Ebiquity plc (EBQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining this call for the presentation of our annual results for the year ended December 2022. That would be myself and Alan presenting the results. And you will have seen this morning the announcement that Alan is retiring at the end of June. So I'm quite pleased that we're able to send him out on a high and he can deliver a positive results presentation for his last outing. I also want to personally thank Alan for not only his fantastic contribution to this business over the last 4 years but his outstanding partnership and support with me as well. And he will clearly be missed. But we will be announcing Alan's successor imminently, and it will be a case of goodbye Alan and welcome to the new the new person. And we look forward to being able to update you on that shortly. But again, thank you very much, Alan, for all your extremely hard work and fantastic support of the business and myself in person. As I said, I'm very pleased that we're able to allow Alan to get out on a high, I think we can report very good progress against our strategic goals and for the business as a whole. We are continuing to build momentum, which is very positive, and we had a strong revenue growth, obviously, significantly contributed too by some strategic acquisitions the last year, but we also made strong organic growth as well of 9%. We continue to focus on improving the operating margin of the business. And as you can see, both operating profit and margins have almost doubled. The acquisition of the 2 -- sorry, the integration of the 2 strategic acquisitions is going well, and I'll talk a little bit more about them as we go through the presentation. We've seen a uniformly good geographic development in the business, I would say, with all of our geographic regions performing well. As you know, for the last 2 years, we've made quite a significant strategic focus to get a number of digital media solutions in the market and to push the revenue growth behind those, and that continues to go well for us and continues to be managed and grow at a good high margin as well. The 2 service lines that have grown most significantly this year had been Media Performance, with significant contribution from 2 strategic acquisitions that have made that growth; but also Contract compliance service line is growing very strongly organically. And as we sit here, I'm pleased to say that we -- to tell you we feel the outlook continues to look encouraging for our business. And I'll pass now to Alan who is joining -- rather than the stream, he's joining via Zoom as well. He will take us through the financial slides.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you, Nick, for your kind words. I will be sorry and sad to leave Ebiquity, but time does march on and sometimes one has to decide to, as the word says, retire at least from active executive life. The revenue growth, as Nick mentioned, really roughly half and half, about 20% from the acquisitions and half is organic and, therefore, contributing to getting back and well above now onto my team levels. Operating expenses have gone up by 17% in total, including the impact of the acquisitions, and -- although it's actually quite difficult to unpick, which is organic and which is the acquisition. So before you ask me, we're not going to be in that -- giving you an organic growth profit -- organic profit growth number as we've been integrating the businesses so much already. But overall, we doubled -- nearly doubled our adjusted operating profit to GBP 9.3 million and very important really in terms of the trajectory, the path that we set to grow our margins, and we're now well into double digits for the whole year as we already were for the half year. Our finance costs, of course, have gone up with the combination of interest rates going up and the fact we got more debt at the moment drawn down, that's the acquisitions. So that number, clearly, to watch but no doubt, it's been a huge player. The adjusted profit before tax, it was 95%, and really flowed straight through to our earnings per share on an adjusted basis, which obviously is a key measure for shareholders. There are quite a few highlighted items in these accounts this year: a combination of the accrual for Digital Decisions; we've got a higher level of purchased intangible amortization because of fair value acquisition assets, acquired assets; a one-off cost on the acquisitions for fees associated with the cost of doing them; and then we -- as we've explained in the notes, vacated 2 of our office premises or parts of the London office, parts -- and the whole of our new office, so we're taking an onerous lease provision on that. And the -- I'll mention Russia once in this meeting, hopefully, which is that we have cut out pretty much [indiscernible] transfer activity Russia to the minority shareholder and MD. Sadly, it's still stuck in Russian government authorization procedure. And in the meantime, as we announced at the half year, we've impaired that asset and it is a [ positive impact ]. Moving on to the balance sheet. In overall terms, it's growing because of the acquisitions, increasing net assets by GBP 13 million. Within that, a key number that we focus on is the net working capital, which has gone up by GBP 6 million, a trend we signaled at the half year, a combination of the integration effects of bringing businesses which actually have different profiles of billing than Ebiquity had, so we tend to bill later in the cycle on a project. And we actually have a lot over the course of the year. In overall terms, debtor days have actually not gone up -- have gone up a little bit from 61 to 67 days so, in turn, reflecting that higher level of invoicing. In the balance sheet, we now have a full liability that is going to be payable to the Digital Decision shareholders of GBP 15.8 million, a number which reflects the very success of that business. And we -- it's our -- we're still undecided exactly at our option, how we pay, subject to a minimum payment in cash of EUR 5 million. So we'll give more news later on exactly what the split would be between cash and shares. There's a little bit of deferred consideration in the balance sheet as well for MMi, which will be payable in '25, and we just paid them a very small amount for now in Canada in January. Our net debt as of end of the year was GBP 9.1 million, up from last year, partly because of the cash outflow but also particularly acquisitions. So in terms of the cash flow, as I just mentioned, we actually had a small net outflow of GBP 1.3 million. And this chart shows the cash flow, including the highlighted items, which still have an impact on the cash. And it also shows the cash -- actually, it's my mistake there, cash inflow from operations on the top of that slide, I should say. We'll fix it in the next version. And the net working capital outflow, we spent GBP 17.5 million on the acquisitions, but financed that, as you know, through a share issue of GBP 14.4 million, and GBP 3.5 million is bank borrowings. The next slide just separates out the adjusted cash flow operations. It's just a measure we use internally and analysts use to look at our cash flow conversion. And that was a ratio of 67%, which we can see here the reconciliation of highlighted items, cash items of GBP 2.5 million in the year. That ratio came down because of the working capital outflow, but it's sort of, traditionally, been around 70% to 80% [ level last year ]. If you then look at our net debt, it's a simple picture now. We have certainly a facility, which we've drawn down GBP 21.5 million, and we have undrawn facilities of GBP 8.5 million at year-end. Within our covenants, no problem there. Thanks, Nick. This year, we've changed the segmental reporting to what we hope is a more meaningful -- well, not meaningful, it's also reflecting our group management structure as segmental reporting should. And what it allows us to talk about more clearly is what's going on within our regions. So we can see that really strong growth. The star, in a sense, is North America in percentage terms, and that does include clearly MMi and Canada. But without those, organic growth is 73%. So a very strong performance as we plan really to get our North American business scaling up in revenue terms to win more market share, and that was very successful. Continental Europe includes MediaPath, 26% up with MediaPath, 6% without it, a really good performance across a number of our countries in Europe. U.K. -- sorry, APAC, 18%, good performance on a slightly smaller base, particularly China and, indeed, Southeast Asia. Our Singapore office did really -- really been winning a lot of good mandates from a regional level. And in the U.K., an overall reduction of 3%, very low, and we are by far the market leader in the U.K. We actually got a 6% increase in domestic media work, which is very good, and also -- but offset by a reduction in international projects, partly a lower activity in pitch, international pitch management, which impacted particularly on that international unit. If we look at the revenue by service line, as I just alluded, Media Management, which includes pitch activity, actually come down by 6%, reflecting the lower agency pitch activity in the market. And where we think we maintained our market share are those concession pitches that did actually happen. Media Performance now is the largest segment, has come a long way because it basically includes now most all of MediaPath work and all of MMi, and also actually Digital Media Solutions, which grew by 76% going up to GBP 6.5 million, so media now is quite a significant part of our overall revenue. And that is all solutions, which came in as a result of the acquisition of Digital Decisions. And we'll talk a bit more about that later, I'm sure. The other good thing to see is contract compliance, which had a very challenging time in 2020, still a bit of a difficult time in 2021, particularly with getting access, going once again to agencies and on-premise access because that's really critical for their business, and they really grew well. And also within that U.S. number is quite a significant growth in contract compliance's work. Our marketing effectiveness, I think, at the half year, we actually showed -- we're showing it's actually gone down but increased profit. And that trend happened for the rest of the year that we've really been focusing on higher-margin projects and that perhaps as well on revenue in certain states, so that's kind of -- probably a deliberate policy, so that we're not going up very much. If you then turn to operating profit by service line, thanks -- by segment, sorry, I beg you pardon. A few point things to highlight there. U.K. & Ireland still remains our largest profit-generating region. But it is now almost matched by Continental Europe within, as I mentioned, includes media -- now it includes MediaPath. But overall, the margin for Continental Europe went up significantly to 30%. So it's now our highest-margin area. And we saw particularly pleasing performances in France, Italy and Spain of profit going up to reflect the revenue performance. North America, really important that we turned it around from their loss-making region, which has been for several years. And we're doing profitable, thanks basically to the strong organic revenue growth that I mentioned already and the benefit of MMi and Canada coming in, which really now can just really scale benefits that we've already achieved in this year but which we expect to continue to see more in the future, including some direct synergy benefits and having MMi now and other scale impacts. In Asia Pacific, also a smaller number overall again, but 42% increase in operating profit, reflecting this revenue performance and getting its margin up by 3 percentage points. Particularly again there, our focus is on getting higher value clients into the mix there, which is paying dividends. I think that's all I was going to say about our numbers, so just any questions you might have.

Thank you very much, Alan. We'll turn then to the integration and contribution of acquisitions first, and then I'll talk through progress against the strategy in more detail, and then we'll pick up any questions at the end of the presentation. So as Alan has referenced, a very, very strong contribution from the acquisitions that we made in North America. And I would say, the strategic one we made in the United States, Media Management Inc, has been transformative to our business. And we also made a small tactical acquisition in Canada, which was our previous outsource partner. The Media Management Inc acquisition, as Alan has already indicated, has really turned our business around from loss-making into a much healthier, more profitable situation. It's really expanded the breadth of our client base, giving us, I would say, much more stability. And it's not just the breadth of the number of clients that we have there now, we're actually penetrated some of the largest advertisers there. I think we can take a good strong market share in some of the largest advertisers in the United States. The Media Management Inc service proposition is very complementary to Ebiquity. So we had very little overlapping or competing business. They offer specific services in a very large regional type -- regional market that Ebiquity didn't operate in, may have a specific approach to audience reconciliation. As audiences -- linear TV audiences decline, advertisers find themselves paying for audiences that didn't materialize. It's quite difficult for them to keep track and make sure the agencies actually deliver the audience back in the future, not just the agencies, the broadcasters. And Media Management Inc has a highly automated approach to finding that restitution, if you like, through their so-called technology, which is very margin enhancing, which you've seen on the previous slides. The additional service offering is enabling us to cross-sell our business much better. And as you can see, we've had quite a lot of focus on cross-selling Digital Media Solutions and with quite a strong degree of success there, more than doubling our revenue. We've also made very good progress against our synergy targets there through a combination of renegotiating our third-party data contracts and eliminating duplicate contracts. But we've also eliminated several duplicate roles and, through the increased resource capacity, have already been [ retiring ] where previously Ebiquity might have had to do that. So really positive contributions, transformative contributions, for our U.S. business due to purchase of MMi but also the strong organic growth, I think showing that we're now developing a much healthier business in the U.S., the world's largest advertising market. And if we look at the ability to cross-sell, now that we have expanded our service offering, we have a healthier business and a greater breadth of clients, it's really encouraging that we've almost doubled the number of clients that are buying 2 or more products from us during the course of 2022. This also enabled us to be more competitive in the market. I think as a small British business in the U.S., it's difficult to get visibility with the large U.S. corporates buying a domestic, homegrown, well-known U.S. business. That's gained us much more visibility in most of the U.S. corporates and, dare I say, more credibility as well. So that's improved the competitive nature of our business, and we've been able to expand relationships with existing clients and bringing several new major brand names from the U.S. market. The other strategic acquisition we made last year was MediaPath Network, which actually have a very similar service offering to Ebiquity but was delivering that service offering in a very different manner. It's delivering it through a unique and highly advanced technology platform, GMP365. And transitioning our business -- or our service provision, I should say, onto that technology platform is a major strategic rationale for acquiring that company. The brands, if you like, can be architected off the GMP365 platform. The founder of MediaPath, Susanne Elias, she has joined the executive leadership team in a newly created role of Chief Delivery Officer, really to drive the change of Ebiquity's service delivery. This is -- it's a hard task. It's a platform -- a technology platform with a high degree of functionality. And it requires not just our people but the agencies and our clients to do things in a different way, by service provision in a different way. So there's a major program underway with lots of hard work being undertaken by a range of people in the organization to train our teams, to sell into clients and to engage with agencies. So that is a 3-year program. It's underway. I would say we're making good progress on that. We've onboarded a number of major international clients that are listed there. And the technology platform has made a significant contribution to a number of new business wins across the world, big brand names in the United States, Suntory in Asia Pacific, obviously a Japanese business there; Karcher on a multiple market basis in Europe; and an increasing range of national advertisers. So we are, I think, making satisfactory progress in the work transitioning our service delivery onto the technology platform. And we've already started to identify quite significant time savings on specific projects, and we've recorded up to 60% time saving on some projects. So the strategic rationale for acquiring MediaPath, I think, is being borne out, and we're starting to see those benefits. But as I said, it's quite a long, hard program but we're well underway with that. So I'll now give you a progress update against the strategy and start with a reminder of who we are, what we're in business to do and the central elements of the strategy. So we are in business to help brand owners increase returns from their media investment and so improve business performance. These media investments, as you know, are absolutely huge, very difficult to size the whole global. But eMarketer, which is a source we typically use, positions the global media advertising market in the region $900 billion. Now a lot of that is the small to medium size enterprises that have been able to access advertising through Facebook, Google and YouTube. But we typically reference the world's top 100 advertisers at our primary target customer. They spend in the region of $100 billion. So we're addressing, we're serving a large market where we feel our services can make a significant impact on advertisers' business performance. So the central elements of the strategy are: to increase revenue from digital services and specifically developing productized data solutions to enable them to be a higher-margin proposition. We have this amazing client roster, and the ambition and the strategic intent is to divert more clients into higher-value strategic relationships. The company has had a bit of a history of a relatively low operating margins, so we are very, very focused on improving the operational efficiency of the business to move that margin up. And then the fourth element of the strategy is a rebalancing of the business geographically. You have seen from one of Alan's earlier slides that we're not weighted to the U.K. and Continental Europe, whereas Asia Pacific is the world's fastest growing, a large market in terms of economy and advertising economy, North America or United States specifically as the world's largest advertising market. And as you would have seen from Alan's earlier slide, the segmentation slide, we are much smaller in those 2 markets, and we have historically been loss-making in the United States. So that's been quite a major strategic focus to improve our business in those geographies. Just to contextualize the market a little now, you'll all be very familiar with the level of media market, so I don't need to dwell on this, but this is as we've seen in June course of 2022. I think it's fair to say that the total global advertising market was more resilient than perhaps many people expected given the backdrop of lots of macroeconomic challenges. Myself -- not just myself but quite a number of business associates operating in the industry, we're expecting either Q3 or Q4 to weaken quite markedly, and that didn't happen. I think the agency group, major agency holding companies, delivered a pretty good set of annual results. We also wondered if maybe it would start to [ peak too ] in Q1 of this year, we're not seeing that either. So it's really quite a resilient market. There was a specific challenge in China. Again, the world is very familiar with the zero COVID policy that was adopted there over a long period of time. That definitely made business difficult for people who were operating out there. Our partners, really, they were almost locked in for quite extended periods of time. That definitely had a dampening effect, as you would know, on the Chinese economy. Now I'm going to reference -- I should say subdued performance from our Media Management service line. Most of the work we conducted in Media Management is agency selection mandates. And that was a relatively slow year in the market in general -- not just our business, but the market in general, in comparison to 2021. So it's somewhat cyclical, this 2020, the hugely impacted COVID year, so very, very little agency selection activity for obvious reasons. That rebounded very strongly in 2021. So we had a surge there, I think, described. And I would suggest 2022 was a year with much more normalized activities. The digital market has seen significant upheaval. It's been interesting to see Alphabet and Meta coming under pressure for the first time really [ that is revenues ] they've been planning to reverse. And clearly, we're all very familiar with Twitter's self-inflicted upheaval, with advertisers saying they're putting their commitment on pause there. I think we're still seeing that pause continue in pretty well all of our clients, I would say, who have deinvested or a reduced investment in Twitter. Now there's been a combination of factors contributing to the gains for TikTok, which has now become really a priority for the marketers. A number of our largest customers, when I speak to them about their priorities for the region, a lot of them said gains for TikTok more strategically is right up their top list of priorities. Amazon is now perhaps an advertising business as is Apple. Now 2 big dynamics impacting the industry have been Commerce Media and Advanced Television. Commerce Media already in asset, it's about $45 billion advertising market in the United States, with all traditional retailers recognizing the opportunity to monetize the audiences coming to their digital real estate. And I have read some commentary that Commerce Media will be the third wave of digital advertising and quite likely the biggest. It's taking search budgets and it is taking open web programmatic budgets. And I think it's also fair to say, it's taking additional retail marketing budgets. So there's 3 big sources of revenue driving that. And clearly, the proposition is that advertisers can identify much more quickly return on advertising investment there. The same big growth area, a very, very rapid growth area, is the Advanced Television market, which is already now about a $25 billion market in the United States. But that is fraught with challenges. As you'll be aware, there's questions over audience measurement. That's question over -- already fraught with questions over accuracy of actual impressions. There's a study that's saying [ 80% ] of all impressions claimed to be delivered, Advanced Television being delivered when the television sets are switched off. So there's a lot of money flowing into it, but the efficacy there, I think, is questionable at the moment. And a smaller emergence, if you like, is that of ad funded models for the major subscription services, nothing -- it would be fair to say that these entries to the advertising market have been somewhat underwhelming. But all of this context, we feel is very positive and supportive for Ebiquity. We have a service proposition that helps advertisers navigate these changes. And there's always new opportunities for us to develop new service propositions to support advertisers. We started publishing a set of operating metrics at the end of December 2020 where we could effectively say January '21 was when we kicked off the strategy to focus on these 4 central elements of our business. But as you can see, the progression against all these metrics is going really well. I think we're very, very happy with this. You can see the cross-sell of clients is really progressing nicely. We now have 97 clients buying 2 or more service lines, up from 58 when we started on this journey 2 years ago. The Digital Media Solutions that we put a significant focus on, again, progressed exceptionally well. We've almost doubled the number of clients buying these digital media solutions from last year. And that is reflected in the volume of impressions and the value of digital advertising that's been analyzed. The reason why these metrics are important is the number of impressions we had on there is giving us an incredibly deep pool of data. And we're constantly enriching our data and that enables us to provide a really, really strong empirical analysis of what's going on and a much more in-depth analysis of the market than any other independent player out there. And the value of digital advertising, again, provides us with that great depth and richness of information and understanding across an extensive range of media investments. And I think it's a good demonstration of our advertisers' eagerness and willingness to buy the services that they want just to analyze much more and more their digital activity. Now the number of countries served with new digital solutions is probably reaching saturation point. I think this is becoming less of a metric, and it's one that we'll probably retire now. And the point or purpose of this metric initially was to demonstrate to the world's largest advertisers that we can provide them with analysis wherever they operate in the world. These huge advertisers, clearly, 80% of their business is in the typical large economies. But then they have 20% of their business in a long tail of much smaller markets that receive very little attention, but that 20% can still be taking tens of millions of dollars of digital advertising. So now we are able to provide visibility to the world to understand its presence wherever they might operate. But as I say, I think maintaining reporting of that metric probably has less value as we go forward as we're confident we're able to service those clients there. Now the final metric a percentage of revenue derived from digital services, it's progressing upwards. That looks like a fairly tepid growth, should we say, but there's been quite a dilution effect from the acquisitions of MediaPath and MMi, both of which were focused pretty heavily in the broadcast market. So I actually think, the fact of our percentage of revenue growing from digital services is still moving in the right direction. It is actually positive even though the [ breaks ], as I said, looks perhaps a little bit subdued, but I think it's positive because we are outgrowing, if you like, revenue from digital in comparison to other services. So I think we'll continue to see positive progression from that and all the other metrics. If we turn to the Digital Media Solutions, it is fair to say that has transformed our capabilities. Revenue growth from that suite of 7 productized digital solutions is 76%, and we maintain or continue to run that as a strong profit margin, over 50%. So that's having a really positive impact on our business. One that we developed perhaps a year or so ago was that of, what we call, our responsible media investment program. There was a growing awareness, should we say, in the marketing community, that they have a responsibility to ensure where they spend their money is not inadvertently funding things that were running counter to their corporate social responsibility or ESG requirements. Until recently, we really haven't been able to measure that. So we developed a solution to give them visibility and actually able to measure the extent to which they are an inadvertently funding elements of the media supply chain that they would rather not. We've now been able to extend that to 13 markets. That clearly is a slightly different solution in each market, depending on the independent data source there. So for example, minority owned media, which is a big topic in the United States, a little bit less so but still important here in the U.K., has a very different meetings in perhaps Continental Europe and Asia, places like that. But we are finding interesting data in terms of advertisers inadvertently funding websites or publishers that are putting out disinformation or harmful disinformation, whether it be conspiracy theories or racist propaganda or anti-vax kind of messages, to the extent that actually we have become a signature to the EU's COVID practice on disinformation, being invited to contribute into their policymaking agenda. And our role in that is to support measurements of member states' progress in reducing funding of disinformation. Now we're all very aware that every company, so all major corporates, are on a path to net zero and have an obligation to measure that. And the Scope 3 aspect of that, I think, has been perhaps one of the hardest challenges. And again, until very recently, I don't think any thought was really put into the impact that advertising investment was having in terms of carbon emissions. Now we have partnered with a company that's cunningly named Scope3. They are the data provider. They measure the carbon footprint or emissions, should I say, of all airlines of the digital supply chain. We're able to match our clients' activity, our impressions to the Scope 3 data. So we are able to identify or measure for our clients the impact they are having on carbon emissions. And we've identified some of the worst, offending, should we say, elements of the digital supply chain that create the largest carbon emissions and now therefore, we will provide advertisers with the opportunity to cut those aspects out of their digital media. And we hope major corporates take this up. As I said, they've got an obligation and responsibility now to measure their carbon emissions and demonstrate their path to net zero. So we would hope that they take this up. And I referenced the explosive growth of Advanced Television. We've put a new product in market. We started at the end of Q4 with Advanced Television solution on the pilot phase with a select group of clients in the United States, and we will be reviewing results from that next month. So we hope that we'll have a product solution that's able to address that market. Whilst that market is very significant in the U.S. at the moment, it will clearly roll into other markets around the world. Our new product development is focused on retail media. We don't have a solution specific to retail media at the moment, but we're working hard on that, and we'll hope to have a product in the pilot phase around about midyear mark. We're evolving our paid search product really through enhancing the automation, seeking to enhance the automation of that. And we started to adjust the Influencer Marketing segment which, as you know, takes quite a lot of spend. We've built a successful product in the market in China and in Singapore, the Southeast Asia and in Italy, so we're now reviewing the efficacy of those whether they should be rolled out on a global basis. The next element of the strategy, central strategy, is developing higher-value strategic relationships. We frequently talk about working with 75 the world's top 100 advertisers. Earlier in this presentation, I referred to them as our primary target customer. With this great client roster of major brands, we feel there's an opportunity to develop higher-value relationships and sell all products and services if we bring more products and services into the market, which we're doing. But we also have an extraordinary breadth of customers, major national domestic advertisers that actually count approximately 600 clients around the world who have very, very strong businesses in a number of national markets, France, Italy, Spain, China, Singapore, Australia and now obviously United States. So we mustn't forget that we have a real great breadth of national advertisers who represent strong growth opportunities for us. And the strategy of seeking to cross-sell against this extraordinary client base is going very well. We now have 97 clients buying 2 service lines, and that's up 28% year-on-year. We continue to be competitive in terms of winning major mandates from the world's largest brand owners. And these are highlights in terms of HSBC, Shell, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW that all audit us, a global agency selection work through the course of the last year. Whilst we worked with a lot of those largest advertisers and brand names, new business opportunities isn't necessarily so much a greenfield site, but we remain interested in converting new logos and new business opportunities, and we've had a good degree of success with that throughout the year. So I think our strong focus on clients and developing relationships is working well. The third element -- central element of the strategies to improve our operating efficiency. I would say there's a number of factors that have been contributing to this significant margin improvement. First of all, we have managed to reduce production costs. That is primarily around the elimination of duplicate third-party data costs that does involve a reduction in paying our outsource partners where we don't have the capability to deliver itself and partly through the acquisition of, for example, in Canada and partly through running more business on the GMP365 technology platform. The Digital Media Solutions is significantly improving our revenue mix. Not only is the revenue growth strongly there at 76% but, as I said before, continues to be delivered at a high margin at somewhere over 50%. The scaling of our business in the United States has turned that business around from loss-making to profit, and we're able to capture good economies of scale there. So the synergies from the acquisitions are on track. But we have continued to focus on scaling, what we call, our media operations center. That's a nearshore center designed to create economies of scale. As you can see, we've transferred more from the higher cost centers to that over the year. We're developing that concept now really primarily through the adoption of GMP365 platform with a transformation of our operating model. So up until now, we've had teams in each individual market, providing the delivery of our services. But as we move that business -- or the delivery onto the technology platform, we are seeking to mutualize the resources, mutualize the people that provide those. We see a relatively limited -- any need for geographic dependency in that segment of our company. So we are in the process and it will run through the course of 2023 of changing the operating model so that we can maximize usage of the GMP365 technology platform. And the final of the 4 central elements strategy is the rebalancing of the geographic distribution of our business. We've spent a little bit of time talking about North America already. But Asia Pacific continues to show good progress. Last year, it was our strongest growing region organically, and it's continued -- it's maintained that [indiscernible] in 2022 with organic revenue growth of 18%. I spoke about the challenges of the zero COVID policy on the economy and business in China. But despite that, we were able to grow our business, I think, quite positively there with 11% organic growth. Exceptionally strong performance in Southeast Asia. Now the business unit in Singapore with revenue up 80% has been driven by a combination of regional new business wins. So client companies operating across Asia Pacific are pointing us to their business on a multi-market basis. But I'll say we've started to penetrate domestic advertisers in Southeast Asia, which are -- tend to be the biggest advertisers in some of these markets. And we started to provide more services to the international advertisers in countries such as Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, which are obviously important advertising investment markets as we seek to gain brand growth. Continental Europe has been significantly boosted by the acquisition of MediaPath, but it is worth calling out a particular standout performance in France, up 46% revenue growth, which is almost highly organic. We also had strong performances from Spain and Italy. Now the Media Performance Service Line, which is our largest, also grew the most at 33%, but that really does reflect a strong contribution from the acquisition of the 2 strategic companies -- or the 2 strategic acquisitions we made, also start growing Digital Media Solutions and capture with it our Media Performance Service Line. The Contract Compliance Service Line, which I'll reference there have been -- had a couple of difficult years through 2020 and '21, has really recovered and delivered strong organic growth, the strongest organic growth, of all our service lines. Now you'll see from the previous segmentation analysis one of the charts that Alan presented, our Tech Advisory service is very, very small. And I don't view this as a legitimate, if you like, standard service lines. So we are now folding that into our Media Management Service Line. And we are disposing of a small asset in Australia, a company called Digital Balance, which really is much more of an agency business and doesn't fit with our organization and really doesn't fit in the strategic direction of our company. We're at very advanced stage of negotiating that. And I think we'll be able to complete that, if not by the end of this month, I should think a few days, then very early in April. So to summarize, a positive 2022. As we look forward, I'm pleased to say that 2023 has started on track, very much in line with our plans and our budget, and we have good pipeline visibility. The strategy is on plan, and we are progressing all elements of the strategy, including the delivery of the synergy benefits to our 3-year targets. We do need to be cognizant of the inflationary environment out there. Indeed, in the fourth quarter of last year, in October of last year, we made a one-off cost of living payments to some of our lower member -- [ lower paid ] staff, quite a broad tranche there actually. So that will require managing, again, the inflationary cost pressures, but we do remain confident on delivering our medium-term margin growth. We've talked about complexity and dynamism of the global media market. There's not going to be any slowing up on that. If anything, it just continues to accelerate the complexity. So we feel our service offering is well positioned to meet the needs of advertisers. So that's [Audio Gap]