SCPPF - S4 Capital plc (SCPPF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-03-27 14:06:09 ET
S4 Capital plc (SCPPF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
March 27, 2024, 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Martin Sorrell - Executive Chairman
Mary Basterfield - Chief Financial Officer
Scott Spirit - Chief Growth Officer
Wesley ter Haar - Executive Director, Co-Founder of MediaMonks
Jean-Benoit Bertie - Chief Operating Officer
Brady Brim-DeForest - TheoremOne CEO
Christopher Martin - Chief Operating Officer
Conference Call Participants
Tom Singlehurst - Citi
Joe Spooner - HSBC
Steve Liechti - Numis
Fiona Orford-Williams - Edison Group
Presentation
Martin Sorrell
So good morning everybody, I'm here in London. I'm joined by on my left Scott Spirit. On my right Mary Basterfield and for the first time on our extreme is right Jean-Benoit Bertie who as you've seen from the release has joined us now as Chief Operating Officer of S4.
The Presentation today is got a number of aspects to it. I'll do a brief introduction, then hand over to Scott to talk a little bit about our strategy. Mary will talk about our results and then Scott will again will talk about market momentum and client analysis and then Wesley ter Haar, who is in Las Vegas? So it's really early morning for him; will cover artificial intelligence and what we're seeing there and I'll do a brief summary and outlook and then for Q&A we have Brady, where are you Brady?
Brady Brim-DeForest
We met early here, too.
Martin Sorrell
Okay. Thank you for any morning and Chris Martin Is in Barcelona. It's a little bit more civilized. So with that let's move to the introduction. Just want to make a few comments on the release and what we're seeing. So after four years of very strong Organic growth to 2023 was a very challenging year. That did reflect global macroeconomic conditions. But it also reflected considerable client caution as interest rates rose and indeed fears of recession.
To deal with that we've made several structural changes to improve performance. The first was a reduction in the number of monks, people in the business from about over 9,000 to about 7,700. The second was a reorganization and additional leadership in our content practice, with the appointment of Bruno Lambertini as Co-CEO, with Wes on this call.
Thirdly the appointment of as I mentioned before of Jean-Benoit Bertie as our Chief Operating Officer, with extensive background at EY, Capgemini and CRM agencies before and finally a simplification of our Board structure and Strengthening the executive committee.
Our board structure historically had been both non-executive and executive. We've now slimmed it down to mainly non-executive. Involvement free freeing up our executives who focus even more on the business. At the same as time as all this we made further investments in our systems, in our processes in our control and our governance and Mary of course has been heavily involved in that in strengthening the central financial team.
Now given all that given mark -- continued market uncertainty, this that, this time this year, we think clients are a little bit more optimistic; at this time last year they were concerned about interest rates rising; now they're focused on the possibility of interest rates starting to fall in the second half of the year. But given all that uncertainty, we maintain our continued discipline in hiring and indeed in-cost management....
S4 Capital plc (SCPPF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript