Ipsos (IPSOF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to our first quarter results for 2025 at Ipsos. And what can one say about the world in 2025? I think just before we look at those numbers from our company, it's worth reflecting on just what is going on, because part of what Ipsos' role is, is obviously to help our clients, business, government, the media, understand public opinion, citizen opinion and consumer opinion all over the world. You can see just by looking at the stock markets, the level of volatility that we're now seeing. There on this chart, indexed to start at a single point at the beginning of the year, you can see how the FTSE, CAC Caron and NASDAQ have diverged and also fluctuated dramatically in response to announcements from Washington about the tariffs. Even before those tariffs were announced, we could see that there were heightened levels of anxiety among consumers, both in Mexico, Canada, America, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and also in China, when the majority of people in virtually every country we have surveyed expressing anxiety about what might happen. It's interesting, of course, to see that in terms of personal impacts on the left side on this chart. The Mexicans and Canadians, and I'll come back to the Canadians in a second, are most worried. But half of the population of EMEA and, interestingly, slightly fewer Chinese citizens worried about the impacts of American tariffs before they were announced. We've also seen, of course, that people have reacted to that by changing their views of America and becoming more positive towards China. So over the last 10 years, we've tracked the reputation of a wide range of countries for a number of our clients. And you can see that the UK and France have been broadly stable of around seven out of 10 people glo...