WPP PLC, the world’s largest advertising company, is accelerating a strategy revamp to cope with continued weak ad spending by its clients.
The London-based company reported a “slow start” to this year and a no-growth outlook for the year after a tough last year, when revenue and profit margins were also flat.
WPP is trying to break down silos among its various creative, ad buying, strategy and public relations businesses to draw on top talent and seamlessly serve clients.
Photo: AFP
Its advertising sales are a bellwether of strength in the global economy, as companies tend to expand or cut their marketing budgets depending on how well their businesses are performing.
After “not a pretty year” last year, WPP is “upping the pace” of its effort to combine its global team, CEO Martin Sorrell said.
“In this environment, the most successful agency groups will be those who offer simplicity and flexibility of structure to deliver efficient, effective solutions — and therefore growth — for their clients,” he said.
WPP said in a statement that like-for-like revenue last year was down 0.3 percent.
It is also facing questions over whether it risks losing business to new challengers.
On one side, consultants like Accenture PLC and Deloitte LLP have been buying up creative businesses in a bid to poach digital marketing work, such as Web site design and app-building.
On the other, the likes of Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google increasingly offer advertising solutions direct to companies, threatening to cut out the agency middlemen.
In response, WPP has been doubling-down on a drive for “horizontality,” its attempt to better integrate its many services and divisions so clients can access the best of what it offers in one place.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by