Anne-Sophie Jugean
Good evening, and welcome to Quadient Third Quarter 2025 Sales Presentation. I am Anne-Sophie Jugean, Quadient 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.
Geoffrey Godet
Thank you, Anne-Sophie, and good evening everybody. For the third quarter of 2025, Quadient delivered €248 million in revenue.
While this reflect 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 sustain 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 monetization of our US, Japanese, and European locker networks.
Meanwhile, Mail remained broadly in line with the previous quarters' trends, and we now expect the rebound in US hardware sales in the fourth quarter firmly. Let me highlight a few key achievements in the third quarter.
Quadient digital SaaS-based intelligent automation platform is now number one worldwide, let me repeat this, number one 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 number one position on the market. On the e-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 e-invoicing rollout planned for 2026.
On the Lockers side, we're expanding our European open locker network to Italy, 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.
Naturally, combined with the expected year-on-year full-year EBITDA margin improvement in these two 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.
Laurent Du Passage
Thank you, Geoffrey. Good afternoon, everyone.
On slide six, 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 Křetínský, has further demonstrated its long-term commitment.
On September 22nd, Vesa crossed the 25% legal threshold, and by the 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 31st, reaching 9.91% as of November 14th. Bpifrance public disclosures are available on the AMF website.
Let me now go over the details of the nine-month key financials. Moving now to slide eight.
This waterfall chart shows the main factors behind the revenue evolution from the first nine months of 2024 to the same period in 2025. Starting on the left with €797 million, we see a €13 million positive scope effect.
It's mainly coming from the acquisition of Parcel Pending in December last year, and to a lesser extent from Serensia. Digital and Lockers contributed positively, with Digital adding €15 million and Lockers €7 million.
However, you can see Mail saw a €48 million decline, with more than half being related to hardware. Finally, currency effect stands at -€19 million, due to US dollar weaker this year than last year starting Q2 onward.
This results in a net €32 million decrease, it's a -4% reported, bringing us to the €765 million. Moving now to slide nine to see the revenue evolution by geography.
Due to the large success of decertification last year and slower recovery than expected this year, North America Q3 and nine-month revenue is declining around -4% compared to the year before, despite the good performance of growth engines locally. It differs from the past years' trends.
On the other side, main European countries and international dynamic continues to show a decline consistent with past quarters, with Mail trend partially offset by Lockers and Digital growth. I think we need to mention that we have extremely promising installed-base development on Lockers side, UK, France, Italy, and also on invoicing side for Digital.
Moving now to slide 10. In the past years, we have been focusing on delivering sustainable growth on subscription-related revenue, fueled by the acceleration of Digital and Locker subscription revenue streams.
Subscription-related revenue from these two growth engines is up by 11.4% in the first nine months of 2025 and represents €228 million, as you can see on the left-hand side. Looking at the longer term, the 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, a 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 is gradually declining due to the market decline, primarily due to the Mail volume decline, and this decline [offset?]
by the growth in subscription-related revenue of Digital and Lockers. Let's now move to the business review section, over to you, Geoffrey, to give some details on our Digital business.
Geoffrey Godet
Thank you, Laurent. As I mentioned in the introduction, IDC ranked Quadient as the number one global provider of customer communication management, or CCM as we mentioned it for a solution.
This represents a 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 three times as fast as the market growth of roughly 5%, making Quadient the fastest growing player, at the same pace actually of player number three. Quadient is now number one 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 moved from license to SaaS model. We expanded our solution to target not only large companies, but also the fast-growing segment of mid-sized companies, and we leveraged our Mail sales organization to cross-sell our digital solution to our Mail customers as well.
I want to take this opportunity to thank our 15,000 customers and and more than hundreds of partners across the world for the trust that they put us they they put in us every day. Naturally, I want to take just a few seconds to thank the Quadient teams across the world that are now the number one in the industry for their relentless effort, 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 were also the 17th overall company in the top 250 of their ranking. Most importantly, I think our true leadership is further validated this year by nearly 1,650 new customers acquired in the just the last nine months.
Now moving to our latest acquisition. This is a Canadian company with decades of history in the CCM space.
CDP Communications is a recognized leader in providing what we call advanced solutions that help businesses in their document transformation and most importantly digital accessibility requirements. 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 accessibility standpoint, and this includes customer-facing, digitized documents, for example, such as the PDF output.
These new regulations, which come together naturally with a greater emphasis on making sure the customer communication is part of a greater overall customer experience and and such for all customers, is naturally creating a need for for organization, for businesses, right, to adopt the types of solutions 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 these new regulation, but also it will help us better competing for new customers because it will increase our differentiation on the market.
Last but not least, this acquisition will be immediately accretive in term of EBITDA basis upon closing, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks. Moving to slide 14.
Another major driver facing the market today is the e-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 size, 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.
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 awaiting 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.
Our strength in the French market is also helping to build a momentum for us across other key European market as well. I think that the basis of is that is that our underlying technology, right, which is integrated across our digital platform, is being adapted to the specific requirements of these markets, which is critical as European-wide mandates are going to be requiring e-invoicing for cross-border transactions, and those European mandates will come into effect by 2030 across the EU.
Because our invoicing solution is so adaptable, flexible from a technological standpoint, it allows us to attack now this massive market opportunity in very different ways. Not only are we selling it directly to our customers, but also through integration with our communication and financial automation solutions.
In addition to that, we're also partnering 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 in quote, gray labels couplings. With this leading product capability and this three-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 markets areas, which is really the B2B.
Laurent.
Laurent Du Passage
Thank you, Geoffrey. Digital continues to accelerate this quarter with a 9.2% growth, thanks to a robust subscription-related revenue, and as well stronger performance on license and professional services.
Over nine 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 and the UK being particularly dynamic. Our ARR reached €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.
Mail revenue continues to be impacted by lower hardware sales in the US. For Q3, hardware sales are down by 16.7%.
It's primarily driven by limited recovery in US Mail hardware sales. Subscription-related revenue also declined in Q3 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 nine months, hardware and licenses are down 17.3%, and subscription-related revenue 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 deeper dive into Mail.
Geoffrey Godet
As Laurent just highlighted, for us, our priority is naturally driving the Mail recovery at this stage. Very encouragingly, we are seeing now some very clear signs of the rebound in the US 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. We're expecting naturally a strong finish to the year as our portfolio of lease contracts returns to 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 mid-term mail volumes usage is also confirmed. We're going to continue to capitalize on a 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, 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 include actually a surge in financial automation bookings of more than 250%. In the third quarter quarter, sorry, we also secured a major digital contract with a US federal agency that is worth approximately $1 million that 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 UK, 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. This new iX Series, that will come into four different versions, 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.
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.
In this chart, you can see three things: 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, either for both Lockers, but also for our other activities, in particular Mail activities. The strategy is to develop our locker network has been built around those three factors and combining them.
If you look at that the top three e-commerce countries on the graph, you'll see relatively low lockers penetration, excluding China, and that Quadient is present and growing in its its market share in each of those countries. 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, we're the one driving the density and the penetration in this country.
In Europe, our focus has been mostly on the UK, and if you recall, we launched the UK open network not long ago, and the adoption has been now quite impressive and very fast, and is as proven in the significant growth in the volume seen in the recent months. I'll come back to 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 open network in Italy. Let's move to the next slide.
The launch of the Italian locker network has been one of the key highlights I think for the Lockers solution in the quarter. In Italy, we have already signed several carriers into the network, with GLS being one of them through a multi-year strategic partnership.
We benefit also from our experience in Japan and more recently in the UK 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 UK have been multiplied by a factor of 20 since January 2024, as supported by both adoption and rising density.
Our locker base globally now stands at more than 27,100 lockers. 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.
A lot of progress for Lockers solution, which translate nicely into the financial numbers that are also continued to improve. Laurent.
Laurent Du Passage
Thank you, Geoffrey. Lockers continued to demonstrate strong momentum in subscription-related revenue.
In the third quarter of '25, we saw robust double-digit organic growth again in subscription-related revenue, reflecting outstanding volume ramp-up in the UK and France, continued solid momentum in the US, and growing usage in Japan. Hardware sales were down in Q3, mainly due to high comparison bases last year.
The reported growth for the first nine months of 2025 is very strong at 25.4%. This includes the positive impact from Parcel Pending acquisition, which contributed €12 million.
The installed base and usage of our Lockers platform continued to expand, ensuring long-term growth perspectives with well-oriented underlying market trends. Over to you, Geoffrey, to conclude with the outlook.
Geoffrey Godet
Over the first nine months of the year, our Digital and Lockers businesses delivered, as you've seen, strong double-digit growth in subscription-related revenue. Meanwhile, Mail continued to follow prior quarter trends, with the anticipated rebound in the US hardware sales that we now expect for Q4.
Far, we've got a good resilience of our EBITDA and EBIT margin after the first nine months. 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.
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.
Operator
Thank you. If you wish to register for a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad, or use the chat box.
Our first question comes from the line of Jean-François Granjon at ODDO. Your line is open.
Please go ahead.
Jean-François Granjon
Yes, good evening. Jean-François Granjon speaking from ODDO BHF.
Three questions on my side. The first one, could you come back on the Lockers business with a more limited growth for the Q3 compared to double-digit we had during the first semester?
Could we be more soccer 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 mention an accretive impact, but could we be more precise about that?
The last questions regarding next year 2026 at this stage, due to the fact that in fact we have a more limited growth, or rather a slight decrease in 2025, do you expect nevertheless, or do you confirm the target you have for the EBITDA margin for each divisions in 2026? Thank you.
Geoffrey Godet
Laurent, do you want to take the first one?
Laurent Du Passage
Yes. Jean-François, if you look at the growth of Lockers in Q3, the main difference with H1 is really on the hardware.
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 very well oriented, quite much in line with what we had in H1. Due to the development of notably the open network in the UK, 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.
I would say the hardware comparison is mostly one of top topic. 17.6% on subscription growth in Q3 compared to 16.1% over nine months means it's even improving compared to Q3, and I think that's the metrics that is particularly important.
I would put the hardware momentary drop in comparison with the growth we had in Q3 last year.
Geoffrey Godet
I'll take the second one, and good evening, Jean-François, thank you for your question on CDP. 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 revenue is probably around 10 million Canadian dollars on a yearly basis.
Seven, sorry, $7 million on Canadian dollars in terms of revenue, and with a percentage of EBITDA margin that is probably more than twice what we could see currently in our digital platform. 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, we'll probably will 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 European-based customers. As I mentioned, they could all be interested in having those kind of compliance solution and see how they could contribute to the further acceleration of the growth of Digital next year.
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.
We do expect also a quite easy and fast integration of both the teams, the technology, so that could really benefit entire intelligent automation platform. Then for 2026,
Laurent Du Passage
I think we answered it at the end of H1, Jean-François, yes, we confirmed the EBITDA margin by solution for 2026. We stay confident, Geoffrey mentioned that in the outlook, of the positive development of each of the solution and the resilience of Mail on the EBITDA.
Operator
Thank you. The next question comes from Flavien Baudemont at Bernstein.
Your line is open. Please unmute your microphone and go ahead.
Flavien Baudemont
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 Lockers launch in Italy? What is the timeline, how much lockers are you going to install, and is there any other open network lockers in Italy?
The second question is on Digital. Can you, let's say, confirm that the FX impact on the Digital revenues is roughly -3%, just to have an idea of what is the organic subscription revenue growth?
Geoffrey Godet
Good evening, Flavien. Thank you for your question.
I will let Laurent take the second one. If you want to start with this one maybe, Laurent, and I'll take the first one on Lockers.
If
Laurent Du Passage
I understand, you're asking the FX impact on the subscription-related growth
Geoffrey Godet
on Digital?
Flavien Baudemont
Yes. Yes, exactly.
Laurent Du Passage
In a nutshell, year-to-date, on the revenue side, you have about 20 million of impact at group level. Okay?
The split between dollar and euro for each of the solution is approximately the same. You should consider that you probably have around 2% of impact of currency on Digital, which is on the overall revenue of €200 million, we are probably about €4 million.
Geoffrey Godet
On the Lockers on Italy, obviously we have 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 a market. It has a low penetration of lockers today, it's a good time to get started.
It's a country that is pretty high in its usage of e-commerce, it's going to drive a lot of those flows that will need to have automation. Most importantly, it's a fragmented market from a carrier perspective.
Contrary to France or Germany, you do not have a dominant player that has more than 50, 60, or 70% market share. This is a much easier country for us to be able to have a higher market share, to ensure a minimum market share for us.
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? We think it's a good moment to start the race.
As it relates to the pace, obviously we are helped as we get started in Italy by all the knowledge and relationship that we have built in the other countries' network. We are starting and we're embarking carriers.
I mentioned GLS, but there are others that we have already relationship with in other European countries, so that made the starting point to secure volume and long-term relationship faster and easier. We're really down now to how fast we can secure good location.
On that front, on the other hand, we'll be very pragmatic because we want to secure 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 a 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. We're really at the early stage, and we'll see how long we need to take.
Before we go at a much faster pace, naturally we're going to ensure that everything works operationally, that we can wrap 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. Just,
Laurent Du Passage
Flavien, one last point. I told you 2%, 19 million over 765 is more 2.5%, rather than €4 million, take €5 million, I think, is probably a bit more accurate for the Digital Forex impact.
Flavien Baudemont
Okay. Thanks.
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 UK?
Geoffrey Godet
It's a very very relevant question, because as you mentioned, finding location is key, could be tricky. A few things that we also have for us is we also have retail chain that we have signed in France or in the UK that are European retailers and also already have footprint in Italy.
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 location, so that makes it easier. Two, because it's a market that is not yet penetrated with many lockers, there's obviously more opportunities and easier opportunities to find those location compared to the UK, 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.
That's why overall it feels today, but it's very early, and this is why also we decided to start, that it should be an easier pass, but the proof is in the delivery. That's why I look forward really to try to update you at the end of March to see after probably six months, five, six months what progress we have made in terms of the potential ramp-up and finding good, affordable locations.
Operator
Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad.
We have a couple of written questions sent through the webcast, I hand the conference back to you, Anne-Sophie. Thank you.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you. We can move on to the written questions.
We have a first question on Mail, actually two questions on Mail. Can you detail the performance of the Mail hardware in Europe versus the US?
Is there any difference of renewal opportunities between these regions? Second question on Mail: What makes you confident that you will see a recovery in Q4?
Why was Q3 weaker than you expected?
Geoffrey Godet
Which one do you want to take?
Laurent Du Passage
I can take the first one. I think from a hardware perspective, over the nine months, the trend for this time is quite similar in NorAm and 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. I think it's important to underline that you have close results for two different reasons.
Geoffrey Godet
We wouldn't expect major change in the future trends of Europe, this is why we feel pretty confident when we see the usage of the various European countries that our long-term assumptions or mid-term assumptions are quite realistic today and been proven accurate over the last seven, eight years. I think we're a good way to predict that.
Out of all the European countries, France as a country is probably the one where we see the highest level of decline and the lowest level of usage. 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.
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 three, two, three things I think that make up a result of a particular quarter or a particular year in the Mail in the US to explain Q3, that will explain Q4 evolution, and what we are also expect for 2026.
The bigger gap that we've seen that explain 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 decertification program that happened by the postal organization in '23 and '24, for which we enjoyed double-digit placement of hardware in the US market during that period of time. As we did the same thing, which is to go back to the customers and engaging with them, our competition did the same thing, we exhausted a little bit for a little period of time most of the new opportunities on 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 and 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. 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 contract are up for renewal.
We know today for 2026 how many contracts are up for renewal for 2026. 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.
Why are we confident on that is that we actually had a lower point of opportunities for to renew those existing contracts because we suffered from the lagging effects 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 of those customers, more contract placed and more contract renewed.
Naturally, 5 years later, which is for us '26 and a little bit in Q4 '25 because the rebound started in Q4 20 2020, we see that we can count on those. That's really where we have our confidence is built, and this is why 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 for opportunities we could close in Q4, and same thing for the opportunities that we're starting to see for the beginning of 2026.
That's why we have more factual evidence of why Q4 is going to be obviously a better quarter, much better quarter than we've seen for the rest of the year.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Follow-up questions on Mail: What is the current mix of hardware sales in Europe versus the US?
Laurent Du Passage
I guess it's more a question for me, Geoffrey?
Geoffrey Godet
As you wish, Laurent.
Laurent Du Passage
No, I think it's for me. 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 share, 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 lease penetration in NorAm that is particularly high. I think that's the color we can give.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Laurent. Moving on now to Lockers.
Is there any other existing open network for lockers of locker provider in Italy?
Geoffrey Godet
Yes, there is. You have, an open network, it's a good point.
I think you have a private network actually, but I think it's the result of a joint venture between the Italian postal organization and DHL. That's the one.
You have also some lockers coming from Amazon already in place in the market. That's, I think, the top of mind.
I'll try to think if I miss 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 UK.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Geoffrey. Still on Lockers, Vinted recently announced it was launching in the US in some limited cities and states to begin with.
Could this be an opportunity for you to look at the open networks in the US?
Geoffrey Godet
It's a very good question, and it gives me an opportunity to share back a little bit where we are in the US. We have launched already quite a few initiatives as it relates to ramping up an open network in the US.
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. It's an open network at home because all carriers, right, all players can deliver into a single locker, it's not limited to Amazon product in a at-home or a multi-family situation.
We now took the question in the angle of looking at the open network out-of-home in the US, and we have placed already some lockers in that context, both in Canada actually and in the US, in Canada with partners like Purolator. We have already also made some more than proof of concept because we have some live lockers in Atlanta and in New York City.
We're obviously refining and fine-tuning what could be the best way to expand the out-of-home open network opportunity in the US market for us. That's the first thing, we're quite active on this.
As it relates to that, definitely I see the potential venture of Vinted in the US as clearly another way to be able to accelerate the US consumer trends and behaviors to get them more comfortable for an out-of-home delivery versus a 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 Point Relais, the PUDO distribution, including also the lockers, the US market is mostly an at-home delivery, right? There is definitely an opportunity to rebalance, not necessarily to rebalance, but to provide another level of automation on top of the at-home delivery, to provide a out-of-home delivery.
In that context, players like Vinted or others coming in the US market would definitely help accelerate that potential penetration. I think we're in a very good position to benefit or seize those opportunities.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Geoffrey. We have a last question on Lockers: What does the increased volumes translated into increased profitability in the Lockers business, providing your strategy of having a subscription model?
Thank you.
Laurent Du Passage
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.
I think that that commitment that we built together with carrier, so that we are safe on or at least we limit the level of risk we take. 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 five parcel that the costs are bigger, they are just the same, just about the same, probably some labels that you should factor in.
There is for me a great relevance having, especially on an open network, an ownership of the asset, where our role is to bring in volume sufficiently to enhance the margin to the maximum we can, meaning driven by the usage of those lockers. We only enter that scheme when we get a certain level of commitment, which you could translate as a fixed, that can offset our investment, and all the margin would come from our ability to attract more volume.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Laurent. Now we can move to Digital questions, and more specifically on invoicing.
In the context of the invoicing mandate, what do you think of the acquisition of Shine by Cegid? What impact does this consolidation has on your strategy and positioning on this sector?
Geoffrey Godet
Thank you for this question. Definitely a more strategic consideration, I need to step back a little bit to try to give you some context.
I think for everybody on the call, Shine is a French or I think actually not French, but I think they're based in Denmark or Netherlands, I forgot exactly the mother company, but it's a mostly French operating company that is a online solution for the very low-end companies, very very small companies, right, try to provide them a online banking full-stop solutions that includes the capability to not just do banking transaction, but also invoicing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc., 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 €60 million or €50 million in revenues, but it's been acquired for, I think, a €1.5 billion valuation by Cegid with the help of Silver Lake.
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, suit better the need of those very low-end customers that have the need like bigger companies, but 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 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.
We consider that that mid-enterprise segment is much more suited to the strength of our intelligent automation platform. This is combined both from a technological perspective, I would say an ASP and value versus the customer acquisition cost.
Those very low-end customers are costly to acquire with respect to the value you could extract from them. What we call the customer acquisition cost versus the long-term value, LTV on CAC, is what you need to measure, and that makes a very difficult equation for us to see a successful pass.
We've seen that with companies, I think, a little bit like Banqup that is based in Belgium that is also addressing the low end of the market. We've seen that a little bit more with companies like Bill.com.
You need a pretty extensive high base to try to scale to potentially generate profit, and we haven't seen many companies actually, not seen any making money on that. 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, how to send those invoice and how to collect the cash, is a most successful approach on that mid-enterprise segment. I do believe today that most players will either position themselves on that mid-enterprise segment, no longer stay on enterprise or mid-enterprise, all low end, and also have to have a need to go from a niche or products, narrow product solution to a platform solutions.
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 to have anticipated those moves now for quite a few years and being past the time to integrate the solutions and to adapt the go-to-market.
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. Serensia, the last few months have been very successful for us in seeing the traction that we wanted to see in the French market.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Specially 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?
Geoffrey Godet
It's another good question. 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 or through using a third party to do so. The upside actually is now resulting in the benefit of the acquisition from Serensia.
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 invoice 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 companies.
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?
They've been more successful or they had initiated the fact to resell their 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. We've seen that with platform like Cerfrance, that's 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. We are continuing to sign additional partnership on that front.
That's obviously also a nice upside. I think the last one is the fact that Serensia has a invoicing platform that provide reporting and dashboarding capability for the large enterprise, so that we could go direct.
Our opportunity 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 large enterprise in France, actually even just in the last few days, but also throughout Q3. We're combining the Serensia invoicing platform with our Inspire platform, with our Evolve platform as well.
The combo of those solution is really what we did not necessarily anticipate on the enterprise segment, and that we are seeing just the early signs. Same thing, I think we'll probably have better visibility on what it could mean for the French growth for us next year.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Geoffrey. We are done with the business-related questions, we can move on now to the financial questions.
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?
Laurent Du Passage
Overall, as you remember, the guidance is low to low single-digit decline on the top line and from flat to low single-digit decline on EBIT. In H1, we had maintained the EBIT at the same level.
The key question for the end of the year is about the mix. We are confident, I think, in the evolution, the positive evolution of EBITDA percentage both in Lockers and Digital, that we are going to be resilient in Mail, but as the EBIT of Mail is still higher than the one of the growth engines.
Depending on where we go in terms of revenue for Mail 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 would help.
If we don't have it, it may fall on the low single-digit decline more than stable.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Laurent. 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?
Geoffrey Godet
This is a interesting question. I think I understand which broker you refer to.
I think it was probably a note from David Cerdan from Kepler. 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 three independent structures, three independent companies to some extent, that could have their own life and which means that from a technical perspective, any carve-outs are possible.
We could divest any of those business, we could bring investors at any of those business, versus the benefit that we enjoy and benefit from the synergies among those three business and working together in hand. One doesn't prevent the other.
We are both ready from an organizational standpoint to have those three business organized independently. Laurent has worked on that for the last three years.
On the other hand, we enjoyed from increased benefit and synergies as we could see in the third-quarter results where we see the cross-sell on both financial automation for digital solution as well as on our CCM solution increasing quite fast. On the Lockers side, sometimes we spend a little bit less time together to mention that, but we also have increasing benefit from both the cross-selling, in particular in some corporate segment, university segment, or with the carriers, but as well from a 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 Lockers side.
One is not independent of the other. We're fully equipped today to benefit from all opportunities.
Anne-Sophie Jugean
Thank you, Geoffrey. We have no further question at this time, we can close the call.
Thank you very much for attending this presentation and for your questions. Our next call will be on the 21st 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 roadshows. Thank you, and have a good evening.
Geoffrey Godet
Thank you.
Laurent Du Passage
Thank you, everybody.
Geoffrey Godet
Thank you. Thank you, Laurent.
Thank you, Anne-Sophie. Bye.
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