Teleperformance SE (TEP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to TP 2026 First Half Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to Jorge Amar, CEO. Please go ahead.

Excellent. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening from wherever you are joining us. Welcome to the Q2 and the first half results update call for TP. Today, I'm joined again by our Interim CFO, Benoit Gabelle. And without further ado, I will jump straight into the key messages for today. And of course, we will be happy to take the questions at the end of the presentation. So with that, as always, our remarks in terms of the representation of our financial figures. And with that, I'll go straight into the key highlights for us. So we are very excited given the results that we come today to share with you. So the first one, it is the sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter on our like-for-like revenue, going from minus 2.2% in Q1, where I last talked to you all to minus 1.2% in the second quarter. And we're going to dive deeper in a little bit around the Trust & Safety vertical that I also started updating you all in the last call. Without that, we are happy to report that we would be growing at a 1.7% like-for-like, especially in our Core Services division at a 2.3%. And there, you see also some of the key numbers that Benoit will go in more detail in a bit when it comes to the performance of both Core Services and Specialized Services. We're also happy to report that our EBITA number is stable first half versus first half of last year, mostly through the actions that we have started executing in terms of our SG&A control, our internal AI efficiencies program that I will update a little bit more in a few slides. We're also happy to report that our net free cash flow before restructuring costs is above what it was last year in the same period of time, raising at around EUR 299 million. I will give a little bit more update later when it comes to the -- our detailed transformation plan, but we're happy to report the growth that we are seeing already in some of our specific verticals that we are focusing on: AI, data services, data notation, data labeling, the same with some of our outcome-based type of lines of business, mostly a Revenue-as-a-Service. And we're seeing the commercial momentum that is building up, not only of our human workforce, but also of our hybrid workforce powered by PT.ai (sic) [ TP.ai ] and the entire set of solutions that we are building. We are confirming our guidance for 2026 and we are also updating our target for our savings plan in terms of efficiencies, both from SG&A, internal AI and many other actions that we are taking, increasing the savings rate from EUR 100 million plus that we told you the last time to somewhere between EUR 150 million and EUR 170 million. And of course, the corresponding impact on some of our restructuring costs increasing to around EUR 120 million to EUR 140 million. If I dive deeper for a second into Core Services, I told you about the sequential improvement and the momentum that we are seeing in some of our verticals. We're seeing tremendous traction in the market when it comes to our AI-powered solutions. We are seeing them with our tech clients, with our banking clients, with our retail clients. So we're really seeing the momentum that everything that the team is building and working on is getting. The same on the work that we are doing in our Revenue-as-a-Service vertical. We are now partnering with many of the AI companies and technology companies that are trusting on us the development of their small and medium business, their mid-market strategy, where we have unique expertise that we have developed over the years and where we are investing some of our AI capabilities and team behind that. And the same, I always get this question, but we continue to see healthy growth in our Care line of business that, as you know, represents still more than 50% of our revenues, and we continue to see that on the back of vendor consolidation that we continue to see in the market on the back of our strong delivery and operational capabilities. So more to come and unpack as I later give you more details on where we are. If I now switch quickly to Specialized Services. There, you have the number of like-for-like growth for the first half, but I would like to focus on the 2 other columns. The first one is the impact on the revenue, excluding the impact of our onetime hit on our Visa contract that was not renewed for TLS, which shows the minus 1.7%. But most importantly, and you will see it now as Benoit walk us through the profitability numbers, we have seen an increased profitability in Specialized Services coming from an internal synergies plan that we have put between Specialized and the Core Services. So our Specialized Services unit, mostly LanguageLine Solutions is leveraging some of our people in the Core Services. And as such, we need to report the net revenue numbers. But if we were to express them in gross, we're seeing actual growth in the first half for Specialized Services on the back of the strength of our solution, the strength that we are seeing mostly in our health care, public safety and financial services verticals within the interpretation and translation vertical business, some of the AI solutions that we're already deploying when it comes to exactly this type of activity. And we're also very, very happy to see TLS reporting growth mostly in Q2. And we have also been awarded a significant contract for the TLS operation. So congratulations to our TLS team that has worked so hard over the last few months to return to growth and get TLS back in a path of profitability. So with that, I'm going to pass it on to Benoit to walk us through the specific numbers, and then I will give you a little bit more of the strategic update. So Benoit, all yours.

Thank you, Jorge. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening for everyone. We will start by looking in more details into the revenues for this year. As you said, we reported minus 4.5% growth for our revenues. The biggest part of that reduction comes from a currency effect, but the impact is significantly smaller in Q2 compared to Q1. The driver for that variation is essentially linked with the variation of USD against euro and INR against euro. Now if we focus more on the performance of the operations, as you said, we have a minus 1.7% like-for-like revenue growth between H1 '25 and H1 '26. The biggest part of impacting our revenue is effectively coming from Trust & Safety because when we exclude the Trust & Safety for the reasons that you mentioned and that you will elaborate further after, we would be growing at group level at plus 1.7% for the H1. Then we have a small impact that we already discussed at the end of Q1, linked with our variation of perimeter, essentially the acquisition of ZP last year that came -- started to be consolidated in February. And then the disposal of our TP Russia subsidiary at the end of the year. If we focus more into the breakdown between Core Services and Specialized Services, we see that for Core Services, the growth has been minus 1.3% like-for-like with a significant sequential improvement in Q2 compared to Q1 from minus 1.7% in Q1 to minus 1% in Q2, and we expect that to continue in the coming quarters. This is mostly driven by what you said, AI-powered solutions, some back office and also our sales collection business, which are value-driven. If we now look at the growth of Core Services stand-alone without the impact of Trust & Safety, the growth would have been of plus 2.3%, effectively demonstrating what you said, which is a very good growth of our Care business and of our business lines of the future. Specialized Services, I think you said most of the important aspects that drive the revenue. Important to note on the technical point that you made about the impact of our synergies. We are effectively starting to build further synergies between Specialized Services and Core Services, meaning we transfer from external parties some delivery into our operations and we recognize the revenues. We allocate the revenues where the operations are delivered. So even though this is revenues coming for LLS towards the client of LLS and part of the business of LLS, the share of revenues that is delivered and supported by the Core Services, that additional part is reported in Core Services. Now if we look more at the breakdown by business line, you said it, the Care part of the business is 56% of the total. It is still growing at a very good pace, single digit, but good pace and good growth. The business line that is impacted the most still is Trust & Safety and now represents only 6% of our total revenues. We will see later on during the year also an improvement on Specialized Services linked with the return to growth, mostly of LLS plus the good news you mentioned on TLS. Now if we look at our portfolio by industry, still very well balanced with financial services and insurance growing at a fast pace together with FMCG. FMCG is close to retail type of businesses. And we see media, entertainment & gaming, which is still a very large part of our portfolio because they represent clients that we have several businesses with, but which is the most impacted by our Trust & Safety business and the decrease that we see in that business. If we now look into more detail at the evolution of our EBITDA margin, we are excited and happy to report that we maintained the same level of EBITDA margin at the end of H1 '26 compared to H1 '25. And as you said, Jorge, this is thanks mostly to the plan that we have put in place to adjust our cost base to meet exactly the client needs plus adopt AI wherever we can in our operations. And that also pays off on Specialized Services, notably the benefit of the synergies that have been implemented with a massive increase of the EBITDA margin of more than 3% enhancement. So all in all, EBITA -- recurring EBITA reports at 13.6%, and we expect it to continue to deliver a good outcome in the second half of the year. Now if we look deeper into our P&L, I will not comment again the first items, revenue, EBITDA, EBITA that again reports relatively flat numbers. The operating profit itself has been impacted by EUR 100 million from the restructuring costs that had implemented in H1 2026. You mentioned that we are increasing and going deeper into our transformation plan. And so the investment we made in H1 has been massive, EUR 109 million and is expected to continue, though at a lower pace in H2 to reach EUR 120 million to EUR 140 million. That investment accounts for the variance -- the biggest part of the variance between the operating profit in '26 and '25. There are other pluses and minuses, of course. One of the gain that we see and that we hope will continue to generate benefits by the end of the year and in the subsequent years as we keep driving and steering and realigning the structure of the group is the reduction of our tax rate. And we will see that later on when we talk about the free cash flow, we have continued to reduce our cash tax impact in our operations. Net profit, EUR 216 million, compared to EUR 249 million in 2025. So relatively close, the decrease being mostly explained by the restructuring costs, but other positive impact as well, notably the gain that we have on the tax charge. Now looking at the free cash flow. We see that the cash flow from the activities after lease payments, interest paid and taxes is decreasing. The big part of the decrease is coming from the nonrecurring cash-outs, EUR 56 million in H1 2026. But we also benefited from positive impact, notably a better discipline in our management of working capital plus in H1 2025, we had some one-off impacts on our free cash flow that impacted on working capital. So you see an improvement of close to EUR 100 million, which is a mix of both, some onetime effects in '25 for a small part and then a significant part that is linked with the improvement of the operations and the financial discipline of the group around the -- I mean, part of it is coming from some of the initiatives we are implementing in terms of tools, management and so on, facilitated notably by AI. We also reduced our net capital expenditure to adapt to the footprint and the new way of delivering of the group. We have a continuous -- we have continued on a journey of rationalizing our CapEx linked with the trajectory of the group -- the trajectory of the growth of the group and making sure that we invest every single euro where this is aligned with the transformation plan and our delivery model for the future. All in all, we are very happy to report close to EUR 300 million of net free cash flow, excluding the restructuring plans, which is a significant increase compared to H1 2025. And same as last year and what we mentioned in Q1, we expect the cash flow generation to increase in H2 compared to H1. I will conclude with 2 slides on our balance sheet. Our balance sheet is one of the strongest balance sheet in the industry with a relatively low debt leverage ratio. We are on a journey to continue to reduce that level of debt. And effectively, we will see the benefit of that by year-end. You see that in H1, despite the payment of a significant dividend to our shareholders, close to 54% of payout ratio, we maintain a level of debt that is stable. Part of the increase is coming from the lease. So it's the debt that is accounted for under IFRS 16. And another component is coming as an accounting consequence of the refinancing we performed at the end of May to extend the duration -- the average duration of our debt. You've probably seen because we released some information in this respect. We issued EUR 1.2 billion dual tranche bonds with close to 6-year maturity for EUR 700 million and close to 9-year maturity for EUR 500 million at an average cost of 5%, which is, I would say, an amazing achievement in the industry with the trend that we see from our competitors, clearly showing the trust that our, I would say, bond investors place into the group and its ability to generate free cash flows in the future. The outcome of this refinancing, I mean, some of the proceeds were used to repay some of the bonds that were coming to maturity in the coming months and some other components were used to repay our facilities with some banks. We now have an average cost of debt of 4.28%, a slight increase compared to where we were at the same time last year. And post refinancing, our gross debt average duration is now of 4.5 years, a 50% increase compared to the 3 years that we had when we launched the refinancing. With that, I'll hand over to you, Jorge, to talk about the 2026 outlook and the strategic update.

Excellent. Thank you, Benoit. And hopefully, with all the details, you can see the early beginnings of the transformation and the impact of what we're driving. Now it's been roughly 4 months since I joined as the CEO, and I'm excited to present these results where we're seeing, of course, in many areas, and I will walk you through more a little bit now, but we're seeing all the areas, but we're seeing also the progress in some of our SG&A in our internal AI efficiencies and the discipline in the cost control that we have put in place. I think with this, I reiterated -- we reiterate the guidance towards the end of the year with all the different components of it on the revenue between 0% to 2%, a stable margin that we were able to achieve in the first half and the same on the free cash flow generation. And of course, we have updated our numbers when it comes to the impact of the efficiency plan and of course, the corresponding restructuring cost. Last time I talked to you, I also started putting forward a little bit more detail into the strategic update and the transformation that we are driving as an executive team for TP. And I talked about these 3 building blocks, to continue evolving our Core Services into what is the next evolution of it in a world of AI, where we have more of the hybrid workforce deployed in our clients of human and agentic, where we have more and more our fees, our compensation tied to the results that we drive in that regard. The second one is all the verticals and the lines of businesses where we are generating revenue for our clients, for instance, so sales, collections, some of the back-office activities. And then also more and more how we are growing in what I call the AI value chain, of course, data notation, data labeling, training of LLMs, SLMs and all the different opportunities that we are seeing as a result of the implementation of AI at scale in a number of organizations. I think in that regard, we're excited for how our TP.ai set of solutions continue to have traction in the market. There, you see that we're now above almost 1,100 projects that we have implemented with some level of AI in our clients. Of course, some of them are related to our tools that are helping our agents be better, faster, more efficient, sell more, collect more, but also some of the solutions that we are seeing when it comes to our vertical solutions, and I'll walk you through now in a detail, but our vertical solutions in our Connect suite and the same on the Grow set of tools. One of the verticals that we are seeing a lot of traction is health care. And here, you can see an example of what we are able to achieve when we deploy the hybrid workforce with our clients, where we bring, of course, our know-how, our processes, our data, our AI tools, some of them developed by us, some of them with our partners, and we bring the humans, the best humans in the industry to come together not only to do what was done today. And that's what you see there in terms of not only the offering, but the customer journey behind it, where we are bringing some of the activities that are done today in a much faster or more efficient way, but we are also helping our clients do things that they wish they could have done before. And now with the combination of the human and the AI, the hybrid workforce, they are able to do. And they are able to improve the patient journey in this case for health care in a way that probably they couldn't before. So of course, we're proud of the results, but most importantly, we are proud of the type of evolution of our business model that we're driving and the kind of deals that we are able to establish with our clients where they leverage TP not only for just humans, but for the entire set of expertise, processes, data, AI solutions and humans together. The same we're seeing in one of the largest U.S. financial institutions where we see there some of the impact on the revenue that we're seeing even this year on the second half of the year. And on this case, it's very similar. We're bringing the agentic automation. We're bringing the analytics. We're bringing human oversight on the AI flows that we are implementing. And of course, we're able to turn these vertical solutions into AI and the possibility of AI into our clients. And this was, in this case, a deal where we were able not only to work and get this kind of work with our clients, but also differentiate ourselves substantially from our competitors that we're not able to offer this combined set of solutions when it comes to AI and human. Of course, I'm sure you're going to ask me, Jorge, you have minus 2%, minus 1.2%. You're still guiding to 0% to 2%. How do you have the confidence that you are going to get to those numbers? And that's a little bit of what I tried to cover on this slide, which is these are just examples. And these are just examples to show you the depth of the vertical expertise that we want to build and that we are building at TP. But also some of the changes that we have done from a people, from an offer perspective, from tools, from processes that are strengthening our commercial organization, both in Core Services and in Specialized Services. And this is what leads us to say that we feel comfortable restating and making sure that we say -- that we will achieve our guidance by the end of the year. And of course, that comes on the back of some win rate improvement that we're seeing, the increased pipeline that we're seeing and of course, the bookings that we're getting from some of our clients. So with all this in mind, hopefully, I'm able to convey some of the things that we're really excited about because we are working hard. Of course, there's a lot more to do, but we are working hard on the evolution of the business model, on the implementation of a hybrid workforce, on the vertical approach for some of our core sectors where we have the trust and the pleasure of serving some of the leading financial institutions, health care institutions, tech institutions. So our vertical expertise continues to differentiate us in the market. I also want to spend a minute talking about Trust & Safety. As we explained and we went through in our presentation earlier, we are seeing increased softness that is coming in Trust & Safety. And this is happening mostly for 2 reasons. The first one is, of course, the application of AI into the automation of what I call the simple content moderation and Trust & Safety activities. And we are also seeing the use of translation tools that are helping some of our clients move volume from some onshore locations to offshore locations when it comes to content moderation. So we are rethinking what does Trust & Safety look like in the future, what does content moderation look like in the future. Of course, the easy volume will probably continue on its way of automation, but what is going to be left for human review will require the next level of scrutiny, the next level of training. And this one is a vertical that we care deeply, not only for its role in society, also for the role that it has and the value that we place on our employees that are doing this type of work day in, day out. And therefore, that's why we believe so firmly that this vertical will continue to transform itself, where it will require a different set of skills, where it will require a human controlling some of what the AI algorithms are moderating right now, and that's where we're making investments with the appointment of a new Head of Trust & Safety that has a lot of experience coming from our clients and some of the technology investments that we're doing on that side. On the other side, what is driving the growth? And here, you have some of the more specifics around it. Sales, I told you about this one. We are conducting a lot of work in this space. We continue to see high single-digit growth in this vertical. It's not only because of the trust of the clients that we have, but most importantly, the set of solutions that we have developed on our TP.ai Grow set of tools when it comes to helping our agents be better at selling with dynamic scripting and with a number of other capabilities that we are investing on. And that is what is really driving that. The same for back office, particularly in our banking and financial services vertical, where we continue to expand more and more our presence in our clients and doing more and more of the hybrid workforce deployment. And last but not least, because it's the one that is growing the fastest, is all the work that we're doing with our clients when it comes to Data Services. This is a really, really interesting space. It is a fast-growing segment of the market, and we're happy to say that we are seeing that growth also for TP, not only for the market. And we are making the investments needed to continue this growth and to not only grow at the rate of the market, but exceed it. Of course, all this is what gives us confidence on the long-term financial ambitions that I, of course, present here before I get the questions when it comes to margin, when it comes to growth and the leverage ratio that I know is one of the questions that I typically get when it comes to capital allocation. So with that, I think we've covered everything. Before I open it up to questions, I also wanted to take a moment to say that we are very proud to announce that we are upgrading our commitment to our employees. As you know, we had a global framework with UNI that expired. And today, I'm happy to announce that on the back of the great work that we were able to do together, we're taking that to the next level with the double commitment that we are making on our employees, the commitment of establishing employee boards in every one of our operations, in most of our operations before the end of the year. And these employee boards will report directly in a consultative manner to our sustainability committee in the Board. So we're very excited to lead the industry into this new wave when it comes to responsibility of taking care of our employees that are the ones that are taking that call day in, day out, that are doing the content moderation, that are doing the interpretation and translation. We thank them for their hard work, and we want them to know that we are upgrading our commitment to them. And hopefully, each of them will see in their own operation their representatives on these employee boards and that hopefully, we can find ways to continue working not only on the wellness, on the health and safety of our employees, but the commitment on the upskilling that we need to do across the industry in this regard. So with that in mind, we're very excited about it. I can go on and on with it. But I want to make sure that we have time for the Q&A. So with that, I will open it up to everyone.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Karl Green from RBC Capital Markets.

A couple of questions from me. Just in terms of the incremental savings that you're targeting, that EUR 50 million to EUR 70 million extra. Could you just elaborate a little bit more on where that's coming from, how you're going to deliver it? And I think probably most importantly, what proportion of that is likely to be retained and accretive to margin rather than reinvested? That's the first question. The second question is just in light of the good margin performance and stabilization in Specialized Services, any further thoughts about strategic options for that division overall, including divestments, please?

Excellent. Karl, great questions. I'll start with the incremental savings and where it's coming from. It is coming from a number of different places. Of course, our SG&A line, where we have been doing a lot of work when it comes to making TP more efficient, leaner, less bureaucratic. We're implementing AI on a number of our own processes when it comes to either finance, HR and some of our other support functions. On the other side, the other part where we are seeing the benefits is applying AI to our core operations. So if you happen to have a change of heart and want to apply to any of our operations in Portugal, in Greece, in Colombia and in many other countries where we have deployed our AI recruiting solution, where we are conducting the prescreening interviews of our agents with AI, where we're seeing tremendous results, not only when it comes to the increasing number of applications of people that are coming to TP, also on the data that we are able to gather and help us better allocate those individuals to the right campaign and the right line of business and also from an employee experience perspective, accelerate the time to offer that we are seeing. So some of those solutions, recruiting, I can talk about quality assurance, I can talk about workforce management and every function that we do in our operation. That's the other part where we are seeing the benefits, and we are accelerating the deployment of those tools. So with that in mind, that's where we are seeing the benefit, and that's why we are so excited that we believe we can achieve that EUR 150 million to EUR 170 million in run rate savings for our transformation. And then when it comes to the stabilization of specialized and the strategic portfolio, I continue running on behalf of the Board, the strategic portfolio review. I will give updates when it's the right time just to know that it continues, that we're making good progress. And hopefully, I can share more news with you soon.

The next question comes from Victoria Chang from JPMorgan.

My first question is on the restructuring costs of the Future Forward plan again. Where do you plan to allocate the increased costs? Is that on headcount in specific regions? And can you give a bit more color on how that is planned to be allocated? And my second question is on North America Core Services. Can we confirm whether the inclusion of TP Infinity and AllianceOne announced in 1Q made any difference to the organic growth rate in 2Q, please? And then just the third one also on Specialized Services. Are you seeing an underlying sequential improvement in 2Q versus 1Q? Because I previously remember 1Q growth, excluding the TLS contract was minus 1%. So given the growth in 2Q, is that an underlying sequential improvement? Or is there adjustments that we need to be aware of?

Of course. You want me to take the one on restructuring costs? So no, thank you for your question. I will not give the details of the allocation, but most of the costs are linked with severance payments linked with employees. And given the nature of the legislation in both regions, Americas and EMEA, most of the costs are linked with EMEA operations. So that is for that component. On AllianceOne, I think the combination of the business that was made at the end of last year, I mean, starting in January, was to revive the growth and benefit from the synergies of the collection business. We had already some components in core in the U.S. with what we have seen at AllianceOne. We don't see any material impact apart from the one that were disclosed in the pro forma numbers that have been shown. And we see, in fact, good benefit from that synergy plan also because we had some, I would say, dual functions that were not necessarily needed. And the combination of the portfolio is now helping to generate new solutions faster, notably the Fab Collect solution that is being deployed.

And then, Victoria, your last question on specialized on the sequential improvement. Yes, we are happy to report that we are seeing that sequential improvement on specialized across a number of the different companies that are part of the Specialized Services on LLS, on ZP Better Together, on TLS, on Health Advocate and PSG. So yes, we're seeing that improvement. It's not just a matter of the restating of the Visa contract, but we are seeing the improvement. And we're seeing that not only in the figures, we're seeing that in the units. We're seeing the increase of the sessions that we're doing when it comes to interpretation in the hospital systems in the U.S. We're seeing more hospital systems that are trusting on LLS to perform this type of activity to them. So we are seeing, again, not only the numbers, but the fundamentals of LLS and the other companies of specialized improve.

And on TLS, we were also happy to see that the impact because there was a question you had on -- in Q1, the impact of the war is nominal, not to say we are exceeding what we were expecting for TLS. So it's a very resilient business.

The next question comes from Virginia Montorsi from BofA.