The Company concluded the acquisition of Epsilon by Publicis Groupe on April 12, 2019. The acquisition was subject to a number of conditions precedent, one of which was obtaining the required regulatory approvals, including from the competition authorities in the United States, all of which were satisfied. Closing took place on July 1, 2019. Apart from this transaction, Publicis Groupe did not conclude any significant agreements or any agreements conferring a significant obligation or commitment on the Groupe, with the exception of those concluded in the normal course of affairs, during the two years preceding the date of this Universal Registration Document.
The Groupe does not believe that it is dependent on any specific patent or license to operate its businesses.
R&D within Publicis Groupe has always taken an applied form, as it is directly linked to the search for concrete technological solutions designed to help our clients, to developing and improving the performance of our products, technological platforms or internal tools, to taking advantage of the latest technological advances to offer new options to our clients. Several hundred PhD students work within the Groupe, most of them at Sapient and Epsilon.
In particular, at Epsilon, more than 50 PhD students in Decision Science are continuously optimizing the algorithms of our platforms to make them more precise, more powerful, and ultimately, more effective. Sapient has developed seven Labs in several countries, which are centers of technical expertise to respond in real time to clients’ technological issues. Our experts are available to answer client questions regarding the implementation of different platforms, the search for optimal solutions and these teams can conduct Research & Development projects on behalf of clients to improve the performance of their tools or develop a new application environment (website, app, internal network).
Lastly, the Groupe’s Media activities invest significant resources in mathematical and statistical processing in order to best advise their clients in their media choices (particularly in terms of modeling the marketing mix or calculating the effectiveness of media actions), and many doctoral students are also part of these teams.
