London (Reuters) -WPP, the biggest advertising company in the world, raised its outlook for annual net sales on Friday. This came after a good second quarter, which was helped by strong spending by clients in the travel and technology industries.
Britain’s WPP (LON:WPP) said that like-for-like net sales from the technology sector grew by 12 percent in the first half. This was helped by a number of deals, including ones with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games and online grocery store Instacart.
WPP, which is based in London and owns the Ogilvy, Grey, and GroupM agencies, said that the travel industry was also making a strong comeback. Sales in the first half were up 23%, but they were still lower than they were before the pandemic.
CEO Mark Read said that he wasn’t too worried about a predicted recession in Britain. He pointed out that customer spending was still going up across all industries and markets. Thirteen percent of WPP’s business comes from the UK.
In an interview, he said, “We haven’t seen any big changes in how much people spend on ads yet.” “We talk to our clients a lot about how they spend their money, and their investments and consumer spending have done surprisingly well around the world.”
WPP now thinks that like-for-like net sales will grow by 6%–7% in 2022. This is up from a previous prediction of 5.5–6.5% growth.
The increase that was expected was less than the 8.9% rise in its main net sales measure (like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs) during the first half of the year. This suggests that growth will be slower in the second half.
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