PUBLICIS Groupe SA Q2 2004 Revenues Release Conference Call - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

OPERATOR: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to today's Publicis Groupe First Half 2004 Revenues Conference Call. For your information, this call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to you host today, Mr. Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead sir.

MAURICE LEVY, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, PUBLICIS GROUPE: Thank you. Thank you for being with us this quite hot day in Paris speaking to you from my vacation place. The revenue for the second quarter are very good. I would start by telling a few words. So I don't know if you are connected with our website, but if you want to have our slide show on the website that you can go through the presentation.

The market in this second quarter has been very good. There has a continued growth in North America and Asia. And Europe is passing to gain momentum with the exception of Northern Europe -- the Nordic region is really in relatively bad shape. We see a robust growth in Latin America and the good news is that all sectors, all industries are now contributing to growth in advertising.

If you look to Publicis, the organic growth is slightly up in the second quarter, it's 4.5 compared to 4.4 in the first quarter. So it's sequentially up modestly, but up. This due primarily to a continuation of trends which has been observed in the first quarter with a slight easing in North America and Asia offset by improvement in Europe, Latin America and rest of the world.

There is a second good news regarding Publicis which is the fact that we had a $1.4 billion gain in new business and unfortunately part of this gain has been offset by some losses, Subway, Miramax, which -- particularly, but also Toys 'R' Us who reduced our net new business to the level of $900 million net, which, by the way, is well above our position in the market, which shows that we are gaining market share -- 60% in advertising and SAMS, 40% is in media buying and media consultancy.

Another good news in the second quarter is the fact that compared to last year each -- the first quarter since a few ones that we have a positive growth including the negative impact of exchange currency. So despite the currencies translation, we have 1.7% growth and very limited changes to scope which lead to organic growth of 4.5%.

The first half organic growth is -- for the total 4.5% and you have the detail on our website -- the details of calculation. The currency conversion, we had still an impact which is much more modest than what has been in the first quarter, it's 27 million in the second quarter compared to 98 million in the first -- for the first half. The first quarter, we had an impact of 14.2% of the currency exchange between U.S. dollar and euro. In the second quarter, it's down to 5.7%. It's still harming us, but more modestly than it has been during the 5 previous quarters.

If you look now at the revenue by geography, we see that Europe is consolidating its growth by 2.2%, which is 30-40 basis points better than the previous quarter. North America is stabilizing at 3.7%, Asia-Pacific 6.7%, Latin America an incredible 35.3% and the Rest of World, which means mainly South Africa and Middle East, 12.6% -- and Russia, sorry.

If we look at revenue by geography for first half, we have 4.5% up which is a combination of 2% for Europe, 3.9% for North America, 7.8% for Asia-Pacific, 28.2% for Latin America, 12% for the Rest of the World. The revenue by geography North America represents 43.7%, which is relatively stable; Europe 40.7%, again relatively stable; Asia-Pacific 9.8%, Latin America 4.1%, and the Rest of the World 1.7%.

The trends by region for the first half -- what we have seen is that in Europe, France, Germany, Italy and UK have shown moderate growth, Spain and Central Europe high growth, the other markets, Northern Europe, business was steady and in Nordic region, seriously down. United States we have seen a robust growth, as you know. Asia Pacific, robust growth with the exception of Australia. Latin America strong recovery from 2003 and robust growth and this is also valid for Middle-East, which is for me always trends to see that Middle-East is with robust growth.

We -- I used to give you a selected growth rates by country. For the countries, which have contributed for more then 10% are Russia, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Singapore. The countries which have contributed by a percentage between 5% and 10% are Korea and New Zealand. The countries which were between 0% and 5% and we are used to see Italy, U.S., U.K., Australia, two countries are joining the group, which …