WPP plc (WPP) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the WPP Q1 Trading Update Call. My name is Claire, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by 2 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to Joanne Wilson, Group Chief Executive Officer of WPP, to begin. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter results. I'm joined today by Tom Singlehurst, our Head of Investor Relations. Hopefully, you've had time to read the press release from this morning. There's also a full deck that accompanies this session with our usual disclosures, including our cautionary statements, which you should read carefully and take note of. Before we dive into the numbers, this is, of course, the first quarter that we are reporting on since we outlined the Elevate 28 strategy. As you know, this is a multi-year plan focused on returning WPP to growth. While it is still early days, we are very much on track against our strategic plan and encouraged by the client and employee response to the actions we are taking and the changes we are making. Driving this scale of change takes time and, of course, won't be linear, but there are definitely encouraging signals, which I will talk about shortly. Before that, I'm going to share some detail on our first quarter financial performance, and then I will open the call up for your questions. And starting with our operating performance in the first quarter on slide four, like-for-like revenue-less pasture costs fell 6.7% in the first quarter, with organic revenue growth, a key metric disclosed by some of our peers, down 4%. Both figures represent a mild se...