Quadient Stock price
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Key metrics
📘 Market Capitalization
📈 What is it?
Market capitalization shows how much a company is currently worth on the stock market.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps classify companies by size (Large, Mid, Small Cap) and indicates their market presence and relative stability.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Large-cap companies tend to be more stable, often pay dividends, but may grow more slowly.
- Smaller firms may offer higher growth potential but come with more volatility.
- Market capitalization is a useful indicator of company size — but not a measure of whether a stock is undervalued or overvalued.
📘 Enterprise Value (EV)
📈 What is it?
Enterprise Value represents the total cost to acquire a company — including its debt and excluding its cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
(= Market Cap + Net Debt)
🏛️ Why is it important?
EV gives a more complete picture of a company's value than market cap alone and is used in key valuation ratios like EV/FCF or EV/Sales.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Enterprise Value shows the true cost of buying a company, including all financial obligations.
- It is more accurate than just looking at market cap, especially when comparing companies with different levels of debt or cash.
- Professional investors prefer EV-based multiples because they better reflect the company’s full financial footprint.
📘 Net Debt
📈 What is it?
Net Debt shows how much debt remains after subtracting a company’s available cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It indicates how dependent a company is on borrowed money and how easily it can service its debt in the short term.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low or negative net debt signals financial strength and flexibility.
- Companies with strong cash positions are better positioned in crises.
- High net debt increases financial risk — especially in environments with rising interest rates or economic downturns.
📘 Cash
📈 What is it?
Cash represents all liquid assets a company can access immediately — including cash, bank deposits, and short-term investments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It reflects a company’s financial flexibility and resilience — enabling investments, buybacks, or buffer in downturns.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A strong cash position means greater room for maneuver and crisis resistance.
- Cash-rich companies can invest, pay down debt, or repurchase shares.
- But excess idle cash might indicate a lack of growth opportunities.
📘 Shares Outstanding
📈 What is it?
Shares outstanding represent the total number of a company’s shares currently held by investors — excluding treasury stock.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s the basis for key metrics like Earnings Per Share (EPS), Market Capitalization, or the Price/Earnings ratio (P/E).
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Fewer shares in circulation typically increase earnings per share — making each share more valuable.
- Share buybacks reduce the number of shares and boost per-share metrics.
- Issuing new shares does the opposite — diluting shareholder value and lowering per-share figures.
📘 Price-to-Earnings Ratio (P/E)
📈 What is it?
The P/E ratio shows how many times a company's earnings per share are reflected in its current share price — in other words, how "expensive" the stock appears relative to its profits.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The P/E ratio is one of the most widely used valuation metrics. It helps investors assess whether a stock appears cheap or expensive compared to its earnings power.
🧮 Calculation
📊 P/E (TTM) = Based on earnings from the last 12 months (Trailing Twelve Months):🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/E may indicate undervaluation — or signal underlying issues.
- A high P/E may reflect strong growth expectations — or an overvalued stock.
📘 Price-to-Sales Ratio (P/S)
📈 What is it?
The P/S ratio shows how much investors are paying for $1 of the company’s revenue – regardless of profitability.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/S is especially useful for evaluating growth companies or businesses not yet profitable. It reflects how the market values the company’s sales.
🧮 Calculation
Market Cap = €467.69m | Revenue (TTM) = €1.04b
Market Cap = €467.69m | Estimated Revenue = €1.04b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/S may indicate undervaluation — or low profitability.
- A high P/S can reflect strong growth expectations — or excessive optimism.
- Especially helpful when evaluating companies where profits are low, volatile, or negative.
📘 Enterprise Value to Sales (EV/Sales)
📈 What is it?
EV/Sales shows how much investors are paying for $1 of revenue — considering not just equity, but also debt and cash. It’s the capital structure–adjusted version of the P/S ratio.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s ideal for comparing companies with different levels of debt. It reflects a company's true cost relative to its revenue.
🧮 Calculation
Enterprise Value = €1.15b | Revenue (TTM) = €1.04b
Enterprise Value = €1.15b | Forward Revenue = €1.04b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EV/Sales allows for capital structure–neutral company comparisons.
- A lower ratio may indicate undervaluation; a higher one may signal strong growth expectations or overvaluation.
- Especially helpful when evaluating high-growth companies with low or negative earnings.
📘 Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow (EV/FCF) | ex SBC
📈 What is it?
EV/FCF compares a company’s enterprise value with its free cash flow. The metric therefore shows the multiple of current free cash flow at which a company is valued. EV/FCF ex SBC additionally accounts for stock-based compensation (SBC). While SBC does not represent a direct cash outflow, issuing shares as compensation can dilute existing shareholders. Therefore, SBC is deducted from free cash flow in this adjusted version.
🧮 How is it calculated?
EV/FCF ex SBC = Enterprise Value ÷ (Free Cash Flow (TTM) − SBC)
🏛️ Why is it important?
EV/FCF provides a valuation based on free cash flow and therefore complements earnings-based valuation metrics such as the P/E ratio. The ex SBC version additionally accounts for the economic impact of stock-based compensation and provides a more conservative view from a shareholder perspective.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low EV/FCF means that enterprise value is low relative to current free cash flow. The reasons should always be considered in the context of the company and its industry.
- A high EV/FCF means that enterprise value is high relative to current free cash flow. This can, for example, reflect high growth expectations or temporarily weak cash generation.
- When SBC is positive and adjusted free cash flow remains positive, EV/FCF ex SBC is generally higher than the standard EV/FCF.
- The metric is particularly useful for companies with relatively stable and predictable cash flows.
- If free cash flow is negative or very low, EV/FCF has limited usefulness and should not be interpreted like a standard valuation multiple.
📘 Price-to-Book Ratio (P/B)
📈 What is it?
The P/B ratio compares a company’s market value to its book value — showing how much investors are paying for each dollar of net assets.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/B is commonly used for asset-heavy industries like banks or industrials. It helps assess whether a stock is trading above or below its net asset value.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A P/B below 1 may signal undervaluation — or weak profitability.
- A P/B above 1 implies the market expects future value creation (e.g., brand, IP, growth).
- Best used for companies with tangible assets and strong balance sheets.
📘 Dividend per Share (DPS)
📈 What is it?
Dividend per Share shows how much cash a company pays out to shareholders for each share they own – usually on an annual or quarterly basis.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
DPS is the absolute value of the payout per share – crucial for income-focused investors and dividend strategies.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A stable or growing DPS often signals a strong, shareholder-friendly business.
- DPS alone doesn’t tell you how attractive the payout is – the stock price also matters (→ see Dividend Yield).
- Long-term dividend growth is often a hallmark of high-quality companies – like the dividend aristocrats.
📘 Dividend Yield
📈 What is it?
Dividend yield shows how large a company’s dividend is in relation to its current share price.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It allows investors to compare dividend payouts across stocks, regardless of price or payout size.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A stable yield can reflect reliable distributions.
- Comparing 1Y and 5Y yield shows whether dividend growth keeps pace with stock price appreciation.
- A low yield isn’t always negative – it can signal strong past performance or growth focus.
📘 Dividend Growth
📈 What is it?
Dividend growth shows how much a company has increased its dividend per share over time.
🧮 How is it calculated?
5Y: Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)
🏛️ Why is it important?
Consistently rising dividends are often a sign of financial strength and shareholder orientation – especially relevant for long-term investors.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Stable dividend growth is a sign of sustainable earning power.
- High dividend growth can significantly boost your total return:
- If a company pays $1 in dividends and increases it by 15% annually over 5 years, you’ll receive $2 per share in year 5 – twice as much as at the start!
📘 Payout Ratio
📈 What is it?
The payout ratio shows what percentage of a company’s earnings (per share) is distributed to shareholders as dividends.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps assess whether the dividend is sustainable – especially in relation to the company’s profitability.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low payout ratio means the company retains more earnings for reinvestment – typical for growth companies.
- A moderate payout (e.g. 25–50%) indicates a healthy balance between returns and reinvestment.
- High payout ratios may seem attractive but can carry risk if earnings decline.
📘 Consecutive Dividend Increases
📈 What is it?
This metric shows how many consecutive years a company has raised its dividend per share – without any cuts or pauses.
🧮 How is it calculated?
(Special dividends are not considered.)
🏛️ Why is it important?
A long track record of increases reflects financial strength, consistency, and shareholder commitment.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A long dividend increase streak builds confidence – especially in volatile markets.
- Such companies are seen as reliable and income-friendly investments.
- The longer the streak, the stronger the company’s dividend discipline.
📘 Revenue
📈 What is it?
Revenue shows how much a company earns in total from selling its products and services – the gross income before any costs are deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Revenue is one of the key figures to assess a company’s size, market position, and growth potential.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing revenue indicates rising demand and can be an early signal of future earnings growth.
- Comparing actual and expected revenue reveals trends in the market environment and analyst sentiment.
- Note: Strong revenue alone isn’t enough – margins and profitability matter just as much.
📘 EBITDA
📈 What is it?
EBITDA stands for “Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization.” It reflects a company’s operating profit before the effects of financing, taxes, and accounting depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBITDA is widely used to evaluate a company’s operating performance – especially across capital-intensive sectors or international comparisons.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high or growing EBITDA indicates strong operational profitability – independent of taxes, interest, or accounting methods.
- It’s especially useful for comparing companies across sectors or geographies.
- Important: EBITDA is not a net income figure – it excludes key costs like depreciation and interest.
📘 EBIT
📈 What is it?
EBIT stands for “Earnings Before Interest and Taxes.” It reflects a company’s operating profit after depreciation, but before interest and tax expenses.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT is a core profitability metric that shows how well the company performs in its main business operations – independent of capital structure and tax environment.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT indicates strong profitability from the company’s core business – before financial and tax effects.
- It allows better comparison between companies with different debt levels or tax structures.
- Compared to EBITDA, EBIT already accounts for depreciation and reflects capital intensity more clearly.
📘 Net Income
📈 What is it?
Net income is the company’s total profit – the amount left after all expenses, taxes, interest, and depreciation have been deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the most comprehensive measure of a company’s profitability – showing how much actual profit remains after all business and financing costs.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing net income indicates that the company is managing all of its costs efficiently.
- It directly influences valuation metrics like P/E ratio and the company’s dividend capacity.
- Over time, net income trends reveal how resilient and profitable the business model really is.
📘 Free Cash Flow (FCF) | ex SBC
📈 What is it?
Free cash flow shows how much cash remains after a company has covered its operating and capital expenditures. FCF ex SBC additionally deducts stock-based compensation (SBC) to adjust the cash flow for the effect of non-cash SBC.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Free Cash Flow ex SBC = Operating Cash Flow − SBC − Capital Expenditures (CAPEX)
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF reflects a company’s actual financial strength – independent of reported accounting earnings. It shows how much flexibility a company has for dividends, share buybacks, or debt reduction. FCF ex SBC also deducts stock-based compensation and shows how much cash generation remains after SBC.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High free cash flow indicates that a company has strong financial strength – independent of reported earnings.
- It is often a solid basis for sustainable dividends and share buybacks.
- Declining FCF can be a warning sign, even if reported earnings remain stable.
📘 Revenue Growth
📈 What is it?
Revenue growth shows how much a company’s sales have changed compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on forward projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected revenue ÷ Revenue in prior year − 1) × 100
Forward growth is based on analyst estimates for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Rising revenue signals growing demand, business expansion, and market share gains – especially important for growth-oriented companies.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growth is the engine of long-term value creation – especially in tech and growth sectors.
- What matters is not just current growth, but its sustainability.
- Forward projections reflect whether analysts expect continued momentum – or a slowdown.
📘 EBITDA Growth
📈 What is it?
EBITDA growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) has increased or decreased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBITDA ÷ EBITDA from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Growing EBITDA indicates improving operational profitability – regardless of financing or accounting effects.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Strong EBITDA growth signals operational efficiency and scalability – especially during growth phases.
- EBITDA growth can be an early indicator of margin and earnings expansion – but should be assessed alongside revenue and EBIT.
📘 EBIT Growth
📈 What is it?
EBIT growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (after depreciation, but before interest and taxes) has increased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBIT ÷ EBIT from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT growth is a direct indicator of a company’s business performance – taking into account capital intensity through depreciation.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Rising EBIT signals improving operating profitability – even after accounting for depreciation.
- It’s especially important for evaluating companies with significant capital expenditures.
- Combined with revenue and EBITDA growth, EBIT growth provides a well-rounded view of operational progress.
📘 Net Income Growth
📈 What is it?
Net income growth shows how much a company’s bottom-line profit has increased or decreased compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on analyst projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected net income ÷ Net income from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate reflects analysts’ expectations for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the ultimate measure of profitability. Growing net income signals stronger efficiency, cost control, and sustainable earnings power.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Stronger net income boosts valuation, dividend potential, and investor confidence.
- If profits stall while revenue grows, it may signal margin pressure.
📘 Free Cash Flow Growth
📈 What is it?
Free cash flow (FCF) growth shows how a company’s available cash – after covering operating expenses and capital expenditures – has changed compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Free cash flow reflects real financial strength. Growing FCF indicates more flexibility for dividends, share buybacks, and reinvestment.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Declining FCF may point to rising investments, increasing costs, or weaker operating performance.
- Especially for dividend investors, FCF growth is critical – since dividends are paid from actual available cash.
- A negative trend isn't always bad, but it deserves closer attention.
📘 Gross Margin
📈 What is it?
Gross margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains after deducting the direct costs of goods sold (like materials and production). It represents the company’s “raw profit” before fixed costs, taxes, and interest.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Or simply: Gross Margin = Gross Profit ÷ Revenue × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
Gross margin indicates how efficiently a company can produce or procure what it sells. It is a key measure of product-level profitability and pricing power.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high gross margin suggests strong pricing power and efficient production.
- Falling margins may signal rising input costs or competitive pressure.
- Compared to peers, gross margin offers insights into the quality of a business model.
📘 EBITDA Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBITDA margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as operating profit before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.It reflects operating efficiency without being distorted by financing or accounting factors.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBITDA margin reveals how much operating income a company generates per dollar of revenue – independent of capital structure and tax effects.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBITDA margin reflects strong core profitability – before accounting distortions.
- It allows for effective comparisons across companies and sectors.
- A stable or growing margin signals efficient cost control and business scalability.
📘 EBIT Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBIT margin shows what percentage of revenue remains as operating profit after depreciation but before interest and taxes.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBIT margin reflects a company’s core profitability while accounting for capital intensity (e.g. machinery, infrastructure). It’s especially useful for comparing businesses with different levels of depreciation.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT margin shows that the company remains efficient even after factoring in depreciation.
- It’s especially relevant for capital-intensive industries.
- Stable or rising EBIT margins over time are a strong indicator of pricing power and business quality.
📘 Net Margin
📈 What is it?
Net margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as bottom-line profit after deducting all costs, interest, taxes, and depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net margin reflects a company’s overall efficiency – across operations, financing, and taxation. It shows how much actual profit is generated from each dollar of revenue.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high net margin means the company is not only strong operationally but also manages financing and taxes efficiently.
- Peer comparisons reveal business quality and competitiveness.
- Declining margins despite revenue growth can be a red flag for rising costs or inefficiencies.
📘 Free Cash Flow Margin | ex SBC
📈 What is it?
The Free Cash Flow Margin shows how much free cash flow a company generates relative to its revenue. In simplified terms, free cash flow is calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. The Free Cash Flow Margin ex SBC additionally accounts for stock-based compensation (SBC). While SBC does not represent a direct cash outflow, issuing shares as compensation can dilute existing shareholders. Therefore, SBC is deducted from free cash flow in this adjusted metric.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Free Cash Flow Margin ex SBC = (Free Cash Flow − SBC) ÷ Revenue × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
The Free Cash Flow Margin shows how efficiently a company converts its revenue into free cash flow. Strong free cash flow can provide financial flexibility for dividends, share buybacks, debt repayment, or further investments. The ex SBC version additionally accounts for the economic impact of stock-based compensation and therefore provides a more conservative view of cash generation from a shareholder perspective.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high Free Cash Flow Margin shows that a company converts a high proportion of its revenue into free cash flow.
- This can provide greater financial flexibility for dividends, share buybacks, debt repayment, or investments.
- The Free Cash Flow Margin ex SBC additionally accounts for potential shareholder dilution from stock-based compensation.
- The long-term trend is particularly important. Declining margins can, for example, result from higher investments, changes in working capital, or weaker operating performance.
📘 Equity Ratio
📈 What is it?
The equity ratio indicates what portion of a company’s total assets is financed by shareholders’ equity – in other words, how much it relies on its own capital.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
A high equity ratio reflects financial strength and stability, especially during downturns. It’s a key indicator of a company’s solvency and long-term risk profile.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Companies with high equity ratios are generally more resilient and less dependent on external debt.
- Low equity ratios can signal higher risk or aggressive financial strategies.
- Important: Always assess the equity ratio in combination with the return on equity (ROE). This shows not just how stable the company is – but also how efficiently it uses shareholder capital.
📘 Return on Equity (ROE)
📈 What is it?
Return on equity (ROE) shows how efficiently a company uses its shareholders’ equity to generate profit. In other words: how much net income is earned per dollar of equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROE is a core profitability metric. It helps investors understand whether a company delivers attractive returns on the capital provided by its shareholders.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROE indicates that the company is using its capital efficiently and profitably.
- It’s especially meaningful for capital-intensive businesses or firms with high equity bases.
- Important: A very high ROE can also result from high debt levels – always interpret it alongside the equity ratio to assess financial health.
📘 Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)
📈 What is it?
ROCE measures how efficiently a company generates profits from its total capital – including both equity and interest-bearing debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It evaluates the return on all capital employed, regardless of how it’s financed.
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROCE is ideal for comparing companies with different financing structures. It shows how well management uses capital to create value for both shareholders and creditors.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROCE means the company uses its capital efficiently – regardless of whether it's funded by debt or equity.
- The higher the ROCE compared to peers, the more value the company creates with its invested capital.
- Especially relevant for capital-intensive sectors like industrials, energy, or infrastructure.
📘 Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
📈 What is it?
ROIC measures how efficiently a company generates returns from the capital invested in its core operations – regardless of whether the capital comes from equity or debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
- NOPAT = Net Operating Profit After Taxes
- Invested Capital = Operating assets minus non-interest-bearing liabilities
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROIC is one of the most accurate indicators of capital efficiency. Unlike return on equity, it is not distorted by leverage and shows how much value is created for all capital providers.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROIC shows how effectively a company uses the capital that is truly invested in its core operations.
- Unlike ROCE, ROIC focuses only on the capital that is actively used to run the business – and that requires a return (i.e. interest-bearing).
- Especially useful when comparing companies with large amounts of excess cash or non-interest-bearing liabilities – giving a more realistic picture of capital efficiency.
📘 Leverage Ratio (Debt-to-Equity)
📈 What is it?
The leverage ratio indicates how much a company relies on interest-bearing debt (such as loans and bonds) relative to its shareholders’ equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
This ratio helps assess a company’s financial structure and risk profile. High leverage can enhance returns – but also increases exposure to interest rate changes and financial stress.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low leverage ratio signals financial strength and independence.
- A higher ratio can improve returns in good times but increases risk during downturns or rising interest rate periods.
- 👉 Always interpret in the context of industry, capital intensity, and interest rate environment.
📘 SBC | in % Revenue
📈 What is it?
SBC (Stock-Based Compensation) refers to equity-based compensation granted by a company to its employees and executives. The percentage shows SBC relative to revenue.
🧮 How is it calculated?
SBC as % of Revenue = (SBC ÷ Revenue) × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
Stock-based compensation is a real cost factor for shareholders. It can increase the number of shares outstanding and therefore dilute existing shareholders. The percentage of revenue shows how heavily a company relies on equity-based compensation and how significant this form of compensation is relative to the size of the business.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A lower figure is generally positive: Stock-based compensation is relatively small compared with the company's revenue.
- A high figure can indicate greater reliance on stock-based compensation and a higher potential risk of dilution. However, it is also important to consider whether the company offsets dilution through share buybacks.
- The trend over time should also be considered. A high but declining percentage presents a different picture from a persistently high or increasing percentage.
- A single-digit SBC-to-revenue ratio is not unusual among many growth-oriented and technology companies.
📘 SBC as % of FCF
📈 What is it?
SBC (Stock-Based Compensation) refers to equity-based compensation granted by a company to its employees and executives. The percentage shows SBC relative to free cash flow (FCF).
🧮 How is it calculated?
SBC as % of FCF = (SBC ÷ Free Cash Flow) × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
Stock-based compensation is a real cost factor for shareholders. It can increase the number of shares outstanding and therefore dilute existing shareholders. The percentage of free cash flow shows how significant SBC is relative to the cash generated by the company. Since SBC is non-cash compensation, it is typically not deducted as a cash outflow when calculating FCF.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A lower value is generally favorable. Stock-based compensation is relatively small compared with the company's cash generation.
- A high value means that SBC represents a significant portion of the company's reported free cash flow, even though SBC itself is non-cash.
- The higher the value, the more significant SBC can be as an economic cost to shareholders, particularly when it results in share dilution.
📘 SBC Growth 1Y
📈 What is it?
SBC Growth 1Y shows how much a company's stock-based compensation has changed compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
SBC Growth shows whether stock-based compensation is becoming more or less significant for shareholders. If SBC increases significantly, it can lead to greater shareholder dilution over time. At the same time, SBC is a non-cash expense that reduces earnings on the income statement but is added back in the cash flow statement.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high positive value is generally negative, as rising SBC can increase the burden on shareholders, particularly through potential dilution.
- What matters is whether the development of SBC is sustainable over the long term. Some level of SBC is common among many growth and technology companies.
📘 Share Count Growth 1Y
📈 What is it?
Share Count Growth 1Y shows how much the number of shares outstanding has increased or decreased over a one-year period.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The number of shares determines how many shares the company's earnings and assets are distributed across. If the share count decreases, existing shareholders' relative ownership increases. If it increases, existing shareholders are diluted. The metric therefore makes dilution and share buybacks directly visible.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A negative value is generally positive, as the number of shares outstanding is decreasing.
- A positive value indicates dilution of existing shareholders.
- A declining share count is not automatically positive: It also matters at what price the shares are repurchased and how the buybacks are financed.
📘 Shareholder Yield
📈 What is it?
Shareholder Yield measures how much capital a company returns to shareholders or uses to reduce debt relative to its market capitalization. It goes beyond dividend yield by also including share buybacks and debt reduction.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Dividend yield only tells part of the story. Companies can also return capital through share buybacks, while reducing debt can strengthen the balance sheet. Shareholder Yield combines all three components into one metric, giving investors a broader view of how a company uses its capital.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A higher Shareholder Yield generally indicates more capital being returned to shareholders or used to reduce debt.
- The mix matters: dividends, buybacks, and debt reduction can affect shareholders in different ways.
- Share buybacks are most beneficial when shares are repurchased at attractive valuations.
- Investors should also consider whether dividends, buybacks, and debt reduction are sustainable over time.
📘 Earnings per share (EPS)
📈 What is it?
Earnings per Share (EPS) shows how much profit is attributable to a single share – and is one of the most important metrics for evaluating a company's performance.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The diluted share count reflects potential new shares that could be issued through options, convertible bonds, or other rights.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EPS is the basis for many key valuation metrics like P/E ratio, PEG ratio, or payout ratio. It enables comparisons of profitability across companies, regardless of their size.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EPS captures per-share profitability and is especially useful for comparisons over time or with analyst estimates.
- Rising EPS may signal consistent growth or share buybacks.
- Important: Always use diluted EPS for more realistic valuations – especially in companies with stock-based compensation.
📘 Free cash flow per share (FCF per share)
📈 What is it?
Free Cash Flow per Share shows how much free cash flow a company generates per outstanding share – after investments, but before dividends or debt repayments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Free cash flow is calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures (CapEx).
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF per Share reveals how much real cash is available per share – useful for dividends, buybacks, or reducing debt. Unlike net income, free cash flow is harder to manipulate and often seen as a more reliable metric.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High FCF per share signals strong financial flexibility.
- It shows how much capital the company can effectively reinvest or return to shareholders.
- Particularly relevant for dividend payers and capital-efficient businesses.
📘 Short interest
📈 What is it?
Short interest indicates how many shares of a company are currently sold short – that is, borrowed and sold by investors who expect the price to decline.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It reflects the percentage of a company’s shares that are being shorted relative to the total shares available.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Short interest serves as a sentiment indicator: A high value may signal skepticism or bearish expectations – but also increases the potential for a short squeeze if prices rise unexpectedly.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low short interest usually indicates market confidence in the company.
- High short interest can be a warning sign – or an opportunity if sentiment shifts.
- Especially relevant in volatile markets or ahead of key earnings releases.
📘 Employees
📈 What is it?
The employee count shows how many people a company employs worldwide – offering insights into its size, structure, and business model.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps assess operational scale, labor intensity, and cost structure. Combined with revenue and profit, it enables key metrics like revenue per employee or productivity.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high headcount can signal operational complexity – but also significant growth capacity.
- Revenue per employee is a key indicator of efficiency.
- Especially useful for comparing tech, industrial, or service-heavy companies.
📘 Revenue per employee
📈 What is it?
Revenue per employee indicates how much revenue a company generates on average per employee – a key measure of efficiency and productivity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The employee count is typically taken from the most recent annual report.
🏛️ Why is it important?
This metric helps compare business models – especially between labor-intensive and technology-driven companies. A high value suggests automation, operational efficiency, or strong value creation per head.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high revenue per employee indicates a scalable and margin-strong business model.
- A low figure may reflect labor-intensive operations or lower value-add.
- Especially helpful when comparing tech companies to industrial or service sectors.
Quadient Stock Analysis
Analyst Opinions
10 Analysts have issued a Quadient forecast:
Analyst Opinions
10 Analysts have issued a Quadient forecast:
Quadient Events
Past Events
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SEP
23
Q2 2027 Earnings Call
12 days ago
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MAY
21
Q1 2027 Earnings Call
5 months ago
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MAR
25
Q4 2025 Earnings Call
6 months ago
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DEC
2
Q3 2025 Earnings Call
10 months ago
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SEP
24
Q2 2026 Earnings Call
about one year ago
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StocksGuide Free
Quadient — Q2 2027 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Quadient's first half 2026 results presentation. I'm Laura Paxton, Quadient's Head of Investor Relations. Today's presentation will be hosted by Geoffrey Godet, our CEO, and Laurent Dupassage, our CFO. The agenda for today's call is on slide 3. As usual, there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. You can either submit your questions in writing through the web or ask questions live by dialing in to the conference call. Thank you very much. And with that, over to you, Geoffrey.
Thank you, Laurent. Good evening, everyone. Let me remind you to get started of the strategic direction that we set at the beginning of the financial year, since everything else follows on from it. The pivot to digital is not new for Quadient, as you know. I've been preparing it for years. Demand for digital automated business and financial communication keeps building up. Artificial intelligence is accelerating it. The digitalization of financial workflows is also accelerating. And so are the invoicing mandates coming across Europe.
And we set a clear objective. Digital becomes Quadient's largest and most profitable solution by 2030. This is where the growth is. This is where our capital and our focus belong. We reinforced the Executive Committee with four digital business leaders at the beginning of the year, and I personally took over direct leadership of the digital business. Additionally, this year, on July 20, we announced that we were conducting a strategic review of our Lockers business. This review, I'm happy to report that is now complete.
And I will take you through the outcome on the next slide. But first of all, let's look at what the Lockers team has built. Moving back to 2018, Lockers was small, we would say, around 2,000 lockers and around €6 million in revenue. Then, quickly after that, as we set our strategy, we acquired Pendiq, a U.S.-based company in 2019. And then from there, progressively, we expanded across the U.S., Canada, Japan, the U.K., and France. We also made another acquisition called Passer Concierge, another U.S.-based company, to constitute the U.S. market in 2024. And in 2025, as a summary, the business delivered €114 million of revenue.
Just as a quick reminder, this represented a 22.4% growth versus 2024 on a reported basis and represented also 11% of Quadient revenue. The EBITDA margin was 5% last year, which was up 4.4 points after already passing the breakeven point in 2024. So, if I was to summarize, in 7 years, we multiplied 19 times the revenue and around 14 times the installed base of locations of lockers worldwide. We could say that we have today a mature asset, profitable, and at scale, the number 1 position in the U.S. and in Japan, and the U.K. network that scaled actually very fast in the last 3 years. We could say that this business has delivered on its promise. So just take the opportunity to thank, obviously, all our partners and our customers, and most importantly, the Quadient Lockers team that built up this business for us. And this is the context in which we ran the strategic review this summer. So now the time is right to consider with its next blockbuster.
So let's look at the outcome. We're going to slide 6. In conclusion, I think the review produced two major outcomes, and you can see them on the left. The first, following a competitive process, we have signed an agreement to sell our U.K. operation, our open network, to a U.K. company called IDS for €65 million. The second outcome is that we also have launched the sale process for the rest of our Lockers business. As a result, the Lockers solution is now presented in accordance with accounting rule called IFRS 5 in this presentation and in our first half financial statement. Consequently, 2025 figures have been restated on the same basis. Laurent will take you through all those changes and their impacts.
Let's start with the sale of the U.K. open network to IDS, which as a reminder is the owner of Royal Mail and also importantly is an affiliate of a company called Vesa Equity Investment which is a shareholder of Quadient. Let me come back to the price. The price is €65 million. I would like a few key points. The least mature of our three key geographies, with an expected 2026 revenue of a little bit more than €10 million, and it was doubling, we had a fast growth, doubling in size, which was '25, as we were in the ramp-up period of getting more and more usage. And given this early stage of development, because our locker investments are usually in the first 3 years, it was naturally the most capital consuming of our open network bases. Getting that ROI on that stage, on that maturity of the development, provides us with a very strong return. The agreement, I want to stress this, came out of a competitive process that was run obviously with the advisors that we mentioned to you at the beginning of July. We had a chance to consider multiple offers that we have received and naturally after reviewing them the board. The Board of Quadient concluded that this offer delivered the best value for the U.K. network and was in our corporate interest and its stakeholders, all our shareholders, and therefore approved the transaction unanimously yesterday.
We expect this transaction, after the signing yesterday, to close before the end of 2026, hopefully even sooner. So, let's move to the next point that I want to talk to you about, about the consequence on leverage for Quadient. We expect the proceeds to take our leverage ratio target, which is excluding leasing, from 1.5 times, which was our previous guidance, to 1.2 times. Let me be precise on this one. These improvements come from the U.K. transactions. It assumes nothing about the rest of the process and nothing about the CapEx, which is my next point. So if I step back a little bit on our capital expenditure at the corporate level, and to be clear, to focus on the Lockers business as a whole, even though the U.K. represented a large portion of the CapEx of the lockers, it more or less now will remove around €120 million of lockers CapEx over the next 5 years. €120 million that are no longer required and it's a capital that we can now redirect to new priorities and focus. My next point is that we expect obviously additional proceeds from the sale of the rest of the Lockers business, and this is in addition to the proceeds from the U.K.
This includes, obviously, for the rest of the Lockers, a Japanese base and a North American operation to cover what we have. These are our largest and much more profitable locker networks. They hold a leading position, the number 1 position in their respective markets. We are currently engaging with potential buyers and obviously, like we're doing right now in the U.K., we will update the market in due course as we make progress. With all of this together, we have what we could say now a strategic and financial flexibility that we simply did not have 6 months ago.
So, let me now hand it over to Laurent for the first half financials. Laurent. Thank you, Geoffrey. Good evening. And before going into the numbers, a word on presentation. Just following the strategic review, as mentioned by Geoffrey, the Lockers business is reported in accordance to IFRS 5 in our half year financial statement. And the European private locker network, which we are retaining as they are largely managed through mail employees, has been reclassified within the Mail segment. All 2025 comparatives shown today have been restated on the same basis, except if explicitly mentioned, so that the figures you see are fully comparable. This reclassification strongly benefits to our EBITDA and EBIT at group level, as Lockers are dilutive to the guidance margin.
It brings about 130 basis points on EBITDA and about 230 basis points on current EBIT margin. On the revenue side, as you can see on the slide, the translation post-IFRS 5 is very straightforward. Digital scope remains unchanged. And Mail is about €3 million of revenue for the private local network being added into H1 2026. On that basis, Quadient delivered €448 million of revenue in the first half of 2026, representing a 2% organic decline compared to the same period last year. Digital confirmed its gross momentum at 6.7% organically at €146 million, while Mail was down 5.7% at €302 million. From a geographic perspective, again, North America, our largest region, was essentially flat at €254 million. Main European countries were down by 4.4%, at €165 million, with, as usual, we'll see that further later, a strategic increase of €1.5 billion. Stronger Mail underlying decline in this geography.
International is down by 4.9% at €29 million, mostly driven by Mail. Turning now to profitability. While I just mentioned total EBITDA margin is improved post IFRS 5 due to the deleted EBITDA from Lockers, EBITDA by at Digital and Mail level are impacted by some low cost, front end cost, and dis-synergies reallocated to both solutions and impacting EBITDA margin by about 0.6 points, on top of which you have a small dilutive private network impact on the Mail side for 0.5 points. Group EBITDA margin stands at 21.5%. It's down 0.8 points compared to last year, mostly due to the erosion on the Mail side and unfavorable mix effect. The return margin was stable at 14.5% despite the implementation costs linked to the French invoicing GoLive and, of course, the Forex. Current EBIT for the period came in at €57 million, a 5.9% organic decline due to Mail. Let's now turn to the revenue bridge on slide 9.
Starting on the left is €465 million restated revenue for last year H1. This bridge shows the continued rebalancing of our portfolio. It had contributed €9 million of additional revenue, partially offsetting the €19 million of organic decline in Mail. The scope effect added €2 million from the acquisitions of both Serendia in June last year and CDP Communications in December 2025. On the right hand side, currency had a €10 million negative impact. It's all coming from Q1, meaning on Q2, no currency impact on the bridge. All-in reported revenue decline at 3.7% and by 2% on an organic basis. Moving now to the current EBIT bridge on slide 10, from the €64 million we stated current EBIT last year, Digital EBITDA grows of €3 million, partly offset the €6 million decline in Mail EBITDA, and you have an additional €1 million of organic increase in depreciation and amortization, notably tied to Digital R&D.
The currency accounted for €3 million of negative impact on the current EBIT, while the scope effect was relatively neutral at the EBITDA level. The result, current EBIT for the first half stands at €57 million, down 5.9% on an organic basis. Let's now move into the details of the performance-backed solution and starting with Digital. On slide 12, so before reviewing specifically the half year, let me put our Digital performance into a longer term perspective and note that these figures are prior to the application of IFRS 5 that are due to the discontinued business for the sake of the consistency of these figures across the long time period. On the bottom left chart, our annual recurring revenue has gone from €109 million in 2019 to €264 million at the end of July '26, a compound annual growth rate of about 15% per annum, with a remarkably regular improvement over the period. The chart on the bottom right now shows the same story on quarterly revenue, with subscription-related revenue growing at 16% from the compound annual growth rate since 2020. A logical similar trend compared to the ARR, and now represents 87% of Digital revenue at the end of H1 2026.
And at the top left side, you can see the profitability trajectory with EBITDA rising from around €20 million over a 12-month period, at the mean of the chart, and to more than €50 million if you take both H2 last year and H1 this year, so the past 12 months.
Over to you now, Geoffrey, on slide 13.
Thank you, Laurent. I mentioned at the beginning of the call that our focus is on our Digital solution. I think we could say that we have built a comprehensive and differentiated B2B platform centered around business and financial communication. We bring it all together in one connected experience, communication management invoicing accounts payable accounts receivable payment and cash visibility. Once a customer is on the platform, every module, every product offers an opportunity for upsell, making our solutions stickier for the customer. Compliance, whether regulatory or financial, is the entry point. It's not the destination. And every change in the regulations offers new opportunities for us. The invoicing mandate in Europe is a case in point.
This is a clear regulatory catalyst that has a significant growth opportunity for a Digital solution. Take the example of France, it just went live with its invoicing mandate on September 1. Germany follows in 2027, the U.K. 2027 and the broader European framework in 2030. Everyone and each one of those deadlines extends our addressable base, market by market, over several years. This is not a single event in one country. It's a sequence for which we have been preparing for, and which we reinforce the synergies between our Mail and Digital activities. Our Mail solution brings a large installed base of business customers who will have to digitalize their financial processes.
What goes through a franking machine and folders and inserters are mainly invoices, which we'll have to sign the delivery electronically in the future. We're therefore ideally positioned to support our Mail customers and through their Digital transformation. Moving on to the next slide, let me give you the facts on invoicing in France, where the go-live happened on September 1, so barely 3 weeks ago. Since that day, every business must be able to receive electronic invoices. Large and mid-sized companies must issue them. The issuance obligation extends to SME in September '27, which is 1 year from now. End of '28 will be the first full year of the widened scope.
Now, where do we stand? As of September 21, more than 950,000 entities were registered with Serendia by Quadient. 950,000, so we're really short of 1 million entities. That also includes entities registered with our partners. This is a reminder, we go to market directly and through white label. For business, we acquired 15 months ago. This is a strong commercial success. And we currently are one of the largest platforms in terms of registered entities. Now, there's two different categorizations. For example, SIREN, or on SIRET, numbers of companies or entities.
Likely less than 50% of the companies and entities in France have registered with a new invoicing platform to date. For the ones that have registered, whether companies or entities, we can estimate that we currently have between 13% to 19% market share. In market share, it is now much bigger than we have ever anticipated. Contracted annual invoices now stand around 350 million. This is to be compared to a total nationwide number of invoices that we estimate from the French government between 2 billion to 2.5 billion of B2B invoices exchanged annually. We have a commercial momentum that is very strong. Invoicing booking in France grew 11-fold year on year in the second quarter.
Let me just repeat this. Invoicing, booking in France grew 11-fold. This includes a multi-million € white label agreement. Now, let's go on actual volumes. I want to be measured. We processed only 700,000 invoices. We expect the ramp-up to remain slow and probably slow until the end of the year, as there are only a few platforms fully operational in France, limiting the digital exchange of invoices, right? Somebody registered with us that would like to send an invoice to a company that is not yet registered, but the exchange cannot happen digitally still, right? So we need the entire market to be able to come together. So there will be an exponential acceleration progressively, but we're still in a slow ramp-up phase. Market is in just its first few weeks, many receiving platforms are still coming online.
A lot of the different platforms that have obtained their registration are not live yet, and they will likely come in the next few months. Adoption will take time. So what matters at this stage is the following. We are certified, we are live, we are fully operational, and I would add that we are part of a limited number of fully functioning platforms. We are operating without any incidents and we have secured an already significant number of customers so the volume will continue to follow. On monetization, the model is a subscription structured by deal type plus the monetization of the usage numbers of transactions of invoices. So if I focus on our direct go-to-market where we sell directly to companies, we offer a subscription fee plus an invoice volume commitment. If I now focus on our white label customers, we offer them a subscription covering a committed volume that will be guaranteed revenue for us.
And in both cases, both cases, sorry, invoices above the commitment will be billed per invoice. Now, invoicing is way more than just processing invoices. For us, it's a fantastic upsell opportunity within our Digital platform. So let me explain to you why by turning to the next slide. The e-invoicing mandate brings customers to us in France but also in other European countries as we build a proven track record of delivery and reliability. The opportunities around this initial invoicing service and what drives customer retention in the long term and what helps grow our relationship with them. On our Digital platform, e-invoicing is embedded with accounts payable automation.
The customer gets approval and purchase order matching. He's got an ERP integrated workflows, he's got payment control, and compliance with the reporting. They move from being just compliant to actually improve how they work, and the benefits are tangible. Our published figure shows 5 times average return on investment on those solutions. Invoice processing time cut by half. Approvals 56% faster. From there, we connect account payable with account receivable. And that gives a real-time view for a CFO of both sides of the cash cycle.
In June, if you remember, we launched our AI-powered cash dashboard, which supports now better forecasting and better working capital decisions for those modern CFOs. So each new module depends on the relationship, and each one of them increases the value of the platform, which in turn for us into more upsell. Looking ahead, and to give you a sense of the proportion for the opportunity from invoicing, we're expecting revenue from invoicing to increase at a very fast pace from now to 2030. In terms of upsell into the financial automation, we expect the invoicing and financial automation solution combined to represent close to half of our European Digital revenue by 2030. Another key point that I'd like to stress with you is our solution is recognized obviously externally and such across our customer journey. I'll take a few examples during the period. Quadient was named a leader by Quadrant Group in the Spark Matrix for Accounts Payable Automation for the third year running.
In the same Spark Matrix for Account Receivable Verification, and this one, this time for the fifth time running, in both cases, specific recognition for AI-driven capabilities. Moving to the next slide, I do not want us to lose sight of Customer Communication Management. It remains the foundation of our Digital business. And this ties together the financial automation and invoicing to the rest of Quadient's offering. Our performance remains very solid for our CCM business, especially in the U.S. where we have signed several large deals in H1. So, let me give you a few examples. We had a long-standing U.S. financial services customer that signed a multi-year agreement expand from a point solution to a full CCM platform. This is a multi-million dollar commitment.
I'll give you another example. Major healthcare customer expanded volumes by 75% from 4 billion to 7 billion pages, and they consolidated onto Quadient, displacing competing solution again. Now, both of these are expansion within our existing enterprise or larger enterprise customer base. In both cases, we're replacing somebody else. So we took, it was a competitive win. So for me, that's still the clearest evidence that this platform delivers at enterprise scale. Why do customers choose us? I'll give you five top main reasons. Unified platform. Deployment, Governance, Compliance and Enterprise scale.
Similarly, to the financial automation product, Quadient was also named a leader by the Cas group in the Spark Matrix for Customer Communication Management for the sixth year in a row. So we sit at the top right of the leader band on those customer impact and technology excellence.
With that said, Laurent will now take you through the Digital numbers.
Thank you, Geoffrey. The Digital revenue reached €146 million first half of '26. It's up 6.7% organically. And our recurring revenue increased further to €264 million, representing an annualized organic growth of 12.9% compared to the end of January '26. It was driven by the momentum of bookings. It's up 20% in Q2 versus last year, related to French invoicing, and by a solid performance in North America and CCM. It includes around €5 million of contractually committed components related to invoicing. It also absorbs €1 million of negative currency effect compared to January '26.
Subscription-related revenue continued to show a sustained growth. Non-recurring revenue improved markedly in Q2 compared to Q1, thanks to a more moderate decline in professional services revenue. On the right-hand side, EBITDA reached €21 million, up 17% year-on-year on an organic basis, with an EBITDA margin stable at 14.5%. It is a solid outcome given the increase in implementation costs tied to the French invoice in Go Live and we expect margin progression over the full year. On an organic basis, margin has increased by 130 basis points. Now moving to Mail on slide 18. The structural trend in Mail is well understood and it has not changed.
But what I want to show you here is different. Mail isn't simply a declining business that we manage for cash. It is an asset that is actively supporting the Digital transition. In Europe, a cross-sell of Digital financial automation solutions to Mail customers grew 4-fold ahead of the French mandate. So the Mail base is doing exactly what we said it would do. It gives full and privileged access to business as they digitalize their financial processes. At the same time, we keep investing where customers ask us to.
We launched the IX9, the premier mailing system in France, which extends our leadership at the high end of the market. We secured the major U.S. public sector, deployment for certified NEO. And our DS67 IQ for the Insata is now rolling out globally. We also continue to create intelligent devices by adding complementary software to our Mailing solution globally. To date, we have rolled out our intelligent solutions to almost 80,000 customers globally, reinforcing the value of our Mailing hardware. We continue to add capabilities to the solution with Smart e-Certify, the ability to print and manage all certified and tracked mail, and digital stamps coming in November this year in the U.S. The customer relationship remains strong. Satisfaction was above 96% globally and 98% in North America, our largest market.
Quadient was also named the leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Mailroom Solutions and Services in its 2026 Vendor Assessment. Let's now move to the number for Mail on slide 19. Mail revenues stood at €302 million in the first half, is down 5.7% organically. Two factors explain this performance. First, it's a slower subscription annual recurring revenue, reflecting the gradual contraction of the installed base after the lower placement of recent periods. And second, software hardware volume in Europe, partly offset by the resilience in North America. Q2 was down 6.4%, a weaker sequential performance, which mainly reflects the expiry at the end of Q1 of a service contract in the U.K. Including this specific impact, the underlying trend was stable over the 2 quarters.
On the right hand side, the EBITDA came in at €75 million, it's down 6.6% year on year on an organic basis, with an EBITDA margin of 24.9%, down only by 0.6 points despite the top line performance. This resilience reflects our continued cost discipline, U.S. tariff reimbursement, as well as the commercial productivity gains with Digital in connection with the ramp-up ahead of the invoicing mandate in France. Moving now to Quadient Financials. So first, let's review on slide 21 the P&L. And as you can see in this slide, the '25 comparatives are shown both as published and restated for the application of the IFRS 5 to the Lockers business. Starting from current EBIT of €57 million, optimization expenses and operating income amounted to €7 million, essentially restructuring in Mail. This brings EBIT to €50 million. Net financial expenses stand at €23 million, slightly above last year. Income before tax is therefore €27 million with an income tax charge of €7 million.
This charge benefits from the release of €5 million tax provision. Net income from continuing operations comes out at €21 million. And net income from discontinued operations is negative €11 million. And this reflects the measurement of the Lockers asset at fair market value, less cost to sell in Europe, outside of the U.K., plus the loss of the business over H1. All in net income for the payers is €10 million, of which €10 million are attributable to shareholders. Moving now to slide 22 and the cash flow. We are up to a very strong free cash flow, standing at €34 million for the first half.
It's significant improvement compared to the negative €4 million we had last year at the same date. Starting from an EBITDA of €96 million, other items represent a €10 million outflow, bringing cash flow before net cost of debt and tax to €86 million. A change in working capital required is a €25 million outflow. It's a normalized level compared to H1 '25, reflecting our business model and billing simplicity. Last year, if you remember, this working capital was particularly affected by the additional inventory you had built at the end of January '25, and it was paid over the first half of. The change in these receivables contributed to a positive €29 million, reflecting the continued decline in our stock base. Interest and income tax paid amounted to €31 million, it's well below last year, to €52 million, which included, as we mentioned last year, one-off impacts of the bond refinancing as well as the BIT tax and the 360 tax payments. Cash flow from operations therefore, which is €59 million and after capital expenditure of €25 million, which is to reflect the low level of CapEx in Mail, Free Cash Flow comes out at €34 million.
Cash flow from discontinued operation was an amount of €12 million. It's higher than last year due to the €5 million plus increase in CapEx in the U.K. Moving now to slide 23 to give you some details on the CapEx. CapEx expenditure presented here including excluding IFRS 16, stood at €25 million for the first half, down from €28 million last year, mostly due to the lower placement in Mail. This mainly reflects a reduction of Mail CapEx in line with lower fronting machine placements, while investment in Digital is growing also due to acquisitions. As you can see in the published figure from 2025, Lockers took for a very large share of Total CapEx was about 30% in H1 '25 against a revenue that represented at the time about 10% of the company. Coming now to slide 24, focusing on the net debt and the leverage, the debt stood at €683 million, that includes the EBITDA 16 at the end of July '26, is broadly stable compared to the end of January.
And in reality, it hides a Forex that is adverse to the EBITDA to the debt at €15 million between the two dates, it's offset by the cash generation during the period. At the end of H1 '26, it breaks down into €435 million of net financial debt for leasing and €216 million of non-leasing debt, as well as the €32 million of IFRS 16 debt. Our average I show, excluding leasing, is stable at 1.6 times EBITDA, even if when removing EBITDA from Lockers and cash held by Lockers entity, which is €7 million, the leverage at group level stands at 3.1 times, including easing. Please note that the H1 ratios reflect the application of IFRS 5, while prior periods have not been restated on this graph. Those ratios continue to stand well below our covenant levels, and as mentioned by Geoffrey, the set of U.K. Open Network is expected to bring the leverage ratio extremely down to around 1.2 times by the end of the financial year. Moving now to slide 25, our financial structure. Our liquidity position at the end of July was strong at €123 million in cash, €200 million of unloaned credit facilities, maturing in 2030, and a customer lending portfolio at €522 million, contributing to future cash flow visibility, with maturities well spread over the coming years.
During the period ending in August, we carried out two transactions, the issuance of a €100 million Schuldschein loan and a German private placement and the earlier payment of €65 million for existing Schuldschein, covering the tranches maturing both in November '26 and May '27. This confirms both our access to diversified sources of financing and our discipline in managing a balanced maturity profile. Let's now move to conclusion on page 26 and 27. We are confirming our guidance for the full year on the basis that now excludes Lockers. You can see the translation on this slide. Our previous guidance for fiscal year '26 was organic revenue change of minus 2% to plus 2%. EBITDA margin above 20% in Digital, above 25% in Mail, and above 10% in Lockers. And the leverage ratio extremely low of 1.5 times.
Now take Lockers out, and that translates mechanically organic revenue change of minus 3% to plus 1%, EBITDA margin above 19% in Digital and above 24% in Mail. These are the figures we confirmed for the full year. And we stress this is a technical translation, it's not a change in our view of the business. The margin is stepped down. The relocation of local costs and synergies across Digital Mail. And for Mail, it does reflect the utility effect of the European private network. Private local network we are keeping. On average, the same translation takes out our deleveraging targets from 1.5 times to 1.6 times because Lockers EBITDA comes out. Then we apply the procedure of the U.K. sale, and that takes us to the 1.2 times at the end of the financial year comforted with the strong free cash flow generation at the end of H1, that assumes the sale completes before year end.
And finally, moving to slide 28. So, the same logic applies to our 2030 ambitions, and here I want to be explicit about what we are doing. 2030 revenue ambition, if you remember, by solution are unchanged, it's around €550 million for Digital and around €500 million for Mail. On profitability, take Lockers out and the emission, we announced in March we'd mechanically come down as well, around 29% for Digital instead of 30%, and a range of 19% to 24% for Mail instead of 20% to 25%. We expect to absorb an impact in full, so we are maintaining around 30% for Digital and 20% to 25% for Mail by 2030. Under the restated scope, that is in aggregate. It is our commitment to absorb around 1 point of margin over 5 years through the growth we are building in Digital. Taking Lockers out does not dilute the ambition we set, and Digital is on track to become Quadient's largest and most profitable solution by 2030. A Digital business growing with strong regulatory and structural tailwinds behind it.
A Mail business that is resilient and that is actively feeding the Digital transition. And with financial flexibility to act. Thank you. And with that, I think we are ready to take the questions.
Thank you. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Anyone with a question may press star and 1 at this time. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and 1 on your telephone. At the moment, there are no questions from the conference call. Thank you everybody.
The first question, what is the expected timeline and valuation range for the remaining assets? The U.S. and Japan businesses where Quadient holding leading market positions. Do you expect the transaction to be completed by the end of FY '26? Would you pursue a single buyer for the entire business or separate transactions by a geography?
It's a good question. I think what is important is to do the process right and maximize the value for Quadient. So that's really our, I think, our guiding principles. The U.S. market, we probably have almost a third or 40% of the market share, definitely number 1. It is an at scale business. Representing 85% or 90% of the rest of the revenue. This is really the primary asset in terms of value creation. It is a profitable base, it is cash generative. So, we have obviously a lot of things for us to look for.
In combination to the strong position, we also have the Japanese base where we have 7,000 lockers, roughly a little bit less than half the base in the U.S. It's a more mature base, strongly cash generative. We have probably 60%, 65%, 70% market share left there. So I would call them definitely premium assets with respect when comparison to the lower maturity of the asset we just sold in the U.K. We do have obviously global players that are operating throughout the U.S. and Japan in different areas that are interested by those assets because they obviously play into the locker themselves, use lockers, invest in lockers, potentially also use their own lockers. And we also have a local or country specific interested parties.
So I would say it will take as long as it needs. The rest of the Lockers will be a bit more complex than the U.K. We have several entities across several countries, spanning from France, the U.S., Canada, Japan, et cetera, with a bigger scope of the business. And so aside that, we'll do what we think is the right thing to do. We have obviously communicated this announcement publicly, so it's also in our best interest to move diligently and as efficiently as we can on that. We're not going to commit to any particular timeline. We obviously just want to make sure we are doing the right thing, but we're definitely focused on it now that we have completed the U.K. sale.
Thank you, Geoffrey. What is the return on investment of the Lockers business?
So, on this question, I can take it. I'm not sure if the return on investment is we're looking to the divested part or the existing part. I think we've been quite clear when we are presenting the investment in Lockers that we're expecting, notably in Japan, we discussed for that, notably in the U.K., that we were expecting an internal rate of return that was significantly above our WACC, whatever the region of the world is. I think the divestment of the lockers in the U.K. is an example of divestment where we've been achieving these goals in terms of return. It's the same that we see today in the Japanese base when we look at the future cash flow. And as mentioned by Geoffrey, it's also the rest of the Lockers network and its quality that we expect to produce a strong payback, which I remind you is already significantly positive in terms of EBITDA on the regions that are Japan and North America.
Thank you. Will the €120 million of locker-related CapEx, which is expected to be freed up over the next 5 years, be reallocated to accelerate investment in the Digital business? And over what timeframe does management expect to eliminate the €2 million to €3 million of stranded costs?
So, a few parts here, if we talk a little bit about the strategic allocation of our capital, and maybe you can specify the stranded costs that are probably a little bit more complex than what we've mentioned in the question. From a capital allocation perspective, I think we've been in our last Capital Market Day pretty specific on how we intended to allocate CapEx, the deleveraging of the company, shareholder returns. We noted the dividend, also share buybacks, and obviously what we think was needed to also to invest into the business and potentially at times also doing some smaller acquisition that we've done with Passer Concierge and we've done more recent with Serendia. I think we've been also very clear as it relates to what is our focus and our strategy, right? And our decision to sell the Lockers business only to be able to focus even more on our goal, which is to make Digital the largest activity, naturally, of the group and see the momentum that we see with the university in the U.K. As a reminder, to achieve our goal for 2030, this is an organic plan and does not require, does not necessitate any inorganic investment or allocation of capital. So from that perspective, we just remain opportunistic. So now that I have shared that context, I think it's important that we complete the U.K. sale. We finish the investment of the rest of the lockers.
And once we have received those proceeds, it will be time probably around the after our financial communication for the full year. Now that then there will be a good time to reset expectation I think for the coming years. And as part of that, obviously, to be able to share with you what the Board of Directors will have decided in terms of allocation of those resources and capital. But from a business perspective, I think we are pretty clear and pretty focused on what we need to do.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Could you remind us what the revenue and EBITDA from the U.K. Open Network was and what multiples the €65 million represent against these?
So I think Geoffrey mentioned the revenue being expected more than €10 million this year and EBITDA being expected to break even this year.
Thank you. Is it safe to assume that the U.S. and Japan will be sold to two different buyers?
No, it's not safe to assume that. We have a business that has a common platform, shared R&D. It's one platform, it's the same platform that is being used by the U.S. consumers. There's the residents in the U.S., the one that has been used in Japan or in Canada or the rest of the world, by the way, even in the U.K. which is a good opportunity for me just to specify. We sold the U.K. base, but we did not sell the IP of Quadient, right? So the platform is, the ownership of the platform and the technology and the R&D, whether it's hardware or software, is retained by Quadient. So this is really what we're selling is the distribution and PC of the local base in the U.K. and we retain that IP and that IP is necessary to sustain both the U.S. and Japanese base not only. So there's I think a legitimate case for a buyer that would be interested by the entire IP.
That being said, we obviously, this is the purpose of the process, will remain open to see if there are various interests as part of the business and if it makes sense and it creates more value, then something we could also consider.
Thank you. And how does Quadient intend to use the disposal proceeds? Debt reduction, enhanced share buyback program, special dividends or reinvestment in the Digital business?
So I think it's a similar question from the one we have before. I think I could just use the difference on the short term we do expect to receive the cash of the €65 million of the U.K. divestment before the end of the year. Laurent explained to you that based on that, we will be able to delever the company much further than what we anticipated in our guidance, so from the 1.5 to the 1.2 at minimum, obviously, but that's a short-term deleveraging and I think it would be great that the full year result would be able to come back to you and set a new expectation as we move forward in line with our business strategies, which is obviously to focus on our Digital business.
And could you give us an overview of the criteria on which the transaction was done?
Yes, on the on the front I think we have a very open process and we have obviously multiple bids because also the quality of the assets and we reviewed it independently and I would say it was on different aspects. Obviously, price is one of them. Speed of execution. Also, the quality of the partnership, because I remind you that we didn't sell the IP here, just the distribution. So what does it mean for the coming quarters, for the coming months in terms of software, for example, in terms of support, services, et cetera. All those elements, and obviously the IDS offer has been the best offer.
And could you give us some more color on the involvement of VESA in the Lockers, Mail and Digital business?
None whatsoever. The VESA, and we're very grateful to have them as our first shareholder. But they are not at the board, so they have no board representation. Therefore, they're not part of the deliberation, evaluation, reviews of the different stages of the offers we have received for the U.K. Neither as part of the decision and the making of the decision about which offer to select and which deal to make. After that, I will not speak on behalf of any of our shareholders, about anything else that they may think or have expressed and that they have expressed it publicly.
And what are your expectations regarding the cash proceeds from Lockers divestitures? Leverage is already under control and 2030 goals are organic.
So that's a good comment and statement. It's logical. And I think with Laurent, we've been very clear and being supported by the board that, you know, for us this year was the year where we needed to get shareholder return and being focused on the return to our shareholders. We have made during the last few years significant investment to transform the company and I we felt that it was time also to be able to provide a return to our shareholders. Now, there could be different ways, right? The share price, the dividend, the share buybacks. And it's true that unless there was something significant that would come, we can achieve our 2030 ambition without that. So a lot, a big part of the analysis between what, is expected as a fair deleveraging. You know the interest rates are also increasing or they haven't been as low as they used to be.
And we need to also anticipate how the market condition could evolve. So there's always a case for a bit more deleveraging. And after that, we have many other options, I think, to create the shareholder return. Dividend is part of our policy. We've been increasing it steadily year on year. Now we have the exceptional proceeds, I think that could also be something we could review. And obviously, there's also a legitimate evaluation of the opportunity of doing a share buyback, especially when we have a share price that is low.
And that's part of what the board is reviewing on a regular basis and have made decisions on a regular basis to augment or initiate a different program in the past. And I think it's in that light that I am sure we will review those expectations and set a new course for the beginning of next year. Thank you.
So IDS Holdco is owned by EP Group, Mr. Kwiatkowski, who is also more than 26% shareholder of Quadient through VESA. How was the conflict of interest managed in the transaction? Were there any competing third-party offers for the U.K. open network? And did the board obtain an independent fairness opinion confirming the €65 million valuation?
So, this was a very competitive process. We had received several multiple offers at various stage, non-binding, and obviously, you know, preliminary LOIs, various level of indication of interest before we could select the right body for us. We had independent advisors with Societe Generale and also with our legal advisors, Darrois Villey Maillot Brochier, has supported us in the process. Make sure we could have a good and fair evaluation of the different terms and conditions that were presented to us. But I think on just the merit of the competitive offer, I think for the board, which is an independent board, Mr. Kaczynski or his entourage, did not participate at the board of Quadient, right? So it's reasonable they've been able to review those without any interference from anybody else. And I think we made the decision that was in the best interest of Quadient based on a very competitive process.
Thank you. There is a provision for the European parcel network on which country? What would be the remaining equity for the European parcel network? Is there specific explanation versus other areas where parcels are strong? And is the European parcel network to be sold in the medium term? So,
I'll take that one, Geoffrey. The rest of Europe, in terms of balance sheet, in terms of size, is relatively small. So basically, the level of equity is limited outside of the private network that is now part of the Mail division. So there is not much left, I'd say, in the group value of Europe. Obviously, the biggest part is Japan, to a certain extent North America, and also all what we call the IP that stands in France. And that is part of the scope to be sold.
Thanks, Laurent. Are your expectations to sell at a premium versus the U.K. price, the U.S. and the Japan Lockers business? Yes.
It's very difficult to know at this stage. We obviously have I think a very competitive price for the U.K. I think we need to go through the process and look at what the market will tell us on the rest of our Lockers business, which again, have significant difference, both in terms of maturity scale and leadership position in those respective markets versus the U.K. and and we look forward to it.
And how much profit is expected on the €60 million divestment of U.K. households?
It's a €65 million divestment. We don't go to the details of by country, what's the equity of each if Lockers. So I suggest we end, we wait for the closing and you will see eventually, at the end of the year, what is the net impact on the specific IFRS 9 and how much upside there's been against the equity value. I think it's just principally the equity, we have a bit of tax, naturally. Absolutely. There is nothing special. Absolutely. And the bulk of it will be the net between whatever the purchase price is minus the tax and minus the equity, which is mostly the tangible assets that are the lockers.
How will customer data and accounts be migrated and managed as part of the data settlement?
The customer data, it's obviously the platform itself, it's how we operate a network. So I think we need to differentiate the data, the operational data, the customer data to run the business versus the back office, the CRM, the ERP, and the financial system that they need. We have established a TSA agreement with the buyer to be able to support them in that transition and making sure that we focus on the customer satisfaction at every moment during that transition and making sure there will be no disruption sufficient time to be able to migrate the back-office system, more generally speaking. And as part of the process too, as Laurent mentioned, the software is owned by Quadient. And we will now become a software vendor for this buyer, and we will be at like we do for many other carriers and we will obviously maintain and support and upgrade the system so there will be no disruption on the data and no need for migration on the short term. The new buyer will set this new course, a new strategy, and we'll be happy to support them in case they elect at some point to change and migrate to another system if they elect to.
Thanks, Geoffrey. Is it your ambition to sell the rest of the Lockers business at a price at more than €20,000 per locker? That price would be consistent with premium versus U.K. deal.
So I'll take that one, Geoffrey. It's a bit of a simplest view to price, I think, to value a business just based on the number of lockers. It's depending on much more what's the usage of this locker, in which market are we in? Do we have the ownership of this locker? On our balance sheet. So again, if you remember, Japan and U.K. are mostly open network and sitting on the relative equity, while North America is mostly sold lockers. So I don't think we can take this shortcut of €20,000 per locker. It's going to depend again. how much is the usage, what is the maturity of this base as well, you know, what's the remaining value of the assets, what's the future growth, obviously, what's the expected margin. And here, we mentioned that we sold U.K., but it's just distribution part.
We also have all the IP and the royalties that have been in France and this also brings an additional layer of margin that needs to be also assessed in the future cash flow.
Thanks, Laurent. You mentioned entity's price value of €65 million for the open network proposals in the U.K. and what was the equity?
So I think we mentioned that already, €3,000, that's the bulk, basically, of the net book value is the tangible asset, which is €3,000. And we know there is a range between €10k to €20k depending on the size of the locker, basically.
Thank you, Laurent. Could you just remind us what is the cost of the?
Yes, that's just what I mentioned. And perhaps, moving on to Neil, would be tariff refunds in each one. So we got about €3 million back on the tariff refund. So we got a little bit more. In fact, part of it was tied to lockouts. So it's been reclassified as well. It's about €3 million.
Thank you. And is there a share buyback program online?
Going at the moment? So we're not currently buying back shares, but we obviously it's part of the consideration of capital allocation in the future whenever we sell obviously and we get the cash first and sell the rest of the Lockers as well.
Thank you. Beyond the acquisition of the U.K. Lockers business, do you have any visibility on VESA's or EP Group's intentions regarding its shareholding in Quadient? Is a shareholder agreement or standstill arrangement being considered?
Obviously, we're not going to speak on behalf of our shareholder. We can refer to their last declaration, when I think they passed a threshold of 25% of ownership and the intent that they had, and I think they've been clear that they were supporting the strategy and that they had no intent to ask for a board position and there is no basis to have a standstill or any other type of agreement that would be a shareholder agreement at this stage.
Thanks, Geoffrey. And when selling the U.K. fleet of lockers, have you kept some intellectual property on the technology with future royalties to be received?
Absolutely, as I was mentioning, you need to be distinguishing the distribution part, which is the distributing legal entity, like Lockers U.K. in this particular case, that is buying both lockers from our supply chain that owns the IP, both of the hardware and the software, and pays royalties based on the usage and based on the access to the software for each locker. So the IP has not been sold and that's why I was mentioning that the overall project of the buyer was also included in the evaluation and the ability to continue supplying IP.
The €65 million purchase price does not include services to maintain the technology that the overall obviously on arm's length basis with anybody that uses our technology, including the new buyer, until they elect to do otherwise.
Okay, thank you both. So I think that's all the questions, so we can conclude the call. Thank you everyone for attending and for asking all your questions. So our next call will be on December 1 for our third quarter sales release. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing you, some of you, in the coming days during our AGM. Thank you very much and have a wonderful evening. Thank you Laurent, thank you everybody, thank you Laurent.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones. Thank you.
This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review.
Quadient — Q2 2027 Earnings Call
Quadient — Q2 2027 Earnings Call
H1 2026: Quadient confirms H1 results, sells UK open Lockers for €65m, launches sale of remaining Lockers and doubles down on Digital invoicing momentum.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: €448m H1 2026 (restated), organic -2% year‑on‑year
- Digital: €146m (+6.7% organic); Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) €264m; Digital EBITDA €21m (+17%), margin 14.5%
- Mail: €302m (-5.7% organic); Mail EBITDA €75m, margin 24.9%
- Profitability: Current EBIT €57m (-5.9% organic); Group EBITDA margin 21.5%
- Cash & leverage: Free cash flow €34m; net debt €683m; leverage excluding leases 1.6x, expected ~1.2x after UK sale
🎯 What Management Says
- Strategic pivot: Digital named priority—goal for Digital to be largest and most profitable solution by 2030, led directly by the CEO
- Lockers review: UK open network sold to IDS for €65m; sale process launched for remaining Lockers (North America, Japan) with IP retained by Quadient
- Invoicing momentum: France e‑invoicing go‑live: ~950k entities registered, ~350m contracted annual invoices, invoicing bookings up 11x in Q2; monetization via subscription + per‑invoice usage and upsell into AP/AR automation
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- Guidance: Full‑year guidance confirmed on Lockers‑excluded basis: organic revenue -3% to +1%
- Margins: Digital EBITDA margin >19% and Mail EBITDA margin >24% (translation of prior guidance after IFRS 5 reclassification)
- Balance sheet: UK proceeds expected to reduce leverage to ~1.2x if transaction closes in FY‑26; Board will decide allocation of further proceeds (deleveraging, buybacks, dividends or reinvestment)
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Lockers sale timing: No fixed timeline for remaining disposals; process aimed at maximising value—could be single or multiple buyers depending on bids
- Use of proceeds: Near‑term priority is debt reduction and lower capital intensity; capital allocation choices (buybacks/dividend/reinvestment) to be decided by the Board after receipts
- Governance & IP: UK sale ran a competitive process with independent advisors; Quadient retains software/IP and will license it (royalties) and provide transition services to buyer
⚡ Bottom Line
- Implication: Disposal of the UK Lockers and launch of wider sale sharpens focus on higher‑margin Digital growth (notably e‑invoicing), materially reduces future CapEx needs (~€120m over 5 years) and de‑risks the balance sheet, while near‑term upside depends on speed of invoicing adoption and timing/pricing of remaining Locker sales
Quadient — Q1 2027 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Quadient's First Quarter 2026 Revenue Call. I'm Laura Paxton, Head of Investor Relations at Quadient, and I'm here today with Geoffrey Godet, CEO; and Laurent Du Passage, CFO.
We will have a short presentation followed by Q&A, and then you can submit your questions in writing through the web or ask questions live by dialing into the conference call. The presentation and press release are now available on our website at invest.quadient.com, and a replay of the call will also be available on our website.
Thank you very much for joining us this evening. I will now hand over to you, Geoffrey.
Thank you, Laura, and welcome, Laurent. Good evening, everyone. Starting on Slide 5. So let me start with a brief reminder of some of the key dynamics shaping our performance as we entered 2026.
As you remember, as I have outlined during our full year results, we continue to operate in an environment that has been driven by key structural trends, right? So first one is the acceleration of digitalization, supported in particular by AI and invoicing mandates.
And the second one is the ongoing structural evolution of the Mail market. Alongside our full year result in 2025, we also announced a major organization of the Executive Committee with a very clear intention, align the leadership with our operational priorities and most importantly, put our digital automation platform at the center of the company with the clear goals to accelerate both growth and innovation.
Now this has already enabled a sharper and more coordinated go-to-market approach and particularly when it comes to e-invoicing in Europe. E-invoicing is not just a one-size-fits-all rollout, right? It requires local execution aligned with country-specific regulation and ecosystems.
And traction is already coming through. So notably in France ahead of the September 2026 deadline and contributing to the strong acceleration we are now seeing in the digital ARR.
So against this, the first quarter is in line with the trajectory that we set out at the beginning of the year. So if we now look at the performance by solution, we can see how these trends are translating across Quadient.
In digital, ARR growth accelerated sharply, up around 16% on an annualized basis versus the end of January 2026. This was supported by both solid booking activity and low churn and a great usage. So more broadly, this level of activity reflects the continued relevance of our solution in an environment where both automation and AI are obviously, as you know, becoming increasingly central to the customer needs that we have.
So lastly, the subscription-related revenue continued to grow in the double digits in particular. In May, we moved to a second solution, we saw a clear easing of the rate of decline, which is a great news, right, with the trend improving significantly from almost 11% decline in the last quarter, right, in Q4 2025 to roughly a 5% decline in Q1 2026.
And this was primarily driven naturally by our main market by an improved performance in North America. We are also seeing some very encouraging signs from a commercial standpoint, right? So in line with the recent change to the Executive Committee, we appointed a new Chief Solution Officer for Mail, and we are stepping up execution, and we have enhanced commercial discipline that support that progress moving forward.
So we do expect naturally and consequently, right, for the Mail to continue easing over the course of 2026. Now a few words just on lockers. Subscription-related revenue continued to grow very rapidly, driven by an increase in usage and the network expansion at the same time.
And the overall performance was impacted on the other hand, with a high comparison basis in the hardware sales, in particular, in our International segment, and we'll go with Laurent over in more details.
So overall, if I step back a little bit, these developments, right, illustrate the continued strengthening of our revenue profile with a further increase in our subscription-related revenue and even a much more controlled evolution of our ML solution.
As a wrap-up, for the first quarter of 2026, we posted EUR 243 million in revenue, down slightly 1.9% on an organic basis. Just a little word on profitability. We have also made a very good start of the year, and we're tracking in line with our expectation on that front as well. So looking ahead for the rest of the year, we expect Digital and Lockers, both to continue delivering some solid subscription-related revenue growth and while the Mail trends are expected to continue easing in the coming quarters.
On that basis, naturally, we confirm our full year 2026 guidance. So with all that said, I will now hand it over to Laurent for the business review.
Thank you, Geoffrey. I'll now go over the details of the Q1 revenue performance. So let's now start with Slide 7. This waterfall chart illustrates the key drivers behind the change in revenue from Q1 '25 to Q1 '26.
Starting from EUR 258 million revenue, we see a EUR 1 million positive impact from scope effect from the acquisition of Serensia and CDP in June and December '25, respectively.
Digital contributed positively year-on-year, adding EUR 5 million over the quarter. As for Mail, we saw a EUR 9 million decline, an improved trend compared to previous quarters. If you remember, on average in '25, Mail has been declining about 2x faster at EUR 17 million a quarter.
Lastly, Lockers decreased by EUR 1 million in revenue impacted by a strong comparison base for hardware, resulting in an organic decline for Quadient overall at 1.9% for Q1. Currency effects impacted revenue by EUR 12 million this quarter, comparison base should ease for USD to euro throughout Q2.
The net result is a EUR 15 million decrease. It's a 6% reported, bringing us to EUR 243 million for Q1 '26. Let's now move to Slide 8.
When looking at the breakdown of revenue, we see the continued shift towards subscription-related revenue across Quadient moving from 70% to 77% from Q1 '22 to Q1 '26. This is the chart on the left-hand side. Despite headwinds on the subscription side for the Mail business, notably in Q1 '26, Quadient still shows a positive growth on the subscription-related revenue in Q1 '26 compared to Q1 '25 by 1.3%.
On the right-hand side, Digital and Locker penetration within the subscription-related revenue has surged from 29% to 43% in the same period of time, resulting today in an almost balanced contribution between Mail and growth engines. Back to you, Geoffrey, to update us on the digital business.
Thank you, Laurent, for those updates. So on Slide 9, I want to highlight 2 key things for the digital trajectory. First one is our leadership in customer communication management. The second one is the acceleration we're seeing in the invoicing in France.
So first, on our CCM segment, we have been named a leader in the Omdia Universe, right, which is the Customer Communication Management 2026 report.
And our Quadient Inspire Suite received yet again the best-in-class recognition and such for 2 things, right, for both the technology and solution breadth and with the highest technology score among the vendors evaluated. What I like about this assessment is that it highlights the areas where we differentiate today and where do we differentiate? A unified omnichannel solution, strong deployment flexibility and the integration of what we call governed human-centered AI into the enterprise communication capability.
Now if we talk about the financial automation and the invoicing, the quarter shows a clear acceleration in commercial momentum in France, obviously, ahead of the September 2026 reform deadline. As you could see, the vast majority of our orders in the period were driven by the e-invoicing. And we delivered our strongest quarter to date, and this is our strongest quarter-to-date in new logo acquisition in France, and it has been supported also by shorter sales cycles and adoption across multiple sectors, multiple verticals and covering both incoming and outgoing invoicing flows.
We also achieved a landmark win with a major vehicle distributor, and we have obviously further expansion and potential across additional solutions with that customer. And importantly, as well, this is not obviously only a sales story, which we like. It is also a clear demonstration of the execution readiness and our ability to scale in this market. Through what we call now the Serensia by Quadient platform, we are, as you know, participating in the French government, we call Grand Pilot, which is effectively the phase where the platforms begin processing invoicing flows in what I want to stress in real production conditions ahead of that September '26 deadline.
And notably, we're already supporting France's largest invoice issuer and we expect additional major customers to join shortly, which I think demonstrates today both our ability to onboard large customers and to handle some very high volume flow.
So not only does the participation in the Grand Pilot validate our technical readiness, but with fewer than 40 platforms from vendors, right, currently issuing invoicing flows, our level of activity already signal a very high degree of operational maturity. And it shows that customers trust us to deliver ahead of the deadline in September, which I think position us as a preferred partner today for businesses seeking reliable and scalable invoicing solution, which is going to be critical for the business moving forward.
And this commercial and operational momentum is obviously reflected in our revenue and ARR growth, which we will now look at in more detail on Slide 10. So, we continue to deliver in Q1, strong organic growth in subscription-related revenue, which increased by almost 11%, 10.8% organically in the quarter and now represent almost 88% of our digital revenue.
This reflects both the natural continued strength of our business model and the increasing visibility of our revenue base. At the same time, our nonrecurring revenue, right, which is mostly services and license combined declined by 16.2%, which naturally reflects the lower professional service -- sorry, lower professional services revenue, and it's mostly linked to two factors.
One, we have an increasing of mid-segment customers being onboarded, as you know, in the total mix, which requires fewer services compared to a large enterprise customer in that segment. And so naturally, that makes a difference in the mix. And the second point is the fact that we have a large proportion of our professional services to our network partners.
So consequently, digital revenue grew by 6.8% organically year-on-year, reaching now EUR 71 million in this first quarter. Beyond the revenue, and I think most importantly, looking ahead, let's talk about our forward-looking indicators, which remains very strong. Our future annual recurring revenue, or ARR, reached EUR 257 million at the end of April.
That acceleration represents an annualized growth rate of 16%. This performance is supported obviously by some solid year-on-year growth in both the booking during the quarter, but also and most importantly, an increased usage combined with a lower churn, which I think highlights the relevance of our platform and its stickiness with our customer base today.
In terms of drivers, we continue to benefit from the strong invoicing momentum that we have on the market in France, which I spoke about on the previous slide as well as a very good performance across the board of our customer communication management, in particular, by the way, in one of the regions in North America, and that has been -- so we've seen also sustained traction from the SMBs across all regions.
So overall, I could say that Q1 confirms the strength of our digital platform with continued double-digit growth in subscription-related revenue and a clear acceleration in ARR, which naturally gives us some strong confidence in the trajectory for the remainder of the year. With that said, over to you, Laurent, on Mail.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Let's now move to Mail performance on Slide 11. After several quarters of stronger decline, market trends are improving, as you can see on the graph, and Quadient performance is converging towards market levels, halving the pace at which Mail was declining on average last year.
Indeed, the market is now recovering following the [indiscernible] with an ease comparison basis and a resurgence of replacements and new logos opportunities seeking to upgrade or be equipped with our latest Quadient offering.
In Europe, we've seen as well a strong order intake over EUR 2 million for highly differentiated folder inserter, DS-700. And we also launched DS-67iQ, the next generation of mid-volume intelligent folder inserters expected to support future upgrades in this market segment. Let's now move to the figures on Page 12.
As you could see from a high-level standpoint on Slide 11, Mail revenue decline narrowed to 5.2% after declining by around 10% year-over-year in 2025. However, the most important point is the significant improvement in the hardware trends with a clear easing from minus 15.6% year-on-year in the last quarter to minus 3.6% in Q1 '26. That's 12 percentage point improvement led by North America and the U.K.
This trend is expected to continue over '26, while decline in subscription-related revenue is reflective of the evolution of the installed base and a consequence of last year's lower hardware placements. We also continue to deploy cross-sell strategies, particularly linking Mail customers to digital solutions such as invoicing and accounts payable, where we've seen strong demand ahead of the invoicing mandate in France. Let's turn now to Lockers on Page 13.
Our installed base reached approximately 28,200 Lockers at the end of Q1 '26, thanks to about 500 new Lockers deployed this quarter, fueled by U.K. and North America in particular.
The adoption in the U.K. is extremely strong. Thanks to this, our open network in Europe has nearly doubled over the past 15 months and the volume of parcels processed through it has been multiplied by an impressive 5x over the same period with another record in April 2026.
This strong momentum is a direct result of the strategic partnerships we established and the quality of the Lockers deployed in differentiated locations, which we will continue to deploy also, thanks to a major open network deal with Morrisons in the U.K. that will provide us 500 locations and around 11 million customers weekly.
In North America, we further deployed our parcel planning solution with the University of South Carolina. We also continue to enjoy a #1 position in the university market segment. Let's look now at Slide 14 with the local revenue.
The strong adoptions mentioned in the previous slide translates into an extremely strong development of the subscription-related revenue, which now represents 80% of local total revenue in Q1 '26.
It is plus 18% quarter-over-quarter, increasing again compared to the trend of Q4 '25, where we've seen 17.3%, which was already increased throughout 2025. This trend is reflecting volume usage and low level of churn across our base. In particular, it is the result of the expansion of our open network in the U.K., the usage initiatives we have in the U.S. to enhance monetization and turnover and also the strong parcel momentum in Japan outperforming the market.
However, this was offset by a 44% decline on hardware, reflecting a softer performance in the U.S. multifamily, but for the biggest part due to a large deal in International segment last year with Lockers delivered across 25. This comparison basis on the hardware side is therefore likely to continue in the coming quarters.
As a result, revenue declined by 3.8% organically from EUR 27 million last year to EUR 24 million in Q1 this year.
Moving now to Slide 15. This slide summarizes our Q1 '26 performance across all solutions as described. Recovery is particularly strong in Mail compared to past quarters. The strong performance in Digital and local recurring revenues set a solid foundation for the rest of the year.
I suggest we now move to the outlook on Page 17. As we look ahead to the rest of 2026, the trends we are seeing in Q1 gives us confidence in our trajectory. The significant easing in the rate of decline in Mail, the continued solid growth in subscription-related revenue across our growth engines and the acceleration in the ARR to 16% provide a good visibility on our development for the coming quarters.
At the same time, we've made a good start to the year on profitability and are tracking in line with our expectations. Taken together, these elements indicate that we are on track with the trajectory we set at the beginning of the year.
On that basis, we confirm our full year 2026 outlook with 2026 organic revenue change expected to range between minus 2% and plus 2% and 2026 EBITDA margin targets confirmed across all solutions, Digital above 20%, Mail above 25% and Lockers above 10%.
Thank you, Laurent. Thank you, Geoffrey. We're now ready to take any questions.
[Operator Instructions] Ms. Paxton, there are no questions in the conference call right now.
Okay. Perhaps we can move on to written questions.
First of all, should we expect a lag effect between the significant acceleration of digital ARR and its translation into organic sales growth?
Thank you, Laura. So technically, the ARR is representative of the coming 12 months basically subscription revenue. So if you look at the ARR at the end of 2025 and if we take the growth of the ARR in '25 was about 10%, and we can see Q1 this year is 10.8%.
So you have as a forward-looking indicator, the materialization of this ARR is coming in the coming months and quarters that follows basically that additional bookings and trend.
That being said, if you were to do Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 at that level of 16% plus growth, then it would translate in the coming 12 months into that 16% growth. This additional bookings that we captured in Q1, yes, we progressively translate throughout, obviously, Q2, Q3, Q4. But when you look at Q2 compared to the Q2 the year before, obviously, what counts is the overall development of the ARR over the 12 rolling months. So the 16% will not translate immediately. It's going to be delayed and cover the coming 12 months.
Thank you, Laurent. We'll stay on the digital. On the ARR growth, what is the total percentage of new ARR driven by e-invoicing? Is the 16-ish growth likely to be replicated in Q2?
So Laura, I'm going to give you maybe the first part of the answer, and then you can complement as you see it because I just want to remind everybody of what is included in our bookings and ARR today and what is not and how the invoicing will impact us moving forward.
When we talk more broadly about the e-invoicing, there are different segments, right? There's the actual platform that is certified by the government that will be active in production starting in September 2026. So on that portion, the actual revenue will only start to materialize from now and from then September '26.
And with the mandate not being applicable to all type of customers in September '26, progressively companies will move from large enterprise mid-segment and the low ones and the mandate initiating the compliance for incoming invoice versus outgoing invoice, and that will happen progressively over 18 months from September 2026.
On the other hand, we have now embarked customer contracts, orders to be able to anticipate that go live. Those value of contracts that we have ahead of time are not included in our ARR calculation yet. So this is further acceleration that will come and be recognized both in our ARR as we can materialize the revenue in the next 12 months, which is not the case yet.
It will start in September '26. Two, we will start being able to also recognize bookings along the way from that date on. And in terms of volume or scale, obviously, as more customers use it and more customers use it for more invoice depending on the different type of flows of invoice, we will have an acceleration on the volume base and the subscription related to this approved platform. What we have included and what we're referring to in the acceleration of the bookings, including in Q1 for that annualized 16% of ARR is because when we talk about the invoicing, obviously, customers don't look just at the approved compliance aspect of the invoicing, but on how to manage the incoming invoices, the account payable workflow or the account receivable workflow.
And on that, we have applications that we are installing for customers or plan to install, we have new orders, and that's what is calculated in part of our booking and part of our we see usage, and that has started to benefit our French revenue already to date in Q1, and it will continue even before September 2026.
And in addition, obviously, what has not taken to materialize in our recognized revenue is the backlog of orders. We have signed a lot of customers since September. It's been an acceleration month-on-month, and we keep accelerating the numbers of new customers we're signing up. And we're going to see that materialization of onboarded customers in the coming months up to September '26 and after September maturity.
And all that will translate into revenue along the way. So there's going to be a delay from what we have signed and not recognized yet in booking and ARR and will come later, and we'll have a fast track acceleration of recognized revenue starting from September '26 and probably with a full blown full speed of the benefit of that invoicing volume probably in the year '27 or probably even '28.
Laurent, feel free to add and complement.
I would comment one thing, Geoffrey, as you rightfully mentioned from September in '26 in France, those volumes that are signed today will materialize and are not factored in today.
So basically, this increase in [ 6% of TRR ] for me is a very positive news because it's in addition of what we expect to come in by the end of the year. It's good bookings, obviously, but it's also a very nice retention.
And I think it's important to see and to acknowledge that our solutions are very sticky. And as we've seen in Q1 is that the stickiness seems to be again improving, which I think is giving us also the confidence of the quality of the service and solutions that we provide.
Thanks Laurent and thanks Geoffrey. Could you tell us a bit more about the higher externalization of services in the digital segment?
Yes, absolutely. I mean, as you know, professional services is mostly the implementation of the software. It's particularly coming from the enterprise segment, meaning where we have a larger scope of integration within back-end systems, could be [indiscernible], could be other back-end systems.
I think it is not necessarily where we see the most strategic part of the revenue nor the most profitable part. And obviously, part of our strategy has to be to focus on where we had the most added value. And we had the trend in the past of a declining professional services level. We still are expecting in the coming quarters to see that level of professional services going down and it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also to refocus on the most strategic part of our business.
And it's also tied to the overall mix. The mid-market part is growing faster. It's consuming very little professional services. So as a mix effect, you also have a decline -- a relative decline of professional services.
Okay. Thank you, Laurent. Another question on Digital. How do you see the upcoming invoicing mandate in France? Are you expecting an acceleration of bookings or are we already in the peak phase of market adoption? I think we've already covered most of this, but perhaps something you'd like to add.
Sure. I think it's a good point. I think we expect some continued acceleration until the September deadline, but also after the mandate and probably to continue another 6 months, another year. I think we believe there will likely be also some shuffling from post-mandate perspective because we've seen other vendors, as you know, roughly 100 vendors that are applying for this certification and some of them are struggling to be able to have the platform ready and successful and some of them are dropping out.
So I think it will continue to be a strong active market, at least 6 months after the mandate getting into Q1 2027. And that's really how we see it today and we're getting ourselves ready to be able to onboard further customers as we move forward and also to help vendors that will require the platform to either white labeling, which we have also done in the recent past.
So to be able to enlarge the scope of services and the scale of the market we can support in France.
And personally, I see many colleagues, many CFOs obviously going to the race of being compliant by September 1. We know that, as mentioned by Geoffrey, there's going to be some lag. We know also that sometimes we select vendors that are not providing fully satisfactory levels when it comes to volumes and it comes to the quality of the integration.
And we expect that we have obviously a lot of demand coming up and some would be also second level demand of people that would not have been successful with the first vendor.
And so we expect the payer to be extremely busy between now and September and even after.
Thank you, Laurent. Regarding the bookings for invoicing in France, do the full software, the overall software revenue, does it include implementation services.
No. When it comes to -- when we talk bookings, we talk about only SaaS when the bookings that comes into [indiscernible] is basically SaaS level, so an equivalent of annual recurring revenue compared to the annual recurring revenue booked at the same date last year. That's what we. We don't include profession services.
On the other hand, from a recognized revenue, we have some services that are included to set up the platform and those services as they get delivered will be recognized from a revenue standpoint.
Absolutely.
And have you observed the emergence of new players and material progress from competitors? Do you think that they are leading the race?
It hasn't materially changed, I think, recently. What we're seeing is obviously different type of players. There's the one like us that really have an ambition beyond France and to other countries and are also helping customers in Belgium who are getting ready for the mandate.
So you would have the quarterback or the major player that are getting ready. The one also they can -- they have already embarked some large contracts, large volume that will likely be able to support those French customers moving forward.
But as we could see with the Grand Pilot, we haven't seen the hundreds of players yet getting to that stage, and they may come to that point later. But our assumptions or current belief today is that as we get to the more tricky part of the validation on the performance, the scaling, the testing, we're more likely to see some -- a few more vendors dropping out.
And we see also already getting codes for some customers or some organizations that haven't been able to move forward with the current shows that they had made before, and we see deals that are coming back to us naturally and being able to help them. So it's less likely to be some attrition. It's difficult to predict at what level.
I think what we're doing is focusing on our capability operationally to scale those customers, onboard those customers properly one by one because we have obviously a large amount of backlog as well of orders that we're going to need to fulfill from now and then.
And Geoffrey, I think one point as well is that we are delivering through our platform, the invoicing capability. But obviously, what's key and reducing for the mid to enterprise side is really having the ability to do both AI and AP and integrate the full process around the invoice, which is not necessarily what other players would focus on, and that's clearly a one-stop shop.
And I see with my team being able just to retrieve the invoice, but also process it and match it to a PO or on the other side, being able to do the [indiscernible] for an unpaid invoice is critical for the larger organizations.
Thanks. Perhaps we'll move on to Mail now. What is the trend for Mail hardware in Q2? Is it likely to be positive?
I think on Mail side, we had a huge step-up already in Q1 compared to the trend we had all along 2025.
We think Q2 with the good fundamentals we see in Q1 being reflected already throughout Q2. So I think the trend we are on is the one that clearly is to continue ease compared to where it was. And the step-up we had compared to last year is large, and I don't foresee any reason why it would not be at least at the same level.
The question mark is how much more we could do, notably on the hardware part that seems to be more dynamic again with again, that lag between the decertification we had back in 2024, 2025, where the market was quite dry and '26, now people are coming back and there are new opportunities of replacement and upgrades.
And I think that's where we are. And when we said overall, we mentioned the full year that we would be at around EUR 500 million by 2030. The CAGR was about minus 5%. We're already minus 5.2%. Obviously, can we do better? That's what we'll see in the coming quarters, but we are pretty confident.
Thank you, Laurent. Moving on to Lockers now. You installed around 500 new lockers per quarter on average. Is there a risk of a slowdown in locker sales in the near term if you maintain this pace?
No, I think one comment is we don't build by Locker necessarily and all the open network is obviously the main driver is the usage is what we could see on the slide I did present where we were seeing the overall volume throughout Europe.
Locker that you deploy in an open network, the level of volume and traffic is low is not going to produce a lot of revenue. And the key lever when it comes to revenue and profitability is really that usage rate and it's a usage rate that we see today particularly dynamic, not only in Europe, but also I'd say in Japan. Japan, we know the market is slightly more mature than what it is in Europe and also installed base is more mature.
But yes, we see volumes going up. So it's not necessarily linked. I think the volume on the open networks and when it goes to multifamily, the amount of monetization we do on the base is also a big driver for. So I don't expect that being a problem going forward.
And in your Q1 2025 results, you mentioned a large hardware deal in Lockers in H2. Should we expect another high comparison basis then? And should we expect a low level of growth in Lockers this year?
So I mentioned that when I was commenting the slide on Lockers. Yes, we had a large deal in 2025 in international geography regarding Locker, it's been spread across the year, mostly Q1, Q2, Q3. We're talking about EUR 7 million for the year, EUR 7.5 million, if I remember well. So that's going to set up a higher comparison base.
That being said, we expect good bookings and good revenue coming from the multifamily side moving along in 2026. And obviously, the volumes I described will be a big push towards revenue that would more than compensate what we've seen in Q1.
In other words, Q1 has been negative, but we don't expect that to happen in the future with Q2 that we expect more dynamic from a multifamily and from a volume standpoint that will offset that comparison base.
Last but not least, I think it's important to mention that this large deal was also from a margin standpoint, relatively dilutive. And I think it's also -- has a very limited impact when it comes to the overall margin of...
Thanks, Laurent. On the profitability side of things, do you think that the EBITDA target for Lockers is challenging given the start of the year?
Yes, it's a great follow-up question compared to the one I just answered. As you know, the recurring piece is much more contributed than the hardware piece. So it's not because the hardware is declining by 44% in Q1 that will prevent us from any improvements.
We did large improvements last year in '25. We'll continue to do improvements in '26 that will be driven by the mix, by the amount of usage we have on the open network and the contribution of this.
And obviously, what I just mentioned as well is the monetization of the base in the U.S. that has been quite successful last year and will continue to be successful this year.
And last question on Lockers. Is the slowdown in residential revenues a one-off in Q1? Or do you see this trend lasting through the year?
I think we definitely see good opportunities for the rest of the year on multifamily. So I don't foresee that trend would necessarily be repeating in the coming quarters. We have quite dynamic level of bookings today in the market.
Just Laurent, maybe you already said it, but as a matter of context, what you said [indiscernible] on the usage and the contribution to profitability. Just I think if I look at the U.K. April was probably the highest month in terms of volume we ever had.
And why does that matter? Is because obviously, traditionally, the peak season for us is more about November, December, January. So being in the month of April to be able to continue to increase the volume significantly and April being the highest month ever, it's obviously a very good sign of the continued increase and current increase of usage of the Locker in the U.K., but it's also a very good sign for what's coming up most likely.
Obviously, we need to get there by the end of the year. But that means that we're starting the year from a really high utilization and high volume, and that should set us from higher contribution as well coming from the U.K. as part of what Laurent described, the U.K. being part of it.
Okay. Thank you, Geoffrey. One final question then, zooming out. Where are you at in terms of the alignment of the businesses by legal entity? Is the reorganization announced earlier this year a signal that it is now completed? What implication, if any, does this have on your strategy?
This is an important topic as well. So definitely with less business oriented and more strategic. If we think about the profound change we're making, right, the alignment organization is both a legal alignment, a financial alignment, a system alignment, people alignment, business alignment, right? So we could really break 3 independent businesses to some extent, even though we are having synergies as part of the group.
So that's what has been going on. So what we said is from a legal perspective, we're roughly in the end phase in the final touches. What we have announced in March and what I have shared with you from a functional perspective, from a leadership perspective was really to adapt our European organization that was fully integrated versus the U.S. U.S. was already aligned by solution.
And what we really did updating obviously the [ ExCom ] structure is pivoting in Europe from an integrated quadrant to in Europe, having an organization by solution.
So that's been good progress, obviously. We still have some work to do on that front because as you can imagine, it doesn't happen just because you change your leadership. But we have fastly executed in Q1 and even in current beginning of May.
So we're obviously moving at a fast pace on that front. And we expect that to continue, obviously, in the coming months. But from a pure shareholding or strategic perspective, what we have operated now means that we have those 3 independent businesses and that we can now benefit from the fact that we could leverage those businesses independently differently, we can bring investors at each of those business levels, and we could start considering any strategic acceleration, which is really a mean to an end because we were not in a position to enable those strategic options before. And now this is obviously something that we can consider. So we're quite happy with the progress made and obviously, the new opportunity that we have ahead of us.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Thank you, Laurent. That's all for the written questions. I'll hand back to the operator now.
[Operator Instructions] Ms. Paxton, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to you for any closing remarks.
Thank you. And thank you, everyone, very much for joining and for submitting all of your questions. Our next events are our AGM on the 18th of June and our first half 2026 results on the 23rd of September.
In the meantime, we look forward to meeting some of you in the coming days during our road shows. Thanks again, and have a great evening.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.
Quadient — Q1 2027 Earnings Call
Quadient — Q1 2027 Earnings Call
Q1 2026: revenue slightly down, digital ARR accelerating thanks to e‑invoicing momentum; full‑year guidance confirmed.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: EUR 243m (reported -6% YoY, organic -1.9%)
- Digital: EUR 71m (+6.8% organic)
- Subscription growth: Digital subscription-related revenue +10.8% and now ~88% of digital
- ARR: EUR 257m (Annual Recurring Revenue, an annualized +16% forward indicator)
- Mail & Lockers: Mail decline narrowed to -5.2%; Lockers installed base ~28,200 (+~500 this quarter)
🎯 What Management Says
- Platform focus: Executive team reorganized to place the digital automation platform at the center to accelerate growth and GTM execution
- E‑invoicing push: Strong commercial traction in France ahead of the Sept‑2026 mandate; participation in the government "Grand Pilot" validates scale and onboarding capability
- Portfolio balance: Shift toward subscription revenue (now 77% group-wide of recurring mix) and cross-sell between Mail, Digital and Lockers
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- Full year: 2026 organic revenue guidance confirmed at -2% to +2%
- Margins: EBITDA targets reaffirmed — Digital >20%, Mail >25%, Lockers >10%
- Drivers & risks: Expect continued digital and Lockers subscription growth; Mail decline to keep easing; near-term headwinds from high hardware comps and currency (~EUR 12m hit Q1)
❓ Analyst Q&A
- E‑invoicing timing: Bookings and some onboarding are occurring now but platform revenue recognition and broader mandate-driven volume will ramp from Sept‑2026 and through 2027
- ARR conversion: ARR (16% annualized) is a forward indicator — revenue impact will be phased over the next 12 months, not immediate
- Mail & Lockers scrutiny: Management expects Mail hardware decline to continue easing; Lockers growth driven by usage/monetization despite a high 2025 hardware comparison
⚡ Bottom Line
- Takeaway: Quadient delivered a steady Q1: digital momentum and ARR acceleration provide tangible upside from the French e‑invoicing rollout, while Mail and Lockers show signs of stabilization; guidance and margin targets remain intact but execution risks center on ARR-to-revenue timing, hardware comps and currency.
Quadient — Q4 2025 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good evening, and welcome to Quadient's Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. I am Anne-Sophie Jugean, Quadient's Head of Investor Relations. Today's presentation will be hosted by Geoffrey Godet, CEO; and Laurent Du Passage, CFO. The agenda for today's call is on Slide 3. As usual, there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. You can submit your questions in writing through the web or ask questions live by dialing into the conference call.
Thank you very much. And with that, over to you, Geoffrey.
Thank you, Anne-Sophie. Good evening, everyone. So let me start by setting out the market context for Quadient. Over the past few years, we've been operating in an environment shaped by powerful structural trends. In 2025, these trends did not change in nature, but they accelerated simultaneously reaching a new level of momentum. So the first one is there is, in '25, a marked step change in artificial intelligence. Rapid advances in AI are accelerating digitalization across industries and reinforcing the long-term demand for software solution. This is not a short-term phenomenon.
AI is fundamentally reshaping how enterprise automate, secure and scale mission-critical workflows, well beyond any single use -- sorry, any single use case and regulatory cycle. What customers increasingly require our software platform that can deliver value quickly, integrate AI natively, including agents and responsibly into system of records and reliably operate within complex legal, regulatory and data security environment. In this context, AI-driven digitalization spans our entire digital portfolio from CCM to AP and AR and of course, compliance-driven workflows, which enhance both the value of our solutions and the breadth of use cases we can address.
The second trend also contributing to the future acceleration in digitalization is the upcoming rollout of e-invoicing rules across Europe with regulatory deadlines now clearly in sight, notably in France in September 2026 and later in other markets, including newly the U.K. These mandates are important catalysts for the digital adoption. But most importantly, they represent only one dimension of a much broader transformation of transactional and financial workflows. And lastly, in 2025, we also observed an acceleration in the structural decline of the Mail market and this following a long period of resilience. These trends reflect both regulatory developments and changing customer behaviors.
More importantly, they highlight the relevance of our long-standing decision to pivot towards digital. Quadient did not start preparing for this transition in 2024, 2025. The ability to offset the decline in Mail with a strong digital offering is at the very core of our strategy and the foundation of our digital division. For both business and financial communications automation and now e-invoicing, we have long been supporting our customers in the automation of transactional processes that sit at the heart of their own operation. So based on these 3 trends, we have updated our long-term financial assumptions.
Regarding digital, we have raised our 2030 revenue ambition to around EUR 550 million from above EUR 500 million previously. And of course, we maintain our EBITDA margin ambition, which remains at 30% for 2030. As a result, digital is expected to become Quadient's largest segment by 2030 and both in terms of revenue and EBITDA contribution. Now regarding Mail, we have lowered our 2030 revenue ambition to around EUR 500 million compared with around EUR 600 million previously. And there's no change to our EBITDA margin ambition for Mail, which remains between 20% and 25% for 2030. The updated Mail long-term financial assumption also led us to record a one-off impairment charge of EUR 124 million against goodwill, and that's in the Mail business. And there's, of course, no cash impact. Finally, our 2030 ambition for lockers remain unchanged.
Moving to the next slide. Having in mind these accelerated trends just outlined and thanks to Quadient's strategic foresight, we are now in the best position than we have ever been to be able to capture the opportunities they are creating. First, we already operate from a position of strength with a best-in-class digital automation platform that is consistently recognized by industry analysts. And this is not a recent achievement. It reflects years of disciplined investment and execution. 2025 alone, Quadient was ranked #1 globally by industry analyst IDC. And we were also recognized by another industry analyst, QKS, as the most valuable pioneer for AI maturity. These are clear third-party validation of both our technology leadership and our ability to operationalize AI at scale.
Second, Quadient benefits from a mature, highly predictable business model. At the end of 2025, our annual recurring revenue, ARR reached EUR 250 million, a level that few SaaS companies can claim and 84% of that total revenue is now subscription-based. This provides us with a strong confidence in our future revenue trajectory. This model is built on a scalable SaaS platform, serving a large and diversified customer base also across regulated industries with very strong customer stickiness. We now support around 17,000 customers worldwide, right, with a well-diversified geographic footprint. And most of these customers are in regulated industries. These foundations were built up proactively and purposely for many years.
Today, they allow us to shift our focus decisively towards scaling execution. First of all, we're expanding the use of AI-powered capabilities across our customer base. Currently, around 60% of our customers use daily such capabilities, and our aim is to increase these to 100% as soon as possible. Secondly, we're building a pan-European leader in financial automation driven in particular by the upcoming application of e-invoicing mandates. With the acquisition of Serensia, the final accreditation from the French tax authorities, which we received in mid-December and already more than 10% market share in France. So with both, we're strongly positioned at the start of a long-term digital growth cycle that will unfold progressively across Europe.
And lastly, we are, of course, sharpening our competitive position in customer communication also, as highlighted by the recent acquisition of CDP Communications in 2025. This enabled us to add differentiating accessibility and compliance features to our existing range of capabilities in which consolidated our CCM market share in regulated industries.
Moving to Slide 7. To support the next chapter of our Quadient growth, I have taken a clear decision to align our leadership team with our operational priorities. As a result of our digital automation platform reaching a scale like EUR 250 million in ARR, it has reached such a maturity that I am now placing our digital automation platform at the very heart of our company under my direct leadership to further accelerate growth and innovation. As part of this evolution, we have now 4 senior leaders from our digital automation platform organization that will be part of the Executive Committee. This reflects our determination to deepen software expertise and accelerate innovation where it matters the most. And this marks the next steps in Quadient's evolution as a global software and AI-driven technology leader.
Moving to Slide 8. In addition, over the past few years, we have executed a complete legal reorganization, transitioning from an integrated multi-entity, multi-country structure to a very simple business aligned organization. This legal organization is now in its final stages and provide us with the structural flexibility that we wanted. This opens up multiple options to support our business development, financing initiatives and broader value creation opportunities.
With that said, I will now hand it over to Laurent, who will walk you through our 2025 financial results. Laurent?
Thank you, Geoffrey. Good evening, everyone. Let's move to the next slide for our key financials for 2025. So year 2025 ended with a revenue growth acceleration and EBITDA margin expansion in both Digital and Lockers, while Mail profitability remained very resilient. Starting with Digital, revenue grew strongly at 8% with an acceleration in Q4. Subscription-related revenue continued to expand at a double-digit pace, supporting further EBITDA margin improvement, reaching 18% for the year. In Mail, 2025 was marked by the low point of the U.S. renewal cycle, which weighed on the hardware revenue throughout the year. And despite those headwinds, Mail delivered a very solid EBITDA margin at 27.1%.
Finally, Lockers recorded another year of strong momentum with 11.4% organic revenue growth and a solid increase in subscription-related revenue. The profitability of Lockers improved significantly at 5%, confirming the trajectory to exceed the 10% EBITDA margin in 2026. At group level, revenue reached EUR 1.036 billion. It's down 3.2% organically. It's in line with the guidance we updated in September. The profitability remained resilient with a recurring EBIT margin of 13% and an EBITDA margin of 22.2%. All Solutions EBITDA are on track to meet the 2026 EBITDA targets, and we will continue to deleverage towards the 1.5x target, excluding leasing.
Let's move now to Slide 11. Looking at the bridge of revenue compared to last year. From left to right, you can see the Package Concierge, Serensia, CDP scope effect for EUR 16 million, main contributor being Package Concierge. Digital with an 8% growth is adding EUR 22 million of revenue. Lockers also contributed positively with more than 11% organic growth or EUR 12 million of additional revenue. Digital and Lockers both accelerated in Q4, delivering organic growth of 8.4% and 16.8%, respectively, in the final quarter of the year. Mail declined by around 9.5%, reflecting both market headwinds and the [indiscernible] softness in the U.S. renewal cycle. The currency impacts were quite significant this year, notably from the USD weakening against euro with an adverse impact that you can see of EUR 37 million on the right-hand side. Overall, the group posted an organic revenue decline of 3.2%.
Moving now to Slide 12. When looking at the breakdown of revenue, we see the continued shift towards subscription-related revenue across the group, moving from 68% to 74% from 2020 to 2025. Despite headwinds in the Mail business in '25, Quadient still has shown a positive growth on the subscription-related revenue. On the right-hand side, Digital and Lockers penetration within the subscription-related revenue has surged from 23% to 41% over the same period.
Moving now to Slide 13. Here, you can see the bridge of current EBIT from last year to this year. We started from EUR 146 million last year. Scope is almost neutral with Package Concierge offsetting this year impact on current EBIT. Digital delivered a solid contribution of EUR 8 million, adding EUR 8 million, thanks to the strong revenue growth and obviously the continued margin expansion. Lockers also contributed positively with an additional EUR 6 million, reflecting both the acceleration in subscription revenues and the improvement of profitability overall.
These gains were offset by Mail, which saw, as you can see, EUR 20 million decline in the EBITDA due to the EUR 70 million drop in revenue, which was clearly offset by strong savings. Depreciation and amortization remained broadly stable, decreasing by EUR 3 million and last currency effect had an EUR 8 million negative impact, largely driven again by the euro-dollar evolution. Overall, this led to current EBIT of EUR 135 million for 2025, representing an organic decline of 2.2% compared to last year.
Back to you, Geoffrey, on the business review.
Thank you, Laurent. Turning to Slide 15. So let me start by taking a step back and looking at the long-term track record of our Digital business. Starting with revenue on the top left of the slide, the message, I think, is very clear. Steady growth quarter after quarter, driven by the continued adoption of our digital automation platform by customers. Over this period, subscription-related revenue has grown at an average rate of 17% per year, reflecting the strength and relevance of our offering. This momentum has been accompanied by a decisive shift to SaaS. The share of subscription-related revenue has increased from 59% in 2020 to 85% today, fundamentally transforming the quality and predictability of our revenue base.
And the same dynamic is visible in the annual recurring revenue or ARR shown at the bottom left of the slide. ARR has grown from EUR 109 million to EUR 250 million over the period, which represents a 15% compound annual growth rate. This is obviously a forward-looking indicator, and it underlines the durability of our subscription growth engine. At the bottom right, share of SaaS customers has grown significantly, reflecting naturally the change to our SaaS digital automation platform.
Now turning to the EBITDA evolution. On the top right of the slide, you can see a low point in early 2022, and this reflects a deliberate phase of transition and the impact of the business model shift at the time, combined with a targeted investment in account payable and accounts receivable following the acquisition, if you remember, of YayPay and Beanworks at the time. What matters most, however, is what come after. Since then, we have delivered a regular and sustained improvement in EBITDA margin, driven by 3 clear factors: the continued growth of our subscription platform, the steady productivity gains across our teams and the fact that both our enterprise and SMB segments are now operating at scale.
Together, these trends demonstrate the strength of our digital model, not just its growth, but its ability to scale profitably over time. Now let's move to another topic, and let me address AI head on because our position is generally differentiated on the market. In an AI world, the real question isn't who can generate content or automate a task. The questions are who produce unique data and who can execute reliably inside the system that actually run the enterprise and who can do it with control, adaptability, compliance and accountability. Quadient operates where the bar is the highest. We sit inside mission-critical workflows that are embedded into system of records such as ERPs, CRMs, billing systems, finance and regulatory environments of the company.
In this workflow, mostly right is just not good enough. Invoices, audits, compliance, they all require near 70, not probabilities. And that's exactly the space we were built for. And this is why we are the trusted execution layer where AI must integrate. AI engine will proliferate across enterprise workflows, and they will still need a trusted execution arm, a platform that can securely connect to systems of records, enforce governance, produce auditable outcomes and execute with reliability and such at scale. AI agents rely on us. They don't replace us.
And let me be clear on the human element. Relationships don't get replaced by AI. So just give you some context, right, many of our workflows, credit, collections, disputes, exceptions, these are nuances, right? They require nuanced context, judgment, and they cannot be safely automated away, particularly in a regulated environment. So our approach is human-centered. We use AI to strengthen those relationships and make workflow smarter, faster and more consistent, not to remove accountability from the process. We're truly built for this moment for 3 very concrete reasons. The first one is that our platform is agentic ready by design with APIs already enabling interaction with third-party software and most importantly, AI agents.
Second, our pricing model is already aligned with where the industry is going. We operate largely on volume and outcome-based economics, not seat-based pricing. So we're not exposed for the AI replacing seats pressure that many software companies face. The third one is enterprise-grade execution is just not an add-on for us. It is our baseline. We deliver compliant, auditable, high reliability workflows, sorry, in regulated industries and such with deep integration, governance and again, scale, and they all are acting as very structural barriers for us. And this is not theoretical. AI is already operational across our digital platform and again, at scale.
We have more than 60% of our digital customers that use AI-powered capabilities today from our platform and such every day. Another key number, roughly 40% of the new code generated for our applications are now AI generated, and we also have 0% AI-related customer churn. So the way I see AI is quite simple. It reinforce a mission, it reinforce the structural barriers and it increases the value we deliver and precisely because we sit at the intersection of automation, compliance and trusted execution.
Moving to Slide 17. And with that said, let me turn to a few concrete examples of how AI is already embedded across Quadient Solutions. Let me be clear. AI for us is not a future ambition, as I mentioned, it's something that is already driving tangible value for our customers today and that both across our financial automation and customer experience management capabilities. Our AI capabilities are built on 3 Quadient core strengths: our integrated in-house AI-enabled components. The second one is our ability to connect and to connect seamlessly with customer systems of records, especially around the ecosystem. And the last one is our long-standing experience supporting, again, highly regulated mission-critical processes in industries such as financial services, insurance and the public sector.
These are the foundations that make our AI capability not only powerful, but trusted in the most demanding environments. If I take the example on the financial automation side, you'll see on the left of the slide, we have shared an example for the account receivable solution. AI improves cash flow performance, and it gives finance teams far greater predictability. And by tapping directly into the ERP and the accounting systems, our models today score risks and forecast late payments with a high degree of accuracy. AI also provides real-time insight into buyer payment behaviors and identifies the patterns and the root cause behind these delays.
So when it comes to execution, AI orchestrates the full collection workflow, choosing the right channel, optimizing timing, automating follow-ups and escalating when needed. So taken together, that drives what matters most for finance leaders, faster, more reliable cash conversion with less manual effort. Now on the CXM side, if we take another example, we have the same foundations, right, that apply, integrated AI, strong connectivity to system of records and a deep understanding of how communication requirements in regulated industry can enable organization to create and deliver communication, obviously, much faster and with far more consistency and both across regions and channels.
Now AI accelerate, in particular for us, migration from legacy platforms can support secure use of customer selected AI models, their choice and speed up the development of what we call very complex business workflows. It also enhance naturally content creation, right, including translation at scale and also provides dynamic recommendation to improve message clarity and the effectiveness of those messages. So if we look at the impact for our customers, it's very tangible, up 50% faster content creation and as much as twice the communication output without any additional headcount.
So in conclusion, whether it's in finance or customer communication, right, our use of AI is already delivering measurable productivity gains, operational confidence and some stronger business outcomes for our customers. Where does our next major opportunity lies in the transition to mandatory e-invoicing, right? That is a change that is set to reshape how company manage their business and financial workflows. And here again, Quadient is ahead of the curve.
Moving to Slide 18. Our Serensia platform has now secured final accreditation from the French tax authority, meaning that we are fully ready for the 2026 reform in France. This places us among a very few select group of certified providers able to support companies through what will be one of the most significant business process transformation in recent years, in particular for Europe. Our leadership is also recognized today by analysts, right? In January 2026, Quadient was named a leader in QKS Group's SPARK Matrix for e-invoicing solution. This highlights the strong combination of technology excellence that was recognized, customer impact that was recognized as well and our regulatory readiness. And all of that is underscoring the strategic importance of our digital automation platform at the most pivotal time.
Let's talk about our commercial traction. It's accelerating sharply. Booking related to financial automation and invoicing in France and Benelux for our region, increased more than tenfold. Just me repeat this, increased more than tenfold between the first and fourth quarter of 2025. This is a clear sign that customers preparing early are choosing Quadient as their long-term partner. And importantly, if we look at the addressable market, it remains largely untapped. We've got a study from OpinionWay that was recently shared that showed that only 7% of French companies are fully compliant today, meaning that the vast majority still need help to equip themselves.
And let's not forget that France is just the start for us. The 2026 reform mark the first phase of a broader European transition to mandatory e-invoicing. Several countries are preparing similar frameworks than the one we've seen in France for the years ahead. And the U.K. is the last one that just announced their program for 2029. So this creates a multiyear growth runway in market -- in the market, sorry, where Quadient has already secured accreditation, recognized leadership by third party, a solid market share and strong commercial momentum.
Moving to Slide 19. On our financial side, for the full year 2025, our digital automation platform delivered double-digit subscription-related revenue growth. And as I mentioned, with strong momentum and such, in particular, in our North American region and the U.K. and in particular, for the last quarter of the year. ARR reached EUR 215 million, representing 10% organic growth and such despite the currency headwinds. We also recorded a record Q4. It's our largest quarter ever in bookings, and it was driven by several multimillion euro wins and also reinforced by the solid cross-selling from our Mail customer base.
Now if we move to profitability, our EBITDA grew 9% year-on-year and the margin expanded to 18% overall for the year despite the temporary dilutive effect that the Serensia integration impacted us. The margin for the second semester, right, the progression of that margin clearly shows the trajectory. We are on track to exceed the 20% EBITDA margin in 2026.
With that said, over to you, Laurent, for the Mail business update.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Moving to Slide 20. In light of Mail's 2025 performance, we have reassessed our long-term assumptions for the Mail business, notably with lower machine placements. With the transactional Mail volume still anticipated to decline by around 7.5% CAGR, the Mail market itself is now anticipated at minus 6% CAGR compared to minus 5% before. We have revised our 2030 revenue ambition for the Mail segment to approximately EUR 500 million compared to the EUR 600 million previously. The assumptions are particularly true in Europe, as illustrated by concrete developments such as the end of nationwide letter delivery in Denmark and ongoing regulated debates in the U.K.
We also see companies actively preparing for the rollout of invoicing mandate in Europe, accelerating the shift away from physical mail. In [indiscernible], we still anticipate an improvement but starting off from a smaller installed base. Reflecting this update assumption, as Geoffrey has already indicated at the beginning of this presentation, this adjustment is a prudent fact-based response to structural market evolution, and it allows us to align our long-term ambition with the realities of the market while continuing to manage Mail with a strong focus on profitability and cash generation.
Moving now to Slide 21. Let me come back briefly to what we've seen and what we are seeing as we enter 2026. This chart shows quarterly year-on-year Mail market revenue growth based on year-on-year growth weighted with our competition as well as Quadient performance on the other side. It shows that market was under pressure, notably from Q3 and Q4 '24 onwards and that there is a slight improvement materializing on the market at the end of '25 that we are seeing now at Quadient on early '26 at the beginning of Q1. While past year has been difficult on Mail, it is important that we also have a true capability on the cross-sell, which has increased by 19%, including a triple-digit year-on-year in Financial Automation booking boosted by invoicing mandate in Europe, as mentioned by Geoffrey.
In addition, our SimplyMail SaaS solution, which enables small businesses to send physical mail and parcels in just a few clicks directly from their existing digital environment saw a strong momentum in '25 with more than 1,100 contracts signed. And in spite of the market condition on hardware, we also had major production Mail wins with our DS-1200 flagship solution that delivered double-digit growth in '25, confirming its strong market traction.
Let's now move to the next slide on the Mail financials. Overall, Mail declined by 9.5% in '25, mainly due to the slowdown in U.S. equipment placements linked to the renewal cycle. This trend was slightly higher in Q4 at minus 10.9%, while we saw a very slight improvement on hardware side. The good news is that despite the top line pressure, Mail continues to deliver a very high profitability with a margin above 27%, supported by the contribution of Frama and our proactive response to tariff changes in the U.S., including price actions and strategic inventory buildup at the end of 2024. Margin performance was further supported by strong cross-sell execution with our digital business and a disciplined agile cost structure.
Now moving to Lockers. The first slide give a clear picture of how we've successfully scaled growth in the Locker solution over the past 4 years. On the left-hand side, you can see the steady growth in revenue since '22, representing a compound annual growth rate of 11% from 2022 to 2025. A second key trend in the increasing weight of subscription-related revenue, which accounted for 65% of total Locker revenue in 2025. In absolute terms, subscription revenue grew at double-digit rates every single quarter. In terms of margin, we can see the rapid expansion over the same time frame on the right-hand side with a confirmed inflection to profitability in 2025, delivering a 5% EBITDA margin. This puts the Locker business on a strong financial footing and positions it for scalable, profitable growth going forward.
Let's move now to Slide 24. Turning now to commercial highlights for the Locker business. 2025 was another year of strong expansion supported by both solid demand and targeted product innovation. In Q4, we secured a multimillion euro service deal to refresh the design of an existing network covering more than 1,700 locations. This demonstrates the confidence of our customers and the long-term value of our installed base. We also expanded our product range with the launch of Premier Locker in the U.S., a premium design-driven solution tailored for upscale multifamily communities. This enhancement strengthens our ability to address a broader set of customer needs in that market. Operational execution remains strong with more than 2,300 lockers deployed in '25, including more than 600 in Q4 alone. This brings our installed base to approximately 27,700 lockers at the end of the year.
Let's now turn to Slide 25 to look at how this commercial momentum translates into the growth of our installed base and usage over the past 2 years. On the left, you can see the steady acceleration in our pace of installation across Europe. Over the past 2 years, our installed base has grown roughly fourfold, supported by continued expansion in the U.K., including partnerships with Evri, Shell Service Stations and The Range. Meanwhile, in the U.S., placements remained steadily driven by continued momentum in the multifamily and the higher education segments. On the right-hand side, we can see the usage in Europe has increased dramatically over the same period, around 20-fold with the U.K. once again a major contributor.
As you can see on the chart, there was a temporary dip at the end of Q4 and the start of Q4 due to lower volumes recorded by Evri with Vinted, followed by a strong rebound as we can see as well later in the period. Lastly, in Japan, volumes increased month-to-month in Q4, signaling growing traction.
Let's now take a look at Lockers financial on Slide 26. Lockers delivered another year of strong growth with 11.4% organic growth and more than 22% reported, reflecting the strong subscription revenue, of course, and the full year contribution of Package Concierge. We recorded a sharp acceleration in Q4 and more importantly, our profitability inflection is confirmed. EBITDA margin increased by 4.4 points to 5% with H2 reaching 6.3%. We remain firmly on track to exceed a 10% margin in 2026, supported by growing recurring revenue and high utilization rates across the networks.
Let's now review the group financials and turn to Slide 28, which is a summary of the financials. So if you can -- as you can see, we summarize here the performance of all the 3 solutions. Again, digital growing strongly 8%, margin expansion to 18%. Mail declined 9.5%, but maintained a very solid 27% margin. Lockers grew 11.4%, as we just saw with profitability improving to 5%. At group level, revenue reached EUR 1.036 billion, and our current EBIT margin remains resilient at 13% despite the mix effect and the decline in Mail.
Moving now to Slide 29, where we see the P&L. Starting from the top, obviously, revenue I just mentioned it, but EBITDA stands at EUR 230 million, which is maintaining a healthy 22.2% margin. The current EBIT is EUR 135 million. It's broadly stable margin-wise, reflecting the operational resilience of our business. The key item this year is the EUR 124 million noncash goodwill impairment, which is exclusively related to Mail in Europe. This is the main consequence of the new assumptions of the Mail market trajectory, as I explained on Page 20, and hence, the mechanical noncash effect on our goodwill -- Mail goodwill assessment. This brings reported net income to minus EUR 66 million. Excluding this one-off impairment, net income would be EUR 58 million, which highlights the underlying strength of our operations as well.
Moving now to the cash flow statement on Page 30. The free cash flow for the year came in at EUR 47 million, impacted by several one-off elements. The adverse effect of working capital, we mentioned that earlier due to the timing of [indiscernible] payments, the EUR 19 million impact, cutoff of VAT payment and employee debt at the end of the year, but this was fully offset by EUR 30 million of cash generated by the leasing portfolio. The higher interest and tax payment is notably due to the [indiscernible] tax and the bond refinancing that we already mentioned during H1.
Cash flow from operation reached EUR 132 million and the CapEx decreased to EUR 86 million, driven by lower Mail placements as we will see on the next slide. To be noted also that our free cash flow was impacted by the negative change impact of around EUR 7 million. At the bottom of the free cash flow from an acquisition standpoint, Serensia and CDP have been acquired in '25 compared to Frama and Package Concierge in '24.
Moving now to next slide on CapEx, Slide 31. CapEx levels reflect the nature and maturity of each platform. Digital remains stable, focused on the R&D and ongoing platform enhancement. Lockers continues to invest materially supporting the rapid expansion of open networks, notably in the U.K. And net CapEx declined significantly due to the lower hardware placements in '25, notably in North America, where the year before it had the certification. Overall CapEx decreased from EUR 98 million to EUR 86 million, consistent with our disciplined capital allocation.
On Slide 32, as you can see, the net debt has significantly declined to EUR 682 million, notably thanks to a large ForEx impact on our USD debt due to the weak level of the dollar at the end of the fiscal year. The leverage ratio, excluding leasing stands at 1.6x, maintaining our trajectory towards a 1.5x target in 2026. We also maintained a solid liquidity position supported by healthy cash generation and tight balance sheet discipline.
On Slide 33, as you can see from a debt management standpoint, we have reimbursed our bond in Q1 and as well as EUR 29 million of Schuldschein, and we successfully raised EUR 50 million of private placement in July. As of January '26, we hold EUR 115 million of cash, and we have EUR 300 million of undrawn on our credit facility. And we maintain obviously a EUR 533 million still customer leasing portfolio that you can see on the right-hand side. This positions the group with strong liquidity and financial flexibility to support the ongoing execution. Over to you, Geoffrey, for the conclusion of this presentation.
Thank you, Laurent. Moving now to Slide 35. So for 2025, Quadient proposed a dividend of EUR 0.75 per share for the full year 2025. This represents a 7% increase compared to the full year 2024 dividend and a year-on-year increase of EUR 0.05. Just to be noted, this marks the fifth consecutive annual dividend increase. This proposal corresponds to roughly now a 46% payout ratio of net income, excluding obviously the goodwill impairment and this is up from 36% last year. And this is well above the minimum of 20% payout ratio that was defined in our dividend policy.
So naturally, subject to the approval of the Annual General Meeting on June 18, 2026, the dividend will be paid in cash in one installment in August 6, 2026. This proposed dividend reflects naturally our confidence in Quadient's future cash generation, our confidence in debt deleverage and our commitment to it and our continued commitment to delivering sustainable returns to our shareholders.
Turning now to our guidance for 2026. As you know, we continue to operate in a very challenging macroeconomic environment and also geopolitical. We have some ongoing uncertainties and particularly around potential supply chain impact. Now against this backdrop, Digital and Lockers are expected to continue naturally to delivering sustained growth and further EBITDA margin expansion. Mail remains naturally also a little bit less predictable at this stage given the limited visibility on the market conditions. That being said, our cost optimization initiatives remains in place, and they will support the resilience of our high mail margin.
As a result, we expect organic revenue growth from full year 2026 to range between minus 2% and plus 2%. And this range reflects the current level of visibility that we have on the Mail business. In parallel, we confirm our EBITDA margin trajectory and such across all solutions. So with expected full year '26 margin for EBITDA above 20% in Digital, above 25% in Mail and above 10% in the Lockers.
Moving to Slide 37. As explained at the beginning of the presentation, we have updated Quadient's long-term financial assumptions to reflect the profound acceleration of the market trends that we are seeing today. For Digital, we have raised naturally our revenue ambition to approximately EUR 550 million from above the EUR 500 million we had stated previously. And for the Mail, we have revised our 2030 revenue ambition to approximately EUR 500 million compared with around EUR 600 million previously. And naturally, our ambition for Lockers remain unchanged and well above the EUR 200 million in revenue by 2030.
We also reconfirm our 2030 EBITDA margin ambition for each of our 3 solutions, around 30% for Digital, a range of 20% to 25% for Mail and around 20% for the Lockers. So taken together, these updated ambitions reflect a clear reality. By 2030, Digital is expected to become Quadient's largest solution and such, both in terms of revenue and EBITDA, and that directly supports our ambition to position Quadient as a global software and AI leader.
Thank you. And I think that with the team, we are ready to take your questions. Laurent and Anne-Sophie?
This is the Chorus Call conference operator. [Operator Instructions] First question is from Flavien Baudemont, Bernstein.
2. Question Answer
Congratulations for the results. I have 2 questions on my side. For the first, I'm a bit puzzled about your Digital sales guidance upgrade for 2030, while in the meantime, you suspended your Digital 2026 sales guidance back in September. I don't really get how you can [indiscernible] expectation and upgrade your midterm guidance at the same -- nearly at the same time? And if I do the math, you need to grow by 14% per year by 2030 to get to the objective. And you grew by 10% in Q4, which means that it's going to be tricky to get 14% of Digital top line growth in 2026. So is it possible to have more element to support your guidance and preferably with numbers such as how much sales you are expected to generate truly for Digital invoice this year, for instance?
And the second is more straightforward. Can you just update us on the Italian local rollout strategy?
Thank you, Flavien. Good evening, and thank you for your question. I can take this question if you want, Laurent. On the Digital side, it's a good reminder for me to share with everybody, the long-term upgraded guidance we gave in terms of revenue, right, to move from EUR 500 million to EUR 550 million is without the help of any acquisitions, right? These are organic assumptions that we have, right? So it's really coming from the growth of our existing customer base on the one hand, and we see the acquisition of new customers, new logos that we're expecting in the coming years.
We have had in the last few years, a steady increase of our annual recurring revenue, and we have also our subscription growth rate that has been always around 10% or more actually in all the past years. We finished the year with an ARR growth around 10% -- at 10% actually organic growth, which basically is a forward-looking view for 2026. And you're right, when you do the math, we do anticipate in the coming years, an acceleration of the recurring and the ARR, right, subscription growth on a yearly basis on the average over the period.
Now this increase has not come linearly. In 2026, we're likely to be around where we've been able to achieve in the past few years but we're going to be able to benefit from the acceleration starting in 2027 and we'll continue to accelerate further in 2028, notably and for the rest of the plan.
Where is this acceleration coming from, it is coming from the benefit of the acquisition of Serensia that we did not plan for when we did our Capital Market Day in 2024, right? So Serensia is related to the accredited platform that we have in France. And we have embarked on the contract bookings, right, existing contracts that are not generating yet revenue. I think we shared in our last -- the third quarter presentation with you that we have now probably secured more than 10% of the numbers of invoice that is expected to be produced digitally through those accredited platforms. So we have a strong leadership position that we anticipate that will generate revenue, and we're not over yet, right? So we have continued actually to sign at the beginning of the year additional contract. It will continue until September '26 to embark customers that have not yet made the decision. And as we shared earlier today, there's still the vast majority of customers in France that have not selected yet an accurate platform. So we have more contracts, more booking that we expect to be able to embark.
And we also believe that this will not stop in September '26, which is the deadline for some of the enterprise in the market to start operating with the government platform. We believe that some of them likely will be late, which has been always the case when those mandate gets rolled out into other countries. So there's our expectation there will be a tail of customers that will be quite strong, probably getting into the beginning of '27.
Now as it relates to how this translate into revenue generation and accelerate growth for us. Because the mandates starts in 2026 and only for some category of customers, I remind you that they are deadlines for large enterprise in September '26, then for mid-enterprise and then small enterprise that spent from '26 to '28. Not all of those contracts will generate revenue right away in 2026 and not on a full year basis. So we'll likely start to have some benefit by the end of '26, mostly in Q4, have a full year benefit of that increase in 2027 and even further in 2028. And as just to take into account the revenue that we will generate and it will accelerate our growth for the French mandate.
In addition to the French mandate, we're also getting ready for additional mandates for other European countries in Belgium, in Germany, in the U.K. but we also have the ViDA standard that is going to be a European-wide standard that will generate the same kind of anticipation by the companies to select the right accredited platform for themselves, getting ready and being able to produce the invoice.
And there will be a delay, naturally a gap from the moment they sign those contracts to the moment we generate those invoices on our platform. And that's mostly what drives the increase in our ambition based on actual data and the numbers of contracts we have secured obviously, up to now. So at the end of 2025, we had more than 10% of those invoices on the market, right, that we expected on the volume. So we estimate the market to be between EUR 2 billion and EUR 2.5 billion of invoices. So that gives you a sense of the sheer size and the big size of invoices that we expect to be able to produce on our platform and that will generate the increase in revenue starting in Q4 and then progressively in '27 and '28.
Maybe one just complement, I think because you made a calculation, and you mentioned the 14% CAGR. I just want to remind you that the numbers we are showing for 2030 at fiscal year '23 rate just to make it comparable to what we said to the Capital Market Day, not -- you should not take as a starting point, obviously, the reported figures for digital because, obviously, the dollar has impacted significantly the revenue side. So in reality, the CAGR should be below that mark that you mentioned.
The second question you had, Flavien, which I also -- was a good question. I'm happy to give you some color. We have studied the deployment of our Italian Lockers in the Italian market. Mostly in 2025, there was the year for us to be able to set up the team, hire the different key leaders, the sales organization, starting to identify the strategic location that we felt would be the most promising one, securing contracts ahead of the deployment of the Lockers, notably with Carriers but a few other players as well and non-carrier related. So that's what we've been doing in '25. So we do expect the rollout, though it has started, to start pick up steam during the rest of the year.
[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions from the conference call. The floor is back to Ms. Anne-Sophie Jugean.
Thank you. So we can now move to the questions submitted in writing. So we have 2 questions on Digital. And I think that part of them have already been answered by Geoffrey and Laurent. Looking at organic growth for digital plus 8% in both 2024 and 2025. Good figures but below the target of 10% CAGR for the 2023-2026 period. Do you expect to accelerate Digital growth rates above 10% in 2026? And what is driving the decision to raise the revenue target to EUR 550 million by 2030? Is it the need to offset the decline in Mail volume? Is organic growth expected to accelerate beyond 10% average on the 2025-2030 period? And have you identified any additional M&A opportunities?
So I believe we have mostly responded to that question. So just maybe just try to add a little bit more color and Laurent you are free also to add additional comments as necessary. The subscription growth rate and the ARR rate, which are -- one is the forward leading indicator of the next one because we recognize the revenue of the next year year has always been poised as a target to be around that 10%, right? That's how we have calibrated our long-term strategic plan for the software business, which is really around the 10% growth rate on the subscription and 30% EBITDA margin because when you combine both 10% on the ARR growth rate and 30% on the EBITDA margin, the total makes 40%. And that's kind of the golden rule, obviously, for the SaaS and software companies in terms of credentials and in terms of being the best practice and top of the class in this market.
And why the 10% for us because we have identified and calculated and our estimations are that the market in average, the markets that we're operating in to, so the different geographies and the different mix of segments both on the enterprise and the SMB with some different weight on both the customer communication and the financial automation side. We estimate that market growth to be at around 10%. So for us, that 10% is not just what we can do and not do, is to ensure that we keep up with the market because we believe we are one of the leading, if not the leading platform, with our EUR 250 million ARR in this market segment. So we want to make sure that we keep track with the market growth. That's the first element on how we have decided to set the level of acquisition cost for us for the coming years.
So yes, we do expect naturally 2026 to be around the 10% for the subscription growth rate in ARR as we get into the first year. For the coming years, we do expect an acceleration. And as I responded earlier, driven by the new benefits and future benefits from the acquisition of Serensia related to the invoicing market that was not accounted for when we initiated our early 2030 guidance.
Thank you, Geoffrey. The next...
Sorry, maybe, Anne-Sophie, on the acquisition. As I again mentioned earlier, no, we did not identify the particular acquisition that would be needed to achieve those targets. We've got 17,000 customers, and we do expect the upsell and the expansion from the existing customer base in addition to the ongoing already a new logo acquisition engine that we have to be able to allow us to meet the target.
So thank you, Geoffrey. And next question is on CapEx. So how will CapEx evolve in 2026? And how will it be spread between the 3 businesses?
Yes, this one is for me. So we -- I think we mentioned this year, the CapEx level was EUR 86 million, Jean-Pierre, you need to think that it will not be significantly different, I think, in the coming years. So we expect something around the EUR 90 million. Obviously, we don't necessarily break it down. But if you think about it, Mail has an overall tendency to decline. I think it's part of the explanation also where we have lower placements in machine means lower CapEx on the franking machine in particular. Lockers still will continue to be quite dynamic and positively oriented, I guess, with the rollout that we mentioned in the U.K. and Italy and the last portion of Digital. Digital is in the scaling phase. The improved profitability is also the scalability of the R&D, so I don't expect a huge increase on the R&D side. So overall, not significantly different, potentially slightly up, but that's what I can say for next year.
Thank you, Laurent. Next question is on Mail. So is the Mail market reaching the cliff drop that we have been fearing? Could we see an even larger decline in 2026 than the one seen in 2025? How confident are you that the 2025 decline was a one-off?
So we are clearly not anticipating a cliff in terms of the decline of the Mail market. We have updated our 2030 ambition for the Mail. It will remain a large part of our success for the 2030 guidance. And we do expect the Mail to still contribute EUR 500 million in revenue in 2030 at that time. Really, if you were to look at the numbers, we're changing a little bit the annual growth rate that we're expecting. We were expecting a decline around potentially 3% to be better than the 5% of the market, 3% to 5%. And we still expect to be able to do better than our anticipation of the market decline over that period of time.
The big difference is, over the coming years, maybe 1 or 2 points of further decline per year of the market, right? So it is a degradation, but it's a predictable degradation. Our anticipation on the underlying Mail volume, the volume of letters is barely changing from now in 2030. This is what Laurent has explained to you, so it's around at 7.2%, 7.5%, right? So the Mail volume will remain resilient, declining, but predictable decline over that period of time.
So with that context in mind, we're coming off 2 different impact in 2025 that have combined themselves an acceleration of the decline in Europe driven by some of those investment mandate and we do expect those to continue and to accelerate and we have taken that into account. And the impact that we had on the U.S. market, mostly driven by the post-decertification effect that we have experienced as a market, right, it's the entire market that have seen that in 2025. We have also seen at the end of '25 that market to start picking it up, which is a good news. And we do anticipate for Q1, our own performance into that market to improve versus '26. So at this stage, even though we have some uncertainty, and we have factored into our range of revenue for the Mail performance to improve in 2026.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Next question. So can you give some trends on revenue by segment in 2026? Specifically, how do you see Mail revenue after the decertification base effect?
I can take this one. So specifically, we don't guide by solution on the revenue side by year because otherwise, it's a lot of different items that we've always being asked. I think the guidance is quite clear. We are aiming for the minus 2% to plus 2% revenue evolution. Obviously, what we factor in this minus 2% to plus 2% is obviously still some uncertainty. Geoffrey mentioned that, on the Mail side, and we've been we've been seeing the difficulty to predict on 2025. So we want to be cautious. The start of the year is obviously showing good signs, better than the trend we had again in Q3, Q4 of 2025. So we believe that the market will positively evolve notably because we get further away from the decertification in the U.S. And that basically, we have a comparison base. It's obviously slightly more favorable, but we get also new customers that get back to renewing their machine, which is normal.
But you have an underlying trend that mentioned by Geoffrey in Europe, in particular, where you have a further decline than when we had shared back in the CMD. And I think we need to consider the market has evolved and now it's back to minus 6% on CAGR, but we are aiming to more kind -- if you do the math, kind of minus 5% CAGR in the coming years. We are currently at minus 10%. So basically, what it means that from minus 10%, you will come back to a trajectory that is closer to that minus 5% or even above if we can, obviously. But we factor that uncertainty within the minus 2% to plus 2% range, I think, for the total revenue level. Digital and Lockers being much more predictable, I guess, and as we mentioned, notably on the subscription part.
Thank you, Laurent. Still on Mail. Does the underperformance of this segment mean you lose market share? Or is it a geographical effect?
So on the market share, the question is fair. Because we can see on the slide that we did slightly underperformed the market at the end of the year because before that, we are very similar. We believe that, yes, the geographical effect is part of it, meaning, basically, if you look market by market, we don't believe we lost market share in the past quarters. That being said in the past, we used to win a lot of market share on one specific market, which is in NorAm one.
Our understanding is also that when we win, it's when we gain new logos. And after all decertification, the opportunity for gaining new logos is obviously scarcer because you have less basically a customer up for renewal. But our belief is that coming back to a phase where you have more customer of renewal also after the post COVID effect, which is part of the answer, basically, where we will be able to hopefully, again, make the differentiation. But if you look market by market, today, we're not losing market share.
So a strong geographical mix.
Yes, it's a big chunk of the explanation, yes.
Thank you, Laurent. And moving on to Mail profitability. Could you remind us how you really managed to contain the decline in Mail profitability? Is it mainly HR reduction or anything else to think about? And are these reductions due to natural attrition or the results of restructuring?
Either way. Laurent, you can take it.
I'm more than happy to take it. I think it's an overall approach. So you have obviously a reduction in cost because we have a very variable production engine. I mean, we source a lot externally and basically we can easily adjust the cost of sales, notably to the revenue. That's part of the answer. But yes, the rest will be mostly on the OpEx side. We have a population on which we have obviously some natural attrition because some gets retired. And notably on the segment, we have a range of people that we not necessarily then when they lead to retirement that we smartly don't replace because we know we need to progressively adapt that structure.
We also contemplate when needed restructuring, and that's what we did this year, notably in France. And it's the overall approach that I think we've been successful in delivering the 27.1% EBITDA this year, and that's all this lever that we are pushing on.
Last portion I didn't mention is obviously the cross-sell. I did mention that in the side of portability, but obviously, we using more our salespeople on the Mail side to sell more Digital, which they've been very eager to do so because of the invoicing coming up and slightly lower traction on the franking machine side, notably has been delivering also some savings with some contracts and some costs being basically Digital ones.
I think to complement what you said rightfully on the synergies. We also have the synergies with the Lockers where the Mail technicians are also now supporting most of the installation in support of our Lockers base, notably in the U.S. but also in the U.K. So these are all contributing factors. And I think the best point of what you said, Laurent, and I think we have a tremendous track record, right? Because when you look at the combination of the viable cost structure the team has put in place, the favorable age pyramid that you mentioned, you could see that even in a difficult year where we lost more than EUR 70 million of revenue, right, almost 10% decline, we've been able to have a very high margin and stabilize it. So I think it's a credit to our commitment to maintain high margin and protect and favor, obviously, the cash generation of this business in the coming years.
Thank you both. And moving now to Lockers. When is the 5,000 units rollout in the U.K. will be completed? What are the ambitions of Lockers in Italy?
So on the Lockers in the U.K., it's a very good question. We always say that for us, the first milestone is to be and obviously, it could depend on different configuration in each of the countries we can operate. But a Locker business, an installed base at scale would be around 2,000, 3,000 lockers minimal, right? So that's our first milestone that we're trying to reach. And hopefully, in 2026, or soon in 2027, we should be able to reach that first milestone. This is what we're focusing on.
Now from now, and the end of '26 or the beginning of '27, we will obviously keep the flexibility to either accelerate or slow down those rollout based on the market condition that we see. For us, what is really important at this stage is maintaining that we always go for prime locations, which means we are going to have a good long term and high utilization of the network. As you could see that what Laurent shared with you, we've been able to manage the deployment of the base and making sure that, that deployment was with a high usage. So that's really for us the freedom that we take, right, based on market conditions, when do we need to accelerate the deployment and we need to slow down a little bit. So it's not a target per se, it is making sure that over a longer period, we can achieve those targets.
And obviously, we could go beyond the first 3,000 and reach the 5,000 or more potentially. Just as a reminder, we've got 7,000 lockers installed in the Japanese market. And we have -- I forgot the exact number, 14,000, I think, in the U.S. now. And for the Italian one, specifically the same thing. We don't want to rush too early to deploy lockers or on the other hand, not take too long. So we will update you on the progress we make in the Italian market along next year. Always market context driven, that's really what we've learned over the past years to be efficient in our rollout.
I think U.S. is 16,000.
16,000. Thank you, Laurent.
That is the acquisition of Package Concierge in addition.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Moving back to Mail. So how much restructuring expense did you have for Mail in 2025?
In 2025 is the bulk of what we have in the restructuring. So we have about 20 -- if I'm not mistaken -- you have about EUR 20 million. So just shy of EUR 20 million, and the bulk of it is the French RCC that we did this year, which represent probably a bit more than half of it, and the rest being other countries and for some also still a little bit of the buildings, notably footprint. So the bulk of it is for Mail.
Thank you, Laurent. So moving on now to questions on Digital. You have increased your revenue target for Digital. Customer acquisition can be expensive for SaaS companies. What makes you confident that you can improve your margin to 20% in 2026 and to 30% in 2030? Same question on Lockers. How confident are you that margins can improve? You are still in the Lockers rollout phase, notably in the U.K. and in Italy?
So I suggest we share, we split the question Laurent, you take the one on the Lockers, I take the one on the software.
Okay.
And actually, thank you for this question. It's a relevant question on the software side. Our assumptions and belief today is that we did structure our go-to-market engine that brings us between 2,000 to 3,000 new logos every year. And you're right, in a subscription business model and for the type of offering that we offer to our customers, the sales acquisition cost that we expense and we incur in a given year doesn't get its full payback in the first year, right? Basically, from the moment we have the sales team engaged to sign a contract. We recognized the booking value, but not -- we don't recognize the revenue, right? Because we could have the full sales expense of the year, sign a contract in December or January for the last month of the year for us. So we'll get the benefit moving forward, but with 0 revenue creation, the first year, which is an extreme case. Obviously, in average, we sign contracts every month from the first month to the last month.
So naturally, we intend to maintain that new logo acquisition engine and potentially to increase it a little bit over the years. But it's true that there's a second benefit that we expect and we see already actually in the last few years, which is the revenue coming from the expansion of the base. More simply put, is the capacity to upsell an existing customer from one solution to another solution. And this is where we're starting to be really good at. And naturally, when you have an existing customer, they already signed a contract, they use the platform. We have a customer success agent that discuss with them. And naturally, the capacity for ourself to convince that customer to use more of the application actually on the usage. It's also applicable or to be able to buy additional capabilities is much less expensive than acquisition of new logo. So it's really that second go-to-market engine that is kicking in and taking a greater impact and greater shares of the booking contribution for the coming years. And naturally, the efficiency of producing that revenue that booking is coming from that. So this is definitely a key lever for us.
And I would just add maybe another level on the go-to-market is the contribution also that we get from partners at our scale, at our size on the market today and being recognized as the leader in much of the segment that we operate into, we are having the benefits of having partners that are happy to work with us and happier to work more and more with us. So it's also part of being more efficient on the go-to-market because naturally, we'll have the benefit of having leads and having customer contracts that are not coming just from our direct sales team, but from an increasing and richer partner ecosystem. We have now more than 500 partners that we work with every day, and we could see that their contribution is going to be beneficial also moving forward in terms of cost efficiency of the new logo acquisitions.
And so for the second question, I guess, the Lockers side, I think, yes, rollout process for sure, I mean, you mentioned the U.K. and the Italian network. You need to think that we have a strong improvement also on the recurring side. The scalability, obviously, the R&D platform on the Locker is also one criteria. The level of investment, I think that we've have recognized up to now, notably in sales, in marketing to find new sites and to roll lockers. We have clearly learned from the past. And I think the level of efficiency we have also placing these new lockers is strong. So in the end, it's mostly tied to how much of recurring revenue you generate and that recurring revenue flows quite naturally like for the Digital part to the bottom line regardless of the team that you have that still continue to expand, but this team doesn't have to expand as fast as the top line. So you have clearly a scalable software and process of rolling out lockers that allows you to increase significantly the margin. We saw that this year, plus 4.5 points, 6.3% just on EBITDA on H2. It's nothing to do with what we had 2 years ago, and we've been rolling out plenty of lockers in the meantime.
Thank you, Laurent. So next, we have a couple of questions on Digital and AI. So do you see a change in the competitive landscape for Digital due to AI? And are you losing deals against AI companies?
It's a very good question, very relevant question, something, obviously, we look carefully at, and I can answer very directly today that we have not lost any deals related to an AI competitor. So we've got 0 churn neither related to any AI competition. So we are obviously, I think, getting the benefits of what I have, I think, tried to summarize for you is the type of solution, the type of platform we provide today, which cannot be replaced by an AI platform at this stage. And this is why I don't believe we see AI competitors being able to replace us, right?
We provide data that are required from a legal proof, right? Whoever sends the invoice, it's become a legal document at the time it is issued. It becomes the reference for different tax institutions in different countries, the basis of any compliance and audits. And we do that obviously on many type of documentation. So our system is a system of records, integrates with the system of records. And we see AI not as a competition that replaces, but as a benefit where we could augment the capabilities, the benefit, the information that we share and we can give to our customers and the outcomes they can get from it because AI agents have need to access our platform, our backbone, and this is why also we build our own capabilities on top of AI naturally. So we see that more as complementary and not as a direct competition at this stage.
Thank you, Geoffrey. And still on the Digital business, you mentioned peers transactions at 10x revenue in the past. Do you think that multiple is still relevant? And if not, what may be the new norm?
Well, that's a very difficult question to answer, and I don't know if I'm in the best position considering that probably more financial specialists could be there. What I would look at is that there's been very few transactions on the M&A side. Since the last month or so or 2 that we had seen some of the publicly traded company in SaaS being impacted recently. And I would add another caution is that, obviously, those impact seems to have been very recent. So we need to see obviously the longer-term impact. And I think just in the past few weeks as companies are trying to clearly explain themselves. I think we could see even recently that there's a lot of software SaaS companies that are what we could call them SaaS winners naturally because like with us, our software, our SaaS solutions are not being impacted, not being intended to be replaced by AI, but could benefit from it moving forward.
So I would be surprised that some SaaS companies could be impacted naturally, the one that may have their business model related to seat usage as AI could potentially automate what certain people could do. So if your business model is ready to seat, it could be the case. It's not the case for us, and it's not the case for a lot of other SaaS companies that operate in the same kind of vertical and specialized environment that we do. So that's, I think, my note of cautions and not projecting any multiple numbers.
We have been, at times, naturally like for Serensia or CDP more recently, looking at acquisitions. So we obviously keep an eye, obviously, on the M&A market. And I think that could represent an opportunity for us if we were to find companies that would be less valuable than they were before and could augment obviously the benefit that we see on the market. But at this stage, I think it's way too early to be able to anticipate what multiple or variable impact -- valuation impact it could have on the entire segment and the entire industry.
Laurent, if you have anything, you probably know this much better than me.
I agree with what you said, Geoffrey.
So thank you, Geoffrey. Last question we have for this Q&A session is on capital allocation. Are you considering starting a new share buyback program in 2026?
I can take that one. As you know, every year, we have a rolling 18 months of buyback capabilities that we -- from which we have a role to do in the general assembly. We just need to keep in mind that we have several targets for 2026. For sure, the first one is that we will pay a dividend that will be higher this year than the one before. We are talking about EUR 26 million of dividend overall, which is up by EUR 1.5 million to EUR 2 million compared to last year with the suggestion we will do, obviously, at the general assembly, would be subject to vote.
And we have also that leverage at 1.5 that we are committed to meet and that I mentioned we were today at 1.6. We mentioned the CapEx. So that's the overall allocation of capital. Would there be room for any share buyback and an opportunistic price point for the shares? For sure, we would trigger that. But we need to meet the overall envelope of what we've allocated to each of the priorities of the company.
So we have no further questions at this time, so we can close the call. And thank you very much for attending this presentation and for your questions. Our next call will be on the 21st of May for our Q1 2026 sales release. And in the meantime, we look forward to meeting some of you in the coming days during our roadshows. Thank you, and have a good evening.
Thank you. Have a good evening, too.
Thank you.
Thank you, Laurent and Anne-Sophie.
Quadient — Q4 2025 Earnings Call
Quadient delivered resilient margins and cash generation while cutting Mail goodwill, raising digital 2030 targets and flagging e‑invoicing as a major growth driver.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: €1.036bn (organic -3.2% YoY; in line with Sep guidance)
- EBITDA: €230m (22.2% margin); Current EBIT €135m (13% margin)
- Digital: Revenue +8%; annual recurring revenue (ARR) c.€250m; Digital EBITDA margin 18% (H2 trajectory toward >20% in 2026)
- Mail & one‑off: Mail revenue -9.5% but EBITDA margin 27.1%; recorded a €124m non‑cash goodwill impairment in Mail (reported net income -€66m; excl. impairment net income €58m)
🎯 What Management Says
- AI positioning: Quadient argues it is a “trusted execution” layer for mission‑critical workflows — AI augments rather than replaces its platform; ~60% of Digital customers use AI daily and management reports 0% AI‑related churn.
- E‑invoicing catalyst: Serensia accreditation in France and early commercial traction (10%+ market share cited) underpin a raised Digital 2030 revenue ambition to ~€550m.
- Business pivot & structure: Digital put directly under the CEO, four senior digital leaders added to Exec Committee; legal reorganization complete to enable strategic/financing optionality.
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- 2026 revenue: Organic growth guidance range -2% to +2% (visibility limited by Mail)
- 2026 margins: Target EBITDA margins: Digital >20%, Mail >25%, Lockers >10%
- Long term: 2030 ambitions — Digital ≈€550m (30% EBITDA), Mail ≈€500m (20–25% EBITDA), Lockers >€200m (~20% EBITDA)
- Capital & cash: Proposed dividend €0.75/share (+7%); net debt €682m, leverage excl. leasing 1.6x aiming for 1.5x; CapEx guidance ≈€90m.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Digital growth proof points: Analysts pushed on how management can lift Digital to a ~€550m run‑rate; management pointed to Serensia e‑invoicing bookings, ongoing ARR expansion and upsell/cross‑sell as the main drivers, with revenue impact concentrating in late‑2026 and accelerating in 2027–28.
- Mail trajectory & impairment: Questions on whether Mail hit a “cliff”; management lowered 2030 Mail revenue target to ~€500m, said decline is structural but predictable, and cited ~€20m restructuring costs in 2025 that helped preserve a 27% margin.
- Lockers & capex: Investors asked about rollout cadence (UK/Italy) and margin path; management reiterated high utilization focus, ~2.3k deployments in 2025, target to exceed 10% EBITDA in 2026 and CapEx steady (~€90m) with Lockers investment continuing.
⚡ Bottom Line
- Investor takeaway: Quadient shows operational resilience: recurring‑revenue momentum in Digital and improving Lockers profitability offset a weaker Mail top line and a one‑off goodwill charge. The strategic bet on AI and e‑invoicing clarifies a pathway to make Digital the largest, most profitable business by 2030, but near‑term returns depend on timely customer onboarding to accredited e‑invoicing platforms and stabilization of Mail volumes.
Quadient — Q3 2025 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good evening, and welcome to Quadient's Third Quarter 2025 Sales Presentation. I am Anne-Sophie Jugean, Quadient's Head of Investor Relations, and I am here today with Geoffrey Godet, CEO; and Laurent Du Passage, CFO. We will have a short presentation followed by a Q&A. You can submit your questions in writing through the web or ask questions live by dialing into the conference call.
Thank you very much. And with that, over to you, Geoffrey.
Thank you, Anne-Sophie, and good evening, everybody. For the third quarter of 2025, Quadient delivered EUR 248 million in revenue. While this reflects a 3.5% organic decline year-on-year. Our growth engines continue to show a strong momentum. Digital accelerated with a 9.2% organic growth driven by and sustained subscription growth across all regions.
Our Lockers business accelerated in subscription growth and once again posted double-digit subscription revenue growth. Subscription growth for the Lockers is fueled by increasing customer adoption and the continued modernization of our U.S., Japanese and European locker networks.
Meanwhile, Mail remained broadly in line with the previous quarter's trends and we now expect the rebound in U.S. hardware sales in the fourth quarter firmly. Let me highlight a few key achievements in the third quarter.
Quadient's digital SaaS-based intelligent automation platform is now #1 worldwide. Let me repeat this, #1 worldwide for customer communication management according to the latest IDC ranking with a 11% market share in 2024. We are also expanding our portfolio with the future acquisition of CDP Communications, a pioneer in document accessibility and automation. This is an opportunity to reinforce our #1 position on the market.
On the invoicing side, Serensia by Quadient, our recent acquisition of Q2 has completed all tests and is on track for final accreditation from the French tax authority. And this ahead of France National invoicing rollout planned for 2026.
On the Locker side, we're expanding our European open locker network to Italy and further extending our footprint. Looking at the first nine months of the year, both Digital and Lockers delivered a double-digit growth in subscription-related revenue. So naturally, combined with the expected year-on-year full year EBITDA margin improvement in these Q activities, Digital and Lockers and the continued resilience of Mail margin, these results give us confidence in achieving our full year 2025 guidance.
To you, Laurent.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Good afternoon, everyone. So on Slide 6, I would like to highlight some important developments in our shareholding structure since end of July. Here, you can see the shareholder positions as of the end of October. Our main shareholders have recently reinforced their commitment to Quadient. VESA equity investment, our largest shareholder, controlled by Daniel Kretínský has further demonstrated its long-term commitment on September 22. VESA crossed the 25% legal threshold and by end of October, it held 26.1% of Quadient shares, up from 22.7% held at the end of July. In addition, Bpifrance has also strengthened its position rising from 8.1% at the end of July, to 9.2% at the end of October. Furthermore, Bpifrance continued to increase its stake after October 31, reaching 9.91% as of November 14. Bpifrance public disclosures are available on the AMF website.
Let me now go over the details of the 9 months key financials. Moving now to Slide 8. This waterfall chart shows the main factors behind the revenue evolution from the first 9 months of 2024 to the same period in 2025. Starting on the left with EUR 797 million, we see a EUR 13 million positive scope effect. It's mainly coming from the acquisition of Package Concierge in December last year and to a lesser extent, from Serensia. Digital & Lockers contributed positively with Digital adding EUR 15 million and Lockers EUR 7 million. However, you can see mail saw a EUR 48 million decline. It's more than half being related to hardware. And finally, currency effect stands at minus EUR 19 million due to U.S. dollar weaker this year than last year, starting Q2 onward. This results in a net EUR 32 million decrease. It's minus 4% reported, bringing us to the EUR 765 million.
Moving now to Slide 9 to see the revenue evolution by geography. So due to the large success of the certification last year and slower recovery than expected this year, north America, Q3 and 9 months revenue declining around minus 4% compared to the year before, despite the good performance of growth of core engines locally. It differs from the past year's trends. On the other side, many European countries and international dynamic continues to show a decline consistent with past quarters, with Mail trend partially offset by Locker and Digital growth. But I think we need to mention that we have extremely promising install-based development on Locker side, U.K., France, Italy and also on the invoicing side for Digital.
Moving now to Slide 10. So in the past years, we have been focusing on delivering sustainable growth on subscription-related revenue, fueled by the acceleration of Digital and low-cost subscription revenue streams. Subscription-related revenue from these two growth engine is up by 11.4% in the first 9 months of 2025 and represents EUR 228 million, as you can see on the left-hand side. Looking at the longer term, strategy focusing on this long-lasting predictable revenue has paid off when you look at the right-hand side of the slide.
Since 2020, the share of subscription-related revenue from Digital and Lockers have almost doubled supported by a 15% CAGR over the 2020 to 2025 period. This reflects our strategic move from a transactional deal based model to a recurring revenue model transformation, we first implemented in Mail and successfully replicated into Digital and Lockers. Year after year, subscription revenue has grown steadily, driven by an expanding installed base. Strong market trends, digitalization and automation as well as parcel growth linked to e-commerce. While Mail continues to contribute its share of subscription revenue, it's gradually declining due to the market decline, primarily due to the mail volume decline. And this decline added by the growth in subscription rate revenue of Digital and Lockers.
So let's now move to the business review section. Over to you Geoffrey to give some details on our digital business.
Thank you, Laurent. As I mentioned in the introduction, IDC ranked Quadient as the #1 global provider of customer communication management or CCM, as we mentioned it for a solution. This represents an 11% market share in 2024. I also want to emphasize that Quadient took the largest share of the market increase in 2024. Quadient actually grew almost 3x as fast as the market growth of roughly 5%, making Quadient the fastest-growing player at the same pace of actually player #3. Quadient is now #1 player globally for the first time. This achievement is the result of the quality of the execution of our digital strategy that we established in 2019. The key element is that we invested to move to the cloud. We move from license to SaaS model. We expanded our solution to target not only large companies, but also the fast-growing segment of midsized companies. And we leveraged our mail sales organization to cross-sell our digital solution to our mail customers as well.
So I want to take this opportunity to thank our 15,000 customers and more than hundreds of partners across the world for the trust that they put in us every day. And naturally, I want to take just a few seconds to thank the Quadient teams across the world that are now the #1 in the industry for their relentless efforts, their expertise and their commitment to success.
In addition, EY and Numeum recognized Quadient among the top three French software publishers in the category of horizontal solutions. And we're also the 17th overall company in the top 250 of their ranking. And most importantly, I think our true leadership is further validated this year by nearly 1,650 new customers acquired in just the last 9 months.
So now moving to our latest acquisition. This is a Canadian company with decades of history in the system space. CDP Communication is a recognized leader in providing what we call advanced solutions that help businesses in their document transformation and most importantly, digital accessibility requirements.
So to give you a little bit more context, more recently, compliance drivers around accessibility and I'll take the example of that with the EU Accessibility Act, which became effective earlier this year. And we have other similar regulations. They are all requiring companies to make all digital content fully compliant from an accessibility standpoint. And this includes customer-facing digitized documents, for example, such as the PDF output.
So this new regulation, which come together naturally with a greater emphasis on making sure the customer communication is part of a greater overall customer experience and such for all customers is naturally creating a need for organization for businesses, right? to adopt the types of solution that CDP actually delivers. Fully integrating CDP together with our now leading intelligent automation platform, we believe that this will be able to more directly help our existing customers complying with these new market drivers and this new regulation, but also it will help us better competing for new customers because they will increase our differentiation on the market. And last but not least, this acquisition will be immediately accretive in terms of EBITDA basis upon closing, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks.
Moving to Slide 14. So another major driver facing the market today is the invoicing regulatory mandates that are facing millions of companies across Europe. Quadient has been rapidly accelerating its ability to help companies and such of all sizes to comply with these new mandates and this naturally supported, of course, with our acquisition of Serensia that we did earlier this year in the second quarter. And we're seeing extremely strong momentum in this area, especially in the last few months.
In France, after months of testing together with the central tax authority, Quadient has passed successfully all tests and is now waiting final certification as an approved and compliant invoicing provider. The strength of our solutions, Serensia by Quadient is what allows us to also rapidly grow our market share with some additional recent contracts awards that is putting us in a position to manage over more than 250 million digital invoices in 2026 when actually the government mandate will take effect.
And our strength in the French market is also helping to build the momentum for us across other key European markets as well. And I think that the basis of that is that our underlying technology, right, which is integrated across our digital platform is being adapted on to the specific requirements of these markets, which is critical as European-wide mandates are going to be requiring invoicing for cross-border transactions. And those European mandates will come into effect by 2030 across the EU. And because our invoicing solution is so adaptable, so flexible from a technological standpoint, it allows us to attack now this massive market opportunity in very different ways. So not only are we selling it directly to our customers, but also through the integration with our communication and financial automation solutions.
In addition to that, we are also partnering with other providers, right, that are integrating our offering into their own applications, and we call that either through what we call fully customized white labels approach or through less customized, I would say, "gray labels" couplings. With this leading product capability, and this 3-pronged go-to-market strategy, we're actually in a very strong position to grow and consolidate our market share by serving the needs of those 4 million businesses in our targeted market areas, which is really the B2B. Laurent?
Thank you, Geoffrey. So Digital continues to accelerate this quarter with a 9.2% growth, thanks to robust subscription rate of revenue and as well as stronger performance on license and professional services. Over 9 months, the growth stands at 7.9%, with a double-digit growth on subscription-related revenue, thanks to a strong underlying demand of SaaS offering in the U.K. being particularly dynamic. Our ARR has reached EUR 242 million, it reflects a 9.1% organic growth rate in terms of bookings, not reflected in this ARR. We are seeing strong sign-ups in France for invoicing and AP platforms which will contribute to revenue, notably in 2026. Overall, the digital segment is delivering sustained growth and is positioning us very well for the future.
Now let's go through the Mail financial performance on Slide 16. So mail revenue continues to be impacted by lower hardware sales in the U.S. for Q3 hardware sales are down by 16.7%. It's primarily driven by limited recovery in U.S. mail hardware sales, subscription rate revenue also declined due to a strong comparison base. There was no rate change this year, whereas Germany and Nordics, both saw rate changes in Q3 '24. Over 9 months, hardware and licenses are done 17.3% and subscription-related revenues is down by 5.2%. Despite these headwinds, we see traction on the end of year pipeline. We remain focused on leveraging our strengths and pursuing opportunities for recovery and growth in the coming quarters.
With that, I will hand over to Geoffrey for a deeper dive into mail.
So as Laurent just highlighted, for us, our priority is naturally driving the mail recovery at this stage. So very encouragingly, we are seeing now there's some very clear signs of the rebound in the U.S. mail hardware market in the third quarter. This is supported by improving demand trends. What we're seeing is that in the fourth quarter pipeline is already tracking ahead of the one we had in Q3. We see that renewal opportunities for 2026 are also stronger than the one we had in 2025. So we're expecting naturally a strong finish to the year as our portfolio of lease contract returns to a post-COVID momentum.
The fundamentals of our mail market remain the same with usage volumes trends that are unchanged. And therefore, naturally, our forecast for midterm mail volume usage is also confirmed. So we're going to continue to capitalize on the highly dynamic segment for us, which is the large mail production sites. We have actually secured some major deals across Europe and North America lately, and in this segment, the flexibility and ease of use of our solutions, I think, are very much appreciated by both the print service providers, who is generally the service providers and the corporate mail centers of the big enterprise. Our solution often combines both the physical hardware and the digital delivery as customers naturally evolve their communication strategies today to a omnichannel capabilities.
At the same time, the strength of our portfolio, which is to combine mail and digital is confirmed with the acceleration of our sales synergies and with the mail sales channels growing cross-sell of our portfolio of digital solutions, 22% year-on-year, and this includes actually a surge in financial automation bookings of more than 250%. In the third quarter, we also secured a major digital contract with a U.S. federal agency that is worth approximately $1 million and has been cross-sold by our mail sales team.
Finally, we reached an important milestone, I think, in the digital transformation of our mail management with the launch of our next-generation smart mailing solutions in the U.K., which features some advanced security and what I believe, a groundbreaking new user interface in order to drive the renewal and the upsell of our installed base. So this new IX series that will come into 4 different version 4, 6 and 8 is combining both hardware and software innovations and that I think offers a very intuitive design faster access to information. It's a very easy integration with the rest of the Quadient cloud-based ecosystem as well. And I think we're blending ultimately the familiarity of a mobile experience that we're all accustomed to with intelligent automation. This is truly and effectively how we help customers simplify complexity, maintain control and ensure compliance as well.
Now turning to the Lockers on Slide 18. I would like to take a moment to come back to our expansion strategy for Lockers. And this is a chart, I think, that many of you already know. The size of the e-commerce market by country, the locker installed base penetration by country as well, right, which is the locker network density in those countries. And the third one, which is the countries where Quadient is present for both lockers, but also for our other activities, in particular, mail activities.
So the strategy is to develop our Locker network has been built around those 3 factors and combining them. And if you look at the top 3 e-commerce countries on the graph, you'll see relatively low locker penetration, excluding China, and that Quadient is present and growing in its market share in each of those countries. And I would add that in Japan, the level of lockers penetration is actually linked to our leading position in the country because we have more than 7,000 lockers so we're the one driving the density and the penetration in this country. In Europe, our focus has been mostly on the U.K. And if you recall, we launched the U.K. open network not long ago. and the adoption has been now quite impressive and very fast and that's proven in the significant growth in the volumes seen in the recent months. So I'll come back to it in the next slide.
Now looking at other opportunities to expand our Lockers footprint in Europe and applying the same criteria as I mentioned before, we have recently announced our decision to launch a locker network in Italy. So let's move to the next slide.
So the launch of the Italian locker network has been one of the key highlights, I think, for the Locker solution in the quarter. In Italy, we have already signed several carriers into the networks with GLS being one of them through a multiyear strategic partnership. And we do benefit also from our experience in Japan and more recently in the U.K. in terms of both location selection strategy and the management of the network, which drives ultimately more efficiency for the launch of our Italian network.
As mentioned previously, volumes in the U.K. have been multiplied by a factor of 20 in January 2024, as supported by both adoption and rising density. Our Locker base globally now stands more than 27,100 lockers. And finally, I just wanted to highlight another key point for you is that we just unveiled a new solar-powered locker. This new Quadient, which we call X series is a battery-powered locker and provide reduced installation costs and reduce also further the CO2 emissions. This is a fully self-contained and autonomous locker, which provide us with more flexibility in terms of our outdoor open network location selections. So a lot of progress for our Locker solutions, which translates nicely into the financial numbers that are also continuing to improve. Laurent?
Thank you, Geoffrey. Lockers continued to demonstrate strong momentum in subscription rate revenue in the third quarter of '25. We saw robust strategic organic growth again in subscription rate revenue, reflecting outstanding volume ramp-up in the U.K. and France continued solid momentum in the U.S. and growing usage in Japan. Hardware services were down in Q3 may need to do a high comparison basis last year. The reported growth for the first 9 months of 2025, is very strong at 25.4%. This includes the positive impact from Package Concierge acquisition, which contributed EUR 12 million. The installed base and usage of our low-cost platform continue to expand, ensuring long-term growth perspectives with well-oriented underlying market trends.
Over to you, Geoffrey, to conclude with the outlook.
Over the first 9 months of the year, our digital and Locker businesses, delivered, as you've seen, a strong double-digit growth in subscription-related revenue. Meanwhile, mail continued to follow prior quarter trends with the anticipated rebound in the U.S. hardware sales that we now expect for Q4. So far, we've got a good resilience of our EBITDA and EBIT margin after the first 9 months. So when I combine that with our expected year-on-year improvement in EBITDA margin for digital and lockers in addition to the resilience of the mail margin, these results reinforce our confidence in achieving our now full year 2025 updated guidance. So we maintain our guidance that is as presented on this slide. I want to thank you.
And with that, we're ready to take your questions with Anne-Sophie and Laurent.
Our first question comes from the line of Jean-Francois Granjon at ODDO.
2. Question Answer
Yes. Jean-Francois speaking from ODDO BHF. Three questions from my side. The first one, could you come back on the low-cost business with a more limited growth for the Q3 compared to double digits we had during the first semester. So could we be more secular about that? And what do you expect for the coming quarters?
The second question for the acquisition of CDP in Canada, could you give us some ideas on the size and the sales of this company? And for sure, the margin, you mentioned and accretive impact, but could you be more precise about that?
And the last question is regarding next year 2026 at this stage, due to the fact that, in fact, we have a more limited growth of the -- slightly decrease in 2025. Do you expect -- nevertheless, do you confirm the target you have for the EBITDA margin for each division in 2026?
Laurent, do you want to take the first one?
Yes. So Jean-Francois, if you look at the growth of lockers in Q3, the main difference with H1 is really on the hardware and the hardware portion is, if you recall, Q3 last year, there was a strong double-digit growth on that hardware piece. That's the main explanation of the direction being different from H1. The subscription part is really well oriented, continue to be very well oriented, quite much in line with what we had in H1 and due to the development of notably, the open network in the U.K., as you could see, volume has been multiplied by 20 since January, and I think it's reflecting the fact that the network is growing, the recurring is coming with it. So I would say the hardware comparison is mostly one of the big 17.6% on subscription growth in Q3 compared to 16.1% over 9 months means it's even improving compared to Q3. And I think that's the metric that is particularly important. I would put the hardware momentary drop in comparison with the growth we had in Q3 last year.
So I'll take the second one. And Good evening Jean-Francois. Thank you for your question on CDP. So we're not going to give the exact information because the transaction is not closed yet, but just in terms of rough order of magnitude, I think CDP and I speak under the control actually of Laurent, on the revenue is probably around CAD 10 million on a yearly basis, sorry, CAD 7 million in term of revenue and with a percentage of EBITDA margin, that is probably more than twice where we could see currently in our digital platform. So it's a strong EBITDA margin contribution that we could expect on that limited scope.
That being said, we haven't completed the acquisition yet. So we'll probably wait until we could see you again at the end of March to try to understand the perspective that we could have, in particular for our European-based customers. As I mentioned, they could all be interested in having those kind of compliance solutions and see how they could contribute to the further acceleration of the growth of digital next year. So it's a good acquisition. It's a long partner that we had a relationship with. We know them. It's mostly going to be an asset-based transfer. It's a limited number of people in Canada, the team know each other. We already have team in Canada. So we do expect also a quite easy and fast integration of both the teams, the technology so they could really benefit into our intelligent automation platform. And then for 2026...
I've already mentioned it. And in H1, Jean-Francois, yes, we confirmed the EBITDA margin by solution for 2026. And we stay confident as Geoffrey mentioned that in the outlook, of the positive development of each of the solution and the resilience of mail on the EBITDA.
The next question comes from Flavien Baudemont at Bernstein.
Good evening to all of you, and thank you for the presentation. I have two questions on my side. First, can you give us more color on the local's launch in Italy? What is the time line? How much lockers are you going to install and is there any other open network lockers in Italy? And the second question is on digital. Can you, let's say, confirm that the FX impact on the digital revenues is roughly minus 3%? Just to have an idea of what is the organic subscription revenue.
Flavien, thank you for your question. I will let Laurent take the second one. If you want to start with this one, maybe, Laurent, I'll take the first one...
I understand. You're asking the FX impact on the subscription-related growth?
On the [indiscernible] digital with the...
Yes. Exactly.
So in a nutshell, year-to-date on the revenue side, you have about EUR 20 million of impact at group level, okay? And the split between dollar and euro for each of the solution is approximately the same. So you should consider that you probably have around 2% of impact of currency on digital, which is the overall revenue of EUR 200 million. So we are probably about EUR 4 million.
So on the locker on Italy, obviously, we have a high ambition for this market because it's a market that is combining a lot of the things that we like to be able to go after market. It has a low penetration of lockers today. So it's a good time to get started. It's a country that is pretty high in its usage of e-commerce. So it's going to drive a lot of those flows that will need to have automation and most importantly, it's a fragmented market from a carrier perspective. So contrary to France or Germany, we do not have a dominant player that has more than 50%, 60% or 70% market share. So this is a much easier country for us to be able to have higher market share to ensure a minimum market share for us. So that's the first thing. This is why we like Italy. And we felt that based on the momentum and the news and the things we've seen from the other players, now would be the right time. You don't want to go too early and you don't want to be too late, right? So we think it's a good moment to start the race.
As it relates to the pace, obviously, we are helped as we get studied in Italy by all the knowledge and the relationship that we have built and the other European, actually or the other countries network. So we are starting and we're embarking carriers. I mentioned GLS, but there are others that we have already a relationship with in other European countries. So that made the starting point to secure volume and long-term relationship faster and easier. So we're really down now to how fast we can secure good location. And on that front, on the other hand, we'll be very pragmatic because we want to secure a good location. We know very well by experience that location is prime from that perspective. It's like in real estate, location, location, location. We have actually built an AI engine with our own modeling to be able to learn on what could be the best locations, and that's what we're starting to do. So we're really at the early stage, and we'll see how long we need to take. Before we go at a much lesser pace naturally, we're going to ensure that everything works operationally that we can ramp up the few first hundreds. And based on the traction we could get, especially with the selection of location. I'm sure, by March, it will be much easier to give you a better sense of what it could mean in terms of ramp-up. At this time, we're really at the beginning of the launch. Thank you for your question, Flavien.
And just Flavien, one last point. I told you 2%, EUR 19 million of our EUR 765 million more 2.5%. So [indiscernible] 4 million takes 5 million, I think is probably a bit more accurate for the digital ForEx impact.
Okay. Maybe a follow-up on the lockers in Italy. Do you think it's going to be easier to find location in Italy rather than in the U.K.
It's a good -- very relevant question because as you mentioned, finding location is key, could be tricky. So a few things that we also have for us is we also have retailers that we have signed retail chain that we have signed in France or in the U.K. that are European retailers and also already have footprint in Italy. So I'm thinking, for example, of pretty large customers of ours like Decathlon for which we're going to install those lockers as well as in Italy and that have prime locations, so that makes it easier.
Two, because it's a market that is not yet penetrated with many lockers. There is obviously more opportunities and easier opportunities to find those locations compared to the U.K., in which we shared transparently that we started on the other hand, a little bit late compared to some of the ideal condition that I outlined for Italy, which made the selection more competitive in terms of location with the other players that already had existing footprint. So that's why overall, it feels today, but it's very early, and this is also we to start that. It should be an easier pass, but the proof is in the delivery. So that's why I look forward really to try to update you at the end of March to see after probably 6 months, 5, 6 months, what progress we have made in terms of the potential ramp-up in finding good affordable locations.
We have a couple of written questions sent through the webcast. So I hand the conference back to you, Anne-Sophie.
Thank you. So we can move on to the written questions. So we have a first question on mail. Actually, two questions on mail. So can you detail the performance of the mail hardware in Europe versus the U.S. Is there any difference of renewal opportunities between these regions? And second question on mail. What makes you confident that you will see a recovery in Q4. why was Q3 weaker than you expected?
Which one do you want to take, Laurent?
I can take the first one. So I think from a hardware perspective, in -- over the 9 months, the trajectory, I mean, the trend for this time is quite similar in NorAm, in Europe, but for two different reasons. I think in Europe, we've seen historical decline on the hardware portion being north of double digit, whereas in NorAm, it used to be relatively flat or even growing in the past years. The reason for having this year, a decline of NorAm at the level or close to -- or a bit more than the level, in fact, than Europe is mostly driven by the decertification moves we had last year. It's not related to an overall trend that would have changed. And I think it's important to underline that you have close results for two different reasons.
And we don't expect major change in the future trends of Europe. So this way, we felt that pretty confident when we see the usage of the various European countries that our long-term assumptions or midterm assumptions are quite realistic today and been proven accurate over the last 7, 8 years. I think we get a good way to predict that. And out of all the European countries, the French country France as a country, sorry, is probably the one where we see the highest level of decline and the lowest level of usage. And on the opposite end, we see in Germany, the highest level of usage on the machine, the highest level of renewals and the lowest level of decline out of the European countries. So that's a good side way to explaining the Q3 performance, and it's really building on the explanation that Laurent gave.
There's really 2, 3 things, I think, that make up a result of a particular quarter or a particular year in the mail in the U.S. To explain Q3, they will explain Q4 evolution and what we also expect for 2026. The bigger gap that we've seen that explained Q3, but also Q1 and Q2 in 2026 is the fact that the market opportunities has been dried up because of the end of the certification program that happened by the postal organization in '23 and '24 for which we enjoyed double-digit placement of hardware in the U.S. market during that period of time. And as we did the same thing, which is to go back to the customers and engaging with them, our competition did the same thing. So we exhausted a little bit for a long period of time, most of the new opportunities in the market. That's the reason where we see after a high comparison basis, lower level of placement.
That being said, the further away we move from the end of that decertification that really ended for us started to end in Q3, Q4 of 2024. The easier it will be to find those new opportunities as they become part of a natural cycle of customers looking for either renewing or extending contracts.
The second driver for which we have very clear visibility is the renewal of existing customers. So for every new quarter that we get into or every new year or every new period that we get into, by anticipation, we know for Q4, how many customers of existing contracts are up for renewal. We know today for 2026, how many contracts are for renewal for 2026.
So what we could say with confidence today is that the level of those renewals are increasing in Q4 compared to Q3 and '26 will have a higher level of opportunities for us to renew versus '25. And why are we confident on that is that we actually had a lower point of opportunities to renew those existing contracts because we suffered from the lagging effect of the COVID impact that we had 5 years ago.
So 5 years ago, in 2020, we had lower renewal opportunities and placements because of the confined period. And the year after, which is '21, we've seen a bounce of those engagement in those customers, so more contract plays and more contract renewed. And naturally, 5 years later, which is first '26 and a little bit in Q4 '25 because the rebound started in Q4 2020, we see that we can count on those. So that's really where we have our confidence is built, and this is the way when I look now at the pipeline we created in Q3, which is the sum of the renewal opportunities from the base that I just described and the result of the effort that we do with the sales team to go after customers and prospects to identify those opportunities, driven both by our sales team, but also driven by demand generation activities by our partners we see with more confidence that the pipeline is much bigger as we go into Q4 and bigger opportunities we could close in Q4 and same thing for the opportunities that we're starting to see for the beginning of 2026. So this is why we have more factual evidence of why Q4 is going to be, obviously, a better quarter, a much better quarter than we've seen for the rest of the year.
Follow-up questions on mail. What is the current mix of hardware sales in Europe versus the U.S.?
Yes, it's more a question for me, Geoffrey.
As you wish, Laurent.
No, I think it's for me. So we don't generally publish that level of information because if we start giving hardware by region or by country, it starts to be quite a demanding number of data, and we already shared, I think, a lot of data. That being said, I think we can probably say that there is a slightly stronger proportion of hardware in NorAm than there is in Europe, also due to the fact that there is a level of least penetration is particularly high. So I think that's the color we can give.
Thank you, Laurent. Moving on now to lockers. Is there any other existing open network of locker provider in Italy?
Yes, there is. You have -- at our open network, it's a good point. I think you have a semi -- I think it's a private network, actually, but I think it's the results, sorry, of the joint venture between the Italian postal organization and DHL. So that's the one. You have also some lockers coming from Amazon already in place in the market. And that's, I think, the key element, the one top of mind. I'll try to think if I missed any. But again, those networks are relatively small in comparison to the network you could see in Poland or even in France or in the U.K.
Still on Locker. So Vinted recently announced it was launching in the U.S. in some limited cities and states to begin with. Could this be an opportunity for you to look at the open networks in the U.S.
It's a very good question, and it gives me an opportunity to share back a little bit where we are in the U.S. We have launched already quite a few initiatives as there is to ramping up an open network in the U.S. We have an open network that is what we call at home with quite a high level penetration of the at-home market for those open network, and it's an open network at home because all carriers, right, all players can deliver into a single locker is not limited to Amazon product at a home or a multifamily situation. So we now -- I took the question in the angle of looking at the open network out of 1 in the U.S. And we have placed already some lockers in that context, both in Canada, actually in the U.S., in Canada with partners like [indiscernible]. We have already also made some more than proof of concept because we have some live lockers in Atlanta and in New York City. So we are obviously refining and fine-tuning what could be the best way to expand the out-of-home open network opportunity in the U.S. market for us. So that's the first thing. So we're quite active on this.
And as it relates to that, definitely, I see the potential venture of intent in the U.S. as clearly another way to be able to accelerate on the U.S. consumer trends and behaviors to get them more comfortable for an out-of-home delivery versus at-home delivery because today, contrary, for example, a country like France, where a lot of the deliveries are done out of home with the -- like the [indiscernible] distribution, including also the lockers. The U.S. market is mostly at home delivery, right? So there is definitely an opportunity to rebalance, not necessary to rebalance, but to provide another level of automation on top of the at-home delivery to provide an out-of-home delivery. And in that context, players like Vinted or others coming in the U.S. market would definitely help accelerate that potential penetration. And I think we're in a very good position to benefit or seize those opportunities.
Thank you, Geoffrey. We have a last question on Lockers. So what does the increased volumes translated into increased profitability in the Lockers business providing your strategy of having a succession model?
So I think we need to remind that on the open network, we have a combination of both fixed and variable revenue on the subscription side. I think the fixed part, and that's what we shared with you in the past quarters is we don't like to go in an open network without a commitment. And I think that, that commitment that we built together with [ Carrier ] so that we are safe on -- at least we limit the level of risk we take. And clearly, the volume part that goes on top is whatever will bring the incremental margin that obviously is almost 100% margin because basically, for the same investment, you get more revenue, and it's not because you have 10 parcel or 5 parcel but because the odds are just the same, just about the same, probably some levels that you should factor in.
So there is, for me, a great relevance having, especially on an open network, an ownership of the asset where your role, our role is to bring in volume sufficiently to enhance the margin to the maximum we can, so meaning driven by the using usage of these lockers but we only entered that scheme when we get a certain level of commitment, which you could translate as a fixed, and that can offset our investment and all the margin will come from our ability to attack more volume.
Thank you, Laurent. So now we can move to digital questions and more specifically on invoicing. So in the context of the investing mandate, what do you think of the acquisition of Shine by Cegid, what impact does this consolidation has on your strategy and positioning in this sector?
Thank you for this question. So definitely, a more strategic consideration. So I need to step back a little bit to give you some context. So I think for everybody on the call, Shine is French or I think actually not French, but I think they're based in Denmark or Netherlands, I forget exactly the mother company, but it's a mostly French operating company that is an online solution for the very low-end companies, very, very small companies, right, and try to provide them an online banking, full-stop solutions that includes the capability to not just do banking transaction, but also invoicing accounts receivable, accounts payable, et cetera, and obviously, being able to certify the invoice for the upcoming mandate in the French market.
This company has been -- I think it's probably in the EUR 60 million or EUR 50 million in revenues, but it's been acquired for, I think, a EUR 1.5 billion valuation by Cegid with the help of Silver Lake. And that really is a way for Cegid as well, right, on the accounting system for the low end to try to provide a holistic solution for those very low end customers. It is our view today that potentially a combined holistic solution, including the banking aspect, stood better the need of those very low-end customers that have the need like bigger companies, not necessarily the means to pay for a lot of value for it. And therefore, a one-stop package could potentially be helpful for them.
This is also the reason why we have decided for the time being, not to go after several years because we obviously had many opportunities to consider it. Our strategy has been deliberately to not go after those very low-end customers, but focus on what we call the enterprise and mid segment, the mid segment going sometimes to companies up to 20 people in size. And we consider that mid-enterprise segment is much more suited to the strength of our Intelligent Automation platform. And this is combined both from a technological perspective, I would say, an ISP in value versus the customer acquisition costs, those very low-end customers. So that when we call the customer acquisition cost versus the long-term value LTV and CAC is what you can -- you need to measure.
And that makes a very difficult equation for us to see a successful path. We've seen that with companies, I think a little bit like Backup that is based in Belgium that is also addressing the low end of the market. We see that a little bit more with companies like [ Bill.com ]. So you need a pretty extensive high base to try to scale to potentially generate profit, and we haven't seen many companies actually have not seen any making money on that. So we see the low-end market being addressed potentially more by those banking solution, online banking solutions.
On our side, that gives us comfort that on the other hand, our mid-enterprise strategy is a successful strategy for digital approach, where the combination and the platform approach to have a holistic view of how to engage with the customer in the business communication, the contract, the orders process, the relationship you have on the business side up to the invoicing and how to collect and how to send those invoice and how to collect the cash is a most successful approach on that mid-enterprise segment. And I do believe today that most players will either position themselves on mid-enterprise segment, no longer stay on enterprise, mid-enterprise or low end and also have to have a need to go from a niche products, narrow product solution to a platform solutions and other M&A activities in the recent months or years actually have confirmed, I think, the vision that we have on the market today. I think on our position, we're quite satisfied. We have anticipated those moves now for quite a few years and being passed the time to integrate those solutions and to adapt the go-to-market. And that's I think what we're seeing, in particular, in Europe and the French market is the acceleration of the pipeline of the momentum. Here, the last few months have been very successful for us in seeing the traction that we wanted to see in the French market.
And especially on Serensia and invoicing, do you see upside to your CMD plan, thanks to the already significant market share that you have captured on invoices?
It's another good question. So Serensia was not -- I mean, the acquisition of Serensia was not part of our CMD plan. During the CMD, we had definitely accounted for being able to provide a solution to our customers for the compliance aspect of the invoice, but we had the plan to do that through a more white label approach using a third party to do so. So the upside actually is now resulting in the benefit of the acquisition from Serensia. So what did Serensia provided us above and beyond, I would say, the volume of invoicing, we could have captured in the CMD plan is a few things. Not only we have that certified platform that seems to be one of the best in the market today. We have already secured probably 10%, 15% market share potentially based on the numbers of invoices that we have on the contract for the upcoming mandates, which out of the 118 companies that are applying for it, puts us in a very strong position to be the leading or one of those leading company. So that's definitely combining the strength of Quadient and Serensia and that's above and beyond, I think, what we had anticipated.
The second thing is definitely the fact that Serensia also had a strength in their go-to-market with partners, right? So they've been more successful or they had initiated the fact to resell the platform in white label or gray capacity that I mentioned earlier and allowing other players to go potentially after the low end of the market. And we've seen that with platform like Cerfrance that certified accountant network in France. We've seen that with Dext, that is addressing also as a software player, the low end of the market. And we are continuing to sign additional partnership on that front. So that's obviously also a nice upside.
And I think the last one is the fact that Serensia has an invoicing platform that provide reporting and dashboarding capability for the large enterprise so that we could go direct. Our opportunities in France was mostly focused on the mid segment. And we've seen recently that by combining Serensia invoicing platform and the Quadient offering, we've secured a large enterprise in France actually, even just in the last few days, but also throughout Q3. And that's -- and we're combining the Serensia invoicing platform with our Inspire platform, with our Evolve platform, as well. So the combo of those solutions is really what we did not necessarily anticipate on the enterprise segment and that we are seeing just the early signs.
So same thing. I think we'll probably have better visibility on what it could mean for the French growth for us next year.
Thank you, Geoffrey. We are done with the business-related questions, so we can move on now to the financial questions. So first question, can you provide some insight into the main factors of uncertainty included in the EBIT margin guidance for 2025 from stable to low single-digit decline? In other words, what conditions are necessary to achieve stable EBIT?
So overall, as you remember, the guidance has led to losing digit decline on the top line and from flat to losing decline on EBIT. In H1, we had maintained the EBIT at the same level. The key question for the [ year ] is about a mix. We are confident, I think, in the evolution, the positive evolution of EBITDA percentage, both in Locker and Digital, that we are going to be resilient in May. But as you know, the EBITDA is still higher than the one for the worse engines. So depending on where we go in terms of revenue for mail, or for Q4, where we have expectations that Geoffrey mentioned being stronger than the one of Q3. That's going to make or not a more favorable Q4 and a more favorable full year. If we have that additional top line, it will help if we don't have it, it may fall on the low single-digit decline more than stable.
Thank you, Laurent. And we have one last question. Just from a theoretical perspective, some brokers believe that everything is ready for a carve-out of one of your free business, legal, central functions. But do you believe that the good traction of the cross-selling prevents you from any possible carve-out?
This is an interesting question. So I think I understand which broker you refer to. I think it was probably a note from David Cerdan from Kepler and that's something actually that we have shared quite regularly, right, that you need to differentiate the fact that we have organized the company in 3 independent structures, those 3 independent companies to some extent got to have their own life and which means that from a technical perspective, any carve-outs are possible, or we can divest any of those business. We could bring investors at any of those business versus the benefit that we enjoy and benefit from, from the synergies among those 3 business and working together then and then.
And so one doesn't prevent the other. We are both ready from an organizational standpoint to have those 3 business organized independently. Laurent worked on that for the last 3 years. And on the other hand, we enjoyed from increased benefit and synergies as we could see in the third quarter result where we see the cross-sell on both financial automation for digital solution as well on our CCM solution, increasing quite fast. On the Locker side, sometimes we spend a little bit less time together to mention that, but we have also have increasing benefit from both the cross-selling, in particular, in some corporate segments, university segment or with the carriers but as well from an operational standpoint where we leverage the same capability to maintain and support a network of device on the mail side and a network of device on the Locker side. So one is not independent of the other. We're fully equipped today to benefit from all opportunities.
Thank you, Geoffrey. We have no further question at this time, so we can close the call. Thank you very much for attending this presentation and for your questions. Our next call will be on the 25th of March 2026 for full year 2025 results release. In the meantime, we look forward to meeting some of you in the coming days during our shows. Thank you, and have a good evening.
Quadient — Q3 2025 Earnings Call
Q3 sales: EUR 248m (-3.5% organic); Digital and Lockers drive recurring growth while Mail hardware lags; full-year guidance maintained.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: EUR 248m in Q3 (-3.5% organic YoY); 9-month reported revenue EUR 765m (-4% vs. prior year).
- Digital: Organic +9.2% in Q3; Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) EUR 242m; subscription momentum strong.
- Lockers: >27,100 units installed; subscription revenue double-digit growth; 9M subscription-related revenue from Digital+Lockers EUR 228m (+11.4%).
- Mail: Q3 hardware -16.7%; 9M hardware -17.3%; subscription-related mail revenue down ~5.2% over 9 months.
🎯 What Management Says
- Market leadership: Quadient claims #1 global position in customer communication management with 11% market share (IDC, 2024).
- M&A & product build: Acquisitions—CDP Communications (document accessibility) and Serensia (invoicing)—to strengthen digital portfolio and compliance capabilities; CDP described as immediately EBITDA-accretive on close.
- Locker strategy: European expansion (Italy launch), U.K. volumes multiplied x20 since Jan 2024, new solar/battery X-series lockers to lower install cost and emissions.
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- Guidance: Full-year 2025 guidance maintained: top-line expected to show a losing-digit decline; EBIT guidance range from stable to a low single-digit decline (sensitivity to Mail revenue mix).
- Near-term drivers: Management expects a rebound in U.S. Mail hardware in Q4 and continued margin improvement from Digital and Lockers; plans to handle >250m digital invoices in 2026 via Serensia.
- Risks: FX headwind (~EUR 19m YTD) and Mail hardware timing remain the primary upside/downside of meeting EBIT range.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- CDP size: Transaction not closed; management cited roughly CAD 7m revenue and an EBITDA margin “more than twice” the current digital platform margin; integration expected to be quick.
- Lockers questions: Italy launch early stage—carriers signed (e.g., GLS), location selection underway; hardware variability explained by timing and high prior-year comps; open networks and U.S. pilots underway.
- Mail rebound & FX: Q3 weakness attributed to high comps after past certification activity; renewals and a stronger Q4 pipeline underpin expected recovery; FX reduces digital revenue by ~2–3% (~EUR 4–5m).
- Structure/Carve-out: Company is organized so carve-outs are feasible, but management values cross-selling and operational synergies across divisions.
⚡ Bottom Line
- Takeaway: Quadient is transitioning toward higher-quality recurring revenue: Digital and Lockers are growing and improving margin mix, while Mail hardware weakness pressures near-term results. Management keeps full-year guidance, backed by a stronger Q4 pipeline and accretive tuck-ins (Serensia, CDP). Execution on Mail recovery and FX exposure are the main near-term risks for shareholders.
Quadient — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good evening, and welcome to Quadient's Half Year 2025 Results Presentation. I am Anne-Sophie Jugean, Quadient's Head of Investor Relations. Today's presentation will be hosted by Geoffrey Godet, CEO; and Laurent Du Passage, CFO. The agenda for today's call is on Slide 3. As usual, there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. You can submit your questions in writing through the web or ask questions live by dialing into the conference call. Thank you very much. And with that, over to you, Geoffrey.
Thank you, Anne-Sophie. Good evening. The first half of 2025 showed a solid performance from our two growth engines, Digital and Lockers, with a double-digit growth in recurring revenue. Both solutions are firmly on a strong and predictable revenue growth trajectory. From a profitability standpoint, lockers' EBITDA margin also confirmed its fast-improving trend. And both solutions are expected to deliver EBITDA margin increase for the full year 2025 and also for 2026. The end of the U.S. postal decertification program that we mentioned last time impacted our mail hardware sales in the U.S., leading to a temporary lower revenue in the period for Mail Solution.
All players in the industry have experienced similar declines. More importantly, we managed to protect the profitability of our Mail Solution. Thanks to the cross-selling between our solutions and also the contribution from the recent integration of the Frama acquisition that we did a little more than a year ago. As a result, for the first half of 2025, we delivered EUR 517 million in revenue, which represents a 3% organic decline compared to the same period last year. Despite the decline in mail revenue, current EBIT for the period was stable at EUR 60 million. So let's now turn to the details of our H1 result with Laurent.
Thank you, Geoffrey. Overall, Quadient delivered EUR 517 million in total revenue in the first half of 2025, representing a 3% organic decline compared to last year. This reflects a 13.4% organic drop in noncurrent revenue, affected by the lower mail product placements in the U.S. compared to last year, decertification period. Mail performance was very much in line with Q1 and also consistent with overall market trends. That said, our subscription-related revenue continued to grow and now stands at EUR 384 million, representing 74% of total revenue, up from 72% last year.
From a geographical perspective, North America has been declining by EUR 10 million compared to last year, resulting from a EUR 19 million decline in Mail, while our other solutions continue to grow. Europe performance in H1 is in line with previous year, with a notable exception, U.K. and Ireland, overperforming the rest of Europe as it benefits from strong dynamics in both Lockers and Digital. International has also been overperforming, thanks to large local deals.
Let's now turn to the revenue bridge by solution on the next slide. This bridge clearly highlights the strong and continued momentum in both Digital and Locker Solutions, while Mail experienced a sharper decline of EUR 31 million in the middle. Out of this EUR 31 million, EUR 16 million are coming from that lower U.S. hardware placements. Just as in Q1, Lockers delivered double-digit growth and Digital grew above 7%, while Mail declined by around 8% year-over-year. The scope effect added EUR 9 million on the left, mainly coming from the acquisition of Package Concierge in December 2024 and to a lesser extent from the Serensia acquisition in June 2025.
On the right-hand side, you can see the EUR 10 million negative currency effect entirely coming from Q2 due to U.S. dollar. Moving now to the next slide on current EBIT. So Slide 9. Despite higher decline in Mail, Quadient delivered a stable current EBIT, thanks to a slight growth of EBITDA in Digital, a limited decline in Mail, thanks to our cost adjustments as well as significant improvement in Lockers, which is up by EUR 5 million year-over-year.
The reported current EBIT for H1 2025 stands at EUR 60 million. It's nearly unchanged compared to the EUR 61 million from last year with a slight positive organic growth, 0.1%, offset by the currency effect of EUR 1.7 million on the right-hand side compared to last year. So now we'll move into the details of the performance by solution. Over to you, Geoffrey.
Let's move now to our H1 2025 accomplishment in our Digital automation platform. Our leadership was further reaffirmed in Q2 '25 with top position in both CCM and CXM Aspire Leaderboards. But I'm also proud to share that Quadient earned the highest score in both AI vision and road map as well as the AI maturity. This leads to be recognized by QKS as the most valuable pioneer in the CCM AI Maturity Matrix. This recognition proves that at Quadient AI is not a buzzword. We're not experimenting. We're scaling AI in ways that set high standards for the industry. The real challenge with AI, as you know, is to deliver measurable value and such at scale. Too often, AI in business today gets reduced to hype, pilots or sometimes even disconnected use cases. At Quadient, we focus not on what AI could do someday, but on what it does today to create sustainable value and accelerate customer success.
Our investments in AI position Quadient ahead of the competitors and show the direction for the whole industry. We also advanced strongly in the account payable AP metrics compared to 2024, especially in technology excellence, where we're now firmly also amongst the leaders of the industry. And finally, I wanted to highlight that Quadient received also the IDC SaaS award for customer satisfaction in the Account Receivable Automation segment.
That's based on the highest scores across 32 customer metrics from product value and usage implementation and customer relationship. So if we step back, taken together, these recognitions show one thing very clearly, Quadient Digital is delivering innovation, customer value and market leadership across every segment we play in. Our go-to-market approach, as you know, has been built on two strong pillars, acquisition and expansion. On the acquisition side, Quadient Digital delivered strong momentum in the first half of '25. We added this time 1,100 new customers, new logos, right, with strong dynamics from large accounts and also on the mid-segment, over 30% growth that is coming from the cross-selling from our Mail customers into our digital platform.
We also secured some several new large enterprise logo, and that includes two large enterprise deals that are each worth more than $1 million. In particular, the one deal that I want to mention to you was a Spanish Bank, which is quite interesting because once it will be fully implemented, they will be one of the largest user of our digital platform, hoping to generate more than EUR 15 billion. I just want to stress that EUR 15 billion communication annually.
If we move onto second pillar on the expansion side, we continue to build value with our more than 16,000 existing digital customers. Following the acquisition -- on another note, sorry, following the acquisition of the e-invoicing platform that we did of Serensia in June of this year, the positive momentum is accelerating. First, Serensia has successfully passed the French tax authority invoicing platform test that was in July. And since July, it is now an Accredited Platform.
And as such, it has already been selected by major accounts and white-label resellers as their Accredited Platform and such ahead of the invoicing compliance date for next year. Now what it means for Quadient is that we're already guaranteed now to manage over 200 million of invoices annually in 2026 and moving forward, securing at least over 10% of the addressable market in terms of numbers of invoice that will be managed annually.
In terms of upsell, I also wanted to share with you another strong example of the benefit of the approach of Quadient of having a best-of-suite approach. This customer story has everything that we could wish for. It's a competitor takeout and it's also a multiproduct, multi-module sell. We signed a deal in H1 with a leading cloud-based electronic healthcare record provider in North America with a full platform bundle, and that included our account payable module, our account receivable module, our hybrid mail distribution module, our CCA module. Over to you, Laurent?
As in Q1, we continued to deliver double-digit organic growth in subscription-related revenue for our Digital business with particularly strong performance in North America and the U.K. Our annual recurring revenue or ARR has increased to EUR 241 million, representing an organic growth of over 10% on a 12-month basis compared to the January 2025 mark. EBITDA on the right-hand side for H1 2025 remained stable year-over-year despite the integration of Serensia and higher commercial expense tied to strong bookings. Looking ahead, we expect profitability to increase for the full year, higher than the 17.5% margin reported for 2024. In summary, Quadient's focus on recurring revenue streams and successful integration of new acquisitions are driving the sustainable growth and supporting our long-term profitability targets. Turning now to Mail on Slide 14.
Thank you, Laurent. Mail had a difficult H1 caused by special circumstances in the U.S. and the U.S. is our main and most resilient market traditionally. The root cause of the H1 decline came primarily from the earlier-than-expected end of the U.S. decertification program. And with all Mail market players experiencing a similar level of both hardware and/or total revenue decline in H1, to get in bit more details and be more precise, the U.S. decertification program officially ended in Q1 2025.
But the initial deceleration in terms of opportunities came as early as the end of last year -- sorry, of the first semester of last year in 2024. So that was roughly 6 months earlier than we had anticipated. With over 50% of the competitive base, generally speaking, the entire market, right, that has been updated in the last 2 years as a result of that program, the resulting factor is a lower numbers of [indiscernible] to sign or to renew deals in H1 2025. This is the primary driver of the decline in Mail hardware sales in H1 that you can see in this graph with North America accounting for more than 80% of the drop in mail product placements.
Moving forward, Quadient anticipate that hardware sales performance is going to improve and is going to improve in the coming quarters as the echo effect of the post-COVID rebound 5 years later, will create higher opportunities for equipment renewals. The fundamentals of our mail market remain the same. The usage volume and the usage on the machine in H1 are unchanged. Our forecast for midterm mail volume usage globally is also confirmed. So naturally and consequently, we foresee a rebound in U.S. hardware sales in H2 and in 2026, and we'll see a return to a more muted revenue decline for Mail Solution over the medium term. And this is what allows us to confirm our 2030 guidance on Mail revenue of around EUR 600 million. Laurent?
Thank you. On Slide 15 now, as we announced, the Q2 trends were very similar to those in Q1. So for H1, Mail hardware sales declined by 17.5%, primarily driven by a strong comparison base in the U.S., as explained by Geoffrey, due to last year decertification, which ended in Q1 '25. Despite these headwinds, Mail EBITDA margin improved by 0.8 points compared to H1 '24. This was supported by the successful integration of Frama, which delivered the expected benefits, the enhanced commercial productivity with Digital and a mix effect from lower hardware placements with limited impact from U.S. tariffs.
Overall, while top line trends reflect the current market challenges, our focus on operational efficiency and integration synergies has enabled us to maintain strong profitability in the Mail segment. Now moving back to Lockers with Geoffrey.
Expansion of our Lockers platform accelerated in H1 as well, both in terms of the size of the network and in terms of its usage. Our overall installed base now is reaching 26,600 lockers globally as we added naturally, I think, more than 1,100 lockers in H1 alone. In the U.K., the deployment of our network has continued to focus on premium location, and we have signed new partnerships with Shell petrol stations, but also a retailer chain, The Range, so that they could install our lockers.
In H1, we also saw further initiatives that drives the volume in our lockers. So if we take another example, in Japan, we extended our partnership with JR East, Smart Logistics. So now users are going to be able to both receive and send parcels through the lockers installed in the train station themselves. Moving to Slide 17. If we look at the European networks, we can clearly see the benefit of having an at-scale network as a key driver for the growth in usage.
The graph on the left highlights the steady acceleration in locker installation across Europe, in particular for open networks since January 2024. Over the past 18 months, the installed base has tripled with mostly premium locations, as I just mentioned to you, some of those new partners. Now let's look at the graph on the right side because that's a clear demonstration, I think, of the successful J-curve of developing and how it develops for our open networks. From the threefold growth in installation, we have been able to generate a 13-fold increase. So just let me repeat, a 13-fold increase in volumes over the same period of time as now users and carriers and consumers are increasing their usage of our lockers. With that, I'll now hand it over to Laurent.
Thank you. On Slide 18, let me start with just showing you the longer-term track record of our Locker business. On this slide, we have shown the evolution of the key financials and operational metrics for our Locker business over the past 3.5 years. The quarterly revenue evolution emphasis strong revenue momentum as Lockers already is a EUR 100 million revenue business on a 12-month basis. An increase in the share of subscription-related revenue with 4 consecutive quarters of strong double-digit organic growth.
Now moving to the other graph, let's review the EBITDA evolution shows a low point in 2022, which was impacted, if you remember, by adverse transportation cost impact at the time. Most importantly, EBITDA breakeven was achieved in fiscal year 2024 last year. With a regular and strong increase of EBITDA margin since 2023, the H2 '25 is expected to be both sequentially and above year-on-year, and we are well on track to reach the above 10% EBITDA margin by 2026. Moving now to Slide 19. We continue to deliver that strong momentum in both revenue and profitability in H1.
Reported growth reached 30%, including the positive impact from Package Concierge acquisition, which contributed EUR 8 million. Organic growth continues to be double digit in Q2 like it was in Q1 and despite the software hardware performance in North America in Q2. We also achieved a double-digit organic growth in subscription-related revenue, driven by the outstanding volume ramp-up in open networks across U.K. and France as well as continued momentum in the U.S. residential segment.
On the right-hand side, our EBITDA has significantly improved, I mean for the first half compared to last year. It's up by EUR 5 million. It's more than 10 points better than last year. And this was fueled by rising recurring revenue and increased usage as well as the accretive contribution from Package Concierge. On Slide 20, moving now to Quadient financials. In this slide, you have just a summary of the different metrics we did review, summing up to the EUR 517 million published revenue or 21% EBITDA and the EUR 60 million current EBIT at the bottom. Moving now to Slide 22. We see the P&L. Income before tax is particularly improved in H1 '25. It's 50% more than last year, thanks to lower optimization expenses than last year, which I remind you included an IT project write-off and some office optimization.
And we have also a stable financial expense. H1 '25 income tax is normalized, while H1 last year included a EUR 15 million tax benefit. We even have a negative cost in tax last year. It results in a net income at EUR 21 million for this period compared to the EUR 24 million last year. Let's move now to Slide 23 and the free cash flow. Free cash flow stands at minus EUR 8 million despite the seasonality that we know of our working capital and the debt interest payment and tax one-offs.
We have two one-offs this semester. Lower mail hardware placement have benefited to the cash flow, on the other hand, thanks to the lease portfolio decline and lower CapEx for Mail, which we'll review in more detail on the next slide. On the acquisition side, you can see the impact of Frama acquisition last year in H1 and Serensia this year. Moving now to the next slide to see details on CapEx. The evolution of CapEx presented here, excluding IFRS 16 CapEx moving forward as in fact, IFRS 16 is not reflecting such a cash out. Well, this evolution reflects the dynamic by solution we explained before, a stabilization of sustained, I would say, investment in Digital, which is mostly related to R&D, the EUR 12 million, increase in Lockers for the benefit of our open-network rollout notably in U.K. that increased to EUR 14 million.
And last but not least, the reduction in mail CapEx due to the lower placement in franking machine tied to the end of the decertification and the reduced activity. Moving now to Slide 25 on net debt and leverage as of the first half of '25 our net debt declined to EUR 712 million. It's clearly favorably impacted by the USD weakening against Europe. The leverage ratios are down. It's at 2.9 including leasing and 1.6 excluding leasing from the 3.0 and 1.7 respectively at the end of January. This improvement reflects the resilience of our EBITDA, with a continued discipline on the balance sheet.
Over the past 18 months, if you look at the figures, we have seen that the leverage kept -- was kept stable or declining. And this despite the EUR 45 million of acquisitions we made over the period.
Our leverage ratios continue to stand well below our maximum covenant levels, ensuring long-term financial stability for Quadient. Moving now to Slide 26. During the first half of '25, we raised EUR 50 million in new facilities, a U.S. private placement issued in July. Thanks to the shelf facility signed earlier this year. We also completed the repayment of our 2025 bond and Schuldschein in February. Our liquidity position remained strong with EUR 123 million in cash at the end of July and a EUR 300 million on joint credit facility, which has been extended to 2030.
The customer leasing portfolios stand at EUR 556 million, it is down by EUR 67 million, which in fact is due for EUR 43 million to ForEX. And we see the maturity and the bottom was spread over the coming years. Back to you now, Geoffrey, for the conclusion.
Thank you, Laurent. This H1 2025 performance, I think demonstrated clearly the solid dynamics of our two growth engines, Digital and Lockers, offsetting the temporary U.S. softer mail impact that we described today with a stable current EBIT. For the second half of the year, we expect Quadient revenue to increase compared to H1, and this will be supported by a few things.
The first thing is the continued, sustained strong momentum in Digital and also in the Lockers. It will also be supported by a rebound in U.S. Mail for us, although it's tougher than initially expected. We also expect a further increase in profitability in H2 versus H1 this year. How does it going to be supported? We're going to have a strong increase in Digital and also the low-cost contribution in H2.
And Mail EBITDA margin is going to remain at a high level as well, thanks to the continued cost adaptation and despite the impact from the U.S. tariff in particular. So consequently, and taking into account the global macroeconomic uncertainties that we all have experienced, we are updating our full year 2025 guidance. And we now expect the full year revenue to decline by a low single-digit on an organic basis. And the full year current EBIT to come in a range from stable to low single-digit decline on an organic basis.
If we look at the midterm guidance, we are confirming all our 2030 guidance, and we're also confirming the full year 2026 EBITDA margin targets and such for our three solutions. So with EBITDA margin expected to be above 20% for Digital, above 25% for Mail and above 10% for the Lockers. Based on the 2024 result and on the revised guidance for '25, we're currently suspending all other elements of the guidance from being part of the previous '23-'26 trajectory. So thank you. And with that, we're ready to take your questions, as usual, for the Q&A, Anne-Sophie.
Thank you, Geoffrey. [Operator Instructions] There are no audio questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any questions sent via the webcast. Thank you.
Thank you. So we have a first written question. So the question is, why did you suspend your guidance for Lockers and Digital on the revenue side for the 2023-2026 period.
That's a good question and Laurent feel free to comment. It just is too early to give the full guidance of '26. So it's likely something we will share with you and we'll get to March 2026 after the full year presentation. The real things that made us suspend the guidance is really related to the U.S. Mail performance that we have this year and the level of uncertainty that we still have as it relates to the pace of the rebound that we'll get in the U.S. main market for H2 and for the pace, obviously, the beginning of 2026, in particular.
All the other elements of our business, including the performance that we have in the Mainland Europe that is at the same level as we expected in the previous years. The performance on our digital activities as well as our local activities are in line with our expectations. And this is why also we're able from a profitability or margin perspective to be able to -- ahead of time to confirm the trajectory. That being said, we live in a world with quite a lot of uncertainties. So it will be, I think, good for us to be able to -- until March to be able to precise the revenue trajectory or solution once we get there.
Thank you, Geoffrey. So the next question is on Digital. So could you please provide further details on the decline of EBITDA in the Digital segment? What are the expectations for the second half of the year.
So I'll take this one, Geoffrey. So EBITDA for Digital is growing. So it's plus EUR 1 million compared to last year. That's what we saw in the bridge. And yes, we still have some growth and scale. I think you're referring maybe to the EBITDA margin that is slightly down. You have this dilutive slight impact from Serensia and the integration cost as well that is a factor. And the second factor is obviously some strong bookings that have impacted the commission side. We are very confident on the second half. We still have the growth in recurring revenue that is highly contributive and we have a level of OpEx that is not expected to significantly increase in H2.
As you remember, we have usually payroll increase at the beginning of the fiscal year. So it should really benefit to the Digital segment and will end up higher than the 17.5% that we had on the full year last year.
Thank you, Laurent. So the next question is on U.S. tariffs. So regarding the tariffs, are you more impacted than your Pitney Bowes and competitor as being a non-U.S. provider.
It's a good question, and it's difficult to know because we haven't looked at the information if Pitney Bowes has actually shared the amount. They have more volume than us in terms of equipment being a larger player. So they may have been more impacted in absolute value, and it depends obviously on how and where they source their -- the production and the manufacturing and reassembly of the activities.
I think they are not producing in the U.S., so they are likely to be subject to tariff like any of the other players like FP and ourselves. That being said, the rate could vary from the one that could be potentially manufacturing in Europe, like some of our competitors in Mexico, which I think may be the case for Pitney Bowes and Asia, like it could be for us. So I hope that answered your question.
Thank you, Geoffrey. The next question is at which leverage would you consider resuming your share buyback program?
So I am getting this one, Geoffrey. When we have the Capital Market Day last year, we mentioned that it would be below the 1.5 leverage, excluding leasing by the end of 2026. We are still at 1.6. So clearly, it's about forecasting and projecting what will be this evolution across the coming quarters. So, so far, we have -- you have seen we still have CapEx, notably in Lockers and the rollout, obviously, of the network. But clearly, it's something we continue to monitor and continue to arbitrate with the trajectory and how much security or guarantee we have to reach that 1.5 that we want to meet at the end of next year.
Thank you, Laurent. So the next question, is there outstanding earnout on your latest acquisitions?
No. That was a straight answer, no.
So moving on to the next question. Have you completed the office optimization process?
Yes.
Yes, we have mostly completed the program completely. We may have -- always -- we're always looking at eventually when we renew lease and have opportunities to adapt to the scale of the business. In some cases, we have a little more people that we have hired. In other cases, people that took the benefit of the flexibility and the program that we provide them to let them work from home. So some time, we adjust down. So there might -- could be some more savings coming.
Absolutely. And just to complete one thing, Geoffrey, when you -- notably, when you -- when we do acquisitions, obviously, we are seeking sometimes to make sure that we merged some offices, so that might be additional, I would say, optimizations. But for our existing offices, I would say we did really the bulk of the work at this stage.
Thank you, Laurent. So the next question is -- Quadient is a key player in the CCM market. What is your view on the recent acquisition of Smart Communications by Cinven this summer.
It's a good question. So to be specific, our understanding is that the current -- the previous owner of one of our competitors, Smart Communication saw the controlling interest, so -- not the entire company to another private equity or Cinven for a valuation that I believe is estimated at EUR 1.8 billion for the entire business for a company that is much smaller than Quadient Digital today from what we know. This means it implies a high multiple on this transaction.
And it shows that this company was highly valuable. So the first thing is congratulation for this transaction. But the best news is that I see that as a win for Quadient and Quadient Digital because it shows that the segment that Quadient Digital has decided to play and focus strategically in. So among them, obviously, we have our CCM activities, the one we're discussing now.
But also, as you know, some of the financial automation segment, hybrid mail, the account payable, the e-invoicing with the acquisition of Serensia, all those segments, obviously, highly sought four segments with investors willing to pay high valuation because it shows the value that those segments provide. So that means that all the segments of Quadient because we've seen some previous transactions, I think more recently in the last 6 months with transactions from Bridgepoint on Esker, but also the transaction in the U.S. around AvidXchange. So it shows it continues to show that those segments are quite valuable for us. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that I see also that as a win for Quadient because we're obviously recognized by some of the industry analysts that I mentioned to you as the leader, and we continue to show the win in the industry. So I'm quite happy that this segment is recognized, and we have the opportunity to lead the segment naturally in this environment. So overall, it's a great news for the market and for Quadient Digital and for the player.
Thank you, Geoffrey. So moving on to Lockers for the last question. What will be the current local usage in France and U.K.? What would be the target for the average full year 2025?
So first, we don't go to that level of detail because we have a lot of metrics that would be communicated. I think what's important to recall is, is the volume in absolute value, which I think is a key metric for us because, in fact, the more you will roll out Lockers or you see you have a ramp up for each locker, so -- looking just at the average of the utilization rate of all the rolled out lockers is not necessarily the right metric, I would say, because basically, if you just expanded for, let's say, 200 just in the past month, then you will drop basically your average utilization rate. So I think we need to focus also on the total volume of parcel that Geoffrey commented earlier. And I think, yes, we still have some room in the existing lockers, but the usage rate is ahead of our plan, so very satisfactory to us.
And we see a good traction of existing carriers that are committing or double -- I mean increasing their capacity requirements.
I think I could even add with a certain level of confidence is that the usage -- that we currently see with the usage trend and path that we see in the U.K. is actually above the trend and the level that we're seeing in Japan. So this is why, as we know, we have a quite profitable base today in Japan. So we're quite excited about the prospect of having such a usage trend evolution in the U.K. in particular.
And we have one last question. What are the EBITDA margin prospects for mail? Could the 2025 EBITDA margin for mail be flat compared to 2024?
So as you could see in H1, clearly, we had an improvement in EBITDA margin despite the decline in top line. And we mentioned the several factors, out of which, obviously, our ability to scale the OpEx, is not the only reason, but that's one of the reasons. Also, there is a bit of a mix effect. H2 EBITDA will be higher than H1 EBITDA.
So we have clearly room in H2 to generate a significant amount of EBITDA and continue to be maintaining the level above the 25% by next year, which is the commitment we took last year and will maintain. We will -- the H2 compared to H2 last year, yes, there will be an impact from the tariffs. I mean we know that. The ability of pushing that impact to the customer is something where basically we need to assess and view. So we will not -- and we don't go into a detail of EBITDA by solution by semester obviously. But you can be sure that it's going up compared to H1 and that will maintain the 25% mark as a minimum for this year and for next year.
Thank you, Laurent. So we have no further questions at this time, so we can close the call. Thank you very much for attending this presentation and for your questions. Our next call will be on the 2nd of December for our Q3 2025 sales release. In the meantime, we look forward to meeting some of you in the coming days during our road shows. Thank you, and have a good evening.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Quadient — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
Quadient — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
H1 2025: Digital and Lockers drove double‑digit recurring growth, offsetting a U.S. Mail hardware drop; EBIT stable and guidance tightened.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: €517m (‑3% organic year‑on‑year)
- Subscriptions: €384m (74% of revenue, up from 72%)
- ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue €241m (+>10% organic vs Jan‑2025)
- Current EBIT: €60m (stable vs €61m prior year)
- Free cash flow: ‑€8m (seasonality and one‑offs)
🎯 What Management Says
- Growth engines: Digital automation and Lockers are the primary growth drivers, both showing predictable, double‑digit recurring expansion.
- AI & product: Quadient highlights leadership in Customer Communication Management (CCM) and Customer Experience Management (CXM) and claims scaled AI deployments delivering measurable customer value now.
- Acquisitions: Serensia (e‑invoicing) accredited in France, securing >200m invoices managed in 2026; Package Concierge and Frama aiding scale and margins.
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- FY25 revenue: Now expected to decline by a low single‑digit percentage on an organic basis.
- FY25 EBIT: Current EBIT expected to be stable to a low single‑digit organic decline versus 2024.
- Midterm targets: 2030 guidance reiterated; 2026 EBITDA margin expectations confirmed: Digital >20%, Mail >25%, Lockers >10%.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Guidance pause: Management suspended multi‑year revenue targets for Lockers/Digital until clearer visibility on U.S. Mail rebound timing.
- Digital margins: EBITDA growth in Digital but slight margin dilution from Serensia integration costs and higher commissions; expect FY25 Digital margin >2024 (17.5%).
- Capital policy: Leverage target to resume buybacks is ~<1.5x net debt excluding leases; current ratio ~1.6x and being monitored.
⚡ Bottom Line
Quadient shows resilient profitability as recurring Digital and Locker growth offset a temporary U.S. Mail hardware slump; management narrows FY25 top‑line and EBIT expectations but reaffirms midterm margin targets. Key risks remain the pace of the U.S. Mail rebound, tariffs and FX; execution on Digital upsells and locker usage will determine near‑term upside for shareholders.
Financial data from Quadient
Revenue
Revenue is the sum of all sales generated by a company, e.g. for its products or services.
Revenue (TTM) metric explainedDirect Costs
Direct costs are the costs incurred directly in connection with the manufacture of the product or service.
Gross Profit
Gross Profit indicates how much of the revenue remains in the company after deducting direct production costs. If the percentage share of sales is calculated, this is referred to as the gross margin.
Gross Profit metric explainedSelling and Administrative Expenses
Selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A) include all expenses for marketing and sales as well as the general administration of the company.
Research and Development Expense
Research and development costs (R&D) provide information on how much the company invests in the research and development of its products. The costs are particularly interesting as a percentage of revenue and in comparison to direct competitors.
EBITDA
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) is the company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The EBITDA margin is calculated as a percentage of sales.
Depreciation and Amortization
Depreciation represents reductions in the value of the company's assets (e.g. due to wear and tear on machinery).
EBIT (Operating Income)
EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) is the company's profit before interest and taxes, also known as the operating income. The EBIT Margin is calculated as a percentage of sales at
.
Net Profit
Net Profit represents the profit or loss after deduction of all costs.
Net Profit metric explainedStocksGuide Premium
| Jan '26 |
+/-
%
|
||
| Revenue | 1,036 1,036 |
5%
5%
100%
|
|
| - Direct Costs | 265 265 |
4%
4%
26%
|
|
| Gross Profit | 771 771 |
6%
6%
74%
|
|
| - Selling and Administrative Expenses | 455 455 |
6%
6%
44%
|
|
| - Research and Development Expense | 60 60 |
4%
4%
6%
|
|
| EBITDA | 239 239 |
4%
4%
23%
|
|
| - Depreciation and Amortization | 95 95 |
7%
7%
9%
|
|
| EBIT (Operating Income) EBIT | 144 144 |
1%
1%
14%
|
|
| Net Profit | -68 -68 |
203%
203%
-7%
|
|
In millions EUR.
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Company Profile
Quadient SA engages in the provision of customer experience management, business process automation, mail-related, and parcel locker solutions. The company is headquartered in Bagneux, Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes. The company rents, leases and markets mailing equipment, document and logistics systems. The company offers postage meters for better monitoring, tracking and control of postal expenditure, folder inserters for fast folding and inserting envelopes, addressing systems, letter opening and extraction systems and software solutions helping with optimizing, controlling and managing mails. The company also provides a range of services, including consulting, maintenance, financing solutions and online services. The company operates through numerous subsidiaries in the United States, Canada, Japan, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, among others. The firm has such subsidiaries as SPSI, a provider of multi-carrier parcel shipping solutions and Temando, Australian technology company providing intelligent fulfillment platform for e-commerce and logistics industries.
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| Head office | France |
| CEO | Mr. Godet |
| Employees | 4,525 |
| Website | www.quadient.com |


