JPM | FTM | Today’s Research | Europe

Research evidence excerpt

JPM | FTM | Today’s Research | Europe

Europe Equity Research

Europe First to Market 12 May 2026

Today’s Morning Meeting | Also Published Today | Key Changes | JPM Events | Upcoming Earnings

Today’s Morning Meeting

Mistral AI (Aaron Steiker)

From Paris, With Intelligence

Named after the powerful winds that sweep across southern France, Mistral AI has rapidly become Europe’s most valuable AI

company (€11.7bn, Sep-25). Founded in 2023 by three AI researchers—Arthur Mensch (ex Google DeepMind), Guillaume

Lample, and Timothée Lacroix (both ex Meta AI)—Mistral first captured mindshare with small, high-performing open-weight

models. Since then, the company has broadened into a full-stack AI platform spanning foundation models (open-weight and

proprietary), applications (assistants and coding tools), enterprise services (customization, integration, and deployment), and

cloud infrastructure. With AI ownership and control moving up the agenda for corporates and governments alike, Mistral now

supports millions of users. In this note, we set out our initial strategic thesis on a company aspiring to make “frontier AI

accessible to everyone.”

European Cement (Elodie Rall/Jean-Xavier Hecker)

ETS benchmark out for Cement looking for a 5% reduction vs. 2021-2025; we view as reassuring and

supportive of further positive cement pricing in Europe

Earlier this morning, the EU Commission provided an update on its long awaited benchmark revision. Specific to the European

Cement sector the revised benchmark for the period 2026-2030 is expected to be 0.657, which represents a ~5% decrease vs.

the previous benchmark of 0.690 across 2021-2025. The revised level is in line with commentary made by Holcim during its Q1

conference call and therefore should not be a complete surprise.