Carrefour Brazil, which used to be listed in São Paulo. Carrefour would own two-thirds of the share capital, 66%, and we acquired the 34% remaining on the Brazilian market in May 2025 last year, which give us obviously much better control and much increased agility to manage the Brazilian operation. We announced the sale of Carrefour Italy in July, and we closed the transaction in December last year. We were struggling in Italy with a small position. We were probably number seven or eight, and that was one of the takeaways that we got from this very strong hyperinflation crisis, which took place in Europe between 2022 and 2023. We had an original diagnosis, which was that being small in a country in Europe was okay because at some point it contributed to the overall firepower of Carrefour in Europe, and which is why we were maintaining some positions in countries like Italy or Romania or et cetera, where we are not leaders. We touched the limit of that with hyperinflation because we did see a lot of food inflation, but we also saw massive pressure on purchasing power of our customers. At some point, volumes were negative, which is quite a hurdle in this industry. We were able to offset this pressure in our key markets of France and Spain. We actually increased margins in France and Spain during the crisis. When it comes to the smaller positions, it was very difficult for us to adjust the cost base. We decided we should take another view, which led to the disposal of Italy. We also announced an agreement to sell Carrefour Romania. We are currently expecting clearance from the local competition authority, we expect to close the transaction sometimes in H2 2026. The key priorities of Carrefour 2030 have been commented by many experts as a return to basics and to operations. The previous plans, Carrefour 2022, Carrefour 2026, were a lot about, as I said at the beginning, bringing Carrefour back to where it should be in terms of performance, and you've seen all the increases that we've brought in terms of margin, in terms of cash flow generation. Today we are really focusing on operations, winning on product offering and customers. The idea is absolutely to drive customer satisfaction in order to get better market share. Gaining market share is absolutely of the essence in this industry. In order to do that, you need to be competitive, you need to have the right offer. If you manage to do both, probably you have the right opportunity. Many things are going to change in terms of assortment, in terms of how we think of non-food, for example, in terms of how we think of fresh products, which is one area of strength of Carrefour. We want to emphasize this. We're gonna insist on these elements. We're gonna add a lot of dedicated spaces, corners, for fresh corners, for segments that we've been testing for a while, which actually work extremely well on non-food or food. I'm thinking about pet food, I'm thinking about sports, I'm thinking about housing. These are tests that we've been making for more than a year now in a selected number of stores in France, which have shown great results, and so that's gonna be a key element. Loyalty will be part of that. Everything we do on digital will also be part of that. We are transforming and investing in the stores. I will get right back to that. Also growth. Obviously, we operate in two different markets, Europe and Latin America. Europe is quite mature when it comes to supply, and especially for hypermarkets and supermarkets, but we do see a lot of potential for convenience stores. We open 300 to 400 new convenience stores every year in France. We're gonna keep that pace, and we do see a lot of potential. We are a very strong leader on convenience stores in France, obviously, that give us premium. We do operate extremely well these stores, we have a lot of appetite for potential, you know, franchisees. It's a 100% franchise business. We have about 6,000 applications every year of candidates to become franchisees of Carrefour, obviously, the strength of the brand, the huge brand equity that we've got on that format is an amazing driver. That will be a key focus for us. The other part of expansion will come from Latin America, which, as opposed to Europe, is far less mature. We do see potential for organic growth of large stores. We're talking about the cash-and-carry format. We operate the leading brand in Brazil called Atacadão, which is about 300 stores. They are very straightforward stores, what we call shoppable warehouses. Much more simple than anything we'll have on hypermarkets. Just to give you an idea, if you take the same size kind of store, you're gonna have 10x less references in a cash-and-carry store in Brazil than what you have in the typical supermarket. Straightforward, easy to manage, very profitable. It generates the highest margins in the group, and we do see potential to expand materially. This is where we will allocate CapEx, and the good news is this is where we get the highest return on capital. You know, a winning strategy to keep strengthening our leadership in Brazil with Atacadão. All of that will come with a lot of innovation. Obviously, artificial intelligence is gonna be a main driver for food retail and for Carrefour in particular. We've been quite active on these matters. We just announced a partnership with VusionGroup, which is giving tags that we use in the stores. They are smart tags. They have cameras. They can manage inventory. They can help a lot for pick in store, typically when the employees prepare digital orders. We invest a few hundred million EUR every year in AI tech and data. Quite difficult to give a sense of where we should be on artificial intelligence five years from now because currently what we do today, we probably had no idea two years ago. That's the pace, and that's how fast transformation comes with AI, but it's helping on a lot of grounds already. Typically, we manage inventories. We place orders thanks to AI. These are the initial elements where we've put the priority on AI. Again, the opportunities are tremendous, and we're willing to take advantage of that. In order to accompany this transformation and the focus on the three core markets, we are aligning our reporting format. As of 2026, and we started with the Q1 sales that we presented last week, we now report France, Spain, and Brazil. We used to present France, Europe, and Latin America. We have France, Spain, and Brazil. As you saw, the very vast majority of sales and profits. We have a segment for other countries, which include Belgium, Poland, and Argentina. Romania is now treated as asset held for sale as per IFRS 5, does not come in the accounts anymore. A quick word about real estate, which is another critical element about Carrefour. We've been rotating real estate for quite some time, and that has generated free cash flow. That topic has been discussed with many investors. We account real estate sales as free cash flow as much as we account real estate CapEx in our free cash flow generation. We asked third-party experts to value the real estate portfolio of Carrefour from the three core markets, France, Spain, and Brazil. We see that the value of the portfolio as of today, at the end of December 2025, was estimated at EUR 14.2 billion, which is roughly EUR 3 billion north of the value at December 2021. There have been some moving parts since then over the past four years. Obviously, we acquired some assets. There was around EUR 1 billion worth of assets in the acquisition of Cora and Match in France, which we acquired for EUR 1.05 billion. There was about EUR 700 million worth of real estate in Brazil when we acquired Grupo BIG in 2021. Grupo BIG used to be the former business of Walmart in Brazil. Again, a lot of real estate value in those two acquisitions, and you can see the EUR 1.7 billion impact of acquisition. At the same time, as I said, we rotate assets. We sold about EUR 1.5 billion worth of real estate over the period. We have the market value evolution and the investments in expansion and real estate projects, which drove this very, very solid increase in value, going from EUR 11 billion- EUR 14.2 billion. EUR 14 billion today is about 20% north of the current market cap. Quite a buffer, I would say, when you think of the value of Carrefour. This value of real estate will be reassessed every year. We will communicate on these numbers. The idea, more importantly, is that real estate is a core business of Carrefour. We will keep investing in real estate. We will keep rotating asset. We will keep harvesting the value creation and reinject capital in the business. That, that is a key element of the value creation that Carrefour can bring. There have been discussions and typically with some of the sell side analysts on that real estate free cash flow. Again, we absolutely consider that it's that it's core to Carrefour, but with a view to be more transparent, when I tell you that we changed the reporting format, this is true for the P&L and then, and the segments. This is also true for the net free cash flow of Carrefour. As of 2026, we will clearly separate free cash flow coming from retail and the food retail operations, the stores, to make it very simple, and the real estate net free cash flow, which is just the balance between CapEx and disposals. That will be effective as of H1. The idea here is to really drive free cash flow growth through retail free cash flow. Real estate, we're gonna have recurring levels, probably to the tune of EUR 200 million or EUR 300 million every year of net contribution to free cash flow. That number should remain quite stable. At the end of the day, our ambition is to drive free cash flow through our operations and the management of our stores. We posted some ambitions for EBIT margin. Today, Carrefour generates 2.6%. That was the level last year. The level was dragged a little bit, typically because of the integration of Cora and Match, which had a negative impact of EUR 120 million on EBIT. You know, the ambitions we have are to increase that margin to 3.2% by 2028 and 3.5% by 2030. We gave an intermediate target also of the 25 basis points increase in EBIT margin for 2026. If we try to break down the increase, we see more upside in France and Brazil for different reasons. More upside than Spain, excuse me. Typically France, as I said, comes from a very low point. 2.4% is a lower number than 2024, which was around 2.7. The rationale behind this is in the integration of Cora and Match. As I said, the negative impact was EUR 120 million on recurring operating income last year. If you restate, if you look at the performance of the legacy portfolio for Carrefour in 2025, the actual margin was 3%. The Cora and Match stores are ramping up. We've seen some very good trends since last December, but 2025 was the year of integration, was a year where we lower prices at former Cora stores, which were actually too expensive and far more expensive than the Carrefour stores. We also changed the assortment. One of the big differences between Carrefour and Cora was the weight of private labels. We at Carrefour sell close to 40% of private labels. Cora was about 15. We changed dramatically the assortment with the Carrefour products. These products are profitable. They come at a higher margin level than the national brand products, but they are also much cheaper, probably 25%-30% on average. When you change 20%-25% of the inventory with products which are materially cheaper, you have this short-term negative impact before it starts dragging more customers, and this is what we've seen since December. We expect to increase EBIT margin in France or ROI margin in France by more than 90 basis points between 2025 and 2030. Part of that will be the restructuring and the ramp-up of the Cora and Match integration. Brazil has a different situation. We reach a cycle trough in Brazil in Q3 last year, which translated into negative volumes, materially negative volumes of about 5%, which is quite traditional for Brazil. Brazil has shorter cycles than what we see in Europe, but also more violent cycles. The gap between trough and peak is definitely much higher, and the volatility we see in volumes is quite important. Volumes were negative in Q2 and Q3 last year, by 5%. They came down to -2% in Q4, sorry. Probably more or less the same kind of negative volumes in Q1 this year, around -2%. Again, we have a strong conviction that we've reached the trough. Obviously, when volumes are negative, there is quite a strong operating leverage. Based on, you know, the recovery, today we don't know exactly the pace of recovery in Brazil, but we, again, have a strong conviction that the toughest is behind us, we do expect Brazil to ramp up. Again, the trough are around 4% margin. The peak is probably north of five, which is why we still expect this very strong margin increase between 25 and 30. Spain, we have lower expectations from Spain, probably less than 90 basis points, which is what this slide is trying to explain. The reason behind this is, again, the situation. As much as Brazil is going through tough times, Spain is very strong, probably one of the most solid economies in Europe as of these days. GDP is growing solidly. Unemployment is at record lows. You know, we do see consumption being very steady in Spain. We have a different position in Spain that we have in France and Brazil, where we are quite massive players. Number one in Brazil, very close number two in France. We're number two in Spain, but we're three times smaller than the largest player, Mercadona, which is a private company based in Spain. We are a strong leader on the hypermarket format, and the leader sells more than 80% of private labels. With this 10% in the Spanish market, we are the largest seller of national brand products, and obviously that gives us a good position to negotiate with these guys and get good terms, because if they want to sell in the country, we are the largest seller of their products. You know, it's a great market for us. We have good expectations, but, you know, 4.2% is a very high level of margin in Europe. We do see potential. All the initiatives that we're bringing, which I discussed about the products, about fresh, about non-food, about all these corners, all the improvements that we're gonna bring in the stores will drive market share. That will drive margin, we don't have the same kind of, you know, upside potential that we identified for France and in Brazil for the reasons that I explained. A few words about CapEx. We announced that we would allocate more CapEx to the stores. You can see here that we will spend probably EUR 1.8 billion this year. It will grow slowly year after year to reach EUR 2 billion by 2030. Quite a stable level of CapEx. 65% ballpark of that will be allocated to commercial concepts, to the modernization that I mentioned, installing those corners in the stores. Obviously there will be maintenance, and there will be real estate transactions. We have a specific envelope of EUR 200 million per annum to modernize the stores in France, and typically the hypermarkets. We started doing that since the beginning of 2026. 25%-30%, which is again, a very, very high number if you benchmark the European peers, will be allocated to tech data and artificial intelligence, including EUR 100 million for AI alone. Then there will be 10%-15% to grow the network, Notably most of that will be allocated to Brazil. As you can see, quite a stable level of CapEx, growing broadly with CPI. Net free cash flow is obviously the central KPI for the group. I guess any good food retailer should be generating strong piles of cash flow, and this is where we put the emphasis. Last year, we generated, on a comparable basis, EUR 1.565 billion of free cash flow. We want to increase that number regularly, and we gave a target of EUR 5 billion of net free cash flow accumulated over the coming three years from 2026 to 2028, with a positive trend every year and some net free cash flow increase every year. As I mentioned, we want that free cash flow to be generated by EBITDA growth. That will come from the performance of the stores. We want more EBITDA coming from France, from Spain, from Brazil. We want to increase EBITDA margin. This is also quite critical for us. That will be the key driver for growth in free cash flow. We expect taxes to be broadly stable. The rate should stay probably at the same levels. The increase will come with the increase in profits. Restructurings. We've had some restructuring in the past. There was a lot to do to transform the company. We still see some opportunities to fine-tune and streamline the organization, but you should not see a lot coming from restructuring in the generation of free cash flow. Working capital. We've obviously went to a very, very atypical kind of performance during hyperinflation, which would drive working capital, which, as you know, is by essence negative in this industry and hence a contribution to free cash flow. We went up to EUR 800 million of positive working capital to free cash flow a couple of years ago. This is now behind us. We are in a much more stabilized kind of business environment. Obviously, there are questions these days about you know, inflation coming back on the back of what's happening in the Middle East. Honestly, what we see in terms of inflationary risk is really, really small as opposed to what we experienced during 2022 and 2023, where we had double-digit food inflation two years in a row in Europe. We absolutely don't see that coming at this point, at least I would say in Europe. All in, we get to a normalized level of working capital contribution, around EUR 200 million every year. We try to optimize that. Obviously, we work on inventory, we work on the growth of the business. There will be a bit of inflation. All in, working capital should not be a strong driver for net free cash flow. CapEx, I discussed the increase between 2026 and 2028. Real estate disposal, as I said, we will keep rotating assets. We will keep harvesting value creation. That will contribute at a stable level of around 250 million per year on those real estate projects, and we will keep investing in the business. Cost of debt. Actually, I can mention this very material operation we did last year right after we acquired the minorities of Carrefour Brazil. There was EUR 1.5 billion equivalent of debt in Brazil labeled in Brazilian reals. We were paying double-digit interest rates on that debt, probably 12% or 13%. We were able to refinance that debt in euros with debt at around 3%, so it's a 10 points increase in the cost of that debt. We said that the overall impact of that operation would be about EUR 100 million positive to free cash flow. We already harvested 22 million last year, there is another EUR 78 million of contribution to free cash flow, which will be sustainable. Again, it's a one-shot operation. That will drive structurally the net free cash flow and cost of debt in a very stable way. A few words of conclusion on capital allocation, which is also critical. When we presented our new plan mid-February, we decided we should put numbers on that slide because it shows the order of priority. First, we invest in the business. We invest in customer experience, we invest in operations, we invest in tech and data, in artificial intelligence. We do that to support the business and to accompany this quite, you know, massive transformation that we see happening in the industry. We have a strong commitment to our triple B stable outlook rating by Standard & Poor's. It was actually confirmed by S&P a couple of months ago. That's a priority. It is critical for us, for our partners, for our franchisees, for our suppliers to bring this kind of solidity. It's one of the best rating in the among the European peers. Again, we will protect that rating to the best of our capacity. We don't want to compromise the quality of Carrefour's debt signature. We decided that we should change our dividend policy. For the past years, you know, as I told you, there was a recovery story at Carrefour. At the time the management team came in place, which was back in 2017, Carrefour had been struggling for a little while and was not generating any cash flow. That has been one of the key elements of the equity story for the past eight years now, which has been to increase cash flow from zero to EUR 1.5 billion, as I mentioned for last year. That gave the capacity to obviously reward shareholders. We paid dividend, and we had a commitment to increase dividend by 5% every year, regardless of the EPS performance. We did that for a little while. Now we are probably back to, you know, a satisfactory level for European food retailers. Our dividend is about 8% of yield, which is probably a good number. We can switch to a more traditional, I would say, kind of dividend policy, which is a dividend yield on EPS. We are committed to pay 50%-60% of the adjusted EPS with an objective to grow each year. If you do a simple math calculation and you use the guidance we gave for recurring operating income margin of 25 basis points, you look at a little bit of inflation for the year, we will submit the payment of a EUR 0.97 dividend per share at our next AGM next month. The ambition is to grow next year based on 2026 earnings, and the idea is really to grow every year. There will be cash left available that will be an arbitrage and a decision from the board based on value creation, and it will be an arbitrage between additional returns or M&A opportunities. There are a few opportunities in the countries that we operate. Definitely, for us, M&A will be strictly restricted to our core market, so we will consider opportunities in France, in Spain, and Brazil. We have a very strict and disciplined policy when it comes to M&A. We are a natural consolidator in those markets. Obviously, we know of every potential opportunity to acquire existing networks in these countries. We always start by assessing the strategic appeal. Does it make sense? Can we convert the stores to our brands? Is it a region where we are a bit weak? Is it a niche that we would like to explore? Typically, we acquired some brands on organic over the recent years. If we see strategic appeal, we are going to enter in the financials, trying to assess the performance of the target, what are the synergies that we can generate. With all that, we can determine what's the fair price we pay that will bring to an accretive transaction post synergies. If there is a way, we are happy to do that, and we have the flexibility. If there is no way, we're happy to pass, and we actually pass on the majority of the opportunities that arise just because we believe they are too expensive. This is the capital allocation which we follow very strictly. We will not derive from this policy. A few words as a conclusion on the Q1 sales for 2026 that we presented just a week ago. Pretty satisfactory levels, I would say, with you know, 2.2% like-for-like sales in Q1, which was an acceleration after Q4. 1.7% like-for-like in Q4 last year, with some acceleration, some increase in like-for-like sales in France and Spain. Brazil remains challenging. As I said, we still have negative volumes and food inflation kept coming down in Q1. Seems to be reversing since the beginning of April. We still have, you know, food inflation coming from 4% in Q4 to 2% in Q1 this year. Obviously with negative volumes, that meant a little bit of pressure on top line, but we do see and we are still convinced that the trough is behind us. As I mentioned, the interesting ramp-up of Cora & Match after the integration is now fully complete and we now see customers coming back. We obviously launched Carrefour, the first initiatives of Carrefour 2030. We improved our price competitiveness. We see the first positive results from the European Purchasing Alliance that we launched a year ago, which is giving us better terms with the national brands. We still grow fast on expansion of convenience stores, as I mentioned. We were the first European food retailer to have a native app on ChatGPT, and we launched a new private label in Brazil. We had no private label in Atacadão. We launched Bulnez, which now has 70 products already for sale in the stores. We made a point that at this point, we have seen no material impact on the group operation from Middle East conflict. There are a lot of questions obviously on that, but at this point we see absolutely nothing. No change in customer behavior, no trading down, no difficulty in getting assortment. For the moment, I would say we have very, very limited impact, a very marginal impact from what happening there. On the basis of that, we confirm the financial targets for the full year, which is increase in all the key economy financial KPIs. I'm done with the presentation. I see that we've had a bunch of questions. I'll be happy to answer them. Obviously, if you want to send me a question, please feel free to do that. My email address is sebastien_valentin@carrefour.com. I'm very easy to find, and you can find that on the each press release of Carrefour. Thank you very much for your attention. Bye-bye.