WPP plc (WPP) Q2 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2022

August 5, 2022 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Welcome to the WPP 2022 Interim Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Today’s conference is being recorded.

I will now hand over to your host, Mark Read, CEO of WPP, to begin. Mark, please go ahead.

Mark Read

Thank you very much and good morning, everybody. I think we’ll take sort of this morning’s presentation as viewed. If you want to look at it, it’s available online. In the interest of efficiency, I’ll make a few opening remarks and then we go on to questions.

So I think if I look at -- as we look at the first half, I think we had continued strong demand from our clients. We had good growth in the first half, 8.9%, actually 8.3% in the second quarter, so only slightly lower than first quarter despite somewhat tougher comparatives. And that reflected strong growth across all of our business, the GIAs. The integrated agency is up 8.2% with perhaps a slightly stronger performance in media, actually a very creditable performance in our creative agencies across the board around 6% in Q2. Public relations is up 7.3%. PR has been our standout-performing business through the pandemic, reflecting this importance to clients. And indeed, our Specialist Agency is actually up 10.9%, so better than the average overall.

Geographically, good growth across all our major markets, notably the U.S., which in the first half, accelerated WPP’s growth. So I think we’re seeing outperformance relative to the rest of the business in the U.S. Again, a marked turnaround from where we were sort of pre-pandemic. It might be our last quarter of growth before the recent outperformance was Q1 2016 and growth in all markets, except for China, obviously, due to the impacts of lockdowns there.

I think that our business is stronger creatively. We were most creative company of the year at Cannes in 2022 and Ogilvy we’re named Network of the Year. In our media business, we were ranked by COMvergence as the world’s leading’s media group, and that’s reflected in a very strong new business performance of $1.6 billion [GBP 1.6 billion] (sic) in the second quarter. Good wins in the likes of Audible, Danone, Audi, Nationwide. Actually, a very solid group of wins across both our creative and our media business, probably a little bit more evenly split creative and media this year than compared to last.