On March 15, 2022, Publicis announced its exit from Russia, by ceding the ownership of its agencies to local management. The Groupe transferred control of its operations to Sergey Koptev, founding Chairman of Publicis in Russia, with a contractual commitment to ensure a future for its 1,200 employees in the country. Publicis thus discontinued its activities and investments in Russia. This sale, effective immediately, led to an exceptional loss of euro 87 million in the first quarter financial statements. Russia has been deconsolidated since April 1, 2022.
There are no significant investments or divestments underway.
Publicis Groupe will continue its investments to provide proposals and solutions to its clients faced with numerous challenges (consumer behavior, multiplication of communication channels, increasing weight of omni-channel commerce, emergence of new players from digital technologies). Thus, all future investments will aim to improve our offering, combining our creative, media, data and technological expertise.
Moreover, as at December 31, 2021 the Groupe also had commitments of euro 206 million under earn-out clauses and euro 16 million for non-controlling interest buyouts, a total of euro 222 million, of which euro 116 million is due in less than one year.
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).
