Good morning! Bonjour. Thank you for coming in the rain to the results for Ipsos for 2023. We are delighted to be here. Dan Levy, our CFO, and I will take you through some of the numbers and the business, and then we can spend some time perhaps discussing them and answering any questions you may have. Overall, the profile of 2023 has been as we predicted, as on this at this event last year, with growth accelerating during the year. As we said, a very different profile in terms of the growth of revenue during the year than we had seen in the previous year, 2022. In 2022, we slowed down during the year. In 2023, we accelerated quarter on quarter. Overall growth at 3%. If we take out the COVID cliff edge, that is now completely out of our accounts, the growth would have been 4%. The operating margin maintained at a record level for Ipsos, 13.1%. Very low leverage, a very solid financial position. That's important and I think reflects that even if the growth wasn't as much as we might have hoped for at the start of the year, and we can discuss all of that, we were able to protect that operating margin because of the flexibility and diversity in our business and our ability to control costs depending on the situations we find ourselves in. What I'd now like to do is hand over to Dan Levy, who will take us through the detailed financial results. Dan? Merci Ben. Mesdames et Messieurs, bonjour. Je vous propose de commencer par la décomposition de la croissance par région. Toutes les régions affichent une très bonne performance au quatrième trimestre. La région EMEA confirme une excellente performance avec 11,2% de croissance au quatrième trimestre et une croissance annuelle de 4,1%, portée essentiellement par l'Europe continentale, avec de très bonnes performances, en particulier, de pays comme la France et la Belgique. Dans les Amériques, nous avons connu en 2023, une croissance organique de 1,7%. Ça reflète une réalité assez contrastée entre, d'un côté, l'Amérique latine, qui a cru à un taux de croissance proche de 8%, et l'Amérique du Nord, à un taux de croissance un peu plus faible, proche de 1%. Les États-Unis ont, comme on l'a déjà dit à de nombreuses reprises, dans ce type d'événement, été en effet impactés par le ralentissement significatif des grands clients de la tech. Ben va revenir dans un instant, mais nous avons observé au quatrième trimestre une amélioration et un redressement progressif de la demande chez ces grands clients de la tech. Et on attend donc que la tendance se confirme en 2024, avec en particulier des opportunités nouvelles liées à l'intelligence artificielle générative. Et au global, finalement, au quatrième trimestre, l'activité accélère fortement en Amérique du Nord avec 7,7% de croissance organique, avec une forte croissance tant en Amérique du Nord au quatrième trimestre, qu'en Amérique du Sud. Enfin, la région Asie-Pacifique affiche une croissance de 5,5% sur le quatrième trimestre et de 3,5% sur l'ensemble de l'année. En 2023, évidemment, cette région a été fortement pénalisée par la situation en Chine. Tout le monde attendait au début de l'année une accélération de l'activité après la fin de la politique zéro COVID. Cette accélération d'activité n'a pas eu lieu. On a plutôt connu une croissance économique assez atone en Chine et ça a évidemment pesé sur notre activité dans cette zone. Lorsqu'on enlève les effets de la Chine, on a de très bonnes performances dans de nombreux pays en Asie, notamment en Inde et en Asie du Sud-Est. Alors, si on regarde la situation par secteur, très bonne dynamique chez les grands clients de la grande consommation, plus 15% au quatrième trimestre, comme vous le voyez sur ce graphique, + 6% sur l'ensemble de l'année. C'est un secteur qui s'est avéré finalement assez résilient à la période 2022, 2023, qui est une période qui a été marquée en particulier par des fortes inflations, et notamment parce que ces clients ont réussi, en moyenne, à passer assez bien des hausses de prix pour faire face aux impacts inflationnistes et donc à maintenir des niveaux de profitabilité tout à fait corrects. Le secteur des TMT, Technology, Média et Télécommunications, est en amélioration avec une croissance certes faible, mais une croissance quand même au quatrième trimestre. Comme vous le voyez sur le graphique, plus 2% moins 6% sur l'année. Cette amélioration reflète ce que je disais tout à l'heure sur le redressement des grands clients de la tech, notamment aux États-Unis. Sur le secteur pharma, le secteur pharma avait assez mal commencé l'année 2023 et assez mal fini l'année 2022, en raison notamment d'un plus faible nombre d'approbations de médicaments en 2022, mais aussi une restructuration de certains grands clients du secteur pharmaceutique après la fin de la période COVID. Cette période est désormais derrière nous et on a vu pendant toute l'année 2023, une accélération du carnet de commandes dans le secteur pharmaceutique. Et du coup, on finit l'année avec une croissance forte au quatrième trimestre, plus 12% et une croissance de 4% sur l'année. Enfin, le secteur public se porte bien avec 7% de croissance au quatrième trimestre et 8% sur l'ensemble de l'année. Si on enlève évidemment les effets de la fin des grands contrats COVID, dont je vous rappelle qu'ils se sont terminés au deuxième trimestre. Enfin, les revenus associés se sont terminés au deuxième trimestre 2022 et donc, depuis le troisième trimestre de cette année, on n'a plus d'effet de base défavorable associé à la fin de ces grands contrats COVID. Le chiffre d'affaires par audience. Alors, nos activités auprès des consommateurs enregistrent une très bonne dynamique avec 12,8% de croissance organique au quatrième trimestre et sur l'ensemble de l'année, 7,1%. Ça reflète les très bonnes performances d'un certain nombre de nos lignes de services, notamment la ligne de services dédiée au suivi de la santé des marques, à l'optimisation des dépenses de marketing, au positionnement de marché ainsi que nos études qualitatives. Les clients et salariés, le segment clients et salariés est stable sur l'année 2023, reflétant là aussi des réalités assez contrastées entre, d'un côté, l'expérience client et les études mystères qui se portent bien et, à l'inverse, ce segment a été pénalisé par le ralentissement de la demande chez les grands clients de la tech. Et puis, je ne reviens pas sur les deux autres audiences que j'ai déjà commentées tout à l'heure. Le segment citoyen est en décroissance de 5%, essentiellement en raison, sur l'année, essentiellement en raison de la fin des grands contrats Covid. Et j'ai déjà commenté l'audience médecins et patients. Alors, je vais peut-être passer au compte de résultat. Donc, le chiffre d'affaires est en décroissance de 0,6%. Cette année, en 2023, un certain nombre de monnaies se sont dépréciées face à l'euro. Donc, on a eu des forts effets de change négatifs, ce qui fait que les effets de change ont fait plus que compenser. Donc, pour 3,9% négatifs, ont fait plus que compenser la croissance organique 2023. La marge brute, comme vous le voyez sur le tableau, progresse de 120 points de base à 67,5%. Cela s'explique par plusieurs facteurs. D'abord, un effet de mix favorable, et notamment une forte croissance ou une croissance plus forte que le reste du groupe dans des lignes de métiers qui sont à marge brute plus élevée. La poursuite de l'augmentation structurelle de la part de nos études qui sont faites online, par opposition à celles qui ne sont pas faites online. La capacité du groupe à tenir ses prix dans un contexte qui était encore, en 2023, inflationniste. Et puis, un effet mécanique de la fin des grands contrats Covid, notamment sur le début de l'année, puisque ces grands contrats Covid étaient des contrats à marge brute plutôt faible, compte tenu des coûts de collecte plus élevés. Et donc, quand on les enlève, évidemment, de la base, ça conduit mécaniquement à augmenter la marge brute. Un point important est que nos coûts d'exploitation en 2023 sont restés contenus. Nous avons adapté tout au long de l'année 2023 l'évolution de nos effectifs à l'activité dans chacune de nos régions et de nos pays. Ce qui fait qu'au 31 décembre 2023, les effectifs d'Ipsos sont de 2,3% inférieurs à ce qu'ils étaient au 31 décembre 2022. Et du coup, le ratio de masse salariale sur marge brute, qui est un ratio évidemment de pilotage important du groupe, est en amélioration entre 2022 et 2023. J'ajoute qu'il est nettement meilleur, par ailleurs, que ce qu'il était en 2019, ce qui montre que nous avons fait des gains de productivité structurels depuis la fin de la période Covid. Les frais généraux sont en recul malgré le contexte inflationniste et nous avons eu en 2023, des coûts de départ plus élevés que d'habitude, à €20 millions, en particulier aux États-Unis, en lien avec le ralentissement que j'évoquais tout à l'heure sur les grands clients de la tech. Au total, comme vous le voyez sur le tableau, la marge opérationnelle s'établit à 13,1%, au même niveau élevé que celui de l'année dernière, 13,1% du chiffre d'affaires. Et je crois que ça démontre, une fois encore, la capacité du groupe à délivrer un haut niveau de profitabilité dans un contexte macroéconomique qui n'était pas nécessairement très favorable et donc à s'adapter au contexte économique pour délivrer la marge opérationnelle. Alors, sous la marge opérationnelle, vous voyez le moins 47,3. Donc, nous avons enregistré une provision importante liée à nos activités en Russie. Depuis l'été dernier, en effet, une proposition de loi est en cours d'examen à la Douma. Cette proposition de loi vise à imposer des restrictions fortes sur les sociétés qui analysent la structure de la consommation en Russie. Alors, il y a encore beaucoup d'incertitudes sur les modalités d'application de cette loi, sur son contenu, sur le calendrier de sa mise en œuvre. Mais à ce stade, en tout cas, elle prévoit de limiter à 20% la détention de telles sociétés d'études sur la structure de la consommation par des intérêts étrangers. Et donc, évidemment, l'examen de cette loi à la Douma fait peser des risques importants sur la pérennité de nos activités en Russie. Et donc, nous avons pris la décision, par prudence, de déprécier l'intégralité de l'actif net lié à notre filiale locale, soit €59 millions. J'ajoute peut-être, parce que c'est probablement important pour vos modèles, que nos activités en Russie représentent un peu moins de 2% du chiffre d'affaires du groupe. Le résultat net du groupe s'établit à 160 millions d'euros, évidemment largement impacté par la dépréciation des actifs russes que je viens d'évoquer, et le résultat net ajusté du groupe, qui évidemment est ajusté des effets non cash et des provisions exceptionnelles, et notamment de la provision russe, s'établit à 229 millions d'euros. Alors, quelques mots sur les flux de trésorerie. Notre capacité d'autofinancement s'améliore de 11 millions d'euros. Le besoin en fonds de roulement affiche une variation négative de 65 millions d'euros, provenant principalement d'un effet de timing, qui est lié au fait que nous avons une croissance, comme vous l'avez constaté, très forte au quatrième trimestre, un plus 8,8%. Et donc, il y a une partie du cash généré par ces revenus qui va être déportée sur l'année 2024. Donc, c'est des effets classiques de BFR liés à l'augmentation de la croissance, en l'occurrence, sur la fin de l'année. Les investissements sont en hausse, conformément à notre plan stratégique. Nous continuons à investir dans nos plateformes, dans nos panels propriétaires, dans les outils d'intelligence artificielle générative, et ces investissements vont encore s'accélérer en 2024. Au total, le free cash flow du groupe s'établit à €169 millions, en retrait par rapport à l'année dernière, essentiellement en raison des effets timing de BFR que je viens d'évoquer à l'instant. Nous avons, et c'est dans la deuxième partie du tableau, accéléré notre politique d'investissement en croissance externe en 2023, puisque nous avons investi €48 millions dans des acquisitions de sociétés. Ben va revenir dans un instant sur la liste de ces acquisitions. Nous avons racheté pour quatre-vingt-cinq millions d'actions Ipsos, pour partie pour trente-six millions, au titre du plan d'actions gratuites pour les salariés d'Ipsos. Mais également, nous avons surtout poursuivi notre programme de rachat d'actions à vocation d'annulation pour cinquante millions d'euros en 2023. Et puis, nous avons remboursé cinquante-huit millions d'euros de dettes à long terme, et notamment un emprunt Schuldschein que nous avons souscrit en 2016, et nous avons versé cinquante-neuf millions de dividendes. Et donc, au total, la trésorerie à la clôture s'établit à deux cent soixante-dix-huit millions d'euros. Enfin, avant de laisser la parole à Ben de nouveau, le groupe se trouve dans une excellente situation financière qui lui permet à la fois de financer sa croissance, ses investissements, et sa politique d'acquisition. Nous avons un niveau de levier, comme vous le voyez sur le tableau, qui est très faible, à 0,3 fois l'EBITDA. Et par ailleurs, nous disposons de près de 500 millions d'euros de lignes de crédit non utilisées à plus d'un an, ce qui nous permet évidemment de préparer sans difficulté les prochaines échéances de dette que vous voyez sur le graphique. 20 millions cette année, en l'occurrence, deux lignes bilatérales, et puis le refinancement de notre bond public en septembre 2025 pour 300 millions d'euros. Je vous remercie de votre attention et je laisse la parole à Ben pour un point sur l'activité. Thank you, Dan. In terms of what's going on in the business, let's just have a look at some different areas of activity. The first is big tech, which is obviously important, and over the last five years, has grown from $144 million- $172 million. You can see on this chart the impact of the cutting of activity in 2022, late and earlier this year. So we're ahead of where we were back in 2021. We expect some ongoing growth. We can see lots of activity in the sector, but it was certainly for our North American business, which was working obviously heavily with clients in the Seattle and San Francisco area. Obviously, that was a big U-turn of inactivity at one point. Overall, though, we're optimistic about big tech, because what we can see is that, and again, you can see it in the valuation of those stocks, is that market is disrupted, and it means that they need information as much as ever. Google and Ipsos have just published a very large... one of the largest studies ever on how people around the world are reacting to AI, the regulatory challenges, what regulations citizens wish to see. We launched that with them at Davos. Huge issues about what responsible AI looks like, and if you just talk to any law firm or bank who are thinking about their own engagement with it, you get-- you start to understand some of the challenges. Many of these brands, of course, their business models are disrupted or potentially affected. Microsoft reentering the search market with a bang at the end of 2022 has, of course, really focused people's minds in that market. Of course, we have the potential now, with AI being added to virtually everything, to look at how customer services will be changed. What does it mean in terms of logistics for B2B? You can go on and on. So overall, AI generates more activity in that sector. In pharma, we've seen a pickup of activity during the year, so minus 3% in the first half, plus 9% in the second half, and one of the drivers of that has been an increase in approvals for new drugs, which then need to be test marketed. There, the product cycle starts again. We are involved at each stage of that product cycle. We can also see growing interest in the pharma community in issues like ESG, their impact on the environment, issues of equity, new areas like non-interventional studies, which are very well suited to Ipsos of its abilities in both offline and online data collection, and of course, digital health. Overall, healthcare continues to be a sector that we expect to grow faster than GDP generally. New services. We have, in the last presentation, at the end of Q3, we took you through the new analysis that we're using to look at new services, because when we originally segmented our work about nine years ago, of course, things that were new then no longer are. So we've grouped these together. They're about 20% of our revenue, 14% organic growth, all of our work on platforms, whether that's Ipsos Digital, which we'll talk about in a minute, our SaaS service, Ipsos Facto, the AI service, and I want to talk a little bit about that. Synthesio, our analysis of social media and web listening. Ipsos RISE, the product that we use in corporate reputation. All of our work in ESG, which is growing rapidly. We're making strides ourselves on reducing our carbon footprint, getting a better gender balance across the company, but our clients are too, and as a supplier, of course, they're interested in what we're doing, but they're also interested in how consumers are going to react to changes in packaging, etc. Science and data, passive data, again, a very important part of our business, particularly in audience measurement, and data analysis, data analytics, and then finally, our advisory services. So all of those things together, we're seeing good growth, and we expect that to continue. Artificial intelligence, of course, is something that when we launched the plan for 2020- 2021- 2025, we didn't really talk about so much. We've always used algorithms in our work, but of course, in late 2022, it exploded. I want to play you a short video now just to explain how we're combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence, because the key point here is that no one is going to lose their job to AI, but they may lose their job to another human being with AI, and we want to be that human being with AI. Please play the video. Thank you. What we've done is build our own safe system that is not exposed to the outside world, where we can load up our data securely, load up client data with their permission, and then analyze it in ways that were just not possible literally months ago. So we're building our own large language models, and very importantly, our own prompt libraries. Some of these prompts now are up to thirty pages long, and that's-- I think this is one of the challenges. When one first opens a Gen AI tool and starts to use it, you can say, "Well, the hallucinations are terrible. What, this-- what is this?" And it's only when you start to really use it in an intelligent way that you get value from it, and that, I think, is one benefit of being one of the larger players in this field. Some of the smaller agencies that we compete with will not have five thousand different people experimenting with different prompts, seeing what's worked, immediately sharing across our network the results of their efforts. So it's giving us more speed. It's giving us more productivity. It means that when Dan and I are looking at payroll in certain parts of the business, and our colleagues say, "Well, we need to add a lot more people," we're saying, "But hang on a minute, we can see that actually you won't need to do that because you will be more productive using this tool." So it's a very fast-moving space, but it is something that is fundamentally different. Is it something different than when PowerPoint arrived in this industry? Not quite clear yet, to be quite honest, but it has huge potential. And in terms of new products, we are... You know, we launched many last year. We have more coming this year. Whether that is one of the tools in terms of web listening, that immediately allows us to search vast amounts of data that is being properly indexed in a secure way, and was awarded a prize by one of our clients, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world, and our advisory services. Qualitative studies, of course, using a lot of voice, video, textual analysis. It is literally game changing for things like translation at speed. And, you know, we, in areas like creative excellence, where we're testing ads, these will come out this year. You know, we can immediately expose a potential ad to AI, index that on a lot of other ads that we've already tested, and then start to make some predictions about what might work, how it needs to be changed, without even showing it to real consumers, because we have so much back data in the model. And month by month, you see more and more ability to analyze data, more and more ability to analyze large data sets. Obviously, originally, many of these models were text-based, but increasingly, it is about analyzing the data itself, and that is, you know, again, hugely game changing for us. So we're very optimistic about the impact of this on the business. Our original product in this area, Ipsos Digital, our SaaS service, has seen ongoing growth this year, 31% more than in 2022, so up from $35 million- million $65- $85 million. It is part of the story on profitability, because, of course, the profitability of this work is double the average of our normal studies, because, of course, it is completely automated, so much faster, and much less chance of human error. We're developing new services in 2024, which will expand the number of people and the number of clients who will want to use it. We're also extending it to more geographies and adding extra functions. So altogether, we see this again as part of our ongoing growth and improved profitability. We've also made more acquisitions in 2023 than we did back in 2022. Quite a marked change in the speed of acquisitions. And of course, they have strengthened our position in the public sector, making us number one in markets like the Netherlands, which has a very developed market in that space. Also in Ireland, and very strong performances now in New Zealand and in Australia. Adding also some new technology platforms, most recently Germany. They work for some of the biggest tech companies. Interestingly, this relatively small tech company works for some of the biggest tech companies in the world in terms of helping them extract value from their data, because they're a specialist data analysis business. So we will continue to look at these types of things. The new vehicle customer study in America, again, is strengthening our position in the automotive sector. We have not made any major acquisitions, because we are still offered things at prices that are not still reasonable. I think there's some interesting discussions to be had there. We want to do something larger. We are looking, and we are in conversations with much larger potential acquisitions than any you see here, but it's hard to be specific about when those would complete. Overall, the ones that we have done this year add about $60 million of revenue in 2024. Overall, we're maintaining high client satisfaction. The average score from our clients is nine out of ten. Our staff remain highly engaged. The average for professional services in our employee research business is about 70%, so we're well above that. 83% of people at Ipsos say that they're really proud to work here, which makes, you know, is nice to see, because ultimately this is about the people much more than anything, literally. Good to see recognition in Time Magazine, in Newsweek magazine, in Forbes, in terms of being trustworthy, a good company for women, well-run, and in our own industry, the Grit Awards have again rated us number one in terms of our innovation, the most innovative insights analytics company in the world. So great to see that. That's a vote by the clients, not by other researchers, so it was nice to see that. In terms of what happens next, I think the first thing is that we want to return more money to shareholders where possible. So we've increased, we will increase the dividend, subject to a vote at the General Assembly in May, by 22% to €1.65 per share. We did €50 million in share buybacks this year. In 2024, we will do some more, but we will look at when to do that, depending on what happens with acquisitions. Obviously, if we made a very major acquisition, there would be less share buybacks. If there aren't, then there will be more. So we will be sensitive to that. But we are trying to create more value for everybody, including our shareholders. In terms of the rest of this year, we're expecting growth above 4% and the margin to be around 13% again. We are continuing to invest in technology, and we're investing more in technology than ever before. We need to do that. Overall, we are in a strong position, no debt, and very clear growth. Thank you very much. Very happy to take questions with Dan. A question from me? Yeah. Yeah, a question more on the competitive environment. Yeah. Do you see new competitors in your business or not so much? Well- Thank you. What about the historical- Yeah competitors? I think what I would say is that there are one of the things about this market is that there are a number of large global players. There's been a lot of consolidation over the last few decades, but there are always new entrants. You know, a shout-out to my friend Stephan Shakespeare at YouGov, who for years has been telling me that we're going to be done and done in or something. So there are always new competitors arriving. But actually, we are able... Once you get to a certain scale, it becomes hard to, it is hard to replicate something like Ipsos, the diversity of countries that we're in, the range of services that we provide. That, I think that is-- And then being able to, as we've just demonstrated with AI, and I think we will show more. I see my friend Michel Guidi, who is our Chief Operating Officer here. We will show more again on the Investor Day later this year. You know, where we- where scale means that even if you are a small boutique enabled with AI, it's hard to compete with the scale and the number of people working in this. It's a little bit like some, you know, some of the new tech startups. They need to, they still need some of the big ones. So no, it's not, I don't think I'm particularly concerned by new startups. The, our major competitors, obviously nearly the biggest ones, run by private equity. We wait to see what happens there. I think we have a very different philosophy to private equity in terms of running this business, and so far, we are comfortable, I would say, in terms of our position relative to them. I'll just say that. Martin, Société Générale. Could we get an idea of your CapEx envelope for 2024? And also, you guided on 4% organic sales growth for 2024, which is below your midterm- Above, above 4%. Does it mean that the payback of your investment is more weighted for 2025? Could we have a comment on that point? Thank you very much. On investment, we used to have an annual envelope, which is roughly $50 million per year. We did $60 million in 2023, so above what we did in 2022. And investment is going to be accelerating this year for all the reasons I've just mentioned before, which is investment on our proprietary panels, on our platforms, but also on the investments we are doing on generative AI, would it be for internal tools or for external offers for the clients. So we are clearly going to be accelerating on investment. The other point on investment is that there is some fungibility, if you like, between investment and acquisitions. There are things that you can do either by investing internally or that you can do by doing some acquisitions. There will be, at some point, maybe some questions about whether we buy a company for a specific technology or whether we invest on our technology internally. I think the other thing is that the investments that we're making start to pay off this year, but it's true that they will pay off even more in 2025. Because, you know, some of these things, I think, and it's interesting if you look at our business, because the things that we're doing are really changing the digital backbone of the whole company. The work on AI, where we've started in a greenfield site from nothing in early 2023, has been really substantial and shows what you can do in a greenfield site with this technology and with the range of skills and expertise that we have across Ipsos. But at the same time, rewiring some of the core processes does take longer, and so that pays off during this year and in 2025. Hello. Hi. I'm William Monso from Midcap Partners. Four questions for you, please. On the sales, you depreciated all your assets in Russia. For the 4% guidance growth, do you take in account the activities in Russia, the closure of the activities in Russia or not? What will be the drivers of growth in 2024? It is always a big tech. And how is your order book for the... Yeah The Q2 in 2024? And can we expect a stable H2 in terms of growth in 2024, and the greatest chunk of growth will be more in H1? And in terms of margin, what do you expect in terms of gross margin? Do you think that it will be improving? And also about the payroll, do you think that it will be stable or it will return to 2022 levels in terms of percentage of sales? Thanks. So maybe I take the Russian one, margin and payroll. So on Russia, as you understood, there is a specific situation, which is there is a draft law discussed currently at the Duma. We don't know exactly what is going to happen. The current draft law, as I said, puts a serious jeopardy on our activity in Russia, but it's not voted yet, so we will see what happens. It's by caution, actually, that we depreciated all our net assets in Russia, which is the $59 million provision that we did. Now, in terms of the future and the organic growth guidance and impact on Russia, Russia is relatively small part of our revenue. It's less than 2%, which means that of course, it's not very pleasant as a situation, but it doesn't bring a lot of consequences in terms of the activity of the group globally. The second point is that, as you know, organic growth is about constant scope. If at some point we were to get out of Russia, that would be taken out of the constant scope. That's for Russia. Obviously, it doesn't change anything about our guidance for organic growth for 2024. On the gross margin, yes, we do expect an improvement of gross margin in 2024. I think it's the tendency that we will observe across the year in the future, and this is for many reasons. We are investing to be more efficient in our operations, which improve the gross margin. Ipsos Digital is also improving the gross margin, and particularly all the service lines which have higher gross margin than the rest of the group, which will grow higher than, quicker than the group in the future, will also have a business mix effect. So there are a lot of reasons on top of the fact that we are continuing the shift from offline to online. So all of these reasons are strong drivers to improve the gross margin in the future. In terms of the payroll, the way we work, and the way we manage the company, and I think it's actually very well seen in what we have done in 2023, is that we try to adapt our payroll cost to the situation of the activity, country by country, and to be, you know, as clever as we can. Which means basically that we pilot the group with the payroll to gross margin ratio, and we make sure that the payroll to gross margin ratio remains acceptable. So this is the way we work. And just to add to that, then on growth drivers, to be honest, there are-- Because of the diversity, and you saw on the chart the sectors and the growth in Q4, that's the sort of pattern that we would be expecting. Hopefully, some pickup in the public sector this year. We've got some changes to make there. Hopefully, by geography, some pickup in the United States now that the tech, in a sense, activity has stabilized and started growing again. It's very exciting to go out there recently and just talk to our clients in Seattle and San Francisco about their plans. The order book at the end of January, we don't do a running commentary month by month, but suffice to say, it's in line with everything that we're talking about here. On payroll, the other thing to remember is many people were asking us questions, I remember a year ago and in late 2022, about would we be able to control the payroll, inflation, etc. I think we've demonstrated that even in a high inflation environment, we've been able to manage the payroll. One part of that is because there is a natural churn in our industry, and indeed in our company, of around 20%. If we don't hire anybody, and we stop hiring, then the company has 20% fewer people by the end of the year, just by natural causes, which gives us this ability to flex. We've been able to deal with that. I think there are, you know, potentially we'll need, we may need to spend a bit more on payroll. We've grown by 3%. We're trying to grow above 4%, but we will always, as Dan says, be absolutely vigilant on that because it is our biggest cost. But it's also, in some ways, you know, people are our biggest opportunity as well. I don't know if that covers everything you want to ask about. I mean, then are you concerned about operational margin? Because the gross margin will improve and the payroll will stay stable in terms of percentage of sales, then we can say that you, with 4% growth, you can have easily higher margins now? Potentially, I think that there's also choices to be made about investment, so it's this trade-off. Okay. Yes. But yes, you're right. We have strong drivers to improve the operating margin, and actually we have already communicated that our target in the long run is more 15% operating margin than 13%. So that would be in a few years in the long run. The strong drivers are obviously all the efficiency gains that we are going to do with being more efficient in our operations, generative AI, having rationalized our platforms, et cetera, plus the gross margin effect that you mentioned. But in the short term, I would also say that because we are investing, that obviously has an impact also on the amortization of the CapEx, which means also that it weighs on the GenX and on the operating margin at the end of the day. So we are investing. That's why we want to be cautious on the OP. The next question, please. What is the impact of the price increase in the growth of 2023? It's very difficult to say because when you have, let's say, for instance, a product testing study, you could have the same product testing at six months' interval, and you could have the same, but the specificities of the product testing is not exactly the same. So you never know whether the move in price is linked to price or inflation, or whether it's linked to different specificities. So it's difficult to say. I would say that a significant part of the 3% is probably linked to price in 2023. Obviously, the diversity of the economies we're working in means it's very hard to average out. Turkey and Argentina are very different to France. Thanks. Hi, Eric from Finance Connect. First, can you give us an idea, some granularity about the profit margin by area? My question is also the impact of the exchange on the operating margin. That's the first question. The second question is about shareholding structure. We have seen that you have buyback of €50 million. Are you going to continue, and what is the situation today? Because by the same time, our shareholder is buying shares, by the way. So can you give us an idea of what happened on that? You spoke about your competitor under private equity. It seems that it could have... Kantar is... Sorry, WPP is going to sell, want to sell its share. Can you give if you have any interest, any possibility to have something in this field? On profit by geographies, we don't communicate that publicly. What I can say is that it is true that there are areas in the world where the margin tends to be a bit higher than the rest of the world. That's particularly the case in the United States, for instance. This is why when we presented our strategic plan, one of the reasons why we thought that it would be a good idea to invest in the US on top of the fact that it's clearly the biggest market in the world in terms of market research. Second, on the impact of exchange rate on operating profit, it is small. So clearly, the exchange rate has played an important role, and we have seen that in the 2023 results on the top line. But because our costs are most of the time in the local currency, the impact on operating margin is extremely small. In terms of the share buyback, so we have done $50 million in 2023, after $10 billion in 2022. What we say and what Ben has said before is that we will continue our share buyback program with a view of consolidation. But clearly, in our capital allocation priorities are acquisition and investment, and we will adapt our share buyback program to the pace of acquisition during the year of 2023, which is one of the reasons why we don't give any numbers for 2024. We're always interested in buying sensibly priced assets that fit well with our business. Whether Kantar and its IPO or potential IPO is that, is quite another matter, to be quite honest. I think the only thing I would say is that we're keen that one of the reasons for Ipsos' success is that the people in the business share in the success with outside investors, and we're keen to maintain that as part of who we are and strengthen that in 2024. What is the capital structure now? Your main shareholder have increased the share you buyback. Are the buyback shares canceled? Yes, yes. Immediately? Well, after a certain, so the- There is no total control today? It's very limited, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. What does that mean? Because it's a kind of reduction for shareholders. What are the main shareholders today? The main shareholders are the holdings of the founder, Didier Truchot, who owns roughly 10% of the shares of the company, and I think a bit more than 16% to 17% of the voting rights, and the rest is on the market. But the main shareholder is buying shares to- Yes. By the same way. So it was ten. It could not be ten still? Didier, let's get the main shareholder to speak. Bonjour, vous savez, dans la vie, on, il faut jamais rester au milieu du chemin. Donc, soit vous augmentez, soit vous réduisez. C'est comme donc, j'ai pris, avec Laurence, mon épouse, qui est là, la décision de nous renforcer dans le capital d'Ipsos. Pourquoi? Parce que, évidemment, qu'on croit dans l'avenir de cette société. On pense que le meilleur est devant nous. Et parce qu'on pense aussi que, à partir du moment où vous êtes le plus important actionnaire, c'est important d'être encore plus important. Enfin, donc, d'être sûr que, comment dirais-je? On peut, on témoigne, via notre présence, de l'importance de cette société. Je vais rajouter un deuxième élément, c'est que dans cette société, donc, qui détient aujourd'hui à peu près 11% du capital d'Ipsos et près de 20% des droits de vote, donc il y a, il y a la, il y a dans ce, dans la structure de cette société, il y a une autre entité, qui s'appelle Ipsos Partner. Et cette entité rassemble un, un, les principaux dirigeants et cadres supérieurs d'Ipsos. Et l'avenir de, de, de tout ça, ce sera quoi? Bah, c'est que, c'est que le, le jour où, où les... Comment dirais-je? Où ma vie professionnelle s'arrêtera, eh bien, le management d'Ipsos, les gens qui travaillent dans la société, auront la capacité d'exercer une influence importante sur le devenir de la société, évidemment, en collaboration et en bonne entente avec les autres actionnaires. Voilà. Merci. Any more for any more? Monsieur. From me, sir. Yeah, given the election in the U.S. this year, do you expect an election effect on your business? It's hard to say because it is late in the year. It partly depends on the outcome of those elections. The American election is very difficult to predict in February for November, when Joe Biden... I think, well, it's pretty unpredictable if you look at all of the factors at play. It's probably, you know, there is more work from, as you know or probably know, there are seventy-one general elections around the world this year, more human beings voting than ever in history. This is positive for us. Against that, a larger part of our business is working directly for government departments around the world. One of the things that happens when there is a change of government is that it takes a few months for the ministries to be sorted out. Some programs stop, some new ones start. The direction of the government changes. It's very likely in my own country, the UK, that we will have a Labour government later this year, and they will probably... Historically, Labour spends more, which is positive for our business, but there may be a pause while they do that. That's another reason for being a little bit cautious about this year. If there are no more questions, we can take questions informally over coffee. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. Thank you.