WPP plc

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining WPP 2026 Interim Results Call. My name is Desmond and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register questions by pressing star followed by 11 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by 11 again on your telephone keypad. For those on the webcast, you can also ask questions via the dedicated Q&A box.

i'll now hand over to thomas singlehurst to begin please go ahead thank you desmond good morning and welcome to wpp's 2026 interim results i'm tom singlehurst head of investor relations and i'm joined today by cindy rose ceo and joanne wilson cfo before we get started please take a moment to review the important cautionary statement on slide two let me also quickly take you through our agenda We'll start with an overview of key messages as well as an update on strategic progress from Cindy. Joanne will then review the H1 numbers in more detail. We will then open up the lines for Q&A. And with that, I'll hand over the call to Cindy.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. When we reported our 2025 full-year results back in February, I laid out in detail our Elevate28 strategy. I made a commitment that we would be transparent about our progress along the way, forthcoming with lead indicators of our momentum and disciplined in how we measure success. Today, I'll share an update on where we are against the plan and why I'm encouraged by the steady improvements we're delivering across the company. Then I'll hand over to Joanne, who will take you through the financial detail. Before I start, I'd like to pay a personal tribute to Paul Richardson, who recently passed away. Paul served as WPP's group finance director for 22 years until he retired from the company in 2019. He joined WPP in 1993 as group treasurer and over nearly three decades played a central role in helping to build WPP into the global company it is today. I know many of you will have fond memories of working alongside Paul and will have also known him personally. Our thoughts are with his family at this time. Coming back to where we are today, the headline is that we're on track with where we said we would be, stabilizing the business and delivering on our ambitions with clear evidence of progress across all leading indicators. As part of Elevate28, we aligned on a new company purpose, to be the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. And to fulfill this new purpose, we announced four strategic objectives. To deliver superior growth for clients, to become a simpler, more integrated company, and to unlock the advantage of WPP Open, our agentic marketing platform, and to create firm financial foundations for the future. We also outlined a detailed execution plan that spans three distinct phases. The priority in 2026 has been to stabilize the business, make the structural changes needed, and strengthen our execution. The next phase is to build on these foundations, returning the company to growth sometime during 2027, And the third phase will be accelerating our growth so we can win our share of a growing market from 2028 and beyond. The building blocks of the new strategy are now firmly in place. We're moving from a holding company model to a single company model with four operating units, creative, media, production, and enterprise solutions that operate across four regions with common incentives aligned to WPP's overall performance, all underpinned wpp open which enables and connects everything we do we've made encouraging progress today we are a simpler more integrated company but our work is by no means complete and our focus remains firmly on execution and delivering against the commitments that we've made to our clients employees and investors The journey ahead won't be linear and there will undoubtedly be ups and downs along the way, but I'm confident that we are on the right path and setting WPP up for sustainable success well into the future. In May 2025, we launched WPP Media, then WPP Production in January this year. WPP Creative in February, and to complete the reorganization on July 1st, we officially launched WPP Enterprise Solutions to the market, a unified, technology-powered services offer that helps our clients modernize their marketing operations and unlock new sources of growth. Let's have a quick look at WPP Enterprise Solutions.