THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS EDITED TRANSCRIPT EI.PA - Full Year 2015 Essilor International Compagnie Generale D'Optique SA Earnings Presentation EVENT DATE/TIME: FEBRUARY 19, 2016 / 09:00AM GMT 1 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. FEBRUARY 19, 2016 / 09:00AM GMT, EI.PA - Full Year 2015 Essilor International Compagnie Generale D'Optique SA Earnings Presentation CORPORATE PARTICIPAN TS Hubert Sagnieres Essilor International - Chairman & CEO Laurent Vacherot Essilor International - COO Jayanth Bhuvaraghan Essilor International - Chief Corporate Mission Officer Paul du Saillant Essilor International - COO CONFERENCE CALL PART ICIPANTS Nicolas Langlet UBS - Analyst Veronika Dubajova Goldman Sachs - Analyst Antoine Belge HSBC Global Research - Analyst Claude BollierAnalyst Delphine Le Louet Societe Generale - Analyst PRESENTATION Hubert Sagnieres - Essilor International - Chairman & CEO (interpreted) Good morning to all of you this morning. Thank you for coming to listen to the presentation of our results 2015. I hope that you've all received the beautiful sunglasses, Osse, that is our flagship brand in Turkey. This morning, you also saw that we've been doing some advertising for west France that is studying at the Brand Institute in Australia on the evolution of myopia in the world. That's one of the major topics. You must have seen it in full details, and you can go on their site. There will be more than 5 billion myopic people by 2050. So this morning, what we would like to do with Laurent and Paul is to analyze all the results, of course. You see, we're smiling; all the teams, our Executive Committee, they're all here, they're all smiling. Of course, we've had a very good year, as you've seen. The coming year will be even better. The past years were also excellent, and I think that there is a reason for that; with Veronique, Ariel, Vivien and Sebastien, we wanted to structure this meeting. Of course, we wanted to focus on the results, and you'll receive all the answers to your questions on these results, but on the reasons too. Why is it that, year after year, that Essilor is doing so well? Why is it that Essilor is having such a good performance? What we need to understand is that, behind this performance, there are 61,000 people around the world who are motivated, who have a real purpose, a real mission that is to improve vision in the world. And when we compare the companies, the performances of all the different companies, we're lucky because we're in an industry that helps the world. We have found our path as a Company. And this corporate mission must be the proof of a commitment of all our stakeholders and 60,000 people in the world who, day after day, hour after hour, consider this as a real personal objective. For all of us, that is the main reason why we are successful. Of course, we have fantastic products, we have wonderful brands; of course, the market is also there. But this really differentiates us from the other companies. So now the figures. You have been looking at them since you've arrived so you know them by heart. Growth of 18.4%. What has increased most in 2015 is our margin contribution from operations, and this in spite of the fact that in 2015 we spent EUR40 million more for advertising so as to be able to keep explaining about our products to all the consumers. So EUR40 million, when you know that 1/10th of 1 point of our margin is roughly EUR7 million, you realize what we can do in terms of our margins. Laurent will go into the details; he'll talk about 2016. We have a target. We're close to 2018 we'll have a margin of 19% roughly. But right now, we are growing, we are conquering and we will continue, as we told you in 2013, we will keep investing in advertising. 2 THOMSON REUTERS STREETEVENTS | www.streetevents.com | Contact Us © 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. 'Thomson Reuters' and the Thomson Reuters logo are registered trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies. FEBRUARY 19, 2016 / 09:00AM GMT, EI.PA - Full Year 2015 Essilor International Compagnie Generale D'Optique SA Earnings Presentation Our earnings per share, 17% growth, and in 2015 we did very well at the stock exchange, 22% to 23%. But we've decided to increase the dividend a little more than what we do usually, and tell our shareholders that we trust them and we're happy that they trust us and they're loyal to us. So why the success now in 2015? This is what we'll try to explain to you with Laurent and Paul. The first thing is that there is a great balance between developed markets and the fast-growing markets, and it's thanks to this balance that we can become stronger. Demand is also very high in mature countries today, just as in other developing countries and we're going to explain to you why. This is due to demographic reasons and [genetical] reasons. The second thing that also explains our performance in 2015 is that we are continuing, of course, to invest more than ever in innovation, but we're doing it over an even wider spectrum. For years, we've spent hundreds of millions of euros to innovate in lenses. Now, we're continuing our pace of some EUR200 million per year, not only in lenses but also protection and prevention, and the new product lines to new markets, where we have been deploying for a certain number of years now. That is sunglasses, sunwear, and all that is related to online, Internet, whether it's examining your eyes. That will facilitate access for consumers to Internet and all the software and systems for a better consumer experience when the consumer buys sunglasses, contact lenses, readers, or glasses on Internet. The second thing is that our lens market, our basic market is driven by two major things; brands and services. And it's in those two areas that we are investing year after year. In this area, we've seen some remarkable performances; I would say unexpected, because when we operated this change we realized that we had a huge momentum. But I'd like to underline the performance in Europe, the performance of France under the leadership of Bernhard, who is here in the front row, since 1.5 years. We were at a meeting on Tuesday morning to set up the plan for 2016, and we have teams that are really highly motivated. I've never seen that for the last 25 years in Europe, and this is a wonderful performance. Remember in 2013 when we told you, Europe, we believe it'll be between 0% and 1% and actually, they have multiplied this forecast by nearly 3. So I'd like to congratulate our European teams. The American market, they are catching up their delay; in terms of the quality of their products they're always 15 years behind, compared to the rest of the world. So one of the major growth vectors are, of course, our acquisitions, whether they are strategic, bolt-on small/average/medium. We have a highly fragmented industry, and especially in strong or fast-growing markets. And in all those countries we've had some remarkable performances. You see all these flags here, these are those countries that have grown between 10% and 15% last year. But our growth today, which is greater than that of the market, and these fast-growing markets, well this is also due to the fact that we are planting our flag in new countries. Now we are present in most of the countries in Asia, apart from North Korea, and we are present in most of the African countries, north to south, east to west, in the whole African continent. Now, the two new activities that we've been developing for the last three/four years, solar and online activities, this has strongly contributed to our organic growth, like- for-like growth. These two businesses are growing faster than the rest, and it is thanks to this lever that we will slowly reach this like-for-like growth above 6% from 2018 onwards. So acquisitions, I've covered that area. This is the second engine; it covers all the Group's business, whether it's geographical, lenses, solar, sunwear or online. We carried out 19 acquisitions in 2015. We've announced and closed a certain number of these at the beginning of the year. The pipeline is growing with the opening of new markets, with new deployments. And thanks to all our success, around the world we see owners of small businesses, whether it's 5 million, 20 million, 30 million or 50 million, they have developed wonderful stores in their countries. They have decided to join us. They love our mission to improve vision, and they love this momentum represented by 61,000 people round the world. So 61,000, I can tell you they're all motivated. They're all aligned; they're all focusing on two major things.