WPP’s Chief Executive has warned of a “challenging” economic environment as the group reported a 5% fall in revenue for the first quarter of the year.
The advertising giant has a major presence in Manchester city centre.
For Q1 its revenue of £3,243m was down 5.0% year on year and 0.7% down on like-for-like performance.
However, CEO, Mark Read, said that this was in line with expectations and he expected performance to improve in the next quarter, despite the potential impact of tariffs.
“Our financial performance in Q1 was in line with our expectations, reflecting macroeconomic challenges and the timing of new business, and we expect these factors to continue in Q2 with performance anticipated to improve in the second half,” he stated.
“While WPP is not itself directly affected by tariffs, they will impact a number of our clients as well as the broader economy. At this point we have not seen any significant change in client spending and we reiterate our full-year guidance which already reflected a challenging environment. As ever, we remain agile and vigilant and will continue to be disciplined on how we are managing our cost base.”
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He added:
“We continue to make solid progress on our strategic priorities. With the internal focus of integration behind them, VML and Burson are seeing renewed momentum in new business with Generali, Heineken and Levi Strauss & Co important wins during the quarter,” he said.
“The acquisition of InfoSum and its integration into GroupM’s data offer accelerates our AI-driven data approach, leapfrogging traditional identity-based solutions. We are also on track with the continued adoption of WPP Open across the organisation with 48,000 of our people (c.60% of client-facing staff) using it in March vs. 33,000 in December.
WPP’s share price hasn’t yet recovered since its 17% drop in February this year, falling 31.95% over the last 6 months.
