Our priority this year, as ever, was integrating agencies that joined the Groupe at the end of 2010 and in 2011. Thanks to the expertise that we've developed in our main Shared Service Centers (SSC), these integrations are now faster, enabling the Groupe to ensure very rapidly not only a high level of compliance, but also new services for these agencies and reduced costs.

In 2011 the geographic coverage of our SSCs continued to widen, essentially in the EMEA region, with deployment of new SSCs in the Middle East. In the Americas and APAC region, our SSCs are approaching their maximum.

Our efforts focused mainly on optimizing processes, and particularly on aligning these processes to prepare for the future deployment of worldwide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). This effort to align processes has already enabled us to construct regional skill centers in Asia and the Americas, and should facilitate ERP, which is heavily dependent on the integration of client and supplier data-bases and the adoption of joint processes spanning all our agencies worldwide.

In Europe, a number of services (notably treasury, legal, tax, real estate and procurement) are being deployed out of major SSCs in order to service countries, such as the Nordics and Baltics, which are not currently covered.

Various new services (both legal and in human resources) are now available to our agencies, while other departments have widened their scope, notably in procurement, real estate and IT. The program to consolidate our real-estate assets sharply accelerated in 2011. Policy adopted over the past six years has enabled us to reduce unused assets to a record low (less than 1.5%), and has optimized occupation rates, reducing our real-estate costs. Outside a few traditionally high-cost markets (Japan), most countries have managed to contain the increase in rental payments, and to maintain rents at an overall worldwide level of less than 6%. We will pursue these initiatives to bring every region to less than 6%.

In IT, as announced, Publicis has finished grouping its various data centers in North America, completing the program we initiated in Europe and APAC. In Europe Publicis deployed its first private cloud, offering our agencies more seamless services; a second cloud will become operational in 2012. The Groupe is thus accelerating its virtual service offering to agencies. Following the virtualization of the main types of servers, application servers and network storage services, which enables greater flexibility and resilience as well as significant cost reductions, the Groupe has begun virtualizing client computers. (forgive me but I think this needs explaining. Surely not the computers of our clients. This will create greater flexibility in the organization of our agencies, as well as better securing our data.

These initiatives have been broadly facilitated by the deployment of a high quality IT network (MPLS), which has been the necessary corollary of the Groupe's digital development.

Procurement policy is progressively extending its coverage to the purchase of services, and has begun to look at production purchases, alongside the Groupe's production platforms. These initiatives depend considerably on our capacity to generate precise data, and setting up the ERP will constitute a significant advance in this respect.

Finally, the Groupe widened its network of telepresence rooms. With more than 25 cities equipped worldwide, communication and collaboration both between our agencies and with our clients should be significantly enhanced. Recourse to travel can be better targeted, enabling savings in terms of staff time and costs, as well as cutting down the fatigue resulting from intensive travel.