Zaid Al-Qassab
CEO & Director
In the room with me or online or even watching on playback. Welcome to our first half results presentation. I’m Zaid Al-Qassab, CEO of M&C Saatchi Group. And although today is focused on the numbers, obviously, I think it’s important to be grounded in what it is we do as a business, and we do for clients. So I hope that video gave you a little insight. And you’ll be able to see here on this slide some of our recent work, award-winning work for LEGO.
I’ll show you more of that right at the end and new ad for the Fiat Panda. Pro forma of this morning is that I’ll take you through top line results before handing over to Simon Fuller, who’s our Group CFO, for more of the detail, and then I’ll talk about our strategy before we take questions. After a solid quarter 1, we were not immune to the geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty in quarter 2. Particularly the ambiguity on tariffs, which led to client caution and project delays. Excluding Australia, net revenue was almost flat, down just 0.7%, which given the macro environment, we believe was a solid result.
Australia, however, was a particularly poor performer with macro headwinds causing client budget reductions plus the flow-through of some prior year client losses, contributing to a 27% net revenue decline in that region, bringing the total company net revenue to a like-for-like reduction of 5.1% in the first half. We took responsive action to correct the margin in Australia, restructuring the local teams, hiring new leadership, closing the loss-making Bohemia Media brand and making significant property savings. In order to protect margins
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