Teleperformance Shares Slide After It Cuts 2026 Sales Outlook on Content Moderation Slump

The French customer-service outsourcing group now expects like-for-like revenue to fall by 1.5% to 2.5% this year. It had previously guided for anything from no growth to 2% growth. The company blamed a sharper-than-expected decline in Trust & Safety, the unit that reviews and moderates online content for platform clients, as well as work moving to lower-cost offshore locations and wider industry headwinds.

The warning matters beyond one company. Outsourced customer service and moderation are among the white-collar businesses most exposed to automation, and Teleperformance employs large numbers of people in both. Investing.com, in its report on the share fall, linked the Trust & Safety decline to automated tools replacing human moderators as well as to offshoring. The company is also betting on AI itself: it said it had 1,400 AI projects at the end of the third quarter, more than double the number a year earlier.

Third-quarter revenue rose 1.0% on a reported basis to €2.532 billion but fell 1.2% like-for-like, the same rate of decline as in the second quarter. A stronger dollar and Colombian peso added about €62 million. Excluding Trust & Safety, revenue grew 2.0% on a comparable basis. Growth in back-office and AI-enabled services only partly offset the moderation slump and the pressure from offshoring. For the first nine months, revenue was €7.42 billion, down 1.5% like-for-like and 2.7% on a reported basis.

Chief executive Jorge Amar said Trust & Safety "remained under pressure" and that "industry headwinds are slowing the pace of recovery."

Its core services division had revenue of €2.19 billion, down 1%, though it grew 2.9% excluding Trust & Safety. Revenue in the Americas slipped 0.3% to €1.05 billion after growing 1.1% in the second quarter, as moderation losses outweighed gains in operations and back-office work. Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific fell 1.5% to €1.15 billion, a smaller decline than the 2.7% recorded in the previous quarter. Specialised services fell 2.9% to €338 million, which the company said reflected the planned transfer of some activities into core services.

The group kept its other 2026 targets unchanged. It still expects a recurring EBITA margin of about 14.6%, assuming a euro-dollar rate of 1.20, and net free cash flow of €800 million to €850 million, excluding one-off cash payments. Restructuring costs this year are heading for the top of the €120 million to €140 million range, and the company expects them to bring annual savings of €150 million to €170 million.

The shares had closed at €80.80 on Thursday. They fell to an intraday low of €63.16 before recovering to about €68.28, a loss of roughly 15.5%. Reports put the fall at between 15% and 18% depending on the time in the session. Teleperformance was among the worst performers in a weak European market. By 0810 GMT the Stoxx 600 was down 1.6% at 644.72, with media, healthcare and retail stocks each down more than 2%, as investors worried that a Democrat-controlled US Congress could curb spending on AI data centres. The CAC 40 fell about 0.9%.

Teleperformance said it will update its 2028 financial targets in the first half of 2027. It will give formal guidance for 2027 with its full-year 2026 results on February 25, 2027.