OVH Groupe S.A.

OVH Groupe S.A.

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Apr 15Next Earn

Q3 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptJune 25, 2026

Octave Klaba

Hello, everybody. I'm Octave Klaba, Chairman and CEO of OVHcloud.

Thanks for joining us today. Let me start with the key highlights of our Q3 FY 2026 on the slide two.

This quarter we generated €290 million in revenue. We had a 9.6% of growth, net retention 102%.

On the revenue for 9 months year-to-date, €845 million, 6% of growth revenue like-for-like, and we confirm all guidelines for FY 2026. Some business highlights.

We were selected for the European Commission deal with a consortium, very happy to be part of this journey. Also, we continue to refresh and to upgrade our entry-level offers like VPS 27, domain names 27, web hosting 27 to continue to acquire and to be really aggressive on the acquisition of the new customers.

Another point, it's acquisition of Gladia, AI company speech-to-text, doc STT, and the goal is to build up and to continue to build up our sovereign and multimodal AI to our customers. The last one, it's we launched the preview of OVH AI Workspace during the VivaTech, that it's open and collaborative agentic AI platform.

On the operational side, we finished organization on the corporate. We have right now the new team in place, with Bruno, with the team in different countries, really happy to have done that.

We still have the different things to finish on the digital cloud and web cloud that will be done in the next weeks. On the Q3, we had, of course, that anticipated increase of the capex, but it was fully anticipated.

We don't have the mainly impacts on the capex because we've been working very well last quarters and to avoid the bad news on the capex on the Q3, and this will be also on the Q4. Then, of course, strict financial discipline to maintain our costs and focus on the cash generation.

Stéphanie will now talk about our financials.

Stéphanie Besnier

Thank you, Octave. Hello, everyone.

This is Stéphanie speaking. As Octave said, in Q3, we delivered a like-for-like growth of 6.9%, a clear acceleration compared with our H1.

This was driven by, first, on Public Cloud, we are up 20.2% like-for-like, back above 20%, and by far the main driver of our growth, adding €11.1 million to our revenue. Second, on Private Cloud, we are up 4% like-for-like, contributing €6.6 million.

Last, Web Cloud and Others, we are up 2% like-for-like. On a reported basis, our growth stood at 6.5%.

Now we turn to slide five for a deep dive on each of our business segments, and we start with Private Cloud. We are now slide five.

Private Cloud includes, as you remember, Bare Metal Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud. In Q3, Private Cloud reached €174 million in revenue, representing around 60% of group revenue and growing 4% like-for-like.

Over 9 months now, it stands at €511 million and we are up 3.6% like-for-like. On Bare Metal, we continue to benefit from the repositioning of our entry-range offers.

Our customer acquisition on starters keeps accelerating, a direct payoff from the new entry-level positioning we took. On scalers and corporate, we keep seeing sustained upselling across our existing customer base.

On Hosted Private Cloud now, the corporate segment is growing, supported by the ramp-up of strategic deals. This momentum is offsetting an infrastructure optimizing movement, as some customers right-size their environment or churn, impacted by Broadcom's price increases.

On product side, we launched our new high-end hardware for Managed VMware, it's designed to support the most critical workloads. We move to the next slide.

Now we are on Public Cloud. Public Cloud clearly is a standout performer this quarter.

In Q3, Public Cloud reached €66 million in revenue, around 22% of total group revenue, and grew 22.2% like-for-like. Like I said, we are back above 20% for the first time since Q4 '23.

Over 9 months, it stands at €184 million, up 16.9% like-for-like. On the solutions now, for starters, we see solid new customer acquisitions.

For scalers and corporate, we have strong upsell driven by the breadth of our portfolio of products and the traction of our 3-AZ regions in Paris and Milan. On entry-range offerings, and notably on VPS, for starters, our customer acquisition remains exceptionally strong, supported by the offer renewal, despite supply constraints.

Let's now turn to Web Cloud. We are on slide seven.

In Q3, Web Cloud delivered €50 million in revenue, representing around 17% of group revenue and growing 2% like-for-like. Now excluding telephony and connectivity, our legacy segments, growth reached 5% like-for-like.

Over 9 months, Web Cloud stands at €150 million, up 2.2% like-for-like. This quarter, we took a first step in the redesign of our offering.

We launched our new web hosting offers and we have now migrated our entire customer base on these new plans. We also enriched the range of new high-value offers, namely Managed Hosting for WordPress and OVHcloud Video Center, as we move the Web Cloud business model up the value chain.

Finally, in terms of dynamics, customer acquisition accelerated on the back of our offensive sales strategy, led by strong momentum in the domain name segments. Now I will take you through our geographic performance on slide eight.

We start with France on the left. France represents 48% of our revenue and grew 5.8% like-for-like in Q3, it's a slight sequential improvement versus the first half.

Public Cloud growth accelerates above 20%, we saw it. It's supported again by the ramp-up of the Paris 3-AZ regions.

Private Cloud shows positive early returns from the Bare Metal entry-range repositioning, and Web Cloud delivers a resilient performance, underpinned by support services and the resilience of the domain names business. Moving to Europe, excluding France, in the middle of the slide, it represents 29% of revenue and grew 7.4% like-for-like in Q3.

Growth rebounds sharply, more than double the rate of the first half, driven by accelerating Public Cloud momentum, while Private Cloud delivers steady growth on the back of our price performance repositioning. Finally, rest of world, which represents 23% of revenue and grew 8.6% like-for-like in Q3.

Growth is led by the ongoing buildout of Public Cloud and by the resilience of Private Cloud across the regions. I will now hand over to Octave for the final slide on the outlook.

Octave Klaba

Thank you, Stéphanie. We confirm all the guidelines for FY 2026.

Like-for-like growth of revenue between 5% and 7%, it would be closer to 7.5%. Adjusted EBITDA more than that FY 2025.

Adjusted capex, keep in mind this is adjusted capex, 33% to 35%. Then, of course, levered free cash flow will be positive.

We are now ready for the questions if you have any.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad or press the blue hand icon. The next question comes from Emmanuel Matot from Oddo BHF.

Please go ahead.

Emmanuel Matot

Hello, Octave. Hello, Stéphanie.

Emmanuel Matot from Oddo BHF. Thank you for taking my questions.

First, you are clearly ramping up your AI efforts with an ambition to develop LLMs, if I understand well your comments from the VivaTech conference last week. Do you have the resources to become truly competitive in this market, and isn't it too late for you?

Do you plan also to maintain a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio below three times? Second question, since you took the role of CEO, Octave, it was in October last year, what remains to be done at OVH to turn the situation around, and for you to feel comfortable discussing a roadmap with us during an investor day?

My last question, maybe for Stéphanie, where do we stand on price increases to offset the surge in memory component costs? Are your main competitors all doing the same?

What is the additional contribution of these price increases to your revenue growth this year? Thank you very much.

Octave Klaba

Thank you, Emmanuel. On the AI, yes, we announced different things.

This is a Q3, and also as for the Q1, we want to just talk about the numbers, but this is good question because we started to talk a little bit more about AI and our strategy, and you will discover in the next months and the quarters where we go and what we want to build. We are going in the direction of building up our teams into be able to deliver in the same time the investment, but it's also profitable growth.

The question is, AI, it's too late for us? No, definitely not.

We are in the game because you have the investment that is quite lower right now to invest in the AI, it's 10 times, 8, 10 times less expensive. You have more teams available on the market.

You have a lot of papers with the researches on the market, and you can create synthetic data. It's easier, it's so easier to go in this market 4 years after.

The market is not done in Europe. We are still looking for the sovereignty in this market.

The current players, they are not good, and we think that we can be good in our, let's say, vertical, that is cloud, everything that we need, for example, code, we need securities, we need defense, we need to manage the infrastructure at scale. All these things, our customers, they want that.

It's so aligned between what we have, data, internal data, not customer data, but internal data, because we manage so large infrastructure with so many internal data that we can use in the AI. Once we have this, and we have more productivity, of course, internally, we can develop faster, we can have more securities, we can go in the less opex.

Also all these tools that we will love to use, our customers will love to use also. We want to offer them what we need internally.

This is one of the purpose where we go and why it makes totally sense for us to go for that and to make money, because in of course, in this AI world, the investment, they are very high. A lot of people talking about the investment, not so many talking about the revenue, and this is where we want to show, demonstrate that you can have the revenue, you can generate the revenue, and all this revenue can flow the investment, and not just putting the money on the table and then hoping that you will transform that in the revenue.

This is on the AI. On the debt, for me, three, it's a red line, okay?

We don't want to go above more than three. Our goal is to keep that less that three, and because it's what I've done for 27 years more, and this is where we will be.

The second question, I didn't get. Sorry,

Emmanuel Matot

what remains to be done as a CEO?

Octave Klaba

On our side, for the first year, what still remains? We need to finish on the Web Cloud, Digital Cloud, starter, scalers organization.

This is exactly what we do today. Once it's done, there was few things on the communication that we need to upgrade because as you probably mentioned, there was a lot of discussions about sovereignty, and I'm not happy how we're taking part of all these discussions, we're upgrading right now that.

Then I think we will be ready to go. There's a lot of things, they are ongoing.

We didn't even start talking because we started working on the step ahead products, step ahead services, step ahead the features that we will release in the next weeks, months, and quarters that I hope that will make difference. On the price?

Stéphanie Besnier

Yes. On pricing, Emmanuel, first, we live an exceptional situation.

As of today, we estimate that the cost of the memories have been multiplied by six in the last 12 months. We consider that it would be multiplied by nine in September.

We have massive price increase on the disk and now we're hearing inflation potential on the CPUs. What we've done, as first, we have front-loaded our purchases.

We front-loaded the capex for '26, front-loaded the capex for '27. We disclosed it in H1, we've made some savings.

Second, yes, we've increased the prices. We've been very transparent on that topic with our customers.

We've decided to increase the prices and we've implemented this increases in April and May. We're comfortable for now with this level of price increases.

The impact on the growth over the nine first months is not significant, it's below 0.5%. Clearly for us, the key question is, yes, the right price and also the supply.

We have also, on top of being careful in the purchasing, we've secured the supply, and that's also something that is very important in the sector right now. Now, and Octave, you've communicated on it yesterday night, we are going to prepare September.

We're working on additional price increase in the given context. There is no need to accelerate massively right now the prices increases on the back of what we've done so far.

We are preparing and getting ready for September '26, and we'll give more detail to our customers first in the next weeks.

Octave Klaba

It's really important that we need to focus on the customers because the increases of the prices that we have in mind are very important. We want first communicate with our customers first and then with market.

Emmanuel Matot

Thank you very much.

Octave Klaba

Thank you.

Operator

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad or press the blue hand icon.

Octave Klaba

No more questions?

Operator

Thank you for your questions. I hand the conference back to the OVH management for any closing comments.

Octave Klaba

Perfect. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Just key takeaways highlights, we generated €290 million, 6.9% like-for-like. Public Cloud is growing faster, reaccelerating faster with 20%.

We were selected for the European Commission, our AI lab we continue to build up with Gladia and preview of AI Workspace. We finished our corporation organization, no issue on the capex, anticipated capex, and we are really strict on the financial discipline.

Then on the guidelines, we confirm all the numbers without any changing. Like-for-like 5% to 7%, adjusted EBITDA more than FY 2025, adjusted capex 33% to 35%, and positive free cash flow this year.

Thank you very much, and have a good day.

Stéphanie Besnier

Thank you.