morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased that we have L'Oreal CFO, Christophe Baboule, here with us. Before we go into some Q and A, I'm just going to give the stage to Christophe, who will do a short presentation SUNDSTROM:] for the next ten minutes, and then we'll get into some Q and A. So over Okay. To you Christophe. So good morning to everybody. We will start with a small movie to let you know what is L'Oreal. So yes, welcome to this incredible category called Beauty, and I hope this puts you in a good mood. So let's go now to speak more about who is L'Oreal. So you've seen the key figures, and I have to say that, yes, L'Oreal is a truly unique company. Why? Well, let me give you four reasons of why I consider that L'Oreal is a truly unique company. Number one, we are by far the largest beauty company. We are 1.5 times bigger than the number two and three times bigger than the number three players, as you can see on this chart. And size matters in our industry. It allows us to scale our acquisitions and licenses. For example, Prada and Valentino both have sales of more than EUR $05,000,000,000 by now. It allows us to scale our brands. We have 12 out of our 37 international brands that are billionaire brands, And I have to say that quite a few more are waiting to join the club. It allow us to scale our innovation. You know that we invest a lot in R and I because new molecules can be cascaded over several brands. And of course, it allow us to scale our technology, and we invest a lot in beauty tech. But scale is nothing without agility, which is why we consistently optimize and improve our operational and organization footprint. Reason number two is that for more than one century, we have been doing only beauty, but we do all beauty, making us the only company that is truly a multipolar company. We are in all categories, as you can see on the left side of the slide, and skincare is our largest category, followed by hair and makeup, with an increasing weight of fragrances because this category gained five points in the last four years. We are in all segments or channels with primarily mass and lux being the biggest ones. We are in all regions. The exposure to our developed market is well balanced. Emerging markets contributing 17% of our sales in 2024, and of course, the contribution to the growth is much higher. This breadth of our footprint makes us a turbulence proof company. Let's take 2024. The ongoing strength in Europe, North America and emerging markets more than offset the softness in China. At the same time, the continued dynamism of the fragrance and hair care markets more than offset the more sluggish momentum that we see in makeup and skincare. Third key point is that over the years, we have built and carefully curated an unrevolved brand portfolio. Our 37 international brands are highly complementary and ensure that we cater to all beauty consumers' wants and needs. And you can see that perfectly on this slide. Our brands travel all price points and cover all consumer aspirations from Hess to more glamour needs. And we continue to add to our portfolio when we find a brand that will enhance our long term growth profile and that is highly complementary. In that spirit, we recently announced two very exciting acquisitions. The Luxe division took a majority stake in Medic8, a premium brand with focus on selective distribution at the health end of the spectrum. And then the Professional division acquired ColorWoo, a U. S.-based prestige hair care brand that is one of the fastest growing and most innovative of its industry. And of course, it will fuel the ongoing hair care boom. Fourth reason, our financial situation is rock solid, which enable us to consistently focus on growing the business. As you know, we grew 7.6% compound annually between 2019 and 2024. Last year, our gross margin stood at over 74%, up 120 basis points in four years despite the significant inflationary pressure. This allow us to continue to increase our brand investment by 140 basis points to slightly over 32% of our sales. And last, thanks to our laser sharp focus on SG and A, our operating margin increased to a record 20%. And let me remind you that our balance sheet remains healthy with gearing of less than 13%, allowing us to pursue growth opportunities as I just described. So let me now say a few words about our recent first half. First, we delivered organic top line growth of 3%. Now adjusted for the impact of our IT transformation, mainly in North America and China, the growth stood at 3.2%, implying an acceleration from 2.6% in the first to 3.7% in the second quarter. Now while I'm on the subject of adjustments, I thought it might be helpful to give you an update of where we are in our IT transformation. To date, we have finalized around one third of the process, which has included a number of smaller countries, but also some of larger countries like China. We promised you earlier this year to be transparent on the impact of this bigger project, which takes us to the chart on the right part. You will recognize on Q1 the 90 basis points impact we disclosed in the first quarter and the 130 basis points effect we quantified in the second. And probably what is important for you is expect that the third quarter, there will be a positive phasing impact of 70 basis points. Regarding now our operating margin, operating profit advanced by 30 basis points, reaching a new first half record of 21.1%. Each of our divisions reporting operating margins in excess of 22%. And three of them Professional, Consumer and Luxe reached a record first half margin. In Dermatological Beauty, the operating margin declined 70 basis points versus last year as we are working to gradually reduce the existing imbalance between the two halves. Regarding the market, that's important, because we continue to expect that global Beauty market growth will be around 4%, plus 4%, with significant discrepancies between the various regions. And of course, we have every ambition to outperform the market with our strong stimulus plan. So what is the stimulus plan? Critically, our Beauty stimulus plan will accelerate further in the second half, up 300 basis points compared to last year. 300 basis points is in addition of launches in the sales that we planned for the second half. We will continue to roll out our most recent blockbusters, and we have an even fuller basket of launches in the second half. This is especially true in Luxe with a new men's fragrance from Prada, you see here the picture, Parading, inaugural fragrance from Miu Miu and the latest skincare innovation from Helena Rubinstein. When it comes to e commerce, in the last twelve to eighteen months, the contribution from online to total beauty market sales has been accelerating. In the first half, online grew more than twice as fast as the market. We are uniquely well placed to benefit from this shift given our long standing investment and presence in the channel. Last but not least, let me put the spotlight on what's new in the areas that I know you are most interested in. First, United States. The momentum continued to accelerate for the market and for us. This was especially true in Consumer Products, where market growth remained solid and where we outperformed the market two to three times, in spite of our adverse footprint, illustrating the success of our launches, especially in makeup, where we grew eight points ahead of the market. We also outperformed the market in our other three divisions, especially in Professional Products. The Chinese ecosystem remains a tale of two cities. In Mainland China, the market continued to stabilize and we continue to outperform it in three of our divisions. I'm quite optimistic about our Consumer Product division, where the gap to the market has been narrowing and with a strong launch pipeline also in the second half. But in Travel Retail, on the other hand, the situation continued to be challenging across all downtown operations, whether in Hainan where the footfall and conversion rates remain under pressure, South Korea and most recently also in Thailand. On the tariffs, well, we have now a better visibility. Recently, we had some small good news, mainly from Canada. They listed tariffs regarding deportation of product from The U. S. And therefore, we believe that the impact in our P and L this year is reducing. I shared a few months ago that could be impacting 40 basis points. We are down to 30 basis points. Last point is our acquisition. We've done recently some acquisition in June, as you know, Medicaid and ColorWow. And the good news is that we're expecting to consolidate both brands starting from this month in September. Thank you very much. And with that, I will hand over to Patrick for our fireside chat. Super. Thanks, Christophe. And thanks also for confirming again the 4% number. I guess you knew that was going to come up as a question. I guess following up from that, how are you guys performing versus the wider market right now? The gap of outperformance has narrowed recently over the last twelve to eighteen months. Are you starting to see maybe some green shoots as we kind of go into the second half now? And maybe that outperformance is going to go back to a bit of more of a historical level. Well, the good news is that at least the market is increasing compared to the first quarter that has been quite impacted in some markets. I'm referring to The U. S, for example. Now the market is probably a little bit above 3%. And what we have seen at least July, August is positive news. Positive news in The U. S, as I just said, because the market is much more dynamic. And also, for the time being, at least in Mainland China, which is the second biggest market, the market is also stabilizing with up and downs because depending on the promotion, but that's pretty good news. And when you dive into how the market is doing, it's quite interesting because when you look at the top 30, actually, we have now the figures of the big players. They have all been publishing the results. And we did the plus 3%, but the top 30 have been growing by only 0.7%. So the growth is mainly coming from the small brands, mainly from the long tail, those indie brands that are gaining strength in countries like in emerging countries a lot, of course, The U. S. But that's quite interesting because it means that among the big players, we are strongly outperforming. But at the same time, we're agile enough also to compete with the small indie brand in some of the geographies. So that's what we are monitoring very carefully. Okay. That's clear. You touched on a few things there, I want to dive into one of the key topics, China, and you talked about how you have innovation coming in the second half there. But I want to go back to the Q2 conference call when you talked about competition is fierce. How has the Chinese market been doing since the six point eight shopping festival? And how do you expect the innovations to go down in the second half? Well, first, some insights about the market in China. Competition, of course, is still increasing. But what we see is competition coming from Chinese brands is only in consumer market. So for the time being, in other in our other divisions, we don't see that fierce competition as the one we can see on Consumer. And it's all about bringing our innovation at the right time. So we know that at Kissing Consumer, our biggest launches are coming in the next four months. So that's why we expect the gap to narrow. And then we'll see. But at least when I look at the results of the 06/18, we've been growing at 10%, while the overall results are at plus seven so we've been doing pretty well. L'Oreal Paris is still the number one brand. We put four of our brands in the top ten, eight in the top 20. So I can tell you that we are still there. We are still there and overall growing, which is also a good news because the market was quite negative still in the Q1, and now it's stabilizing. So it's not a big wow, but at least with the innovation, with investment, little by little, we are coming back from a market that was very negative in the second half of last year, minus 6%. So to see the market stabilizing, for us at least, it's a good news. Okay. Related to China on LUX, you talked about the consumer side of things. But can you maybe touch on why the LUX market has been in general a bit weaker? In China, there's that concern, but also in The U. S, we've seen a bit of weakness. Is it suffering from years of inflation? Is it more competition within the luxury space? Or are consumers trading down the pricing ladder? Can you pinpoint what you think is the cost of concern? Well, there are many factors, and I think that the reasons quite could be quite different from one big regions to other ones. First, I want to remind that, for example, in emerging markets, the luxury business is doing pretty well, so growing very fast. Even in Europe, our old continent, luxury has been developing pretty well, nearly at least above 4%. And now you have two big regions for which I believe the reasons are quite different. You have China on one side, where this is due to the economic situation. You know what happened in the past three years. But one of the probably things that could change a bit the face of luxury brands is that you have noticed that recently, the stock market in China have been catching up a lot. And I'm sure that this will help the sentiment of the Chinese consumers probably to look back a little bit more to our luxury brands. And even within the luxury, you have, for example, our couture brands in China are performing extremely well. I mean, we are speaking about double digit growth. So probably when it comes to skincare brands, it's where here there is more competition coming from dermatological brands, so our brands, by the way, but also from the market. And from The U. S, I think there was a specific situation that is linked to the Q1 for political and economical reasons. But what we've seen since the end of Q2 and confirm in July and August is stronger dynamic in The U. S. Market. And then it comes with innovation. So that's where big companies and we are doing our job is to bring innovation. You know that fragrances are doing extremely well. The market is still it's not anymore double digit growth worldwide, but it's still growing by more than 7%. In that context, we are well above 10% growth. And we need to fuel the pipe with a strong innovation, and that's why we have new launches coming in the second half. So we'll see what happens. Okay. So going from to a quite good success story with Kerastase, Can you maybe talk about your success there? What's driving that success maybe? And where are there still white spaces with the brand across different markets? Yes. This is an incredible result, and we see Kerastase growing extremely well in all regions of the world. In The U. S, it's a huge growth. And I think it's first the fact that the consumers, and we have seen that not only in our Professional Product division but also in consumer, Consumer has been looking for more value in hair care. So every time we put some innovation, and that's true with L'Oreal Paris, it's true also with Garnier, so with other brands, when we put more innovation in the products, implying higher prices, the consumers have been responding extremely well. And by the way, the first success we've noticed, it's something that was designed by the Brazilian teams, so a market where prices are not that big. And actually, when we roll out this innovation into other geographies in The U. S, in Europe, it has been the same everywhere. So that's why we have been, I think, doing a lot in valorizing this category and therefore enhancing the growth. So Kerastase is benefiting from that. Consumers are looking for more value in terms of innovation, so they dare to put the price. And of course, it comes also with very strong innovation. And in that respect, the latest launch of Kerastase is doing extremely well. And the third main reason is e commerce. This is a brand that is also boosted by our strength in e com. And I think if you sum up those three ingredients, this is those are the main reasons of the strong success of Carlyle Stazem. Okay. And maybe going to another brand that has had a great success over the last seven years, CeraVe. And it's quite interesting because we've seen a bit of a moderation of growth there recently, which I know you guys have touched on a few times. But what is the opportunity you guys are still looking at within the CeraVe skin kind of space? And lastly, on CeraVe, you just did the anti dandruff line. Curious to hear the strategy behind that rollout, guessing that's after a different demographic and target audience compared to the Kerastase brand. Well, yes, maybe for the audience, I want to remind what is the history of CeraVe because it's a brand and when we acquired, it was doing €150,000,000 and is now bigger than €2,000,000,000 So of course, there's been a huge, probably one of the most incredible success stories among our brands. So this is a brand that has been a bit of victim of its own success. So that's the main reason of the plateauing of the brand in the past few quarters. But the teams have been now preparing the next steps for the development. So first, it comes with new products. So as you know, we launched for recently the hair care range of products, and it's visible here in The U. S. Fortaming is doing pretty well because in the therapeutic hair care category, we have already 8.5 of market share. So of course, we have now to scale this product in other geographies. And we are also bringing innovation, new products in new categories like hand and care. So new launches, it's the number one thing that we are doing. Second is geographies, because even if we started to develop in other regions, the growth of The U. S. Has been so big that still today, The U. S. Is still half of the market. So we don't have to forget about the huge potential that we still have in other regions, and that's why we put recently the brand in India, doing extremely well also in China. We are focusing now in the lower tier cities. So there's a lot to do in many emerging markets. And third point is this brand is addressing probably one of the biggest needs that the consumer has. It's about skin resolving skin problems. And we know that many in emerging markets with urbanization and pollution, the needs are incredibly big and untapped yet. So that's why we are investing also in helping dermatologists to be more visible in some of the countries. So sticking with skincare, we've seen some softness recently in the market, particularly in derma. And lux, obviously, has been a bit weaker. Why do you think that's the case recently? And I guess from your growth perspective, is are we seeing the competitive dynamics heat up quite a lot? Well, I don't worry that much because, honestly, I've been looking at what was the growth of skincare over the years. And probably among the categories is the category where we see more stability. The fact is that sometimes you have a year where the category is growing by five, six and the year after is growing by three, four. But on average, it's always growing by four to 4.5. It's not linked to fashion, it's not linked it's really a need. So last year, the market was quite dynamic. This year is a bit less, but I'm convinced that probably next year it will come back. So behind, it's a lot about innovation, to be honest. So and here, we know that we should do better, First, because we have the strongest research teams in this market, so we have all the capabilities to put innovation in the market. That's why there has been this stimulus plan put for this year, but not only this year, we are already preparing for 2026. But the long the key drivers behind the long term growth of this category are still there. So that's why it's up to us to churn out the right products and take our fair share in this market. And this is very important because, as you know, this is the biggest category in beauty. So we cannot also ignore the fact that skincare being mainly a Chinese or North Asia category, when China is at zero growth, definitely, it has an impact on this category. But you China, and this is a category that is still growing by 4% to 5% this year. Okay. You mentioned a few times around about indie brands in the market. And one of your competitors this week have talked about barriers to entry have come down, but barriers to scale are still there. How do you see the kind of the fight with indie brands? Do you see it as good for the category? In aggregate, when you add up all the indie brands, it does seem like the environment is much more competitive in the last two years than it has been historically. Is that what L'Oreal thinks as well? Or do you guys think differently about that? First, we welcome competition. Then I would like to make a small distinction between competition and number of competitors. So obviously, barriers to entry have been much more lower than probably ten years ago, so that's why we see plenty of our brands. Just want to tell you that, for example, in the last count that we did in countries like China, but also Indonesia, we count more than 20,000 brands. So it's a very dynamic market. And I think that any brands are very important in the economy of beauty because a lot of innovation is coming from them. So it's very important to have a dynamic indie ecosystem. That's why this market in The U. S. Is extremely interesting because indie brands are quite strong. And the point is that, of course, many of them are disappearing, but it's a way for us also, L'Oreal, to understand what are the latest needs or latest hot cakes in the market. Sometimes, we take from some good ideas from this ecosystem. And sometimes, as I mentioned before, for those that are the most promising, we try to acquire them. So what is interesting is that overall, worldwide, the weight of those indie brands is increasing. I estimate that it's probably today 9% of the beauty business worldwide. It was much less ten years ago. And also, the strongest in this brand ecosystem was mainly here in The U. S, but today, we see this happening in other markets, in China, in Southeast Asian markets and now in India. So yes, interesting. We need any brands, that's bringing a little bit of spice in the competition. You talked about M and A there, and it's you've been busy the last twelve months as well on the M and A front, and you mentioned a few of the brands in the presentation. Considering now that the quantity of brands now under the L'Oreal umbrella, how should we think about M and A moving forward? Are you guys comfortable with continuing doing disciplined bolt on M and A? Should we have any concern of portfolio sprawl? No. What is important is to keep enriching our portfolio, making sure that we have at any time the best portfolio we can to address all categories of beauties in all geographies. So that's why from time to time, it's important to bring into the portfolio those brands that are in two ways interesting for us: first, because they bring growth on the long term and hence the interest of having a bolt on strategy because it gives you the capacity to bring growth for years. And the second is, of course, this is a brand that has to be complementary to our current portfolio. And then at the other what is important as well is, of course, to be not be complacent with our current portfolio. So at one stage, if a brand, we are not capable to meet what are our targets or the brand is not fitting anymore really some of the consumer needs, Well, it's our responsibility also to clean sometimes the portfolio of our brand, and that's what we do. So usually, we don't speak a lot about them because they are very small, but latest divestment was Carol's Doctor here in The U. S. In the past, we've done with other brands in France. What is important is no complacency in our portfolio. That's important as well. Yes. And that's for sure. When we go back a year, it's been a year since the Galderma stake and partnership. How do you guys view that stake over the long run? It's been very topical, I think, over the last twelve months. And maybe secondly, can you talk to what you've learned over the last twelve months since the stake? Well, first, we are quite happy with this investment because the value has just doubled since we did this acquisition. We are still, of course, working with them on this R and I partnership. And by the way, we were just yesterday discussion with them to review where we are today with this partnership. Very interesting results. So basically, we are bringing to them some of our technologies, and they have been testing it and we saw very good results. So this will reinforce their capability, at least on the marketing side, to explore new territories as well. So we decided just yesterday to go into the second phase with them. And what is important is that we take the time also to understand the whole ecosystem. So of course, we can understand from ourselves because we have some brands, I mentioned, SkinCeutical or SkinBetterScience that are really in the ecosystem of those injectable business. We have been also doing investments in small investment, but acquiring a chain of clinics in China. We took also participation in a clinic chain here in The U. S. To understand also better from the inside, what is the perception of the consumer, how they behave with those injectables, how much it's enhancing the consumption of topical products. So we are consolidating all those data to even further understand not only the direct benefit of injectables, but also the halo effect on the whole beauty ecosystem. So here, I want to state again, this is a market that we want to be in. It's just that we have to consolidate the learnings on this because it's an important strategic movement. Okay. We have just about a minute left, and I there's two questions I want to get into, but the first one is just on channel exposure. You talked about the beauty ecosystem. We know the channel shift over the last decade has been pretty large. How should we think about your channel focus now between department stores, specialty, travel retail and ultimately online? Is there one where you think the battleground is more intense? I'm guessing it's online. But how should we think about your exposure? We are quite agnostic to one channel or the other one. What is important is to be aware the consumers are willing to shop. And we believe that what makes the strength today is the O plus O strategy, so being visible not only in online, but also offline. And then it's up to each of those channels to adapt themselves and make sure that they keep their attractivity with the consumers. And that's why we see some channels that are still overperforming, namely e commerce. And as I was saying at the very beginning, we are really overperforming in the e commerce, which is quite important because in emerging markets, e commerce is taking now a fair share of the business. But it's extremely important as well to be visible in the off line in the brick and mortar. So we see and here is not only The U. S. Perspective, but we see some department stores that are renovating a lot. They are merchandising and they are doing extremely well. Some others are not investing and therefore losing shares. More complicated recently in drugstores, but we see Ulta is doing well, Sephora is doing well. So we just follow the trends. And again, I think it's more in the hands of the retailer to keep investing and make sure that the way they expose the brands are is attractive for the consumers. And secondly, to that last question, do you think the physical store experience like department stores, is that the one where consumers are still looking to engage with beauty products? Is that still as important as it was? It is very important. That's why we are investing a lot ourselves. It's not only training our beauty advisers, but we have more and more devices in department stores, for example, in Lancome, that are bringing science and the consumer can have a deep understanding of what's the situation of the skin, what is the true product that will solve the problem she has or he has. And this is something that is very difficult to afford on the e commerce platform. So for those consumers that are really willing to understand what is the true product that will be useful for them, Nothing better than to go to a Lancome counter in The U. S. Or whatever in the world, wherever in the world. Okay. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, Christophe, and thank you for listening. Thank you very much. Thank you.