FINANCIALS: PageGroup posts significant drops in profit worldwide
“Ongoing challenging market conditions” have led global recruitment giant PageGroup to significant drops in profit in most of its regions during Q4 2024.
In its quarterly trading update, the company revealed today [13 January 2025] that group gross profit (GP) fell by 13% to £196.7m in Q4 2024, compared with £237.5m at the same time in Q3 2023. The EMEA region, which makes up 55% of the group, suffered the highest tumble of 15.9% (in constant currency). Within that region, representing 55% of PageGroup’s operations, GP fell by 23% in Germany and 17% in France.
The UK profits dropped by 13.6%, with the Michael Page organisation experiencing a 9% loss in profits and Page Personnel 22% down on Q4 2023. The UK represents 12% of the PageGroup.
The Americas region fared better, reporting a 5.5% drop in profits but the US portion earning a gain of 3%. Latin America’s profits fell by 14% from the same time last year.
In Asia Pacific, with a drop of 14.6% in profit overall, Greater China’s profits tumbled by 23%. South-East Asia marked the lowest fall at 4% year-on-year.
Temporary recruitment during Q4 was down 14%, just slightly less than permanent’s fall by 14%.
“Although salary levels remain strong, offers made to candidates are not as elevated as they were in 2022 and early 2023. As a consequence, conversion of interviews-to-accepted offers remains the most significant challenge,” the update said. “While our fee rates remain at high levels, as clients’ recruitment budgets have tightened, they have become more risk averse, which has continued to slow the recruitment process, impacting time-to-hire.”
Fee earner headcount was reduced by 130, or 2.4%, to 5,370 from Q3 2024’s 5,500. Productivity at PageGroup was down by 5% from Q4 2023.
The company’s full-year results will be announced in March, and the update said the Page board expects 2024 full-year operating profit, after one-off costs of £5m relating to the closure of its shared service centres in the UK and Singapore, towards “the lower end of the current market consensus range of £49m-£58.5m”.
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