ManpowerGroup Inc. (NYSE:MAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jack McGinnis: Yes, happy to talk to that. I think for the first quarter for GP margin, still holding up very well, I’d say, so you can see at the midpoint we’re at 18.1% – that’s still up 70 basis points year-over-year. I think based on the earlier question we had on GP margins, still anticipating and seeing good staffing margin, still solid pricing environment, and we don’t see that changing. Although perm is coming off record lows and slowing on a year-over-year basis in terms of growth trends sequentially, there is still good perm activity in various markets, so we still see that contributing to the GP margin. I think on the bottom line, it’s actually pretty straightforward. We are seeing a decrease in operational leverage with the revenue trends.

I mentioned in the first quarter, we ended up on a flat organic days-adjusted basis. We stepped down in the first quarter, so although at the midpoint in constant currency it’s at minus-1, as I mentioned, we have more days in the first quarter, so when you adjust for days, that takes it down to about minus-2.5%. It’s really the lower volumes that are translating into lower GP dollars, which are falling down. We are making adjustments, but that is contributing to the EBITA margin of the minus-30 basis points year-over-year in the first quarter, really driven by the volumes.

Ronan Kennedy: Thank you, appreciate it.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Mark Marcon of Baird. Your line is open.

Mark Marcon: Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Jack, RPO, where is that as a percentage of GP?

Jack McGinnis: Mark, we like to talk perm overall, so that includes RPO, but also includes the perm activity that’s happening in the staffing brands as well as Manpower and Experis. On an overall basis in the fourth quarter, our perm as a percentage of total GP is about 18.6%. We’ve talked about that in the past, you’ll see that coming down from the record levels of perm that we had in the second quarter, and we expected that to happen. At that point, it was above–just slightly above 20%, and so now it’s coming down just below 19% now, and we would expect that to continue to settle in at more historical levels, somewhere in that range, maybe even a little bit lower as we go forward, as expected.

Mark Marcon: Yes, and you mentioned that RPO is continuing to–grew during the fourth quarter, although it declined in the U.S. Where are you seeing the growth on the RPO side, and as you talked about it settling in a little bit more as a percentage, what range would you expect it to go to if the economy softens a little bit further on a worldwide basis if there’s more caution?

Jack McGinnis: Sure, I’d be happy to talk about that. The U.K. had very, very RPO growth in the fourth quarter. We saw very–Poland is a great operation for us in terms of supporting our global RPO – they had very strong growth as well. Japan had strong RPO growth and France had strong RPO growth as well, so those are all some of our larger markets that did very well in RPO, which took us to overall growth despite the U.S. being down in the fourth quarter. Overall RPO was up double digits in revenues, and so that would be the main drivers. I think to your point in terms of the outlook, we would expect that year-over-year growth rates for perm would continue to come down as we move forward, again as we get further away from some of the record levels of activity and we anniversaries very, very high rates in the prior year.