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Text: We have posted to www.
I hope everyone on the call is staying safe and healthy.
I'm pleased to update you on how we continue to respond to and overcome the challenges of the pandemic.
I'll first discuss our financial results, then we'll cover our performance with respect to our strategic priorities and operations and will end with our expectations for the remainder of 2021.
For the first quarter, organic growth was negative 1.8% which positions us for a very strong recovery for 2021.
Going forward, we expect to see positive organic growth.
The new disciplines, we have disclosed are as follows.
CRM Precision Marketing which includes our market consulting, digital and direct marketing agencies, CRM Commerce and Branding Consultancy includes our branding consultancies, shopper marketing and specialty production agencies, CRM Experiential includes our events agencies and CRM Execution & Support is unchanged for the most part, from our prior reporting and includes primarily our field marketing research agencies and our agency servicing the not-for-profit sector.
We believe this additional level of disclosure will allow you to have a better understanding of our operations.
Getting back to our organic growth by geography, in the United States organic growth was down 1% an improvement of over 8% from the fourth quarter.
Advertising and Media and CRM Precision Marketing were positive in the US while the rest of our disciplines, continued to be negative with CRM Experiential having the largest negative impact on our growth.
Europe continued to face significant challenges due to the pandemic in Q1.
Although overall, the markets continued to improve while the rollout of vaccine in Europe lags that of the United States and the UK.
Some countries like Germany and the Netherlands are starting to make progress.
The UK was down 6.4%, about half the decline in the fourth quarter.
CRM Precision Marketing, CRM Commerce and Branding Consultancy and health were all positive in the UK, primarily offset by a significant reduction in CRM Execution & Support due to our field marketing operations.
The Euro and the non-Euro markets were down 3.2% as compared to a negative 9.2% in Q4.
Multiple countries had positive growth in the quarter and the majority continued to improve sequentially.
As you turn positive in Q1 with organic growth of 2.5% Australia continued to perform well and we saw a significant return to growth in our events business in China which combined with improvements in the other operations in the market resulted in double-digit growth.
Latin America experienced negative 2.4% growth in Q1 and meaningful sequential improvement compared to the fourth quarter.
EBIT margin in the first quarter was 13.6% as compared to 12.3% in the first quarter of 2020.
EBIT improved due to the repositioning and cost management actions we took in 2020.
In 2021, our management teams are continuing to align cost with revenues and we're also seeing continued benefits from reductions in addressable spend.
While we expect addressable spend will not return to pre-COVID levels, travel and certain other addressable costs will likely increase during the course of 2021, as conditions improve.
Overall, our expectation is that operating margins for the full year of 2021 will exceed our 2020 operating margin, excluding repositioning costs incurred in Q2 of 2020.
Net income for the quarter was $287.8 million, an improvement of 11.5% from 2020 and earnings per share was $1.33 per share, a year-over-year increase of 11.8%.
Turning to our liquidity, the refinancing steps we took earlier in 2020 combined with our enhanced working capital processes and the curtailment of our share repurchase program, have positioned us extremely well.
We generated $383 million in free cash flow in the quarter and ended with $4.9 billion in cash.
Given the continuing improvements in our operations, strong liquidity and credit profile, our Board has approved the resumption of our share repurchases beginning in the second quarter.
This follows our recent decision to increase our dividend by 7.7% to $0.70 per share.
Both actions are a testament to the steady improvement in our results and our expectations for further improvement for the remainder of 2021.
Our traditional uses of our free cash flow paying dividends, pursuing accretive acquisitions and using our remaining cash for share repurchases is now fully back in effect.
Phil will cover our first quarter performance in more detail during his remarks.
Turning now to our strategy and operations.
In the midst of the pandemic, our key strategic objectives served us well.
These strategies are centered around hiring and retaining the best talent, driving organic growth by evolving our service offerings, improving operational efficiencies and investing in areas of growth.
As part of this process, we continue to make internal investments in our agencies across all practice areas during a very difficult year.
We made good progress on enhancing our capabilities throughout our portfolio, and we will continue to pursue investments with a specific focus in precision marketing, MarTech and digital transformation, commerce, media and healthcare.
We are also accelerating our pursuit of acquisitions in these areas and we've recently completed two transactions; Omnicom Health Group acquired US-based Archbow Consulting.
Archbow helps pharmaceutical and biotech companies design, build and optimize market access operations, product distribution and patient access.
These capabilities will deepen Omnicom's health group's consultative services to biotech and pharma companies across a broad spectrum from operations to marketing.
Also in the quarter Credera, our MarTech and digital transformation consulting business and part of Omnicom's Precision Marketing Group acquired Areteans.
Areteans will extend through their depth in digital transformation, digital marketing and e-commerce.
The company specializes in the design, delivery and implementation of real-time interaction and digital customer relationship management for some of the world's largest brands.
It expands our operations in Australia, India, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK.
Turning to Omni our data and insights platform, as I've mentioned in our last call; looking beyond our media business our practice areas are increasingly leveraging Omni to identify insights for their specific disciplines and clients.
Last quarter Omnicom Public Relations Group launched OmniEarned ID a solution that allows clients to evaluate the outcomes of Earned Media with the same precision as paid media.
More recently, our Health Group launched Omni Health which integrates key healthcare data sets within a privacy compliant ecosystem.
Since we launched Omni 3 years ago, we've continued to [Indecipherable] and insights platform.
As compared to other solutions built on limited -- open source approach -- connects more data sources across more media and commerce platforms to deliver better outcomes to our clients.
In Q2, we will be launching Omni 2.0 using next generation API connections to seamlessly orchestrate, identity sources and platforms -- insights and superior decisioning for our clients across all our networks and practice areas.
Just as important Omni 2.0 continues to build on our commitment to consumer privacy and transparency.
Our data neutral approach, which results in the most diverse compilation of data sets continues to be rooted in a robust data privacy compliance methodology.
This approach puts us in a strong position for a post-cookie world; a few points on this are, through our pioneering work creating data clean rooms, we have direct connections to the first-party data of many of our clients.
Because we are open source and data neutral, Omni works seamlessly across walled garden environments, as well as the broader ecosystem.
At the same time, we orchestrate datasets from about 100 privacy compliance sources to provide a comprehensive view of the consumer across devices.
As the marketplace and technologies continue to rapidly advance, we are confident, our talent, platforms and the strategies built on a foundation of our creative culture, give us a competitive advantage in effectively serving both new and existing clients.
As testament to this success, we've had several key new business wins this past quarter, including a multi-year agreement with Alliance, a leading financial services provider for creative development and production services.
Through this master framework agreement, Omnicom will produce work for Alliance on a global and local level, offering creative solutions to activate the global brand strategy for more than 70 countries, where Alliance operates.
In addition, after recently selecting OMD as its US media agency of record Home Depot has named BBDO as its creative agency of record.
Avocados from Mexico hired GSD&M as its agency of record.
TWBA\Chiat\Day LA was named Agency of Record for three new clients; Behr Paint, Moderna and Schwan's Company.
Through the strategic and creative accounts for Vanguard and Vantage and OMD won the media business for Dr. Scholl's.
In summary, we've made significant strides in evolving our services, capabilities an organization to better service our clients with data science and technology, while remaining grounded in our core strength of creativity.
I'm proud to lead a company with an extraordinary group of people who continually deliver the best creative work in our industry.
From their unwavering dedication, creativity and innovation came the number of industry awards and recognition.
Here are just a few highlights.
For the drums, wealth creator rankings Omnicom was the number one holding company for the fourth year in a row and BBDO won the network category.
[Indecipherable] was named campaign US's 2020 advertising agency of the year.
Critical Mass was named Ad Age's 2021 best places to work with.
BBDO, TBWA and Goodby Silverstein & Partners, were all named to Fast Company's prestigious list of Most Innovative Companies for 2021 making Omnicom the only holding company -- there are three agencies ranked in the top 10 in the advertising sector.
And PHD was named EMEA's Media & Network of the Year and UK Media Agency of the Year Campaign's UK Agency of the Year Award.
Our people have a wealth of knowledge, experiences and perspectives that lead us to this innovation and forward thinking look.
The diversity of our group is something that needs to be celebrated, prioritized and improved upon and it's a strategic focus for us in the year ahead.
With our launch of OPEN2.0 last year, we have made a clear action plan for achieving systemic equity across Omnicom.
We have more than doubled the number of DE&I leaders throughout Omnicom and we are establishing specific KPIs for our networks and practice areas to deliver on and to be measured by.
I look forward to sharing the progress we are making on DE&I on our future calls.
As I discussed earlier, we are confident in both our organic growth expectations and EBIT performance for 2021.
It has taken some time to turn the corner and we are now on a clear path to return to growth.
At the same time, we know that we must continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation and to adapt to any unforeseen challenges that may arise.
As we continue to enhance our operations, we are also evaluating what the future of work looks like at Omnicom; our leadership on a local and office level are working on gathering feedback from employees and clients to help us decide what the new normal will be; one where we can service our clients efficiently while also connecting with colleagues in the safest and most flexible way possible.
The incredible talent within Omnicom has helped us maintain business continuity through the lows of 2020 and overcome its challenges.
As John said, as we move through the first quarter of 2021, we continue to see an improvement in business conditions particularly when compared to the peak of the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020.
As we anticipated, we again saw a sequential improvement in organic revenue performance, a decrease of 1.8% in the first quarter of this year which is a considerable improvement in comparison to the last three quarters of 2020.
And now that we've cycled through a full year of operations since the start of the pandemic, we expect to return to positive organic growth in the second quarter and for the full year.
We continue to see operating margin improvement year-over-year resulting from the proactive management of our discretionary addressable spend cost categories and the benefits from our repositioning actions taken back in the second quarter of 2020.
Turning to slide 3 for a summary of our revenue performance for the first quarter, organic revenue performance was negative $60.6 million or 1.8% for the quarter.
The decrease represented a sequential improvement versus the last three quarters of 2020, including the unprecedented decrease in organic revenue of 23% in Q2 11.7% in Q3 and 9.6% in Q4.
Regionally, although we continue to experience declines in the Americas, we continue to see improvement when compared to what we experienced over the previous three quarters.
In Europe, FX gains helped to offset negative organic growth and our Asia-Pacific region saw positive organic growth with a mixed performance by country.
The impact of foreign exchange rates increased our revenue by 2.8% in the quarter.
Above the 250 basis point increase we estimated entering the quarter, as the dollar continued to weaken against some of our larger currencies compared to the prior year.
The impact on revenue from acquisitions, net of dispositions decreased revenue by 0.4% in line with our previous projection, and as a result our reported revenue in the first quarter increased 0.6% the $3.43 billion when compared to Q1 of 2020.
I'll return to discuss the details of the changes in revenue in a few minutes.
Returning to slide one, our reported operating profit for the quarter was $465 million, up 10.8% when compared to Q1 of 2020 and operating margin for the quarter improved to 13.6% compared to 12.3% during Q1 of 2020.
Our operating profit and the 130 basis point improvement in our margins this quarter was again positively impacted from our actions to reduce payroll and real estate costs during the second quarter of 2020, as well as continued savings from our discretionary addressable spend cost categories including T&E general office expenses, professional fees, personnel fees and other items, including cost savings resulting primarily from the remote working environment.
Our reported EBITDA for the quarter was $485 million and EBITDA margin was 14.2% also up 130 basis points when compared to Q1 of last year.
As we've discussed previously, we have and will continue to actively manage our cost to ensure they are aligned with our current revenues.
In addition to the overarching structural changes we made during the second quarter, we continue to evaluate ways to improve efficiency throughout the organization.
Focusing on real estate portfolio management, back office services, procurement and IT services.
As for the details, our salary and service costs are variable and fluctuate with revenue.
They increased by about $7 million in the quarter but excluding the impact of exchange rates, these costs were down by about 2.6%.
While it was a reduction in base compensation overall from the staffing actions we undertook during the second quarter of last year, it varies by agency, and certain of our agencies have added people as business conditions improved in their markets.
In addition third-party service costs were effectively flat on a reported basis and down slightly on a constant currency basis.
In comparison, these costs which are directly linked to changes in our revenue decreased nearly 40% in the second quarter of last year, 20% in the third quarter and 12.7% in the fourth quarter of 2020, consistent with the decline in our revenues across all of our businesses in those quarters.
Occupancy and other costs, which are less linked to changes in revenue declined by approximately $18 million reflecting our continuing efforts to reduce our infrastructure Call as well as the decrease in general office expenses since the majority of our staff has continue to work remotely.
In addition, finally, depreciation and amortization declined by 3.7 million.
Net interest expense for the quarter was $47.5 million compared to Q1 of last year and down $500,000 versus Q4 of 2020 -- 2020 our gross interest expense was down $1.5 million an interest income decreased by $1 million.
When compared to the first quarter of 2020, interest expense was down -- from $4.7 million, mainly resulting from $7.7 million charge we took in Q1 of 2020 in connection with the early retirement of $600 million of senior notes that were due to mature in Q3 of 2020.
That was offset by the incremental increase in interest expense from the additional interest on the incremental $600 million of debt we issued at the onset of the pandemic in early April 2020.
Net interest expense was also negatively impacted by a decrease in interest income of $6.4 million versus Q1 of 2020 due to lower interest rates on our cash balances.
Based on -- effectively flat in 2021 when compared to 2020.
Our effective tax rate for the first quarter was 26.8% up a bit from the Q1 2020 tax rate of 26% but in line with the range, we estimate for 2021 of 26.5% to 27%.
Earnings from our affiliates was marginally positive for the quarter, representing an improvement compared to the last year.
And the allocation of earnings to the minority -- year in our less than fully owned subsidiaries.
As a result, our reported net income for the first quarter was $287.8 million up 11.5% or 29.7% million when compared to Q1 of 2020.
Our diluted share count for the quarter decreased 0.3% versus Q1 of last year to 216.8 million shares.
As a result, our diluted earnings per share for the first quarter was $1.33 up $0.14 or 11.8% per share when compared to the prior year.
Returning to the details of the changes in our revenue performance on Slide 3, organic revenue performance improved again compared to the reductions in client spending, we experienced during the last three quarters.
We continue to see our clients across a wide spectrum of industry sector -- modify spending as they -- pandemic on their businesses.
While helped by FX -- was [Technical Issues] or up $20 million 0.6% from Q1 of 2020.
CRM precision marketing which includes our precision marketing and digital direct marketing agencies which were previously included in our CRM Consumer Experience discipline.
CRM commerce and brand comprised of the Omnicom Commerce Group and our brand consulting agencies; both previously included in CRM Consumer Experience CRM Experiential which includes our events and sports marketing businesses which was also included in CRM Consumer Experience and our CRM Execution and Support discipline which includes our field marketing, merchandising and point of sale, research and not-for-profit consulting agencies and remains largely unchanged.
Turning to the FX impact, on a year-over-year basis the impact of foreign exchange rates was mixed when translating our foreign revenues to US dollars.
The net impact of changes in exchange rates increased reported revenue by 2.8% or $95.7 million in revenue for the quarter.
While the dollar weakened against some of our largest major foreign currencies, we also saw some strengthening against the handful of others.
In the quarter, the dollar weakened against the euro, the British pound, the Chinese yuan and the Australian dollar while the dollar strengthened against the Brazilian real, the Russian ruble and the Turkish lira.
In light of the recent strengthening of our basket of foreign currencies against the US dollar and where currency rates currently are, our current estimate is that FX could increase our reported revenues by around 3.5% to 4% in the second quarter and moderate in the second half of 2021 resulting in a full year projection of approximately 2% positive.
These estimates are subject to significant adjustment as we move forward in 2021.
The impact of our acquisition and disposition activities over the past 12 months resulted in a decrease in revenue of $15.1 million in the quarter or 0.4% which is consistent with our estimate entering the year.
Our projection of the net impact of our acquisition and disposition activity for the balance of the year, including recently completed acquisitions and dispositions is currently similar to Q1.
As previously mentioned, our organic revenue decreased $60.6 million or 1.8% in the first quarter when compared to the prior year.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy and on our client's planned marketing spend appears to be moderating in certain major markets.
As long as the COVID-19 pandemic remains a public health threat, global economic conditions will continue to be volatile.
We expect global economic performance and the performance of our businesses to vary by geography and discipline until the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy moderates.
We expect to return to positive organic growth in the second quarter and for the full year.
For the first quarter -- the split was 59% for advertising and 41% for marketing services.
As for the organic change by discipline, advertising was up 1.2% Our media businesses achieved positive organic growth for the first time since Q1 of 2020 and our global and national advertise -- when compared to the last three quarters although performance mixed by agency.
[Technical Issues] 7.2% on a continued strong performance and the delivery of a superior [Technical Issues] service offering.
CRM commerce and brand consulting was down 4.2% mainly related to decreased activity in our shopper marketing businesses due to client losses in prior quarters.
CRM experiential continued to face significant obstacles due to the many restrictions from holding large events.
In the quarter, the discipline was down over 33%.
CRM Execution and Support was down 13% as our field marketing non-for profit and research businesses continue to lag.
PR was negative 3.5% in Q1 on mixed performance from our global PR agencies, and finally, our healthcare agencies again facing a very difficult comparison back to the performance of Q1 2020 when they experienced growth in excess of 9% were flat organically.
So the businesses remained solid across the group.
Now, turning to the details of our regional mix of business on page 5 you can see the quarterly split was 54.5% in the US, 3% for the rest of North America.
10.4% in the UK, 17.1% for the rest of Europe, 11.7% for Asia-Pacific, 1.8% for Latin America and 1.5% for the Middle East and Africa.
In reviewing the details of our performance by region, organic revenue in the first quarter in the US was down $18 million or 1%.
Our advertising discipline was positive for the quarter on the strength of our media businesses and our CRM precision [Technical Issues] which once again experienced our largest organic decline over 34% in the US while our other disciplines were down single-digits [Technical Issues] down 3.2%.
These were down 6.4% organically.
Our CRM precision marketing, CRM commerce and brand consulting and healthcare agencies continued to have solid performance.
They again were offset by reductions from our advertising, CRM Experiential and CRM Execution and Support businesses.
The rest of Europe was down 3.2% organically.
In the Eurozone, among our major markets Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands were positive organically.
Germany, Ireland and France were down single-digits while Spain was down double-digits.
Outside the Eurozone organic growth was up around 5% during the quarter and organic revenue performance in Asia-Pacific for the quarter was up 2.5%.
Positive performance from our agencies in Australia, Greater China and India, were able to offset decreases in Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and Indonesia.
Latin America was down 2.4% organically in the quarter.
Our agencies in Mexico and Colombia were positive in the quarter, a double-digit decrease from our agencies in Brazil offset that performance.
And lastly, the Middle East and Africa was down 10% for the quarter.
On Slide 6, we present our revenue by industry information for Q1 of 2021.
Again, we've seen general improvement in the performance across most industries when compared to the previous few quarters.
But the overall mix of revenue by industry was relatively consistent to what we saw in prior quarters.
Turning to our cash flow performance on Slide 7, you can see that in the first quarter, we generated $382 million of free cash flow, excluding changes in working capital which was up about $20 million versus the first quarter of last year.
As for our primary uses of cash on Slide 8 dividends paid to our common shareholders were up $140 million, effectively unchanged when compared to last year.
The $0.05 per share increase in the quarterly dividend that we announced in February will impact our cash payments from Q2 forward.
Dividends paid to our non-controlling interest shareholders totaled $14 million.
Capital expenditures in Q1 were $12 million, down as expected when compared to last year.
As we mentioned previously, we reduced our capital spending in the near term to only those projects that are essential or previously committed.
Acquisitions including earn-out payments totaled $9 million and since we stopped stock repurchases, the positive $2.7 million in net proceeds in net proceeds represents cash received from stock issuances under our employee share plans.
As a result of our continuing efforts to prudently manage the use of our cash, we were able to generate $210 million in free cash flow during the first 3 months of the year.
Regarding our capital structure at the end of the quarter, our total debt is $5.76 billion, up about $650 million since this time last year, but down $50 million as of this past year end.
When compared to March 31 of last year, the major components of the change were the issuance of $600 million of 10-year senior notes due in 2030, which were issued in early April at the outset of the pandemic.
Along with the increase in debt of approximately $80 million resulting from the FX impact of converting our billion-euro denominated borrowings into dollars at the balance sheet date.
While the change from December 31 was the result of just the FX impact of converting the euro notes.
Our net debt position as of March 31 was $863 million up about $650 million from last year-end, but down $1.5 billion when compared to Q1 of 2020.
The increase in net debt since year-end was the result of the typical uses of working capital that historically occur which totaled about $840 million and was partially offset by the $210 million we generated in free cash flow during the past three months.
Over the past 12 months, the improvement of net debt is primarily due to our positive free cash flow of $860 million.
Positive changes in operating capital of $537 million and the impact of FX on our cash and debt balances which decreased our net debt position by about $190 million.
As for our debt ratios, our total debt to EBITDA ratio was 3.1 times and our net debt to EBITDA ratio was 0.5 times and finally, moving to our historical returns on Slide 10.

user
q1 earnings per share $1.33.
q1 revenue rose 0.6 percent to $3.427 billion.
expect to achieve positive organic revenue growth beginning in q2 of this year and for full year 2021.
negative effects of covid-19 pandemic began to have a significant impact on our businesses late in q1 of 2020.
operating margin for q1 of 2021 increased to 13.6% versus 12.3% for q1 of 2020.

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