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Rodolphe Belmer
CEO & Chairman of the Board

Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our H1 results presentation. I’m Rodolphe Belmer, CEO of the group. And along with Mr. Pierre-Alain Gerard, we will walk you through the group’s performance for the first half of 2026 before we answer your questions.

Let’s start with the key highlights on Page #3. In H1 2026, the group maintained its clear leadership in linear, both in terms of audience and in terms of advertising market share despite a particularly competitive environment, notably with the Winter Olympics in Q1 and the Football World Cup in Q2. Second, our H1 results are in line with our full year targets for digital growth and profitability against a difficult advertising and a regulatory backdrop. Third, the level of COPA, which stood at EUR 77 million in H1, is above expectations and validates the choices we have made to safeguard profitability, notably regarding the Football World Cup. Lastly, the group maintained a solid financial position, which gives us flexibility to keep executing on our strategy. In an environment that remains volatile and offers limited visibility, we maintain our 2026 targets.

Let’s go now into more details into business review, starting with our Media and Studio segments, starting with Media on Page 6 of the document. In H1, the group maintained its linear leadership across commercial targets. And the TF1 channel, our flagship channel kept its significant lead over its main competitor. As I said, this performance is particularly noteworthy

Edited excerpts from a chat:

The five-day non-stop selling has revived concerns of a longer downturn in the market. What does the weekly candle indicate on where we are likely to end the July series?

The Nifty slipped from the consolidation on the daily chart on Thursday, with follow-up selling taking the index to 23600 on Friday. Besides, the index has fallen below the 50 EMA as well, confirming a new downtrend for the short term. The weekly chart looks more scary. Over the last four weeks, the Nifty has failed to rise above the 50-week EMA, as sellers remained strong at the higher levels while buyers remained fragmented. Now that the Nifty has closed at a several-week low, the chances of further weakening look imminent. Immediate support is placed at 23600. A fall below 23600 might trigger a severe correction, as investors would be running away, putting the Nifty at greater downside risk. On the higher end, 24000 will become the line of polarity. Unless the Nifty moves higher to reclaim 24000, the broader trend is likely to remain weak.

Banking stocks triggered the initial correction, but selling subsequently spread across sectors. Is Bank Nifty still leading the market lower, and where do you see its next support?

A few days back, the banking big boys were trading with their loud voices, especially ICICI Bank and SBI. But in the last two days, the scenario has changed, with the market being pulled down by stocks like HDFC Bank, SBI, and Axis Bank. The index has slipped below both the medium-term 200 DMA and the short-term 50 EMA. The RSI is in a bearish crossover and falling, indicating weakening momentum. The situation looks a bit weak, and banking stocks might weaken further, at least as long as the index remains below 57000. On the lower end, support is placed at 56000/55000.

India VIX moved higher as crude oil crossed $100 and foreign investors continued selling. What are the options data, open-interest structure and volatility indicators signalling for the coming week?

Panic rose as Brent Crude futures climbed above $100, sending India VIX above its 200 DMA. However, it was short-lived for the time being, as India VIX retreated due to some correction in crude oil prices. A short-term cap is placed at 15. The next round of panic might overwhelm the market if India VIX crosses above 15. Call writers have increased their positions at the 24000 and 23800 strikes, while put writers have shifted their positions down to the 23500 strike.

HDFC Bank ended the week over 9% lower after its earnings-triggered breakdown. Is the stock now technically oversold, or do the charts indicate another leg of downside?

The shares of HDFC Bank have given a breakdown from their recent consolidation as traders exited the stock following the quarterly earnings. The stock has corrected well below its 50 EMA, confirming deep short-term weakness. The stock has broken below its short- to mid-term support of 770. On the weekly chart, the stock is on the verge of falling to a 52-week low, while the weekly RSI has entered a bearish crossover. It looks weak, with the potential for further sharp cuts, and appears to be a good sell-on-rise stock.

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Bajaj Auto jumped more than 5% following its results, while M&M Financial Services surged nearly 8% in a session. Are these sustainable breakouts with scope for follow-through, or isolated earnings-driven spikes in a weak market?
Both the stocks have witnessed quality breakouts and look very good for further upside. Both the stocks are showing very strong chart structures. However, the overall market weakness might weigh on the individual stocks and hold them back from gaining in the short term. Once the sell-off subsides, these two stocks might resume their strong rally.

Give us your top ideas for the week ahead.

Buy LTM 4091 SL 3950 TGT 4300

The stock has formed an engulfing candle on the daily chart. The RSI is in a bullish crossover, indicating strong momentum. Besides, the price has risen above the 50 EMA on the daily timeframe. The stock looks good on the charts, with decent potential to rise towards 4300. On the lower end, support is placed at 3950.

Buy EMMVEE 331 SL 317 TGT 350

The stock has formed a bullish engulfing candle on the daily chart near the support of the 50 EMA, making the pattern more significant and indicating the possibility of a decent rally in the near term. The RSI is in a bullish crossover, indicating strong momentum. The stock looks promising on the charts, with the potential to rise towards 350. On the lower end, support is placed at 317.

Buy RRKABEL 2493 SL 2400 TGT 2650

The stock is in uptrend on the daily timeframe with higher top higher bottom formation. Besides, the price has been sustaining above 50EMA. The RSI is in bullish crossover and rising. The stock looks good on the charts, with decent potential to rise towards 2650. On the lower end, support is placed at 2400.

Wordle players closing out the week with Friday’s puzzle got a word that works both ways, one that greets and bids farewell in equal measure, drawing directly from Hawaiian culture and offering a welcome change of pace from more clinical five-letter answers.

The New York Times’ daily word game, which has become a fixture in millions of players’ morning routines since its 2022 acquisition by the Times, challenges solvers to guess a five-letter word in six tries or fewer, using color-coded feedback to narrow down the correct answer with each attempt.

The answer for July 25

The solution to Wordle #1862 is ALOHA, a word deeply associated with Hawaiian culture that functions as both a greeting and a farewell, commonly used to convey warmth, love, peace and goodwill. The word is frequently heard when welcoming visitors to the islands, but carries the same meaning when saying goodbye, a duality that sets it apart from most everyday English words.

Structurally, the puzzle offered a distinctive challenge: the word contains three vowels and only two consonants, along with four unique letters and one duplicated letter, the letter “A,” which appears at both the beginning and end of the word. That heavy vowel concentration made ALOHA a notably different kind of solve compared with more consonant-heavy recent puzzles, rewarding players who leaned into vowel-rich opening guesses.

A puzzle built around connection

Puzzle commentators described Friday’s word as fitting neatly into a broader theme running through the week’s editions, one centered on connection, teamwork and smooth transitions between ideas. Some players moved through the puzzle with relative ease once they zeroed in on the word’s Hawaiian cultural association, while others reported working through several unrelated guesses before the pattern of vowels and consonants clicked into place.

The word’s association with hospitality and goodwill offered a lighter, more culturally rich challenge than some of the week’s earlier puzzles, and its dual meaning as both a greeting and farewell added a layer of thematic resonance heading into the weekend.

How Wordle works

Wordle presents a fresh five-letter puzzle every 24 hours, resetting at midnight in each player’s local time zone. Players receive six total guesses, with color-coded tiles indicating how close each guess comes to the correct answer: green confirms a letter is both correct and correctly placed, yellow indicates a correct letter placed in the wrong position, and gray rules a letter out of the solution entirely.

Created by software engineer Josh Wardle as a personal project in 2021, the game quickly went viral before The New York Times acquired it in early 2022 and folded it into its broader digital games platform, which today also includes Connections, Strands, the Mini Crossword, Pips and Sudoku.

Strategy tips for future puzzles

Puzzle strategists commonly recommend starting with a word that balances frequently used vowels and consonants, such as R, S, T, N and L, to maximize the amount of information gained from an opening guess. Popular starting words that fit this approach include Adieu, Audio, Raise and Stone, each offering broad letter coverage without repeating overly common consonants in a single guess.

Watching for duplicate letters within a five-letter word, as Friday’s puzzle featured with its repeated “A,” remains a commonly overlooked pitfall for players narrowing down their final guesses. Recognizing frequent word endings, including “-ED,” “-ER” and “-Y,” can also help players close out a puzzle more efficiently in the later stages of a solve.

A cultural touchpoint beyond the puzzle itself

Beyond its function as a Wordle answer, ALOHA carries significant cultural weight in Hawaii, where it is understood to represent far more than a simple greeting or farewell. The word is often described as embodying a broader spirit of love, compassion and mutual respect, a concept sometimes referred to as the “Aloha Spirit,” which has even been codified into Hawaii state law as a guiding principle for how residents and visitors are expected to treat one another.

For Wordle players outside Hawaii, Friday’s puzzle offered a small window into that cultural context, turning a routine daily word game into an unintentional lesson in the layered meaning behind a word many players likely use casually without fully considering its origins.

A daily ritual for millions

Wordle’s continued popularity has often been attributed to its simplicity: one puzzle, six guesses, and a built-in sharing feature that lets players post their results on social media without spoiling the answer for others. That structure has helped the game become something closer to a shared daily ritual than a simple word puzzle, with friends, families and coworkers frequently comparing notes and streaks each morning.

Tracking performance over time

The Times’ companion analysis tool, Wordlebot, evaluates each day’s puzzle after players complete it, offering data on the average number of guesses needed to solve that day’s word, along with luck and skill scores meant to reflect how efficiently a player’s strategy aligned with the information available to them at each stage of the solve. Difficulty can vary considerably from one puzzle to the next depending on how common a word’s letter structure is relative to typical opening guesses.

A new Wordle puzzle will publish at midnight Saturday, continuing the franchise’s uninterrupted daily streak dating back to its 2021 launch. Players can access the game through the Times Games website or the NYT Games mobile app, available on both iOS and Android devices. For those who wrapped up Friday’s puzzle quickly thanks to ALOHA’s distinctive vowel pattern, or those who found the heavy vowel concentration more challenging than expected, a fresh five-letter word and a new opportunity to extend a personal streak awaits with Saturday’s reset.

“There’s an assumption that grandparents just babysit.

“My mum’s 82 and my dad’s 87 with quite advanced dementia, so it’s not as simple as sending the boys up to them for a couple of hours.”

Harriet thinks thought needs to be given to the way the school year is structured.

“Six weeks is a long period, especially for SEND children, because of the lack of routine. It makes it really difficult,” she said,

The Somerset Parent Carer Forum surveyed its members, and said it was a “recurring concern” that there is a struggle to find holiday activities.

“Too often, activities aren’t able to provide the support children need, or parents have to stay throughout, meaning they don’t receive the respite they desperately need,” said CEO Ruth Hobbs.

“School holidays should be a time for children to have fun and build friendships, while families have the opportunity to work or recharge.

“Single parents are one of my biggest worries at this period, as they don’t get a break,” she added.

Hobbs advised checking local authority websites, external, which publish lists of activities for SEND children, and social media.

She also said activities can get booked up far in advance, so recommended calling early to secure a spot.

By Thursday, Burnham’s attention had turned to businesses, announcing a 20% cut to rates for pubs and small live music venues.

Aidan Lavin co-owns the Raven and Bine pub in Southampton and said: “It’s a promising start from the new prime minister, however, I fear it’s nothing even close to enough.

“The increasing pressure from VAT to business rates to an increased minimum wage, it just feels like the walls are closing in from all angles.”

Lavin said he believes that without further measures, businesses across the South would not survive.

“It’s coming to a point now where we are going to lose some of our inns and taverns, never to be returned,” he told the BBC.

On Friday, Burnham headed to Manchester to spend his first day working at No 10 North, a new regional branch of the PM’s office.

It is part of a move to shift power away from Whitehall and in to “every postcode”, external.

Operating from Heron House in Manchester’s city centre, No 10 North will be the government’s new situation room for growth, it was announced.

It brings the “levers of local economic growth and devolution together under one roof for the first time”, said the government.

Véronique Bédague-Hamilius
CEO & Chairwoman

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this webcast to discuss our 2026 half year results. I am joined this evening by Pierre-Henry Pouchelon, whom you know very well. I will begin by taking you through the key highlights from today’s release, after which Pierre-Henry will provide a more detailed review of our commercial performance and financial results. And as always, you will, of course, have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation.

Let’s begin with the 3 key messages from the first half. Firstly, our first half performance is fully in line with the group’s trajectory. In a market that remains at the bottom of the cycle, as you well know, we continue to improve current operating profit, which doubled compared with the first half of ’25, while maintaining strict financial discipline. We are also reaffirming our 2026 guidance despite a more challenging market environment. I would like to emphasize one important point. Our trajectory does not depend on a market rebound. It is underpinned by the transformation measures we have implemented and by levers that are within our control and that we’ve been actively deploying since 2024. Pierre-Henry will return to this in greater detail.

Secondly, New Nexity continues to gain momentum quarter after quarter with several strong indicators during the first half that I will now discuss. First, our lead in the regeneration of commercial sites has been confirmed. Our offering is high quality and fully aligned with market demand. And finally, we recently announced that we had entered into exclusive negotiations with Groupe

Saturday’s edition of the New York Times’ Connections puzzle sent players on a tour spanning family vocabulary, African geography and a wordplay category that tripped up even some experienced solvers, blending straightforward category knowledge with a trickier structural twist by the time players reached the puzzle’s toughest tier.

Connections, the Times’ daily word-association game, challenges players to sort 16 words into four hidden groups of four, each color-coded by difficulty from yellow, generally the most straightforward, through green and blue to purple, typically the most conceptually demanding. Players are allowed up to four mistakes before the puzzle locks them out.

Here are the four categories for July 25

The yellow group, puzzle number 1,140’s easiest tier, centered on Spanish words for family relatives, grouping ABUELA, HIJO, MADRE and PRIMO. In Spanish, abuela means grandmother, hijo means son, madre means mother, and primo means cousin, giving the category a straightforward theme for players with even basic familiarity with the language.

The green group carried the theme “Start to Cry, With ‘Up,’” bringing together CHOKE, MIST, TEAR and WELL. Each of these words can be paired with “up” to form a phrase describing someone becoming emotional or beginning to cry, as in choke up, mist up, tear up or well up. Several solvers noted that WELL in particular was harder to place in this category than the other three words, since its more common associations, water sources or general wellness, made its connection to crying less immediately obvious.

The blue group asked players to identify African currencies, linking KWANZA, LEONE, NAIRA and RAND. The kwanza is the official currency of Angola, notably distinct from Kwanzaa, the unrelated annual cultural celebration observed in the United States. The leone serves as the official monetary unit of Sierra Leone, the naira is the legal tender of Nigeria, and the rand is the currency used in South Africa and several neighboring countries within the Common Monetary Area. Multiple solvers described this category as one of the toughest of the day, with several noting they recognized some of the underlying countries but hadn’t realized the specific words functioned as currency names.

The purple group, traditionally the puzzle’s most difficult, followed the pattern “Strip ___,” connecting CLUB, MALL, POKER and STEAK. Each word completes a common two-word phrase when paired with “strip”: strip club, strip mall, strip poker and strip steak. Notably, several solvers found this category more approachable than the currency-based blue group, despite its purple ranking, since the wordplay pattern became apparent relatively quickly once a couple of the pairings clicked into place.

A puzzle that flipped the usual difficulty curve

Several puzzle commentators noted that Saturday’s edition subverted the typical expectation that purple categories are always the hardest to solve. One reviewer described completing the puzzle without any mistakes but noted that the blue African currencies category proved more challenging in practice than the purple strip-word category, despite blue traditionally ranking as the second-most difficult tier. That reviewer specifically credited recognizing Sierra Leone and South Africa as countries with helping crack the currency group, while acknowledging limited prior familiarity with kwanza and naira specifically as currency names.

Other players reported similar struggles working through the Spanish relatives category if they lacked language familiarity, with abuela and madre proving more recognizable to English-speaking solvers than hijo and primo, which some players initially considered for other possible groupings before settling on the correct category.

How Connections works

Connections has grown into one of the Times’ most popular daily offerings since its official 2023 launch, building on the success of Wordle, which the Times acquired the previous year. Unlike Wordle’s single daily answer, Connections rewards players who can identify conceptual overlaps between words that initially appear unrelated, a format that has helped make it a fixture of daily routines and group chats since its debut.

Puzzle strategy generally favors locking in the category a solver feels most confident about first, since an incorrect guess counts against the four-mistake limit regardless of which category it targets. Solvers who scan the full 16-word grid for potential overlaps between categories, rather than committing to an early hunch, tend to navigate trickier puzzles like Saturday’s more successfully, particularly when a word could plausibly fit more than one theme.

Part of a broader puzzle lineup

Connections is one of several word and logic games the Times publishes daily, alongside Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword, Pips and Sudoku, some of which remain free to play while others require a Games subscription. The Times also produces a Sports Edition of Connections, built around athletics-themed vocabulary, which runs as a separate daily puzzle from the main edition.

A new Connections puzzle publishes at midnight local time in each time zone, meaning players in different parts of the world are often solving different day’s puzzles depending on when they check in, a structural quirk that has become a familiar feature of how the game is discussed and shared across social media each day.

A new Connections puzzle will publish at midnight Sunday, continuing the daily format that has made the game one of the Times’ most consistently engaging offerings since its debut. Players hoping to keep a personal win streak alive, or looking to avoid the kind of stumble that Saturday’s African currency category caused for several solvers, can expect a fresh set of 16 words and four new categories waiting with tomorrow’s reset, part of a format that continues to reward both broad general knowledge and careful, structural pattern recognition in equal measure.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)