Welcome to the FDJ United Half-Year 2026 Revenue Conference Call. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. The slides presented in the call are already available on the FDJ United website. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to Stéphane Pallez, Chairwoman and CEO, and Dan Lévy, CFO and Performance Leader. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. This is Stéphane Pallez. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on your time zone. Thank you for joining this presentation. I am pleased to welcome my friend Dan Lévy, who has been our new CFO and Performance Leader since mid-May. As you know, Pascal Chaffard is now CEO of the OBG Business Unit and Strategic Transformation Leader. I will start by commenting the key highlights of the first semester before handing over to Dan to give you more details on financial results. Of course, I will conclude with guidance and perspective and we will, of course, have a Q&A session. My message today will be straightforward. While the first half of this year was affected by a more demanding environment, we remain focused on restoring profitable growth. We are acting with discipline, we are competing selectively to come back to better trust. Let me start with the main highlights of the first half under the fact that this period was shaped by three factors. One, of course, was already anticipated, i.e., the impact of gaming tax increase across several markets, which is quite significant in this first half, as you know. It was combined with a softer lottery performance in France, particularly in the second quarter, and contrasted but broadly expected performance in OBG online betting and gaming. At the same time, of course, we continued to execute our performance plan. We launched targeted action to support growth, we advanced important initiatives on topics that are key for our business, such as AI transformation, digital lottery, and responsible gaming. Turning to the key highlights of H1. The figures are quite clear. GGR was down by 1.3% at EUR 4.3 billion, revenue was down 4.5% at EUR 1.782 million. This revenue performance includes, as I said, an impact of around 300 basis points or EUR 52 million from calendar gaming tax increase. I remind you, in France, U.K., Netherlands, and Romania. In the French lottery and retail sports betting business, we will give you more detail about that. Lottery performance was affected by inherent gaming risks, such as fewer and lower high jackpot cycles in EuroMillions compared with the very high base of last year. Also by more, I would say, difficult to predict factor environments, such as exceptional heat waves, which have been impacting our point-of-sale traffic, particularly at the end of this semester. In online betting and gaming, Q2 was broadly in line with our expectations. French migration was successfully completed. The Dutch market is recovering. We are implementing turnaround measures and allocating resources to priority markets. To get deeper into our results, I will talk about EBITDA. EBITDA was EUR 404 million, representing a 20.7% margin. It reflects our cost discipline, which has been remaining strong. Variable costs, of course, decreased in line with the activity. Fixed costs were down 2.8%, confirming that our performance plan is delivering. To get back to better growth trajectory, we are putting in place several significant dedicated initiatives for the H2 of this year and, of course, looking beyond to 2027. The H2 will see a strong commercial action plan in the French lottery business and in preparation of a major renewal of our lottery game portfolio in 2027 with a strong focus on innovation, particularly for digital lottery, I will come back to that later. Of course, we'll continue to work on the turnaround of OBG. We will also accelerate the intervention of AI as a transformation lever for our business, both to support growth and to improve performance. We have also launched a review of our portfolio of markets in OBG, and a review of non-core assets, particularly within the payment and services business units. Turning to the French lottery and retail sports betting. I will give you some more details. The GGR of this business unit has decreased by 2%, and revenue decreased by 3.9%, including a EUR 28 million impact from calendar gaming tax increase. Lottery GGR was down 2.1%, and revenue by 4%. Actually, when you exclude EuroMillions long cycles, which had a very significant impact in terms of comparison with last year, lottery GGR increased by 1% and iLottery GGR by 6%. We believe that this reflects the strength of our underlying business and the potential of the digital channel. We'll come back to that later. In retail sports betting, GGR was down 1.1% and revenue 2.9%. Actually, this reflects an overall performance which improved in Q2, supported by a more attractive sports calendar, including Champions League final stage and, of course, beginning of the World Cup. The BU's recurring EBITDA, which EUR 423 million with a margin of 34.1%. We come back to that later. In terms of initiatives that we have already launched, and will have a concrete impact in H2 2026 and looking further in 2027. We are actively managing our game portfolio with the objective to reinforce the attractiveness of our portfolio to stimulate player engagement, while, of course, maintaining our responsible gaming standards. In the H2, we will activate the lottery portfolio with a specific plan of dedicated advertising and promotion. To support particularly the events that we have in mind, which is the relaunch of the Cash five-year scratch game and additional events such as attractive jackpot for EuroMillions and Super Loto and EuroDreams event. A lot of events in the H2 to sustain our growth with advertising and promotion support. We are also preparing very actively our plan for 2027, which will be a major year for renewal of the lottery offer with the relaunch of EuroMillions in March, including a new EUR 300 million jackpot cap. A new instant game, EUR 10 instant game in June, and the relaunch of Lotto in October of the same year. Big year with big relaunch of major games that are both important for our point of sale business and, of course, for our digital channel. For the digital channel, we have also launched a new plan to sustain the growth of the digital lottery. This plan will be around investment in customer experience with a more premium, immersive, and interactive offering. It will also use AI-driven personalization and automation to automate customer operations. This also will be a big change in terms of personalization and performance. With that, we intend not only to continue to grow the number of players in our digital channel, but to increase player value through a better, more relevant, and more engaging experience. Turning to OBG. As I said, OBG at Q2, in fact, in line with expectations. It's still, of course, a situation of turnaround, as I said. We were able to basically reach the type of objective that we had with this Q2. Since GGR was broadly stable, down 0.2%, with revenue declined by 7.4%, mainly reflecting the impact of gaming tax increase, EUR 24 million. Actually, when we look at our portfolio, we see that when you exclude U.K. and Netherlands, which are the most difficult markets, GGR increased by 6.6%. Revenue was up 0.6%, with good performance in France and Scandinavia. The BU's recurring EBITDA reached EUR 67 million with a margin that is at 15.5%, which is, of course, a low level of margin. Again, the question of this portfolio is getting back to growth and, of course, sustain our cost optimization too. This is what we are doing today. For OBG, it's really a contrasted performance across markets. We are very satisfied with the migration that we managed in France to migrate ParionsSport en Ligne and Unibet under the Unibet brand. We merged the player bases. This is a commitment that we made, but it's also important for the efficiency of this business. They are now operating under a single brand and a single proprietary platform, this was, again, successfully completed at March end. This is a very important personal milestone. That was really our main milestone for this semester. On this basis, all gaming verticals were up in terms of activity, and cross-sell was very good. In the Netherlands, the markets remain challenging, but recovery is visible. GGR in Q2 was up more than 10% versus Q1, and the year-on-year decline narrowed significantly, even if we stay in a negative trend, because we were at -15% in Q1. We are now at -4%. We believe that we are on a positive trend in the Netherlands, although, of course, it's a business that we manage tightly. In the U.K., as anticipated, situation remains more difficult. The action plan for U.K. is underway, and we expect to start seeing results by the end of 2026. In OBG, globally speaking, we are implementing under the leadership of Pascal Chaffard, who has now established his new organization. We are implementing a global and complete plan with five priorities. One is a more strong shift to AI-led marketing and generosity. Prioritizing market investments and optimizing our CRM. Second is, as I mentioned, the turnaround of U.K. and Netherlands. More advanced in Netherlands than in U.K., definitely. But of course, very key for this business. Third is unlocking player value through better player experience. Working on the apps navigation and customer service, which has started. Four is, of course, how to develop the sports betting proprietary platform that we want to get to at the end of 2027. We'll have decisions to make on this and to announce during this year. We're working out on this. Of course, finally, cost optimization, because we are beginning to see some effects of cost optimization, but we believe that we need to accelerate on this one. I also want to mention that we had a good FIFA World Cup. Of course, this will impact also the second half of the year. We were able to use the World Cup as a positive driver for the group. Of course, you know that it was a larger event than the previous one, with more countries and matches. Therefore, of course, in comparison, it's not on the same basis of business. Globally speaking, the stake for the whole group, we are EUR 700 million as a whole, with, of course, a high concentration of France. In France, we saw a slight decline in point of sale stakes, but online stakes were approximately twice as high for this World Cup. Very strong performance of our French business and very good performance of the whole European portfolio of OBG in this World Cup. GGR was at the end above EUR 100 million. We believe that it's a good positive sign of the strength of sports betting brands in France and of also the advantage of having a diversified geographical footprint. A word on AI, since I mentioned that this is part of the plan that we're putting in place to accelerate growth and performance. We are now aiming at having more, I would say, concrete impact on AI and with definitely more mature capacity to get results from it. It will be first on the growth side to help us know, understand, and engage our players through more personalized journeys and product innovation. We aim to have 80% of marketing campaigns automated by 2028. It's starting now. On the performance side, AI will help drive operational excellence by improving productivity, automating customer communication, and increasing service quality. 30% of FDJ customer communication will be fully automated by 2027. We're also building the foundation of action plan by training all our employees. 100% of our group employees will be trained by the end of 2027. We invest also on our tech with tech governance plan delivering on track already this year. Last but not least, we are, of course, maintaining our extra-financial highlights and ambition. Three pillars of this. First, on responsible gaming, we continue to support training, and particularly training of young people on this gambling. We think it's very important, and it has been particularly visible during the FIFA World Cups because, of course, the issue of drunk adults in gaming and also underage gambling is still something that is very watched by our regulators. Second, our ESG commitments were again recognized by independent third parties with our inclusion in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook and the highest A score that we had for the fifth year in the Vérité40 index. Finally, we continue to develop our impact on society, particularly through Mission Nature, which is the version of dedicated game for heritage that we have now on biodiversity and which will be dedicated in 2027 to forest, of course, linked to the very large forest fires that we got this year with exceptional events that we will be having in the second half of this year. I will stop at this point and let Dan give you more details on this first half. Thank you. Thank you very much, Stéphane. Hello, everyone. As this is my first results presentation, I just want to share with you all that I am very delighted to have joined FDJ a little bit more than two months ago. Stéphane has set out the strategic context, let me now focus on the financial performance. H1, as was said by Stéphane, has been marked by identified headwinds, which led to a decrease of 1.3% in GGR. Given the gaming tax increases, revenue is down by 4.5%, and as detailed before, we are investing and taking short-term and medium-term measures to resume with profitable growth. Recurring EBITDA stands at EUR 404 million in H1, which is a 22.7% EBITDA margin. I think it is important to dwell on the fact that despite the headwinds we had on the top line, we delivered a solid profitability level by keeping strict control on our cost base and by deploying our performance plan, which is delivering exactly as planned. Let us move to the detail. Next slide is the slide on GGR. Starting with GGR, the group delivered more than EUR 4.3 billion in the first half, which is down by 1.3% compared to last year. Obviously, as said before, we have a significant impact of gaming tax increases. Public levies on games increased by 120 basis points to 60.6% of GGR, and this is particularly the case in France, the U.K., Netherlands, and Romania. This represents EUR 52 million increase in tax in H1, with obviously a direct impact on our revenue and obviously as well on our recurring EBITDA. As a consequence, as you can see on the chart, NGR is down by 4.1%, which is a sharper decline than GGR. Turning now to revenue. Group revenue stands at EUR 1.78 billion in H1, which is down by 4.5% on a year-on-year basis. In LSF, revenue is down by EUR 50 million, which reflects, as explained by Stéphane, the lower lottery activity, and on top of that, an extra EUR 28 million taxes. In OBG, the revenue is down by 7.4%. As explained before, on OBG, the gross gaming revenue is broadly stable, but obviously tax increases reduced the reported revenue by around EUR 24 million. International Lottery is doing well. Revenue stands at EUR 81 million, up 1.4%, supported particularly by our lottery in Ireland, Premier Lotteries Ireland, and particularly across digital channels. To finish with this one, payment and services generated EUR 30 million revenue in the first half. Looking now at the rest of the P&L, I think quite a lot about revenue. Cost of sales stand at EUR 760 million, which is down 3.8%, basically in line with activity because it's mainly a variable cost. This mainly reflects for LSF, lower retailer remuneration, as well as the benefits of the full internalization of commercial forces, which is now completed. For OBG, the reduced remuneration of third-party game supplier as well as lower banking commissions. Marketing costs are up to EUR 160 million. If you strip out the effect of additional advertising tax in France of EUR 8 million, this marketing costs are slightly down by 1.4%. We spent this half of the year EUR 91 million in IT services, which is up by 2.6% as we continue to invest in our technology operations and in our platform capabilities. Personal expenses stand at EUR 288 million. They are down by 4.8%, but if you strip out the effect of the employee share ownership plan costs, which happened last year in 2025, the personal expenses are probably stable compared to last year. Finally, we have done some savings on G&A. G&A costs are down 13.2%, mainly driven by lower consulting fees and by lower expense on real estate as well. Overall, I think, the cost base shows clear evidence of the impact of our performance plan, which with savings, which help to mitigate the revenue decline impact on profitability. Costs globally are down 3.3% in the first half of the year. Variable costs minus 3.8%, fixed costs minus 2.8%, this cost discipline at the end of the day, helped delivering a recurring EBITDA margin of 22.7%. I'm going to be quick on the next slide with performance plan, and not comment it in all detail. Just to say basically that execution of our performance plan is making progress, as I said before, and is fully on track with what we expected. We expect EUR 100 million savings for this year, 2026, and we are also expecting, as announced before, more than EUR 100 million in 2028. Turning now to the rest of the P&L, below the EBITDA. Depreciation and amortization amount to EUR 175 million. Non-recurring items are -EUR 142 million, mainly due to impairment of tangible assets in OBG for EUR 138 million, which is directly linked to the challenge activity in the U.K. and in the Netherlands. The financial results is negative by -EUR 34 million, a slight improvement compared to last year, H1. Income tax stands at EUR 69 million, reflecting partly the impact of exceptional corporate tax in France for EUR 20 million. At the end of the day, the reported net income is -EUR 16 million, mainly linked to the OBG asset impairment that I mentioned before. All in all, the adjusted net income stand at EUR 180 million, which obviously remains the reference number for our dividend policy. This adjusted net income is down 19% compared to last year. Let me finish with the balance sheet, which obviously remains one of the Group's key strengths. Net financial debt stands at EUR 1.96 billion at the end of June 2026. Our debt maturity profile, as you can see on the chart, is well spread and secure with no short-term concentration risk and obviously no liquidity risk. A few weeks ago, Moody's confirmed FDJ, Baa1 investment grade rating with a stable outlook. This is clearly an important external recognition of the Group's financial strengths. All of this gives us, obviously, the flexibility to keep investing in our growth while maintaining a disciplined resources allocation. I thank you very much for your attention, and now I hand over to Stéphane to take you through the outlook. Thank you, Dan. Quickly, to conclude with the outlook. As Dan said, the context is that with a difficult first half, we want and we have the capacity to invest in our growth for the second half and to 2027. In that context, we will, of course, be financially disciplined in terms of allocation of our resources. In this context, our guidance is, of course, to take into account this first half by adjusting our guidance on revenue. We now guide on a stable GGR for the year and low single-digit decline in revenue. However, we maintain our guidance on EBITDA margin between 23% and 24%. As Dan explained, we believe we definitely have the capacity to reach this level of EBITDA margin at the point we are today with the perspective of the second half. This guidance, of course, includes, to remind, EUR 70 million of gaming tax increase for the year, with approximately EUR 30 million in LSF and EUR 40 million in OBG. Of course, we confirm our dividend policy guidance, no change, with a year-on-year increase based on a payout ratio of at least 75% of adjusted net income. To conclude, we believe that we have many strong assets, unique position, diversified business, lottery, gaming and betting, strong brands, better footprint and a clear commitment to responsibility. Of course, we want to use those assets to again, get back to a more attractive growth path. First half of the year was demanding, but we have already been taking strong actions with selective priorities to sustain our growth trajectory for the future. We remain confident in our capacity to return to profitable growth. Thank you for your attention, and we are of course now happy to answer your questions. If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Estelle Weingrod from JPM. Please go ahead. Hi. Good evening, thanks for taking my questions. I've got three, please. The first one, you mentioned a review of OBG markets and an action plan in the U.K. Can you elaborate a bit more on both? I mean, first, is there a country you're contemplating exiting within OBG? Then what's the action plan for the U.K.? One question on the Netherlands. Can you give us more color on the underlying trend in the market? I guess comps are getting easier going forward, either return to GGR growth year-on-year, likely in H2. Just last one is a short one. One question on your medium-term guidance. Is it still standing? I mean, you have not mentioned it in the last release, just wanted to check on this one. Thank you very much. First on the review of OBG markets. At this point, it's really aimed at investing our money where we think we can get a good return in terms of profitable growth. There is not any potential decision on exit. It's really investing where we believe that, again, there is a good return. We are, however, of course, looking at all our assets, not fixing anything. There is no decision on exit. In U.K., I'm not sure I can give you more details about the action plan in the U.K. First, of course, to continue to improve the quality of our platform in sports betting. The U.K. has been impacted by, at the beginning, the low performance of casino in this market, we've been already improving that. That's one fundamental element. Second element is really, again, to be more selective in terms of market investment, because we don't want to spend money if it's not useful. On this basis, we will assess at the end of this year where we are in terms of results and see how we can look forward. On Netherlands, I'm not sure I have more elements to give you than the one that already mentioned in terms of improvement of the situation. What we see giving us confidence is the fact that we are now coming from the negative point that we hit within probably a certain stabilization of the market. We expect this to continue, in terms of improvement, till the end of this year. For the midterm guidance, we have not changed it. We will, of course, comment at the end of this year how we see our trends going forward, but we have not changed our midterm guidance. That's why we did not mention any new elements. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. The next question comes from Richard Stuber from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Hi. Good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. Just three please, from me. First one in online France. I know you've had a new entrant, I think Bet365 entered the market just before the World Cup. Could you comment about the competitive intensity more generally in the French market and whether you're seeing them having much of an effect? The second one, again, is going back to the U.K. online. It looks like your GGR is down about 25% in the second quarter as well. Can you just confirm again whether it is still profitable after the increase in gaming taxes in April? The third question, we haven't spoken about it for a while, but international lotteries. I think there was a report that you may be looking at the Austrian lottery operator. Could you comment around that and more generally about the opportunities you find from extending your international lotteries from Ireland and adding on to just Ireland? Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. On the first question, which is did we see the impact of Bet365 arrival in the French market? At this stage, frankly, no significant impact. The competition during the World Cup was not, I think, very much impacted by Bet365. I think one has to stay cautious on the future because they will certainly use their sponsoring of the Champions League in the second half. At this stage, this was not really a significant element in the competition in the French market. I will send an answer to U.K. afterwards. On international lottery. First, as you saw, we had a very good performance on the PLI, it is small, but it's been actually quite positive. On this basis, we think we have now, I would say, a good track record to look at other opportunities. This is what we do in a very systematic way. Austria is definitely a country where the situation could evolve and where there could be potential to be part of a competition in 2027. We are watching carefully this situation. We have not, of course, taken any decision because we don't know all the details about how this will develop. It's definitely part of the things that we have to consider in the context of developing our international lottery activity. I think that's the main situation that is clear today in the European context. I don't have any other, I would say, current situations that I would need to mention at this point. On U.K. Yes. On U.K., you are right. We are down in the U.K. by roughly 20%, and this was the case already in Q1. As we said before, no significant improvement. Again, we expect some improvement by the end of the year in the U.K. I confirm that we are profitable in the U.K. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Sabrina Blanc from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Yes. Good evening, Stéphane. Good evening, Dan. I have two questions from my part. The first one is regarding the opportunities in Austria. I understand that you don't have all the details at this stage, but do you assume that the process would have to take into account an upfront payment? My second question is regarding the IT platform migration, to have an update on where you are now, what we meant to do, and how the World Cup was a good test regarding the platform. I'm not sure I completely got your question on Austria, because the sound was not great, Sabrina. You want more details on Austria? Upfront payments. Sorry. [crosstalk] Upfront payments. Well, frankly, it's too early to comment on that. Again, we are watching carefully the situation. We have not made any decision at this point. I won't go more into details. On the IT platform, what we saw on the French market, where we had a very good performance during the World Cup, is that actually the platform that we have in the French market has been completely consistent with our capacity to sustain our offer after the migration. I think that's a strong confirmation since in our vision of progress platform migration, we might actually use the platform that we have in France and reinvest on it to use it in the future in France and even potentially in other countries. In the rest of the market, as I said, we saw that we were able actually to sustain our offer on KSP in the countries where we have migrated on KSP. We are considering these different elements to take decision in the second half to optimize our platform migration plan. That's where we are today. We'll talk more about this in the second half, where we assess the different performance and we decide what is our medium-term plan to get to those appropriate platforms that we are aiming at for OBG business. I think those are your two questions, right? Thank you. Exactly. Thank you, Stéphane. Thank you. The next question comes from Johanna Jourdain from Oddo BHF. Please go ahead. Yes, good evening. Just a quick one for me. Could you please share any view on your revenue trajectory for Q3 with the FIFA World Cup being a tailwind and also no more impact from French taxation if I'm right? Thank you. Maybe I will speak about GGR because obviously we want to strip out the kind of tax effect. On GGR, we have guided for the whole year on the stable GGR. As you saw, we are doing -1.3% in H1, it means basically that we can see the GGR is going to be up by something which is around 1.5%. This is the pure impact. It is true that we do have a difficult comparison last year in Q3, particularly on LSF. Actually Q4 is actually better comparative. On top of that, as Stéphane explained, we have launched many commercial initiatives to make sure that we return to growth by the end of the year, that will have probably the most important impact in Q4. You should be probably expecting a trajectory which is improving between Q3 and Q4 being probably better than Q3. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments. Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions. Of course, we remain ready to answer more if you have more in the coming days. Thank you for your questions and listening to us, and have a good evening and see you or talk to you soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.