“We now expect the negative impact of Covid-19 on our business to significantly increase in the short term but it is not possible to quantify its depth or duration of the impact,” says Jean-François Decaux, chairman of the world’s leading outdoor advertising company, announcing first quarter 2020 results.
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| The Clock, Melbourne. (JCDecaux Australia) |
JCDecaux’s first quarter revenue for the three months ended March 31st, 2020 fell by 13.9% to €723.6m, compared to €840.0 million in Q1 2019. Adjusted advertising revenue decreased by 14.6%.
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'Not possible to quantify the depth
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“After a good start in most markets with growth outside of China in January and February, our business started to be significantly affected by total and partial lockdowns due to Covid-19 in March forcing us to withdraw our Q1 revenue guidance,” said Jean-François Decaux, chairman and co-CEO. “Our digital revenue which now represent 27.6% of Group revenue versus 23.5% for the same period last year grew at +0.8% with digital Street Furniture and digital Billboard growing +17.5% and +2.8%, respectively, while digital Transport declined -10.1%.
“Street Furniture’s organic revenue decline of -5.0% was entirely driven by lockdowns introduced late February in Italy and starting mid-March in many other countries such as France, Spain, UK, Australia… as well as US States / cities such as California, NYC… Billboard’s revenue declined -9.5% organically for the same reasons. Transport was the most impacted segment with a -23.8% organic revenue decline mainly due to a significant passengers traffic decrease in both airport and transit systems and to a material drop in advertising sales in Asia-Pacific with China being the first country to be affected by this pandemic.
“We now expect the negative impact of Covid-19 on our business to significantly increase in the short term but it is not possible to quantify its depth or duration of the impact. As a result, we are not able to provide any guidance for Q2 2020 as well as for Q3 and Q4.
“Having said that, the lockdown measures are reminding billions of people around the world that we all need to be Out‑of‑Home in order to live a normal life with friends and families. For this reason, we expect OOH / DOOH media to benefit from the reopening of countries and cities with Street Furniture and Billboard advertising rebounding faster than Transport which will be affected by social distancing while airport advertising will take longer to recover to pre-Covid-19 level.
“For example, in France, when the government announced lifting progressively the lockdown restrictions starting on May 11th, we started to book both national and local Street Furniture and Billboard advertising campaigns. In China with metro passenger traffic in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at more than 60% pre-Covid-19 level and domestic airport travel resuming, our advertising sales are improving.
“With our well diversified geographic country and advertisers portfolio, our growing premium digital portfolio combined with a new data-led audience targeting platform, our ability to win new contracts and the high quality of our teams across the world, we believe we are well positioned to outperform the advertising market and increase our leadership position in the outdoor advertising industry through profitable market share gains after the crisis.”
