WPP posts strong revenue growth in first quarter
Holding company posts 6.7% revenue increase led by new business wins including Coke
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In its first quarter trading update issued today, WPP reported revenue growth of 6.7% to 3.1 billion pounds. On a “like for like” basis excluding currency, acquisitions and divestitures, its revenue grew 8.1%.
“We saw strong growth across all business sectors and regions, as client demand for our integrated offer remained very positive,” said CEO Mark Read in announcing the results. “We are benefiting from our excellent new business performance in 2020 and 2021, with the onboarding of Coca-Cola being a significant focus. In new business reviews so far this year, we extended our relationship with Mars becoming their global media partner, added digital to our Sky media remit, won the global creative account for JDE Peet’s and were appointed strategic communications partner by Migros, with a focus on commerce strategy, data and content. We also won new assignments with Samsung and Square.”
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By sector, the British holding company reported like-for-like growth of 8.6% in its global integrated agencies sector—the strongest performer was GroupM, with a gain of 36% in revenue less pass-through costs in the quarter. Excluding GroupM, that sector was up 5.6%, led by Hogarth. WPP said AKQA Group, Ogilvy and Wunderman Thompson “all recorded good growth and VMLY&R continued to grow despite a strong prior period.”Its PR sector was up 14% in revenue on a like-for-like basis in the quarter, followed by specialist agencies, up 13%.
WPP cited a number of moves to bolster its business including the founding of The Metaverse Foundry, a 700-strong team of people at its creative content company Hogarth, dedicated to the metaverse; the launch of Everymile, a digital commerce managed service for clients and the merger announced yesterday of Essence and MediaCom into EssenceMediacom, “a new agency offering combining Essence’s digital and data-driven model with MediaCom’s scaled multichannel audience planning and strategic media expertise.”
In addition, the holding company has united Finecast, Xasis and GroupM services into GroupM Nexus, which it is calling “the world’s leading media performance organization.”
By region, India rose the highest in like-for-like revenue during the first quarter at 25%, followed by China, up 11.9%, Germany, up 16.1%, the U.S., which grew 8.9% and the U.K., up 8.1%.
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