Mark Read
Management
Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first quarter trading update. And thank you for joining us. I'm joined on today's call by Joanne Wilson, our CFO; and Tom Singlehurst, our Head of Investor relationships. Before we get started, please have a look at the cautionary statement, which you can see on Slide 2, and look at that carefully. So turning to the overview on Page 3, I'll quickly summarize where we are for the year. Joanne will take us through the financial performance. We'll review the strategic progress and then tackle the Q&A. So on the overview on Page 4. Firstly, in terms of the first quarter 2025 performance, when we met in February, we talked about the challenging macro environment as well as how the timing of our new business would impact the shape of growth at WPP throughout the year. And as you know, we had a challenging fourth quarter. And so we were cautious giving our guidance for the year as well as being aware of some of the tariff issues and discussions that have been taking place. We did highlight those in our release. And I'd say that our performance in Q1, we saw sales -- net sales down 2.7% is consistent with what we were saying at that time and therefore, very much in line with our own expectations. And at the same time, I don't want to give the impression that we're happy with these results. We're not. It's not where we want to be, and we have concrete plans to address the areas of competitive underperformance, including some steps like the acquisition of InfoSum that we have taken this quarter. The first quarter did include some encouraging signs. Our overall performance in the U.S. improved in Q4, albeit…