Double Digit Growth for Sorrell's S4

Sir Martin Sorrell's digital ad group S4Capital has announced a 15.2% like-for-like increase in revenue, in unaudited preliminary results for the full year 2020. EBITDA rose 18.3% on the same basis. Reported revenue, including acquisitions, was up 59.3% to £342.7m.

Profit jumped during the year: reported operational EBITDA was £62.2m, up 86.1% on last year's figure. Profit before income tax was £3.1 million, after charging adjusting items, versus a loss of £9.2 million in 2019. The firm says it has made a good start to 2021 with like-for-like January gross profit well ahead of budget and budgeted gross profit up 25% on the same basis.

During the year the firm acquired Circus Marketing, Digodat, Lens10, Orca Pacific and Brightblue Consulting, and already in 2021 it has added Decoded Advertising and Metric Theory. Today it announced the pending combination of MediaMonks with design and experience agency Jam3, which is based in Toronto with offices in Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Uruguay.

The Group now has approximately 4,400 people in 31 countries, which it says is 'trending towards double where we were this time last year'.

Executive Chairman Sorrell said the year was 'again outstandingly successful', adding 'We now have five 'Whoppers' secure or in sight', a reference to the previously announced '20 squared' client objective - it aims to 'develop' twenty clients with more than $20 million revenue per year. He concludes: '2021 has started strongly, well in line with our latest three year plan to double organically in three years and we are focused on three objectives for the year - to bed down our two new 'Whoppers' and develop and identify five more; to roll-out our unitary branding; and to continue to broaden and deepen our digital client offering by combination. We believe 2021 and 2022 will be very strong years economically, as the world rebounds from the pandemic and spends and invests the huge pandemic-driven fiscal and monetary stimulus'.

Web site: www.s4capital.com .