WPP plc Q4 FY2024 Earnings Call

So, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us in Sea Containers today who you found it busy coming in for our preliminary results for 2024 and strategic outlook for 2025. Now the past year has been extremely busy, and it's thrown up both challenges and opportunities. But throughout this, we remain focused on executing our strategy to deliver long-term sustainable growth and through this value to our shareholders. I'm going to walk you through the key highlights. Joanne will then talk you through our financial performance, and I'll come back with GroupM CEO, Brian Lesser, to talk about the strategic progress we've made this year and is yet to come. We'll follow that by taking your questions. Now before I do that, I would like to make two points: first, to thank Tom Waldron, who's sitting here with us for his hard work for us over the past couple of years in leading our IR team and also welcome Tom Singlehurst, who's crossed sides to join us who's sitting in the front row, for those of you who are not here, he's here. So before we start, we should just look at this cautionary statement and read that carefully. So turning to the highlights. Why we've achieved a lot in 2024. I do know that the main focus for many of you and actually has come up in the Q&A will be our net revenue growth, which came in at minus 1%, consistent with the lower end of our guidance range. We were conservative when we guided you at Q3. Now this performance does mask competing tailwinds and headwinds. Now I'd highlight a robust performance within our top 25 clients, which grew 2% and supported solid growth within media and production. On the other side of the coin, we did face challenging trends in China, an 80 basis point drag and the impact of historical client losses and weaker discretionary spend, particularly focused in the fourth quarter. Despite this, we delivered a stronger headline operating margin at 15%, up 40 basis points year-on-year. And we did this and included within that GBP 250 million investment in AI and data and incremental GBP 30 million over the course of the year. We also made great progress in our strategic transformation infrastructure. Our investment in WPP Open and a stronger balance sheet. So if I'd say, up from what I think the 3 main takeaways were from what we achieved in 2024, there will be first strong strategic progress; second, better new business performance in the second half, I'd highlight those wins. And thirdly, better cash conversion, which I know is something that's been on our shareholders' minds for some time. And we do need to get this new business improvement back to where we want it to be to deliver growth where we need to be. So I'll come back to you shortly to discuss why we remain confident, but let me first hand over to Joanne to take you through the financial highlights.

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. Let me take you through some more detail on our financial results for 2024, and I will start on Slide 7. So like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 1% for the full year 2024. At the end of Q3, our year-to-date like-for-like was a decline of 0.5%. Q4 performance was disappointingly soft and took our full year like-for-like to the bottom end of our guidance range. Despite the softer top line performance, we delivered a 40 basis point improvement in headline operating margin to 15%, benefiting from structural cost savings and continued disciplined cost management whilst driving incremental investment in WPP Open in AI and in data. We also improved our operating cash flow conversion to 86%, benefiting from strong working capital management. That, together with the sale of FGS Global resulted in year-end net debt of GBP 1.7 billion, a GBP 0.8 billion reduction year-on-year. Turning to the headline income statement on Slide 8. Overall reported revenue less pass-through costs was GBP 11.4 billion, a decrease of 4.2% year-on-year. FX contributed to a 3.1 percentage point drag with M&A, a further 0.1 percentage point headwind, leaving a like-for-like decline of 1%.

Apologies, everyone. It appears that we have lost connection with our speaker line. Please hold on while we attempt to reconnect. The call will resume shortly.

Okay. Sorry about that. Operating profit margin of 15% benefited from that 0.4 percentage point improvement on a constant currency basis and was up 0.2 percentage points on a reported basis. Maybe down the P&L, a reminder that income from associates excludes any contribution from Kantar in accordance with IAS 28 due to nil carrying value on our balance sheet. Net finance costs of GBP 280 million increased during the year, reflecting higher interest rates following our successful bond refinancing in 2024. Our effective tax rate increased as expected by 1 percentage point to 28% and noncontrolling interest of GBP 87 million were flat year-on-year. Headline diluted EPS of 88.3p was down 5.9% on a reported basis and broadly flat like-for-like. Consistent with our dividend policy, the Board has recommended a flat final dividend of 24.4p given a total dividend of 39.4p for 2024, which is in line with 2023 and represents a cash return to shareholders of over GBP 420 million. Moving to Slide 9 and the reconciliation between our headline and reported operating profit. Headline operating profit of GBP 1.7 billion is adjusted for goodwill impairment of GBP 237 million, which relates to AKQA and other smaller agencies. Reported gains on disposal before tax were GBP 329 million, was GBP 275 million arising from the disposal of FGS and the adjustment for litigation and other charges includes GBP 68 million relating to ongoing legal matters and claims. Finally, restructuring and transformation costs of GBP 277 million include costs relating to the creation of VML and Burson and the simplification of GroupM as well as costs associated with our ongoing ERP and IT transformation and property-related costs. As a result, our operating profit increased from GBP 531 million in 2023 to GBP 1.3 billion in 2024. Moving on now to Slide 10 and performance across our business.

So thank you very much, Joanne. So at our Capital Markets Day just over a year ago, we framed our strategy as being based around these 4 strategic pillars. So let's look at the progress we made on each of these in turn. On the first, AI, data and technology, 2024 was really about cementing WPP Open as a single technology vision, platform and team. And I think it's a significant departure from where we've been historically where technology was often developed at an agency, sometimes even at an office level. This is allowing us to build a single platform that spans the whole company, integrates how we work and also how we work with our clients with great investment in WPP Open now at GBP 250 million per annum we're seeing greater adoption with 33,000 people using it in December and increasing deployment in our clients. And I'd remind you, as Joanne pointed out that, that incremental investment came within delivering 40 basis points of margin improvement over the course of the year. And personally, I was every day showing CEOs and CMOs how it can transform their marketing efforts.

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everybody. I'm Brian Lesser, Global CEO of GroupM. It's great to be here with all of you today. I'm excited to share GroupM's vision and how we're driving priorities to improve our offering. Today, I'm going to focus on two key areas. The first is GroupM's 5 strategic priorities. And the second is our data strategy. So let's dive in. Since rejoining GroupM, I've engaged extensively with our clients to understand their needs. The conversations have been insightful and several key themes have emerged. Clients are asking, how can we drive effectiveness through AI and technology? How can we enhance efficiency through greater integration? What structure makes it easier for clients to work with us? To address these, we have taken significant steps, but above all, we remain relentlessly focused on client retention and growth. Let's start with client retention. We are focusing on making client experiences more seamless and frictionless while delivering exceptional value. On the client growth and new business side, we are driving success through creating the most competitive offering backed by our investments in data and technology and leveraging the strongest global network with WPP's assets for multi-market advertisers. We've seen early progress with recent wins, including Johnson & Johnson in the U.S., retaining and growing the Unilever business in the U.S., expanding our relationship with Unilever globally and securing Amazon's global business outside of the Americas. Data, Technology and Open Media Studio were fundamental to winning and expanding with these businesses. To drive change in these focus areas, I've defined 5 key priorities: first, data and technology. We are fearlessly embracing AI and technology with a future-focused Open platform designed for tomorrow. WPP Open and Media Studio form the backbone of this approach, and we're driving towards 100% adoption from our clients. This will enable our shift from ID to AI that underpins our data strategy. Second, people. We are up-leveling our talent by investing in technical employees and workforce development, ensuring alignment with our clients' future needs. Additionally, within the global organization, I have restructured the team to focus on what's most important to our business by appointing 4 new roles focused on clients, growth, transformation and operations and market expansion. Third, innovation. We are entirely focused on innovation, introducing new proprietary trading models and next-generation media products. This will allow us to offer more performance to our clients at efficient prices, using our expertise, scale and data capabilities to redefine industry standards. Fourth, collaboration. We're improving internal and external collaboration across GroupM and WPP integrating media, creativity and production more effectively. And finally, fifth is our org design. We are further simplifying our structure to become a unified company with one voice to clients and partners.

In 2024, we made significant strides in eliminating complexity, but we know that we have to be simpler and there is more work to do. Now let's talk about our data strategy and AI because AI is fundamentally transforming our industry. AI is quickly becoming the norm in how we work. As Mark spoke about, consumers are engaging with AI in new ways, gaining a deeper understanding of its benefits and risks. As this shift happens, GroupM will fundamentally change the way we work, streamlining our media planning and buying via automation. We won't just react to this change, we will lead it.

The market is quickly moving from identity-based solutions to AI-driven connectivity. Here's what that means. We believe that data connectivity is more important than simply owning a database and the value of connectivity will only grow over time. No matter how many traditional IDs you own, it will never be enough. The real power lies in connecting data across publishers, partners, retailers, platforms and clients and thoughtfully using our own first-party data assets in conjunction with the available data in the world. The future is about connecting disparate data sets to extract insights, create predictive models and drive performance. Traditional ID solutions like those grounded in e-mail addresses only learn from overlapping data points, relying on outdated look-alike models that limit insights. Using technologies like federated learning, we can create shared knowledge and predictions across all of our partners without sharing raw data and activate via simple connector. It's a game changer.

And as Mark mentioned, this will drive significant efficiencies in audience targeting and real-time campaign optimization, tailored to clients' unique needs based on their own data maturity. By 2030, we'll be working with thousands of data partners to guide audience decisions. The only way to harness that scale is by leveraging AI at every step of the process. No singular legacy database can manage that scale and complexity.