Publicis Groupe has seen Asia Pacific contribute year-on-year growth of 4.1% for the first quarter, the company has reported.
Announcing its results – the first since undergoing a major restructure last year, Publicis Groupe – the parent company of agencies Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, Starcom and Zenith – reported total revenue growth of 8.9%, led by the Middle East and Africa.
However, on the cusp of hosting the Rio Olympics, South America posted a dramatic drop in revenue, down 21.1% – a situation the company admitted was a problem for that region.
Total revenue for the company in the first quarter was €2.291bn ($US2.59bn). The region led the globe in digital growth, with APAC up 21% while there was negative growth in analog, down 3.9%.
CEO Maurice Levy said the transformation of the company, begun last year, had been crucial to its future as it moved from being a holding company to being a “connecting company”.
“This is due to the fact that the digitisation of the world has a huge impact on our clients, the need to transform themselves and in order to best serve them, we need to transform ourselves,” Levy said.
“This is what we are doing. By the way, something which is extremely important is that 55% of our revenue is now derived from digital, so we had to change the way we are operating.”
He said the transformation of the business was proceeding more smoothly than anticipated, admitting: “It is a mystery how this has worked well and there is very few things that we have to do and, as we indicated already, everything will be up and running by the end of June”.
