Le 1819 Stéphanie Colo. Welcome to 1819. EMEIS is slowly recovering. The group publishes results that confirm a recovery trend. Good evening, Laurent Guillot. You are the CEO of EMEIS. You cover five businesses: nursing homes, as we know, but also mental health clinics, medical care and rehabilitation clinics, home care services, and service residences. On your results, first quarter 2026, revenue increased by 6.3% to 1.5 billion euros. Growth driven more by international than by activity in France.
Yes, absolutely. Nevertheless, French activity is also doing a little better since we have revenue growing by 4.8% in France, driven by the continued recovery of our nursing homes and especially the occupancy rate in our nursing homes, which is a very important indicator.
And then driven a little bit by our clinics, which had positive elements in the first half. But it's true that international is much more dynamic, with occupancy rates that are recovering and rising quite well, but also a price component that is extremely positive.
Because EMEIS is present, maybe not in 19 countries, and you are mainly present in Europe, in Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, beyond France.
Exactly. So, can we say that these first quarter 2026 results are a return to normal after difficult, complicated years?
Well, not completely a return to normal, because when we say we have an occupancy rate of 87% in France, we see that we still have significant room for improvement. So we expect this improvement to continue over time, and we have a growth opportunity that is still significant. On the other hand, what really marked the return to normal, if we can say that, for EMEIS, is everything we did in 2025 with the extremely important disposals that allowed us to raise 2.35 billion euros, which allowed us to refinance the company and exit safeguard proceedings, putting us in a more traditional situation for a company.
And you just exited this safeguard plan early, it was last February. Does that mean all that is behind you? Are there still structural fragilities to address?
Well, I would say on the financial side, all that is behind us. Obviously, we still have debt, we still have a high level of debt at the end of last year, pro forma of the operation we did, that is, the sale of part of our real estate we did at the very beginning of the year, we had a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 9.9. That will improve with operational improvement, but you see it's still a bit high. So we have that to continue working on. But apart from that, I would say gradually the company's profitability and the financial indicators are improving. And why is it improving? Because from the start we focused on two important axes: taking care of our employees so they can take care of our patients and residents in the homes.
We'll come back to that. A bit more on the numbers. Will you continue this policy of deleveraging and disposals to reduce debt?
No, I think now we have done, well, we won't stop there, we still have a few facilities that are a bit more difficult. We still have some activities in South America, exactly, from which we will exit. We still have a few facilities in China from which we will exit, but I would say the very large operations with very significant amounts, we will do much fewer. We will just do small adjustment operations at the margin of our portfolio.
What has been the impact of inflation, especially energy costs, perhaps also wages, on EMEIS's results in recent months? So, have you observed,
We don't see any impact for now, it's much too early. Moreover, we are fairly well covered on a number of purchases, including energy, so I don't anticipate a significant impact for 2026. And as for commenting on 2027, it's still a bit early because we don't know in which direction things will evolve.
Indeed, we'll come back to the occupancy rate. It's really the compass to look at when looking at your results. The occupancy rate is approaching 90% internationally, 89.8% in France. Does that mean that families' trust is completely restored after the difficult months and years, after the scandal of the book Les Fossoyeurs?
Well, we still have work to do on the occupancy rate, because if I look just at nursing homes in France, we are still at 87%. And you know that a nursing home operates really well optimally and with a certain stability for our employees when the occupancy rate is between 92 and 95. So you see, we still have a way to go. On the other hand, it's true that compared to the low point of 2022-2023, we very strongly went below 83, sometimes below 82, and so we can see that we have really turned around, and especially what is notable is that 2024, 2025, and I would say early 2026, we are advancing and progressing with metronomic regularity, which is always satisfying.
And how did you go about winning this trust? What was it? Strengthening controls? Was it education, was it a lot of communication as well?
It was a complete overhaul of quite a few things in the company. Obviously, the change of brand, I see behind you, the brand change had an impact, the communication we did, and above all the work on the well-being of our teams and the quality of work we do in our facilities, on which we have invested and worked enormously. We have put more people with our patients and residents than before. We reinvested in quality, and so all that eventually pays off, because you know the business is very local. Reputation is very local. It must not be tarnished by a national scandal. But otherwise it's very local, and little by little we regain it. The other element is that we worked a lot on sales, on digital, on how to contact our potential patients and potential residents.
So precisely, you have ahead of you a wave of baby boomers that should come to your facilities, at least boost demand to enter your facilities. How are you preparing for it?
The demographic growth of those over 75 is more than 30% in 10 years. It's going to be a tidal wave. It's going to be very significant growth that is not yet visible today. It's not completely visible today because if I look at the people entering our facilities today, they were born between 1939 and 1945 approximately. So you see there is a demographic trough at that time. But I would say in a year, in two years, obviously, it's going to be a significant tidal wave. We are working differently, and I think we also need to work with the government to better plan this wave, because currently that's not the case, nothing is planned. We had a freeze on the development of nursing homes and the treatment of the elderly for a few years indeed. And so we need, and that's what we did in a column with colleagues from the public, private, and non-profit sectors, to signal the needs to plan better, to plan both financial needs, investment needs, but also to plan what will be most important: human needs. By 2035, we will need more than 200,000 additional caregivers across the entire care sector. It's gigantic. So we need to start training, we need to start using AI and digitalization much more to reduce the administrative tasks that we make these people do, who committed to care to accompany others, not to do bureaucracy. And also, we will need to look at how we call on resources that may come from abroad, from outside. And that's really important because recruiting staff currently just to face a normal year before this demographic wall, you
