Havas Group continued its 2014 turnaround in the third quarter, posting an 8% revenue gain to 447 million Euros or about $554 million at today’s exchange rate. The company reported organic revenue growth for the period of 6%.
For the first nine months, Havas reported a 4.4% revenue gain to just over 1.3 billion Euros, or about $1.63 billion with organic growth of 5.8%. By comparison, for the first nine months of 2013, Havas reported a 1% revenue decline with organic growth of just 0.7%.
Havas CEO Yannick Bollore termed the results “highly satisfactory” and credited the improved results to a company-wide effort to provide integrated strategies to clients and to better collaboration internally by consolidating staff in key locations at new offices or “villages” as the company calls them.
Bollore told analysts and investors on a conference call Thursday that the company expected full-year organic growth to fall within the 4.5% to 5.5% range, which suggests that Q4 growth won’t be as high as the average for the first nine months. Still, Bollore said that “we consider excellent” the year-to-year improvement that the company will show for full-year 2014.
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Bollore also gave a shout out to Arnold for “stopping the bleeding,” noting that the company had won an eight-figure telecom account that he did not identify by name but that will help it “turn positive” from a profitability standpoint in 2015.
In North America, the company’s largest market by revenue, organic growth in Q3 was 4.7% and for the first nine months was 4.6%. Year-to-date growth in the UK is nearly 12%. Asia-Pacific and Africa combined showed nearly 11% growth, while Latin America was up 5.9%.