Edited Transcript of WPP.AX earnings conference call or presentation 23-Feb-20 10:00pm GMT

And looking out to the 2020 financial performance of the group, Jens will present the new strategic plan for our business today to return the group to sustainable growth. And taking into consideration the transformational change to be undertaken in 2020, along with an uncertain economic backdrop, we expect to provide guidance on the 2020 outlook at the AGM in May this year.

So turning to the headline results for the business. The analysis looks at the performance of the continuing and discontinuing businesses in 2019. The performance of discontinuing businesses includes the results of Kantar and Ogilvy New Zealand, 2 units that were sold in 2019. And overall, the total headline results indicate a decline in earnings per share of 9.6% which, while disappointing, is in line with market guidance.

Turning to the portfolio of companies. There was mixed financial performance. Our Global Integrated Agencies comprise our media and creative brands and is our largest individual segment. Certain brands in the Global Integrated Agencies segment faced headwinds in 2019 due to global and local account losses and this was amplified by weak media market and economic conditions throughout the year. We expect 2020 to continue to be a challenging environment for this segment with account losses impacting the first half results.

The strongest performing brands in this segment are where we have powered up our creative capabilities with technology and digital expertise and the brands that have integrated creativity and technology have experienced growth in 2019. And it’s with this success that we expand and accelerate the integrated model under the new strategic plan.

The performance of the Public Relations segment declined in 2019 as a result of just 1 brand in the segment and we have quickly taken steps to remediate this issue. Overall, the segment has been performing strongly over a number of years, and the outlook remains positive with the expectation it will return to growth in 2020.

The Specialist Communications segment comprises digitally focused businesses and have delivered organic earnings growth in 2019. The digital businesses contained within the specialist segment are growing and are well-positioned for further growth both locally and in Southeast Asia.

Progress has been made in restructuring Large Format Production segment. The improvement is reflected in earnings, which is primarily driven by a strong second half performance, creating momentum as we go into 2020 and is a result of the restructuring actions delivering cost and operational efficiencies. The largest of these savings was generated through property consolidation and improvement in its overall supply chain. And the benefit of these initiatives is an improvement in the quality of its operations and enhanced customer experience that we expect will drive client retention and growth in the future.

Turning to the detailed profit and loss account and looking at the key drivers of margin performance in 2019. We have seen margin improvement in all segments with the exception being the Global Integrated Agencies. And what is driving this margin decline in this segment is an increase in the staff cost to revenue ratio. We have not been agile enough to adjust our cost base for changes in net sales. However, we have identified areas of improvement and changes are taking place. Pleasingly, the campus strategy has reduced our establishment costs in 2019 along with a reduction in other general and administrative costs.

Turning to simplification and Kantar. Our clear objective has been to simplify the company, making it easier to navigate and manage. This has been achieved through targeted closure, merger and sale of 15 brands in 2019, and we expect the measured rationalization of the portfolio to continue in 2020. The most significant transaction in 2019 was the sale of 100% of our interest in the Kantar businesses in Australia and New Zealand.

The transaction valued Kantar at $168 million equivalent to 8.2x multiple of Kantar’s 2019 budgeted EBITDA. The proceeds on completion were $159 million received in December and have been initially used to repay debt with the leverage ratio reducing to 1.1x at year-end. And as a result of the Kantar transaction, the company has announced a capital management program which I’ll now talk in more detail about.

The Board has announced a capital management program totaling $50 million comprising a special dividend of $0.015 per share fully franked over the next 4 dividend periods. And the special dividend program will commence in April 2020. This special dividend program is in addition to our ordinary trading dividends.

In determining the announced capital management initiatives, the Board has taken a conservative approach on the back of the current balance sheet leverage and the intention to operate at the lower end of the stated targeted gearing range of 1.5x to 2x. We also looked at the excess franking credit balance position, the earnings outlook and our anticipated funding needs for the new strategic plan.

The Board believes it struck an appropriate balance in rewarding our shareholders in the context of the current under leveraged balance sheet and ensuring there is capacity to support the new strategic plan being implemented by our new CEO. The capital management program is to be continually reviewed with opportunities to deliver additional distributions to shareholders as we achieve earnings growth and greater clarity around the cost and speed of our transformation initiatives.

In addition to the special dividend, the directors of WPP AUNZ have declared a fully franked final dividend of $0.029 per share. The total ordinary dividends for the 2019 year is $0.052 fully franked against $0.063 in 2018. The final ordinary dividend represents a payout ratio of 70% of earnings, in line with our targeted payout ratio of 60% to 70% of headline earnings per share. And the total dividends for 2019, including special and ordinary dividends of $0.067 per share fully franked, an uplift of 6% on 2018. The final dividend will have a record date of 31 March and be paid on the 7th of April 2020.

Looking at the balance sheet of the group. The key movements in the balance sheet at 31 December 2019 relates to the impairment of intangible assets. As announced in the 2019 half year results, the company has recorded an impairment charge following a review of the carrying value of the group’s intangible assets. The impairment charge of $298 million relates to acquired intangible assets, including brand names, customer relationships and goodwill. It represents a write-down of 25% of the intangible asset values contained in the balance sheet at 31 December 2018. It is noncash in nature, has no impact on the company’s debt facilities, compliance with banking covenants, payment of dividends or our ability to undertake capital management initiatives.

The impairment charge for the Data Investment Management group segment is $44 million and is — reflects an adjustment to the carrying value of assets to be in line with the Kantar sale value. The impairment charge for the Global Integrated Agencies totals $250 million and the charge has been driven by a reassessment of future cash flows and growth rates, reflecting the segment’s current performance and future earnings outlook.

Turning to our debt facilities. Post the disposal of Kantar, we have reduced our overall debt facilities by $100 million in accordance with our banking agreement. We have access to debt facilities of $420 million with a syndicate of 5 banking partners and the maturity profile has $270 million of debt expiring in June 2021 and $150 million overdraft working capital facility expiring on the 29th of June 2020.

The company has improved its net debt position with earnout — including earnout payments totaling $121 million at 31 December 2019 and the leverage ratio is 1.1x. Our targeted leverage ratio remains 1.5x to 2x, measured as net debt plus earnouts divided by our headline EBITDA.

Looking at our cash flow. WPP AUNZ is a strong cash-generative business, and over the last 24 months, we have delivered a cash conversion of 98% of EBITDA. Capital expenditure has been intentionally restrained over the last — and is below our depreciation expense.

The cash outflow relating to acquisitions is $5.5 million and relates to the buyout of minority shareholdings. This is consistent with our strategy to simplify our corporate structure. And in this example, holding 100% of the equity position of these companies has facilitated the operational mergers of AKQA in New Zealand and Wunderman Thompson. The cash outflow — sorry, the cash outlook is positive, and we expect to deliver strong free cash flow again in 2020.

So that concludes the review of the 2019 financial performance. I’ll now hand you back to Jens to present the new strategic plan for the group.

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Jens Monsees, WPP AUNZ Limited – CEO, MD & Director [4]

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Thank you, Chris. The numbers from my point of view are obviously not meeting our expectations. From my view, that happens when we don’t evolve quick enough in terms of the digital opportunities that we see in the market, and I’m excited now to present our new strategy for the upcoming years.

So if we talk about the future, the step change and the transformation that we are carrying out is a tremendous step forward. Actually, the new users, the shoppers, have such a different behavior, and it reminds me to a Queen concert I was 10 days ago, where 1 song goes, “I want it all, and I want it now.” So this is the consumer, the shopper of the future, everything right on track in the convenient way with 1 click. Therefore, there has never been so much money in the market especially in advertising and media. The opportunity is great and it’s exciting times to be in our business. Our clients are facing rapid changes in consumer behaviors and the evolving business models.

We are open for it. We welcome change, and we want to drive and be on the forefront of the transformation, especially in digital. From my tech experience, I would say that the time is now. And obviously, we need to unlock our potential, not only looking at tech and data but also, from my experience, change is driven with culture and with the people driving our solutions.

So how do we make that step change now? And I would like to talk about our transformation right now. But to know where we are heading, we first have to look at our past, where we come from. We have more than 60 strong brands, but they were very independent in the past and obviously trying to serve only their P&L and their clients with their solutions. This needs to be changed. We have to have a more collaborative and much more connected approach towards our clients because in the future I would say that none of our brands can cover the full solution portfolio that our clients are needing.

So if we think about it, the brand as speedboats, then now we want to make a fleet out of these speedboats, so we give them radio and radar. That means we communicate much more. We are orchestrated. And in the future, our independent speedboats will build a fleet around our clients.

There are more Apple iPhones sold per second than there are babies born. Forecast suggests that the Internet of Things will be worth around $1.6 trillion by 2025. And the worldwide number of Internet of Things, connected devices projects an increase to 43 billion by 2023 according to McKinsey. So there’s lots of opportunities out there.

Creativity is at our core, but we need to broaden the definition of creativity. Creativity can also be that we create a new algorithm as our strong media brand essence, where we do the whole media planning for Google, or for example our virtual realities that we conducted with our brands AKQA and Ogilvy, where we work together with IBM for the Australian Open to make the viewer and the customer being very much into the game and not only be a visitor of the game.

Creativity empowered by tech. I think we need tech in every of our pillars. Not only on the classical communication where we have more and more one-to-one communication to our customers, we also need tech in the experience space, in e-commerce space, especially the rise of e-commerce and in the technology space. And obviously, these growth areas need to sit on a stronger platform of integrated systems. Consolidated data and also the huge opportunity of implementing tech with consulting capabilities and delivery capabilities need to be faster in the future.

If you think about the CMO’s agendas of the future, they have actually a very, very tough job. And it’s on us to help them navigate through the digital landscape and also through the ever-changing world and demands of the users and the customers.

This is not only happening in our region, it’s happening across the globe. And especially if we look at Southeast Asia, where we are looking at more than 700 people — 700 million people, there’s this huge opportunity in these countries where they’re actually leapfrogging digital and going into a much more interesting and much more tech-orientated future than in the past.

Let’s have a look at our markets first, outside in. If we see the new CMO agenda, everything starts with the user that you see here on the right-hand side of the slide. The user at the moment doesn’t have a face because the CMOs and the clients of us, they don’t know the user by heart. So if we think about knowing the user better, we obviously have to look at the IT infrastructure. Normally, it’s a legacy system landscape. Data are sitting fragmented everywhere in all the different IT systems, and now it’s on us to bring them together and to build a data layer across the different IT systems.

Only if we do this then we come to a unique customer ID, where we actually identify the user and knowing the relevant content that this user, this shopper, this consumer needs in that moment of time at that place in time. So we need to build out on our analytics and AI components with automated campaign management, like Adobe, Sitecore, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. We have to get the right content, the right digital content, the right product, the right price, the right service via the right channel, and then we have actually a more satisfied consumer and more relevant content for that user.

If you ask me who has this in place in the moment, I would say nobody, not even the tech players like Amazon or Google because they’re missing out on the physical side of the omnichannel and on the stores and then the brick-and-mortar businesses. But this is where all the CMOs in the moment are striving for. They are going more and more into a data and tech-based communication.

Last thing on this slide. I think if we take our portfolio and our brands, you can map it very nicely here because we are in PR, we are in social media. AKQA is doing the connected webs and apps. We are, with our media partners and our media channels with GroupM, all across the one-to-one communication and customer interaction we have with Ogilvy, with Wunderman Thompson, with VMLY&R, the right creative content with Hogarth, one of the best digital production that you can have. But now it’s a time to stitch it all together. As I said, we will not continue with independent brands. We will continue with strong brands, building a fleet around the user and the shopper and especially our clients and customers.

What does it mean in numbers? Our addressable market is growing if we think not only about traditional communication. Experience and commerce are growing double digit. And also the technology space is growing double digit, now already at $7.4 billion. And on top, I think the consulting space is an untapped opportunity for us where we have to bring our data and our tech into the game because at the end of the day, it’s us, it’s the media companies running and operating the business for our clients.

So what does it mean for WPP now? What does this market opportunity provide for us and how we will capture them? First of all, it’s about 7 big pillars that we are looking at, and we are thinking about a 3 years plan of transforming then strengthen and then growing and scaling the business to a new norm, where we say a leading creative tech company, this is the new WPP AUNZ.

On the next slide, I would like to guide you through our new mission and operating model. We put the clients first and not the brands. So it’s the clients first served by the smartest and most creative people, managed out of a campus nearby, I will come back to this, offering the best solution for our clients’ needs via our strong brands. Yes, we will have also strong brands in the future, and they will even be strengthening and prospering and more precisely distinguished between each other, enabled by a delivery facilitated by WPP AUNZ. So what we do is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel in each and every brand. The delivery comes out of a platform. And I’ll also come back to this in the future.

On the next slide, you see our strategy in a nutshell. It’s about the operating system. It’s about how we focus on clients in the future. It’s about our people and talents. It’s about the platform. It’s about our tech solution, and it’s our geographical presence.

And let me start, when you look at the next slide, with the operating model. We already, in the beginning of the year, introduced a new leadership model and also a new leadership team to make the new operating model happening immediately. So when you think about our mission statement, it’s clients first. You see here, as an example, a few industries like retail, like automotive or mobility, like FMCG, like financial services, like government, like technology, and we can go further. The main point of this operating model is that we are now orchestrated around our clients. And the brands who are serving their clients are open doors where our clients and customers can tap into.

So for example, what does the orchestration layer mean? We are now establishing overarching KPIs and the framework that is focused on collaboration across each brand. We are rolling out our campus model. We are establishing 1 P&L in several campuses to avoid any internal conflicts, conflict of interest between the brands, and we are establishing 1 overarching CRM system.

On the platform, I will come back to this and talk to this separately. The center of excellence that you see in the middle is a new established team that is bringing the data from all the brands and the tech from all the brands and the consulting together. Let’s have a deeper look into the center of excellence in the next page and how it works. The new established center of excellence brings together skilled practitioners from across 6 leading agencies with our company to provide deep experience in technology, data and analytics. It creates new opportunities in areas previously served by management, consulting groups and system integrators.

So from our opinion, if we bring the mar tech and the ad tech, the data and the consulting together from all the different brands, then we have the right way and the right scale to tap into several businesses. At the end, and I think we will achieve this by 2020, early 2021, we will have an end-to-end tech stack empowered by all the data that we currently have fragmented sitting in our different brands.

Looking at our clients. There are a few clients where we already bring the full solution to the table. For example, KFC, where we have, obviously, the creative lead going to agency, Ogilvy. We have MediaCom, where we do the whole media part. We have the PR part with opr. This is a future model where a lot of our clients are developing, too.

So from my point of view, there are 3 key activities: a sector practice area, where we are focusing more on the exact industry that we are serving; a top client lead team across our 15 to 20 top clients, where actually we bring all the solutions to the table; and the systematic line mapping. In the moment, this was done independently in all our brands. In the future, it will be 1 overarching CRM system and a systematic client approach.

We are a people business so our talents are most important and critical to us. So when we want to become a tech company, we need to bring techies into our teams beside the strong creative power that is already in our DNA and in our core. Critical here is making sure we attract and retain and develop the most smart and creative talent in the Australian, New Zealand and Southeast Asian market. Our approach is about changing the leadership, enable growth and brand — career paths across the brands and not only in a brand; importantly, rewarding performance appropriately, including focusing more on shares and options than on short-term cash.

Now a look on our delivery platform. In the past, every brand was doing things like HR systems, remuneration packages, IT and tech differently. And I think we should, in the future, not reinvent the wheel in each of our speedboats, it needs to be an integrated approach: 1 CRM system, 1 legal team, 1 platform management, 1 media system, 1 financial system, 1 HR and workflow system and 1 PR and marketing team. Therefore, in the future, we will have much more synergies and we are more fluent across our brands by delivering on the work that is asked from our clients.

From a solution point of view, besides the center of excellence that I already described, we are in very close partnership with tech providers like Microsoft, like Adobe, like Sitecore, but also like Salesforce. And together with them, there’s a huge implementation road map for many of our clients, where we actually bundle and join forces around the clients that we are both having, the tech platforms and WPP. And therefore, it’s a huge opportunity to help our clients navigate the digital plays and implement faster and more consistent.

On top, we have a very selective M&A strategy. We were laying out specific criteria, especially focusing on tech and future-proof businesses, growing businesses. And a good example here is that we just acquired Dominion, a very small company. We obviously integrated into the New Zealand AKQA business. And this company is very capable to implement the Adobe tech stack and it’s heavily growing, very profitable. And not only, obviously, the AKQA team is stepping into these new capabilities, but we open this across our brands.

Let’s have a look at our region. For Australia and New Zealand, I already laid out that we are focusing on 1 campus approach. That means for Perth, Adelaide, Auckland, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne, we are striving to have 1 building and 1 campus with 1 production studio. Production in the past was sitting in all the different brands, and they had all their different studios. In the future, it will be 1.

On top, we are focusing on restructuring New Zealand because the profitability of that market was, in 2019, very disappointing. With the new synergies that we get out of the campus model, we will be back on a profitable growth plan in 2020 already.

Beside Australia and New Zealand, we also have the opportunity to tap into this growth, big growth region of Southeast Asia. And there are 2 important elements of the strategy. One is having more client-facing teams on the ground. Our strong growing brand Aleph with a high profitability is exactly at the right spot and at the right time, growing with the market. And the model is very interesting because Aleph is working fluently so there are no borders. They are operating in Singapore and Thailand and Indonesia and the Philippines and Vietnam. And wherever work needs to be done, there’s a strong delivery center, and this is why the profit margin is so incredibly high.

My belief is, for the future, we need to elaborate and invest in this model also for Australia and for New Zealand and not only for Southeast Asia. That will give us more margin points on that space.

So if we now listen to all the strategy part, Chris, I will hand over to you what does it mean for the financial road map.

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Chris Rollinson, WPP AUNZ Limited – CFO [5]

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Thank you, Jens. So I’ll take you through the financial impacts of the strategic plan. And overall, we will create greater value for our shareholders through the transformation period in 3 key areas: organic net sales growth; operating margin improvement; and a targeted investment and acquisition program. We’ll look at each of these in turn.

So firstly, organic net sales growth. Our objective is to accelerate our organic revenue growth to 2022, driven by an expansion of our solutions, growth in existing and new client engagements and focus on retention of our existing client base. We have established the center of excellence as a key pillar in the expansion of our solutions and the drive into experience, commerce and technology. Our ambition is to expand our client engagements, along with retention of our key clients, which will be supported by the establishment of client leads and creation of key city campuses. We believe these 2 initiatives will ensure our clients are at the center of everything that we do.

Next, we are targeting operating margin improvement of 2% to 3% over the period to 2022. There are 5 key levers to drive this margin improvement in shared services, rightsizing the cost base, property, production and finally, external spend. With shared services, we will expand our existing finance, IT, HR and legal shared service centers. This strategy will deliver scaled service delivery hubs, underpinned by common systems and processes. And we expect to see very significant improvement in operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Rightsizing the cost base. We will continue down the path of simplifying the service offering and building brands that are clearly differentiated and have the ability to scale. Property is our second largest cost. The strategy is 1 campus per major city. This drives efficiency and becomes a ground for greater collaboration between our brands and our people. And we are targeting a 50% reduction in the number of properties by 2022.

With production, we are looking to consolidate our fragmented content and delivery studios, and the plan is to leverage our existing delivery studios, both on and offshore. And finally, we’re targeting external spend across the group, and the plan is to leverage our centralized strategic sourcing capabilities and better utilize the purchasing power of the group. A percentage of the savings from the cost reduction initiatives will be reinvested to support and deliver the strategic transformation plan.

And finally, delivering the strategy will require operational and capital investment. At this early stage, the precise plans, amount and timing of these investments is still being reviewed. The funding of these initiatives will be through reinvestment of cost savings achieved and retaining balance sheet flexibility to fund a targeted acquisition program to deliver the new strategy over the 3-year period.

The operational investment will be made in 3 important areas of the business in talent platforms and client leadership. And the capital investment will focus on targeted investments and acquisitions required to deliver the strategy. And we expect incremental profit from these acquisitions to contribute to headline earnings per growth over the period.

Looking at the key financial metrics that will apply over the transformation period to 2022. Our operating cash flow is expected to remain strong. We are targeting balance sheet leverage to be between 1.5x and 2x. Our targeted ordinary dividend payout ratio will remain at 60% to 70% of earnings over the period. Our operating margin target is 15% to 17% of net sales by the end of 2022. And we retain balance sheet flexibility to fund a targeted acquisition program over the 3-year period to deliver on the group’s new strategy.

I’ll hand you back to Jens.

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Jens Monsees, WPP AUNZ Limited – CEO, MD & Director [6]

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Yes, thank you, Chris. So what can we expect already from 2020 onwards? We will reinvent our operating model. We will establish the center of excellence. We will have a top clients team and the sector practice. Actually, our governance practice is already in place and growing heavily because we are working already there across the brands.

We are rolling out our new leadership model with new and accountable KPIs and a new incentive scheme based on shares. We are beginning to centralize our services, entering partnerships with tech platforms, seeking opportunities to add tech capabilities through attractive strategic M&A, as Chris pointed out; a campus in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Auckland and Wellington. We will restructure New Zealand, explore growth options for Southeast Asia, also offshoring and nearshoring opportunities.

And to tell you what, only 2 months now in the year 2020, we already achieved meaningful progress in the first phase of our transformation. We have the new leadership structure in place. I was holding many town halls across the company with very positive and energizing feedback from the team and from the staff. We are having a new leadership model in place in New Zealand. We have already added capability into our technological pipeline with the acquisition of Dominion, and on top, our center of excellence has already the first people and the first hirings in the team.

So with this, I am looking very much on exciting times, being very confident that we can deliver on our step change and on our new plans. Obviously, there’s a lot to do and we are quite busy of driving all this change. From my point of view, as I said, the focus is on our people, on our culture and our creativity and last but not least, also on our tech and data capabilities.

With this, I would like to open the floor for questions and happy to answer whatever comes in your mind. Thank you.

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Operator [7]

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(Operator Instructions) There are no questions at this time.

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.