Tuesdata: How the holding companies stack up after reporting season

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It’s reporting season. Today we take a look at how the global holding companies have performed in the first half of 2022. 

In this article we will look at the performance of WPP, Omnicom, Havas, Interpublic, Publicis, Dentsu, and our very own Enero.

Last time we produced such a piece (you can read it here), S4 Capital was part of the group we reported on. It isn’t included this time as its second quarter report has not yet been released. However the company has already downgraded expectations for the rest of the year.

Practicalities and caveats 

There are a lot of complications when it comes to creating these comparisons. For consistency, we will use similar methodology as we did in the last report Unmade produced on this topic. 

It’s more complicated to make direct comparisons than it might seem.

For one thing, the holding companies report into different global accounting regimes depending on where they are headquartered. So they work to slightly different accounting conventions.

This list includes US, UK, Japan and Australia based businesses.

We’ll use revenue as the first guide to performance. We’ll then drill down to EBITDA (earnings before interest taxation, depreciation and amortisation) to get a more accurate look at profitability. 

And finally we will graph the market cap of each business. As we’ve mentioned previously when reporting market caps, this doesn’t give as full a picture as enterprise value, which also factors in debt levels, but it’s readily available and transparent. 

The biggest caveat of all is that different businesses report in different currencies. This list includes those that report in US Dollars, Great British Pounds, Australian Dollars and Japanese Yen.

Being that we are based in Australia and report for Australian audiences, we have converted all monetary values into Australian dollars based on the current (volatile) exchange rate.

There has been significant fluctuation in currency values recently. The conversions for this report were done on August 15. If we had done the calculations a month ago, the numbers would have been slightly different.

Those are all of the obvious caveats. Time to take a look at the numbers.