WPP's profit soars 219% to £629 million in 2024, despite revenue decline
According to WPP's annual report, 85% (approximately) of the company's consolidated revenues were derived from Global Integrated Agencies
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The British advertising giant WPP saw an increase in its operating profit to 1,325 million pounds in 2024 compared to 531 million pounds in 2023- up 149.5%. The company's profit in 2024 witnessed a massive jump to 629 million pounds versus 197 million pounds in 2023. However, WPP's revenue marginally declined by 0.7% to 14,741 million pounds in 2024 compared to 14,845 million pounds in 2023.
According to WPP's annual report, 85% (approximately) of the company's consolidated revenues were derived from Global Integrated Agencies, with the remaining 15% of its revenues derived from Public Relations and Specialist Agencies.
It said that WPP's media planning and buying business, GroupM, grew in 2024, with the Amazon and Johnson & Johnson wins and a Unilever retention, despite some losses, including Volvo.
WPP has predicted that 2025 will be the year of transition for GroupM as a new leadership team implements its plans and laps prior to client losses. However, trading is likely to remain challenging in China in the first half of 2025 due to the actions taken by the new China management team.
Regarding Artificial Intelligence, data, and technology advancement, WPP mentioned that AI will be the single most transformational development in the ad industry. WPP has increased its investment in WPP Open, an AI-powered marketing operating system, to 300 million pounds in 2025 from 250 million pounds in 2024.
"It will impact every element of how we work, freeing up our creative people to do better work, increasing the efficiency of our production teams to produce much greater volumes of high-quality work and empower our media teams to develop and deploy more effective plans in a fraction of the time," WPP added in its annual report.
WPP is also investing in Global Delivery Centres (GDCs) with a capability hub headquartered in India. The GDCs will play a critical role in the company's business transformation and simplification strategy with capabilities from hyper-personalization and composable commerce to cloud modernization and product engineering.
Furthermore, WPP has axed all references to “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “DE&I” and “DEI” in its annual report. The phrasing has switched to “people and culture” in the 2024 annual report.
