Earnings call transcript: Capgemini Q1 2025 shows steady AI growth

Capgemini’s recent earnings call revealed a mixed performance for Q1 2025, with revenue reaching €5,553 million, marking a slight decline of 0.4% year-over-year at constant exchange rates. Despite this, the company has shown resilience with a 2.8% increase in bookings and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.06, indicating a healthy pipeline. The stock showed no significant change in the immediate aftermath, trading at €159.99, reflecting a cautious market reaction to the results. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company appears undervalued, with a P/E ratio of 14.3x and a notable free cash flow yield of 10%.

Key Takeaways

• Capgemini’s Q1 2025 revenue slightly declined by 0.4% YoY.
• Bookings increased by 2.8%, with a strong focus on AI and data technologies.
• The company launched the AgenTeq AI platform, boosting AI-driven bookings.
• The manufacturing sector showed weakness, while Financial Services gained momentum.
• The stock remained stable, reflecting cautious investor sentiment.

Company Performance

Capgemini’s Q1 2025 performance reflects a challenging market environment, with a slight decline in revenue. However, the company has managed to sustain growth in its bookings, driven by a strong focus on AI and data technologies. The launch of the AgenTeq AI platform and strategic partnerships with tech giants like Google Cloud and NVIDIA have positioned Capgemini well in the competitive landscape. Despite the decline in the manufacturing sector, other areas such as Financial Services and TMT showed positive trends.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: €5,553 million, a decrease of 0.4% YoY.
• Bookings: Up 2.8% at constant exchange rates.
• Book-to-bill ratio: 1.06.
• M&A contribution: Approximately 1 point.
• Total headcount: 342,700, a 0.5% increase quarter-on-quarter.
• Offshore headcount: 199,400, representing 58% of total.

Outlook & Guidance

Capgemini has set financial objectives for 2025, targeting revenue growth between -2% to +2% at constant currency and an operating margin of 13.3% to 13.5%. The company expects organic free cash flow to be around €1.9 billion. While H1 growth is expected to slightly outpace Q4 rates, the outlook for H2 remains cautious due to geopolitical uncertainties.

Executive Commentary

CEO Ahmed Azai highlighted the impact of AI, stating, "We are seeing the impact and the ROI will materialize more and more on clients." CFO Nivi Bagat emphasized the company’s focus on margins, stating, "Our focus on margin is stronger than ever before." These comments underscore Capgemini’s strategic emphasis on leveraging AI for client transformation and maintaining profitability.

Risks and Challenges

• Geopolitical uncertainties could impact client decisions and market stability.
• The competitive landscape with ongoing price pressures may affect margins.
• Weakness in the manufacturing sector could continue to drag on overall performance.
• Potential market volatility could impact financial projections.
• Attrition rate remains a concern, standing at 16.1%.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts probed about the impact of geopolitical tensions on client decisions, to which Capgemini responded that no material impact has been observed. Questions also focused on the role of AI in driving new transformation programs, with the company maintaining a defensive stance due to potential market volatility.

Full transcript - Carrefour (CAP) Q1 2025:

Conference Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Capgemini twenty twenty five Q1 Revenues Webcast and Conference Call. You’ll need to press 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again.

Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ahmed Azai, CEO. Sir, please go ahead.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Good morning, and thank you for joining us for this Q1 twenty twenty five revenue call. I’ll be joined today by our CFO, Nivi Bagat. So in Q1, the group delivered the performance slightly better than our initial expectation. This comes despite a macro and geopolitical environment that remains challenging. The Group generated revenues of €5,553,000,000 representing a year on year revenue decline limited to minus 0.4% at constant exchange rate, which represents a 70 bps improvement on the Q4 rate.

The contribution from M and A in the quarter is around one point. Bookings were up 2.8% at constant exchange rate and reached 5,884,000,000, which represents a strong book to bill for Q1 of 1.06. Looking at the trends we observed in this first quarter, they are consistent with our anticipation. From a sector perspective, Manufacturing remained weak, with growth rates similar to Q4 and therefore continue to weigh on the group growth. Financial Services and Public Sector on the other side maintained their good momentum enjoyed in Q4.

The improvement compared to Q4 primarily came from the Energy Utilities TMT and Services sector. Now from a GEO perspective, North America is back to slight growth in Q1. At plus 0.8%, growth rates in The UK and Ireland and Asia Pacific and Latin America are also accelerating and that’s partly offset by the deceleration observed in the rest of Europe. Finally, France has now passed the trough. And from a business perspective, Strategy and Transformation maintained its positive growth rates.

Application and Technology returned to growth this quarter, while Operations and Engineering decelerated to minus 2.6%. When we look at the clients, they are really focused on transformation programs at improving agility, cost and efficiency of their operation, at the expense of what we consider as being more growth oriented projects, and as you expect, discretionary spending remains subdued. Now compared to three months ago, the level of uncertainty increased with geopolitical and tariff tensions. At this stage, the Group has not seen a material impact on client decisions compared to the beginning of the year, but of course we remain extremely cautious of any potential development. In that context, Capgemini, a high value added services around cloud data AI, Digital Core or even Digital Continuities, continued to enjoy a good growth in Q1.

Our offering portfolio aligned with current customer needs is leading to some noticeable deals, for instance, for US leader in the pharma industry looking to significantly increase production capacity in Europe in the next few years, we were chosen to transform and accelerate the digitization of their manufacturing processes, thanks to our industry expertise and strength in manufacturing execution system. We will also manage a dedicated application management service center for their production lines IT systems. For European clients in the defense sector, we are developing a digital twin for various components of a defense platform. This project leverages the results of a dedicated test campaign, our comprehensive activities include mechanical analysis prediction and correlation of test results and the development of advanced programming tools to interface sensor readings with a structural model. This integrated approach ensures accurate and efficient monitoring and optimization of the platform’s structural integrity.

Continuing on that, let’s illustrate now the ongoing dynamics in the defense sector in Europe, where we see increasing opportunities. We are building on a strong track record and leadership position over many years. In 2024, we generated about 1,000,000,000 Euro of revenue in European Defence, up 12% year on year. We are well positioned being one of the very few European skilled players combining a leading position in all relevant industries, combining digital, engineering, data and AI, cyber and transformation capabilities. Looking at our activities across Europe, we are engaged with ministries of defence, with the EU, with international agencies to provide direct support for the transformation of armed forces.

We provide support to most top tier defense industry players across Europe on their ongoing program. Our support extends to their supplier networks, addressing demand for ramping up and ensuring high quality standards. Beyond mastering supply and quality and production management, we also help with the integration of workforce management and data tech and AI foundations of course. We are involved in several upcoming key defense programs, and we are working with specific agencies for the next frontier program, usually on cutting edge technology. We are committed to support the actuation of European defense, we launched a specialized defense actuation program, designed to address cross border defense programs, accelerate the build up of capabilities, and strengthen our collaboration with ecosystem partners.

Now moving to AI, the traction of course continues to be very visible around AI and data, where client demand remains robust. This dynamic is supported by generative AI, which drove more than 6% of our Q1 bookings. We also have the emergence of AgenTeq AI, which is driving a new wave of operational efficiency and value creation. The market is increasingly receptive to AI agents and we are strategically positioned to seize this growth opportunity. Our investments in key assets are bearing fruit, for instance, we deployed the platform to create, integrate, orchestrate and monitor trusted AI agents.

Coupled with our AgenTik AI Gallery, it will help us accelerate deployment at our clients while ensuring security and privacy. We enriched our offering with AgenTiC AI to bring them to the next level of hyper automation, context understanding and scientific innovation. We now have 10 AgenTiC AI offers addressing customer experience, engineering, operation or application mainframe refactoring. We also reinforced our ecosystem of technology partners, we now have 25 dedicated partnerships. We recently expanded our strategic partnership with Google Cloud transform customer experience across industry, with AgenTik AI, and with NVIDIA to build bespoke AI agent driven solutions tailored to various industry use cases.

We already successfully executed numerous projects on agentic AI. By leveraging AI agents, we can achieve hyper automation of complex variable processes that were previously beyond the reach of traditional data RPA or conventional AI methods. We are also combining agents with generative AI assistant to augment the human teams on what can be automated. Let’s highlight a couple of examples from the first quarter. For BAT, we developed AI coscientist agents to support their R and D teams, which will result in more efficiency and effectiveness within R

: and D, and providing them with the capability to gain insights and value from both external and internal data sources and also predictive models. And for European Telco, we are developing an agentic solution to enable autonomous networks with the implementation of agents in network domain coordination.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: In spite of increased geopolitical tariffs and tension, for the moment the Group has not seen a material impact on client decision, compared to the beginning of the year. After this Q1, we also expect Q2 to be slightly better than anticipated and therefore now see our H1 constant currency growth as slightly better than Q4 rate. We are confirming our financial objective for 2025 and as such, we do retain the cautious stance adopted at the beginning of the year. As a reminder, our financial objective for 2025 are revenue growth of minus 2% to plus 2% at constant currency, operating margin of 13.3% to 13.5% and organic free cash flow of around 1,900,000,000 Thank you for your attention. I now hand over to Nivi.

Nivi Bagat, CFO, Capgemini: Thank you, Jaime, and good morning, everyone. I’m pleased to share with you our Q1 twenty twenty five performance. Let’s start with our quarterly revenue growth. As highlighted by Ayman, we had a good start to the year. Q1 revenues came slightly above our expectations at €553,005,000 up plus 0.5% year on year.

Currency movements had a positive impact of 90 basis points mainly due to the appreciation of the USD against the euro. So the revenue decline at constant currency was limited to minus 0.4%, which represents a 70 basis points improvement on the Q4 twenty twenty four growth rate. Finally, in line with our comments at the beginning of the year, M and A contributed to around one point in Q1. A word on currencies. There has been a lot of volatility lately.

Based on where we are today, we expect FX impact to now turn negative from minus 1.5 to minus two points in Q2 and minus one to minus 1.5 points for the full year. Looking first at revenues by sector. At constant currency, Financial Services and the Public Sector maintained their solid momentum in Q1 twenty twenty five and grew by 22.7% year on year respectively, in line with their performance in Q4 twenty twenty four. The Energy and Utility sector improved by four seventy basis points in Q4 growth rates, returning to growth in Q1 at plus 2.5%. The TMT sector delivered a fourth consecutive quarter of improvement with robust growth of plus 3.8%.

The manufacturing sector remained weak but did not degrade further. It declined by minus 5.9% in Q1, a rate similar to Q4. The consumer goods and retail sector turned slightly negative in Q1 to minus 1.5%. Finally, revenue growth in the services sector improved by three forty basis points on Q4 twenty twenty four, with the decline limited to minus 1.8% in Q1. Moving on to revenues by region.

The improvement in the growth rate compared to Q4 was primarily driven by a two forty basis points acceleration in North America and a two forty basis points improvement also in The United Kingdom and Ireland region. Revenues in North America were back to slight growth in Q1, up plus 0.8% year on year. This performance was driven by TMT and financial services sectors and partly offset by a decline in the manufacturing sector. Growth in The United Kingdom and Ireland region accelerated to plus 3.9%. Public, Energy and Utilities and Financial Services sectors contributed to this growth.

Revenues in France declined by minus 4.9%, most notably due to persisting weakness in the Manufacturing and Energy and Utility sectors. In the Rest of Europe region, revenues were down by minus 2.3%, reflecting the decline in the manufacturing sector, whereas other sectors were broadly stable. Finally, the Asia Pacific and Latin America region enjoyed solid growth with revenues up plus 7.6%. The public and TMT sectors posted a strong growth complemented by robust momentum in the financial services and manufacturing sectors. Moving on to revenues by business.

At constant currency, total revenues of our management consulting business, Strategy and Transformation Services, grew by plus 1.2% year on year in Q1, in line with our performance in Q4 twenty twenty four. Application and Technology Services, which is Capgemini’s core business, returned to growth in Q1 with plus 1.9% year on year. Conversely, total revenues in Operations and Engineering Services further declined in Q1 with a contraction of minus 2.6%, weighed down by the large exposure of engineering services to the weak manufacturing sector. Moving on to the bookings evolution. Q1 bookings amounted to €884,005,000 up plus 2.8% year on year at constant currency.

This corresponds to a strong book to bill ratio of 1.06. This is above the historical average for the period and reflects our good performance on large deals. Moving on now to the headcount evolution. Total headcount increased slightly over the past quarter to reach 342,700 employees at the March 2025. This represents an increase of 0.5% compared to December 2024 and one point six percent year on year.

Onshore headcount decreased by 1.4% to 143,300 employees, while offshore headcount was up plus 3.9% to 199,400 employees. This corresponds to 58% of our total headcount, up plus one point year on year. Lastly, attrition remains in our optimal operating range at 16.1% on a last twelve month basis. On that note, I hand back to you, Ayman, for the Q and A session.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Thank you, Nivi. So let’s now open the Q and A to allow maximum number of people in the queue to ask questions. Operator, could you please share the Q and A instructions?

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our first question comes from Frederic Bouleyne from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Good morning.

Conference Operator: Frederic, your line is now open.

: Hi, good morning, Eman and Nidh. Thank you for taking the question. So my question is on the outlook. If you can spend a bit more time on the underlying macro assumptions you have, Are you expecting a fairly stable H1 versus the midpoint of the range? That leaves a pretty wide range for the second part of the year.

So it would be good to understand a little bit the assumptions on both sides and more specifically what you’re seeing in terms of elongated discussion cycle, discretionary spend and manufacturing where we’ve seen a bit of a stabilization, but still a fairly negative level. And then if I can get a follow-up around Gen I mean, very interesting pipeline. Is it all additive at this stage? Or are we starting to see some contracts where Genea also enables much faster delivery and some form of deflation? So where are we on that Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: So I’ll consider these two questions. One is around the outlook and the second one is around Genea. So listen, on the outlook, as we said, when we talked in February, we said we expect H1 to be from a constant currency at about the same level as Q4, which is minus 1.1, And you know, we have about one point of M and A in the first half. Now after that Q1 and what we see in Q2, we see it’s going to be slightly better than what we initially said, so slightly better than minus 1.1 in terms of constant currency. So what we see is stabilization for the moment in the environment.

The outlook regarding H2 remains wide, because we remain cautious. I mean, we said we don’t see for the moment the impact from the trade tension and tariffs flowing down to material impact on decisions from our client. But it doesn’t mean that these things don’t change in the coming weeks. The environment is still volatile, so we’re going to keep our cautious stance for H2 as we had in February, because we know things might change, because the tariffs and the tensions are changing every day, and that will might end up having an impact. But right now, we don’t see it.

So this is for the outlook. On G and A and AI, listen, it’s definitely driving demand. I don’t believe it’s all accretive. I think some of it is accretive, of course, but some of it is not. But it’s fueling a lot of discussion and a lot of new transformation programs.

I think certain thing that we see today in terms of potential deals would not have happened without GNI and the new technologies playing out. And agents is another part basically coming and fueling more discussion, more decision. Also from our perspective, I think we start to have a pretty good maturity in terms of understanding where things can play, how you do hyper automation, we start to have a development of assets which are specific to different parts of the business, to our business services or digital operation part, in our engineering part, in our application part, in testing, infrastructure, around insight and data. So we really start to have very specific assets that enables us to help develop agents and deploy them much faster. So we start we see an acceleration and we’re seeing the impact and the ROI will materialize more and more on clients, which will continue to drive a pretty good and healthy growth coming from all the area of AI, data, GenAI, and now agentic AI.

: Okay, many thanks.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Just a moment with our next question, please. Next question comes from Balaji Your line is now open.

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: Thank you. Balaji Thirupati from Citi. One question and a follow-up from my side as well. Firstly, I’ll congratulate you on your results, particularly given the volatile environment.

: Thank

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: you. One question. While you have mentioned broadly unchanged client behavior, could you share how you see end markets progressing progression going forward, at least in the near term? Also, if you could share any color on when you see trough for manufacturing sector, and are we already there with around 6% decline in last two quarters? And follow-up on the competition or competitive environment.

With increase in uncertainty, the potential is also for heightened focus on cost from your clients. So how have you seen competitive behavior in this environment? Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Okay. Listen, on the end markets, I mean, it’s clear that it’s heavily impacted by some of the sectorial trends. So the manufacturing sector is definitely weighing on countries like France and Germany, which are heavy on manufacturing. So that’s not surprising. Public sector financial services tend to be good.

So UK looks better because it’s heavily financial services and more public sector in The UK. So I think the sectorial trends continue to a certain extent to influence what we see globally. Latin America continues to be extremely good. APAC, we see rebound, notably very high growth in Middle East, for example. So Continental Europe is a bit subdued because of manufacturing notably, not only, but this is kind of releasing that way.

Have you seen the trough in manufacturing? I don’t think that it’s going to improve very quickly in the short term. I think hopefully in H2, with stabilization and base effect, we should start to see less impact. But I think we still see the impact going in the second quarter. It remains a difficult environment, because the clients are not going to resume spending for the moment, which means we start to see stabilization, but not a pickup in spend.

On the competitive environment, listen, the market is slow, so it’s competitive, but price have been competitive for a while. So I don’t see any fundamental change. We still see some consolidations going on. They are competitive. We win a number of them.

They bring you volume, but we have to compensate. So yes, there’s pressure on margin, but there is nothing new compared to what we have seen in the last few quarters. It’s an environment that remains quite competitive with price pressure because the market is soft.

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: Very clear, Eman. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Steve Mert from Barclays. Your line is now open.

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: Great. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Just maybe a follow-up question on Q2. You mentioned you anticipate this to be better than expected.

But could you maybe perhaps also give us a bit more color how you see the Q2 relative to Q1? Is

Mohamed Moala, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: it

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: fair to say that this growth should be broadly similar or would you expect Q2 maybe be even better than Q1? And then secondly, how much is the weakness in manufacturing, the weakening in operation and you’ve been driven by intelligent industry versus just the core IT services? Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Yes, on Q2, you’re asking me for I mean, the way you phrase your question, you asked me for the number for Q2, and I’m not providing a guidance for Q2. So we say slightly better than expected. We said minus 1.1% in constant currency in expected more or less in H1, and we think it’s going to be slightly better since you can drive what Q2 looks like a little bit. On the manufacturing side, I think it’s a cross sell. Yes, of course, engineering is heavily impacted by manufacturing, but so is the rest of the spend.

So when clients start to squeeze, they squeeze everything. So I know that might be one or two points different between engineering and IT, but this is the kind of things we’re talking about. So it is in the same range, it’s not specific on operations or engineering, it’s also it’s across basically the overall spend.

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: Great. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Just a moment for our next question, please. Next, we have Mohamed Moala from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Mohamed Moala, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you. Good morning, Eamon. Good morning, Yuri. And congrats on the quarter.

Eamon, just wanted to better understand, what kind of drove the outperformance. Was it better execution? Was it perhaps more prudent kind of expectation management? And and as you look forward, you know, you’re still cautioned around the environment, and I know IT services has a kind of a a lagged effect often. So just curious to see if you’re still comfortable, I think, with your prognosis at the start of the year that the midpoint would be a reasonable starting point.

And then if you can just give us the kind of the variables around what can cause you to kind of over and under shoot. Is it just macro or are there any specific initiatives? And the second question was, you called out sort of defense quite discreetly in the slide. Just wanted to understand how big of a driver this could be over and above kind of say AI for you. And have you built anything in terms of your short or medium term expectations in terms of that opportunity?

Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Okay, so the better performance, I think we just executed a bit better. As you know, we have launched some initiatives to be able to improve our execution in some areas, and I think we are starting to execute better in a number of areas. We have done, as you know, some changes of leadership, notably in North America, and this starts to have an impact on the ground. So I think, you know, part of it is definitely execution. I cannot say that the environment has significantly improved in the last three months.

But on the other side, as I said, we have not seen a big deterioration for the moment as well. The scenario, know, going to when you say the likely scenario is the midpoint. I mean, again, here, I cannot for me, if nothing changes yet, but the question today with what’s happening, there’s so much volatility. In three weeks, scenario could look somewhat different. Remember, this tariff weighs a huge amount in terms of people’s psyche, in terms of how they’re going to make decisions around investment in the coming weeks.

So I that’s why we remain with something looking quite wide going into H2. I think we planned what we anticipated that well when we were in February, and our scenario does cover the fact that things deteriorate. Okay? So we kept that caution in the scenario because we know that things could get worse and we could have an H2 that basically doesn’t look good. So I don’t expect deterioration beyond what we already gave you in the guidance.

So we consider we have enough caution already built in the guidance to take that into account. But so far, we haven’t seen and definitely we don’t see it going into Q2. On defense, for us, it’s an opportunity. And I think because everybody talks about it, because Europe is going to spend more on defense, I thought it was we have already started working on it. We did not wait for the last three months to work on it.

We already had anticipated that. We have a defense task force that has been going on now for a couple of years, and we consider there’s an opportunity based on the amount of technology, our engineering capability, our transformation capability, our digital capability, to be able to play a bigger role. And we are already well positioned with a number of defense players in Europe with Ministries of Defense. And we thought it was important in the current context to highlight what we’re doing in that area as this is going to be seen as a growth opportunities for the coming years.

Mohamed Moala, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Nicolas David from Alder BHS. Your line is now open.

Nicolas David, Analyst, Alder BHS: Yes. Good morning, Eamon. Good morning, Navey. Congrats also from my side regarding this solid Q1. My first question is a follow-up regarding the short term trends.

Notably, I mean, mentioned that you didn’t see any major impact on your business. But if we take the most discretionary business you have in the time and material business, I mean, Services, do you see some changes in the month of March versus January and February, nevertheless? And this is why you are relatively cautious nevertheless for Q2 overall? And my second question is, could you comment on your appetite to reinforce potentially your BPO business, notably in the light of some media reports about M and A there? Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Okay. So listen, no, to frankly, I cannot say that we have seen something negative turning out in March. So I mean, our on Q2, which is slightly better than expected, so I’m not cautious around Q2, I’m cautious for the rest of the year, not necessarily on Q2, because Q2, we don’t see a degradation. On your second question, as you know, we don’t comment on market rumors, but it’s a good try.

Nicolas David, Analyst, Alder BHS: And your comments regarding BPO overall and your view on this business?

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: No, I mean, we business services. I think it’s a good business from a in the current environment, as you know, from a digital operation, there’s good opportunities. So it’s something we continue to pursue, but nothing beyond that.

Nicolas David, Analyst, Alder BHS: Right. Thank you, Emmanuel. It’s a try.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Just a moment for our next question. Next, we have Laurent Douay from Calpe Trevon. Your line is now open.

: Yes. Good morning, Eman. I also have two. The first is on the nice resilience at the start of the year, slight bit to your own expectation despite the the worsening macro. I I was hoping to get what went better than what you planned.

Any specific vertical or or regions? And in particular, compared to most of your peers that are decelerating, did you have specific helps on big contracts starting at the start of the year? So any granularity on this would be very helpful. And my follow-up is more precisely on the rest of the world, LATAM and APG. It’s the second quarter with a big improvement.

I think you improved 10 percentage points in six months’ time. So what’s happening there? Anything specific as well? Thanks.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Sure. No, listen, it’s slightly better. So let’s not consider something has gone much, much better. So it is slightly better. UK was probably slightly better than what we’d have expected.

France improved a little bit compared to Q4. So you some little improvement right and left. And then yes, the APAC LATAM growth was also a bit better. Mean, that’s really what drove and North America returning to slight growth was also good. So I think it’s in different areas.

And as you see, when we looked at the sectors, we said compared to Q4, where I mean, we had improvement in TMT, we had improvement in services, we had improvement in energy and utilities. So, you know, it’s that’s really where we saw some of the addition better. APAC LATAM growth, we have good growth. I mean, we have healthy and very good teams notably in Brazil and Mexico that are driving good growth in LATAM. And I think in the APAC area, Australia is doing better.

Financial services and this is becoming more healthy. We had some good wins and consolidation that are now paying off. Middle East is growing fast from a small base, but we have a very strong growth in The Middle East. We are able to penetrate some very large accounts, and of course, that’s providing some good traction moving forward.

Balaji Thirupati, Analyst, Citi: Great, thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Just a moment for our next question. Next, we have Tobey Ogg from JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Tobey Ogg, Analyst, JPMorgan: Yes. Hi, morning, Eamon and Nivi. Thanks for the questions. Just first one, just on the organic growth. So you indicated around one point of M and A contribution in Q1.

And I think at the full year results, you talked about one to two points of inorganic for 2025. So just an update on whether that remains the same would be great. And then just secondly, just on the demand environment. I know you’ve indicated you haven’t seen a material impact on client decisions, but have you seen any differences in behavior from customers pre Liberation Day end of March and post Liberation Day in April? And then what are clients saying to you now around, you know, their spending plans?

Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Sure. So on the M and A impact, I mean, it hasn’t changed so far. It’s still about one, that’s what we have embarked. So, so far no change from that perspective. What clients are saying about investment plan?

As I say, I haven’t seen material, I mean, again, for me, it’s simple, I look at what’s happening compared to what we expect, and then I have the feedback from teams on the ground, that seeing, you know, clients are starting changing decisions or putting on hold some projects. So you can have one or two projects put on hold right and left, but it becomes an anecdote in the context of what we’re trying to manage globally. That’s what we say, we don’t see any material impact. Have you seen a difference in terms of things? You know, when you have discussion with clients, there’s a bit more concern, but everybody is waiting to see exactly what’s going to happen around these tariffs and what’s really going to hold at the end of the day.

That’s why I say it’s still a wait and see game, but decision that clients wanted to take in terms of making things happen or programs we have, like in digital continuity or digital core, like deploying SAP, we haven’t seen clients pulling back and say, No, no, we stop, or we’re going to delay decision by six months because of the current environment. So we haven’t seen that happening yet, but we remain cautious. I remain cautious because I know that things can change in the coming weeks, But so far, so good.

Tobey Ogg, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Priest of UBS. Your line is now open.

Michael Priest, Analyst, UBS: Thank you. Good morning. I guess, Eamon, you had the results in late Feb. And at that point, you were expecting organic growth to or constant currency growth to deteriorate. So it’s quite a big swing in the last month or so of the quarter.

Can you talk about what went better and why your visibility didn’t sort of capture that? And then in terms of France, I think you were quite categorical in saying it’s past the trough. Could you talk about why you have that confidence and maybe on auto aerospace related to that, is there something in the comparative that means that you feel that you’re on an improving trajectory in France? Thank you.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: Yes, so I mean, we didn’t have a significant improvement. We said it’s slightly better, so I cannot say that basically something has fundamentally changed. As Laurent asked me before and I answered, things were a little bit better in some places, like in The UK, like in LatAm and APAC, U. S, but it is slightly better. It’s not suddenly we got two or three points more growth than what we expected.

So will caution here. It’s good that first things have not deteriorated and they got a little bit better. So that’s what has changed. We did not expect things deteriorate. We said H1 should be in line with Q4.

Yes, there’s a little bit more M and A in H1. So yes, we expect a little bit of deterioration potentially going into Q1. There’s a bit less, but it’s not it’s good news, but it’s not a significant change from that perspective. On France, again, it’s a question of looking at the environment, what we have in the pipeline, what Tim says on the ground. And yes, you’re going to have base effect that we start playing because of the decrease we started seeing in Q3 and Q4.

But we feel that we have passed the trough when we look at our Q2 and moving forward. Things are improving a little bit. It’s not material at this stage, but at least we don’t see further degradation coming in France for the moment based on the current perspective. We remain cautious, as I mentioned before.

Michael Priest, Analyst, UBS: Okay. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our last question comes from the lines of Charles Brinay from Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini0: Hi, good morning guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. Can I just ask a quick question on profitability and margins? It feels like there are two opposing forces at the moment. On the one hand, you’ve got better than expected revenues and decent utilization that should be beneficial for margins.

Yet on the other hand, you’re talking about some pricing pressure across the industry that’s potentially a drag to margins. Just at this stage, can you talk about whether you’ve got incremental comfort or otherwise in the margin guide? And is there anything to call out in the H1 and the H2 phasing? Obviously, the moment, H2 revenue is expected to be better than H1. Should we expect the margin performance to be 2H rated?

Thanks.

Nivi Bagat, CFO, Capgemini: So just as a reminder, when we had set out our guidance for the margin, we had set it to 13.3% to 13.5%, and the top end was predicated on some level of acceleration. Now clearly, should that acceleration come through, then hopefully some of that will start to come through. So in terms of the seasonality that you talk about, I don’t expect it to be a big swing either which way. There could be some seasonality in H1 as a result of that, but I don’t see that to be a big swing. But I’ll come back to saying that our focus on margin is stronger than ever before, so we focus on our portfolio mix.

Amit talked a lot about the various value added services. And really, the focus of the value added services is where we’ll bring that, if you like, the improvement that we will see in terms of gross margin. But I think it’s also important to also understand that we’re focused on our operational parameters, whether it’s our utilization, offshoring, G and A, I talked about that in February. So that’s something that we continue to be focused on as well. So focus continues as far as the margin is concerned, but any kind of reacceleration would be important if we have to get to the top end of the guidance.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini0: Can you see any scenario in which H1 margin is down year on year with a recovery in H2? Or are you confident that we’ll see at least margin stability throughout the year?

Nivi Bagat, CFO, Capgemini: As said, there could potentially be a small sort of seasonality effect in H1, but I don’t see a big screen, no.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: But like we can have potentially any year.

Nivi Bagat, CFO, Capgemini: Which is no different to any of the previous years or this year for that matter.

Ahmed Azai, CEO, Capgemini: You. Okay. Thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you in the coming weeks.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Thank you for your time and joining us today. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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