Robert Walters plc (RWA) Q3 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello and welcome to the Robert Waters Q3 Trading Update Call. My name is Saskia and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this call is being recorded. For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, David Bauer, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Saskia. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Robert Walters third quarter 2024 trading update. I'm David Bower, Chief Financial Officer, and joining me this morning is Toby Halston, our Chief Executive. I hope you've seen the statement we published earlier this morning. Before we move to Q&A, I'll make a few remarks around performance at the group level before Toby touches on trading across our regional segments and then our full-year outwork. Unless otherwise stated, all net fee income percentage movements are in constant currency terms. As you have seen, group net fee income of around £80 million was down by 12% year-on-year in the third quarter, mirroring the year-on-year performance seen in the second quarter. In that sense, the trading backdrop remains largely consistent with what we were seeing with client and candidate confidence levels yet to show signs of material improvement. One contrast to our second quarter, where you might recall we saw a particularly soft exit rate in June, was a more consistent pacing for this third quarter just gone, as implied by the September exit rate, which saw Group B income down by 13% year on year, and therefore broadly consistent with the quarter as a whole. Looking at our service lines, specialist recruitment fee income of around £66 million was ...