WPP plc

So, good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us in Scene Containers today. We 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've remained focused on executing our strategy, 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 Group MCO 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, while we've achieved a lot in 2024, I do know that the main focus for many of you, and I'm sure it's 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. And 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 medium production. On the other side of the coin, we did face challenging trends in China and 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 £250 million investment in AI and data and incremental £30 million over the course of the year. We also made great progress in our strategic transformation, a simpler structure, our investment in WPP Open and a stronger balance sheet. So if I say, you know, up from what I think the three main takeaways were from what we achieved in 2024, there would be first, strong strategic progress. Second, better new business performance in the second half. I 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 continue to get this new business going. 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, discuss why you remain confident, but let me first hand over to Joanne to take you through the financial highlights.

Good morning, everyone. Let me take you through some more detail on our financial results for 2024. And I will start on side seven. 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 £1.7 billion, a £0.8 billion reduction year-in-year. Turning to the headline income statement on slide eight, overall reported revenue-less pass-through costs was £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%.

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