Orano - Annual Activity Report 2025 59 SITUATION AND ACTIVITIES OF THE COMPANY AND ITS SUBSIDIARIES DURING THE PAST FINANCIAL YEAR 2 Foreseeable developments and future prospects Competencies The nuclear industry is facing massive skills needs to support its relaunch, with 100,000 new hires anticipated by 2035 according to GIFEN. In this promising context, Orano is deploying an ambitious strategy to attract, integrate, train and retain its employees and thus sustain and secure the group’s activities over the period of its strategic plan. The group recruited nearly 1,700 people on permanent contracts in France in 2025, and intends to recruit in total around 15,000 employees over the next 10 years to respond to retirements, natural turnover and, above all, the significant development of its activities. Orano is boosting the visibility of its employer brand by highlighting the Company’s unique mission and promoting a distinctive corporate culture based on the positive impact of its activities on society. The group is also working on several partnerships with schools and educational establishments offering specializations in its strategic professions (mechanics, processes, chemistry, radiation protection). Orano also invests in the development of its teams’ skills by building evolving career paths, either bottom-up or crossfunctional, and by relying on several strengthened training programs, including professional schools, located near industrial sites, which are a central pillar of this strategy: the École des métiers in la Hague, the Mining College covering all professions in the uranium cycle, the École des métiers de la Chimie in Tricastin, the École des métiers du Démantèlement et des Services launched in 2023, and the Campus des Métiers du Recyclage, inaugurated in 2024 with the support of France 2030, capable of training up to 250 people per year in MOX professions. These measures are complemented by professional development programs to maintain high standards in response to changes in the workplace, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, project management, and eco-design. Customer growth The group manages a portfolio of development projects generating significant investments in both its core businesses and new activities. In Mining, Orano began production in 2025 at the South Tortkuduk deposit operated by Katco joint venture in Kazakhstan, and signed an investment agreement with the Mongolian government to develop and operate the Zuuvch-Ovo uranium mine in the southeast of the country. At the front end of the cycle, work on the extension of the Georges Besse II enrichment plant, which began in 2024, is progressing in line with expectations. It will produce its first SWUs in the summer of 2028. This project represents an investment of approximately 1.7 billion euros for ~2.4 million SWUs/year. In the Back End, the group launched a 3.8 billion euro Life extension and resilience Program to extend la Hague (Manche) and Melox (Gard) plants beyond 2040. It will ensure the industrial transition with the new reprocessing-recycling plants built through the Aval du Futur program, for which Orano began feasibility and simplified preliminary design studies in 2025. With regard to new activities, construction work on the Advanced Thorium Extraction Facility (ATEF) in Bessines-sur-Gartampe (France) progressed in 2025 according to schedule, with startup scheduled for 2027. This facility will produce thorium-228, a precursor of lead-212, used in vectorized internal radiotherapies (RIV) against cancer developed by Orano Med. Competitiveness Industrial and commercial performance is at the heart of the group’s strategy and an essential condition for the success of its development and in particular all the projects detailed above. To this end, Orano is rolling out its three-year Opteam26 operational performance program across all its sites, with a target of saving 300 million euros by 2026, including continuous improvement approaches (“Kaizen” projects) aligned with the issues of the plants and involving all employees in the field. 2025 confirmed the strong ambition to ramp up production and increase the performance of our sites. Thus, in Mining, the start of production at the South Tortkuduk site in Kazakhstan raised Katco’s production level. Production levels are rising in conversion and enrichment plants. Finally, the Back End plants are gradually returning to a nominal level of production. 2.6.2 Orano’s financial outlook After posting operating results above expectations for 2025, Orano has a solid financial outlook in a context of accelerating major investments. In this context, the group decided to introduce in its outlook a financial leverage objective in the medium term, instead of “net cash flow”. Orano forecasts the following outlook: ● a revenue in 2026 anchored above 5 billion euros, a high level consistent with the momentum in clearing the backlog; ● an EBITDA to revenue rate in 2026 between 23% and 25%; ● a financial leverage (net debt/EBITDA) ≤ 1.5x at end-2028.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzMxNTcx