
Letter to shareowners continued
Reported Americas net revenue was £587.9 million, down
14.6%, EMEA net revenue was £123.4 million, down 7.3%
and Asia Pacific was £43.3 million, down 16.7%.
The Group has taken a non-cash impairment charge net
of tax of £280.4 million reflecting trading conditions in
the second half of 2024 and the medium-term outlook
following the completion of our budget and three year
planning process. The amount is included in adjusting
itemsafter tax.
We are seeing our AI initiatives improve visualisation
and copywriting productivity, deliver considerably more
effective and economic hyper-personalisation (better
targeted content at greater scale), delivering more
automated and integrated media planning and buying,
improving general client and agency efficiency and
democratisation of knowledge. Monks.Flow is our AI
product solution that automates marketing workflows
and we are continuing to add applications and expand its
capabilities. Our end-to-end suite of Monks.Flow products
orchestrates and helps enable our clients to more easily
implement AI solutions, particularly in visualisation and
copywriting, in hyper-personalisation at scale, in real time
focus groups and linking media planning and buying.
We are seeing significant opportunities for new business,
particularly driven by our AI tools and capability.
New business wins in the year include General Motors,
as their foundational agency, Qiddiya, Marriott, Burger
King, Panasonic, FanDuel, AliExpress, Decathlon,
Santander, SCJohnson, ICBC, Asana, CashApp, Shopify,
Courseraand Singapore Sports Hub. We are also winning
multiple exploratory assignments, as clients experiment
and explore AI applications and develop AI use cases.
AI capability is becoming more central to the agency’s
wayof working and new business efforts. In this regard
the Group’s early adoption of AI and proactive approach
tostafftraining on AI is beginning to pay off.
Our three new Go-To-Market propositions, Orchestration
Partner, Real-Time Brands and Glass Box Media are all
starting to resonate strongly with clients. These are built
around hyper-personalisation at scale, social media,
brandstrategy and transparent media buying and planning.
Environmental, Social and Governance
(ESG)strategy
We remain committed to the pillars of our ESG strategy:
people fulfilment, our responsibility to the world and
one brand. We continue to focus on improving our
external reporting, our reporting tools and governance
to help us move towards increased transparency and
effective reporting and to comply with future global
regulatory requirements.
Across the Group, we support community and charity
services through donation of hours and we’ve grown our
total For Good projects to help create a positive impact
alongside our commercial clients. We remain focused on
our people and their experiences through our robust suite
of programmes that enhance connection and development
across the organisation. Cultivating a deeper understanding
of cultural fluency remains a top priority as we continue to
foster an inclusive environment.
We continue to enjoy our B Corp status. This certification
recognises our achievements in governance and
accountability, environmental performance, social impact
and DE&I, that we are accountable to all stakeholders,
not just shareowners and that we are transparent in
our reporting.
Summary and outlook
For the Group as a whole, given the wider market
uncertainty and the priority shown by technology clients
to AI-related capital expenditure rather than operational
expenditure, such as marketing, we target net revenue and
operational EBITDA to be broadly similar to 2024. We will
continue to focus on our cost base and will take further
action to support profitability. We expect the comparatives
for the first quarter to continue to be difficult, in part due
to the residual effect of the reduction in revenue from one
key client in Technology Services. We expect an improved
performance in the second half of the year, aided by the
phasing of revenue from new business.
Our targeted range for the year end net debt is £100 million
to £140 million. We target medium term financial leverage
at the lower end of our previous range of around 1.5 times
operational EBITDA. Over the longer term we continue
to expect our growth to outperform our markets and
operational EBITDA margins to return to historic levels of
around 20%.
The strategy of S
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Capital remains the same. The Group’s
unitary, purely digital transformation model, based on first-
party data fuelling the creation, production and distribution
of digital advertising content, distributed by digital media
and built on technology platforms to ensure success and
efficiency, resonates with clients.
We continue to streamline and integrate our businesses,
wehave rebranded to Monks and are focusing all our
current capabilities into two Practices: Marketing Services
and Technology Services. Our tagline ‘faster, better,
cheaper and more’ or ‘speed, quality, value and more’ and
a unitary structure both appeal strongly, even more so in
challenging economic times.
S
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