Key financial highlights
- · Group revenue up 10% to £1.93bn (2018: £1.76bn), driven by a strong performance (+16%) in Less Transactional business lines (57% of 2019 revenue)
- · Underlying* profit before tax maintained at £143.4m (2018: £143.7m), despite a £3.5m reduction in profit from the implementation of IFRS 16
- · Statutory profit before tax increased 6% to £115.6m (2018: £109.4m)
- · Underlying basic earnings per share (‘EPS’) in line at 78.0p (2018: 77.8p)
- · Statutory basic EPS increased 8% to 60.6p (2018: 56.2p)
- · Final ordinary and supplementary interim dividends up 3% to total 32.0p per share (2018:
31.2p)
* Underlying profit before tax (‘underlying profit’) is calculated on a consistently reported basis in accordance with Note 4 to this Preliminary Statement.
Key operating highlights
- · Resilient performance reflects geographic diversity and strength of Less Transactional service lines
- · Our Transaction Advisory revenue grew by 2%, led by North America, Europe and the Middle East
- · Further strong growth from our Less Transactional services (+16%) with Property and Facilities Management revenue up 17% and Consultancy revenue up 15%
- · UK profits increased by 7% to £81.9m, led by Property Management and Consultancy
- · Savills UK Residential grew revenues by 6%, outperforming the decline in UK market
volumes
- · Continued growth in North America driven by the occupier-focused business with revenue up
11% and underlying profit up 35% to £17.3m
- · Savills Investment Management reported a record year with revenue up 19%, profits up 65%
to £18.1m and AUM up 8% to £17.7bn. £3.1bn new inflows up 29% on 2018 (£2.4bn)
Commenting on the results, Mark Ridley, Group Chief Executive, said:
“I am very pleased that Savills delivered a good performance in 2019 in some challenging market conditions. This reflects the strength and resilience of our global, diversified business as we continued to grow our Less Transactional service lines and outperform in many of our transactional markets.
“We continue to focus on growing our Less Transactional businesses, increasing our share of the global transactional markets and enhancing the resilience of the business. While we continue to monitor the impact of global uncertainties on investor and occupier demand for real estate, we have made a good start to 2020 with the first two months outperforming the same period last year on all measures. As a result of the dynamic situation in respect of COVID-19 it is difficult accurately to predict its impact on our business for 2020 as a whole, although we do expect a greater weighting of activity to the second half of the year.”
