(News Bulletin 247) – The Sodexo entity bringing together restaurant and gift vouchers is organizing a day dedicated to investors this Wednesday and has delivered its outlook for the financial years ending in 2024 and 2026. Its listing on the stock exchange via a distribution to its shareholders will take place on February 1st.

Pluxee is getting ready to stand on its own two feet. Behind this still little-known name hides the current subsidiary of the collective catering group Sodexo which brings together the services known as “employee benefits and rewards”, that is to say quite simply restaurant and gift vouchers.

Last spring, Sodexo management decided to spin off Pluxee on the stock market, noting limited synergies with its traditional catering activities.

The idea is also to give more resources and autonomy to this subsidiary, so as to reproduce the success of its competitor Edenred, the former Accor subsidiary which entered the CAC 40 last June.

Pluxee’s IPO is scheduled for February 1, in just three weeks, after shareholders’ approval of the operation, expected on January 30 during a general meeting. It will be carried out via a distribution-quotation.

>> Access our exclusive graphic analyses, and gain insight into the Trading Portfolio

Ambitious objectives for 2026

To prepare for this important deadline, the future former Sodexo subsidiary is organizing a “Capital Market Day” this Wednesday, a day dedicated to investors. The opportunity for a company to show itself in its best light to the market, and also to deliver its ambitions and objectives.

Thus, Pluxee has announced that it is targeting “double-digit” like-for-like growth (more than 10%) and a recurring gross operating margin (Ebitda) that is at least stable for the 2023-2024 financial year, which will end next August. For comparison, for the 2022-2023 financial year, the recurring Ebitda margin stood at 34.5% for a turnover of 1.052 billion euros.

In the medium term, that is to say over the 2025-2026 financial year, Sodexo expects double-digit growth, as well as a recurring Ebitda margin of around 37%.

Incidentally, the company specified that it had achieved like-for-like growth of 19.7% in the first quarter, that is to say from September to December. Growth in operational revenue stood at 12.9% excluding currency and scope effects, while growth in revenue from “float” reached 99.5%.

These “float” revenues are generated by prepaid service voucher groups by investing in the short term the funds issued by their customers and entrusted to them while waiting for the employees of these same customers to spend them. The increase in short-term interest rates over the past year has logically increased this revenue.

Stifel judges that the growth target for the 2023-2024 financial year is “prudent”, the bank forecasting an increase of 17% on a comparable basis for the current financial year. Conversely, on the 2023-2024 Ebitda margin, Stifel is counting on a rate of 33.9%, less than the minimum of 34.5% therefore targeted by Pluxee.

The group’s margin objective for 2026 also appears demanding in the eyes of Stifel, because this means that the annual increase in Ebitda would be around 20%. “We believe this forecast is quite ambitious given the investments required to maintain double-digit growth and the fact that the float revenue dynamic will fade,” says Stifel.

“Although ambitious compared to its peers, Pluxee’s objectives are reasonable,” says UBS.

Target SMEs

To achieve its objectives, the company intends to implement a strategy based on six pillars. Pluxee intends in particular to increase its offer of benefits to employees, fertilize its customer portfolio through cross-selling, generate efficiency gains to improve its profitability, or even acquire new customers with a focus on SMEs.

On the Paris Stock Exchange, Pluxee’s announcements logically have little impact on Sodexo shares, which rose 1% to 104.05 euros around 10:30 a.m.

Pluxee also announced that the Dutch Financial Markets Authority (Pluxee is domiciled in the Netherlands) had approved its prospectus for admission to Euronext Paris. This prospectus was the subject of a European passport with the Financial Markets Authority (AMF), therefore paving the way for listing on February 1. “The technical reference price of the Pluxee share should be announced on January 31, 2024 by means of a notice issued by Euronext Paris SA after the close of the market on Euronext Paris,” the company indicated.

Apart from Pluxee, another major stock market split on the Paris market will take place this year, with Sanofi planning to list its Consumer Health activities (Doliprane, Allegra) on the stock market. Renault, for its part, still intends to put on the stock market a minority share of the capital of its subsidiary Ampere, dedicated to electric vehicles and on-board software.