Tuesdata: How Publicis became the holdco to watch

Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly data-led analysis for Unmade’s paying members.

Today, we examine the state of play between the global holding companies. We also highlight a slightly more upbeat day on the Unmade Index.

Everyone else hits the paywall a bit further down. Subscribe today to get all of our Tuesdata posts and access our full publishing archive, which goes behind the paywall after two months.

Unmade members also got discounted tickets to our events, including humAIn, our conference focusing on the impact of AI on media and marketing. The coupon code to access that discount appears in this post below the paywall.

How the holding companies stack up

Reporting season for the first quarter of the calendar year has wrapped up, which makes it a good time to assess how the major communications holding groups are faring.

In today’s piece, we publish a comparison of how the holding companies performed in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same in 2022, highlighting their revenues, market capitalisations and – where new numbers were released – profits.

The companies featured in today’s piece are WPP, Interpublic Group, Publicis and Vivendi-owned Havas Media Group.

We’ve also added S4 Capital, Dentsu and Enero

into our market capitalisation comparisons, although they have not released quarterly figures – some do so only every six months, or a little later in reporting.

We’ll start by taking a look into each holdco’s operating revenue (excluding passthrough revenue from buying media for clients).

We performed our calculations on market caps and currency conversions based on the close of trading on May 4. Each company reports in different currencies, so for the purposes of this analysis we’ve converted all figures into Australian dollars. WPP reports in UK pounds, Publicis and Havas are in Euros, Omnicom and Interpublic post their numbers in US dollars, Dentsu is in Japanese Yen and Enero reports in Australian dollars.

WPP wins the revenue crown

UK-based WPP not only had the highest revenue of the holdco’s, but also scored the most significant growth in revenue compared to the same quarter last year – $690m. WPP includes agencies like VMLY&R, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy along with the GroupM media agencies EssenceMediacom, Mindshare, and Wavemaker.

Although Publicis is the largest holding company of the group by market cap (more on that shortly), it tied with Omnicom for second largest in revenue – with both delivering $5.1bn. Publicis kicked off the year with healthy growth on its corresponding 2022 numbers – a lift in revenue of $460 million.

Meanwhile, US-based Omnicom – parent company of media agencies including OMD and PHD and creative networks DDB, TBWA and BBDO – stayed flat, posting $5.1bn in revenue for both Q122 and Q123.

Interpublic Group owns global agency networks FCB, McCann Worldgroup and MullenLowe. These networks then comprise agencies like Initiative, UM, Jack Morton, Weber Shandwick, McCann, Momentum, Huge and 303 MullenLowe. IPG landed a $440 million jump in revenue on the same quarter last year.

Havas passed the $1 billion revenue mark in its first quarter this year.

Profits: IPG versus Omnicom

The only two holding companies to report their profit for the quarter were Interpublic Group and Omnicom.

They both saw declines in their operating income this quarter compared to last year.

IPG posted a $363.8m quarterly profit in 2022 which declined to $278.8m in 2023.

Omnicom didn’t see as sizeable a fall in profit – it dropped from $522.8m to $513.2.

The fuller picture for the other holding companies will only emerge when they report their half year or full year profits next time round.

Market capitalisations – Publicis on top

We’ve also compared each holding company’s market capitalisation. Though Omnicom took the lead as the largest holdco this time last year, with a market cap of $21.88bn, it’s since been relegated to second place.

Publicis kicked off 2023 by overtaking Omnicom as the most valuable holding company. Its market cap was $30.5bn, towering above WPP, IPG and Vivendi (which owns Havas).

Interpublic has grown slightly since last year, to a $20bn market cap from $18.27bn.

WPP has retreated since last April, with its market cap dropping by $1.41bn in just over a year.

Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital saw a fairly significant decline in its market cap. It had a $3.95bn market cap around this time last year, but that’s now fallen to $1.48bn.

Publicis, however, has grown by a healthy $10.15bn since April 2022, the most significant improvement of all the holding companies so far this year. For the current quarter, Publicis is the group to beat.

Unmade Index swings up after a week in the red

The Unmade Index, our measure of the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks, finally saw some positive movement yesterday after a tumultuous week of consecutive falls. It climbed 1.03% to land at 643.3.

Seven West Media’s share price decline has persisted, falling by a significant 4.17%. Small B2B publisher Aspermont saw a similar decline, falling 5.88%.

The biggest improvement came for communications agency holding company Enero Group, its share price climbing by 4.86% after a 4.63% tumble just a few days ago.

Other winners included outdoor advertising player Ooh Media, which rose 3.28%. This was despite yesterday’s query from the ASX about whether the company breached its continual disclosure duties by waiting until last week’s Macquarie investor conference to reveal that it had hit headwinds in an announcement which crushed the market cap by more than a quarter.

Nine’s price lifted by 1.52%.

And Southern Cross Austereo improved by 3.12%, taking it back above $200m.

Time to leave you to your day. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

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