The WPP Scangroup FY2025 financial results press release arrived in my email inbox yesterday — a loss of KES 714 million against KES 507 million the prior year, gross profit down 27% to KES 1,468 million, a one-off severance charge of KES 176 million partially offset by a KES 436 million combined foreign exchange and impairment benefit, and a new Group Chief Executive Officer, Akua Brayie Owusu-Nartey, describing the Company’s intent around three executional pillars she calls “Relentless Growth, Remarkable Solutions, and a Return to Ruthless Basics.” There is the obligatory commitment to WPP Open (WPP’s AI Marketing Platform & Strategy). There is a transition of the Tanzania operations from a fixed in-market delivery model to a partnership market access model. There is a closing data point asserting that “over 65% of marketing professionals in East Africa” are already experimenting with AI tools.

Read in isolation, it is a story that is uncomfortable. Read against the forty-three years of corporate history behind it, and the parent-company reinvention that has just been announced in London, it is something else entirely. What WPP Scangroup’s FY 2025 financial results actually represents is the latest chapter in a story that began in 1982 with a single small advertising agency in Nairobi, that climbed to nearly seventy percent market share at its peak, and has since splintered into a collective of successful independent advertising agencies— many of them staffed by people who once worked at Scangroup — while the listed entity itself has booked three consecutive years of losses. To understand what yesterday’s results mean, you have to read them from the beginning.

From Scanad In 1982 To Industry Domination By 2013

Bharat Thakrar founded Scanad Marketing in 1982 as an independent challenger in a Kenyan advertising market dominated by the local outposts of British and American agencies. The DNA of the agency that would eventually grow to become Scangroup was forged in those years — entrepreneurial, intensely commercial, and willing to compete in ways that more comfortable established networks were not.

On the 29th August 2006, Scangroup listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange in an IPO that was six times oversubscribed, with Thakrar holding a 28.53% founder stake. The listed equity currency that came with the IPO was deployed over the following seven years to fundamentally restructure Kenyan and East African advertising. 

In January 2007, Scangroup acquired 50% of RedSky, bringing the Safaricom advertising account into its orbit — and Safaricom in 2008 was the largest advertiser in Kenya, with annual spend of approximately KES 1.8 billion. Shortly thereafter, FCB Tanzania (Vodacom) followed. In 2008, Scangroup acquired major chunks of Ogilvy & Mather’s continental business in a deal valued at approximately US$6.1 million, bringing in Coca-Cola, Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, GSK, Barclays, Standard Chartered, and others. 

Over the next several years, Grey East Africa, JWT Kenya and Tanzania, McCann Erickson, Universal McCann, MediaCom, Mindshare, MEC, Hill+Knowlton, and Millward Brown were all absorbed into the Group. Many of these were not always acquisitions of vibrant businesses. There were also acquisitions of agencies that held important client accounts but were under serious commercial pressure.

By 2011, Scangroup controlled approximately 70% of agency-handled media buying in Kenya. In late 2013, WPP PLC moved from minority to controlling stake at 50.1%. That was peak Scangroup. A Kenyan advertising company founded as a small independent agency in 1982 was now the controlling vehicle for the world’s largest advertising holding group’s African operations — across over twenty African markets, employing more than a thousand people across a dozen agency brands.

The Talent Approach Built The Empire — & Cost Competitors Dearly

I’ll be candid about something those of us who operated independent agencies in Kenya during the Scangroup expansion years experienced directly. The way Scangroup grew was not only through acquisitions. It was also through the aggressive absorption of talent from competitor agencies — and the client relationships that moved with that talent.

I founded Dotsavvy in 2002, and through the years that followed there were multiple instances where talented people we had hired, trained, and developed left, often without warning and often without adequate notice periods, to join Scangroup-owned agencies. Conversations with founders of other independent agencies during that period consistently surfaced the same pattern. For smaller agencies unable to absorb that kind of talent shock, the loss of one key person could be existential. 

I am not making any specific allegation. I am describing competitive practice as it was experienced — and widely discussed — across the advertising agency community in Kenya through the years. The reality is that aggressive talent acquisition, tough negotiating tactics, and a willingness to do whatever it took to satisfy clients were a defining feature of how Scangroup’s agencies operated. In some respects, this was simply what commercial success looks like. In other respects it produced behaviours that competitors would describe as not being fair.

To be very honest, this DNA was the Group’s strength. It was also, I have come to believe, part of what eventually became its problem. An organization built on relentless competitive pressure develops internal cultures that are difficult to soften when the external environment changes. The external environment did eventually change — abruptly, in February 2021.

Things Start To Fall Apart: February & March 2021

On 18th February 2021, the WPP Scangroup Board suspended Bharat Thakrar from his role as Group CEO, alongside CFO Satyabrata Das, citing “allegations of gross misconduct.” The share price plunged. Kenya’s corporate and advertisining communities were stunned. Thakrar had founded the business he was now suspended from. He had taken it public. He had built it into a dominant force in Kenyan and Pan-African advertising. To many, he was indistinguishable from WPP Scangroup itself.

The publicly established facts of what followed are these. The investigation that led to the suspension was, according to court documents subsequently filed by Thakrar himself, driven principally by Andrea Harris, WPP PLC’s Group Chief Counsel based in London — not by the independent Scangroup Board committee that had been formally appointed to oversee the matter. 

On 23rd March 2021, rather than continue through what he later described as a process that was “clearly pre-determined,” Thakrar resigned. He has consistently described the resignation as “not voluntary.” Das resigned on 10th May 2021. The investigation by Control Risks Group, when it concluded in September 2021, found no incriminating evidence against either man. Neither has been the subject of any criminal charge.

The years since have produced a series of regulatory and judicial findings that reframe these events in ways that are uncomfortable for the parent company. In October 2024, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner of Kenya ruled that WPP Scangroup, WPP PLC, and Control Risks Group had breached Kenyan data protection law in the way they processed Thakrar’s personal data — including his private WhatsApp messages — during the 2021 investigation. 

Thakrar subsequently filed a substantive damages suit seeking approximately KES 4.3 billion (£24 million), alleging “neo-colonialist practices” and discrimination against him as an executive of Indian extraction. In May 2025, the High Court dismissed the suit on a procedural technicality — wrong court — and Thakrar has stated his intention to appeal. As of yesterday, the matter remains formally unresolved. He continues to hold approximately 10.49% of WPP Scangroup PLC, the second-largest shareholding after WPP itself.

The Splintering: Independent Agencies Staffed By Former Scangroup Talent Are Now Thriving

The five years since Thakrar’s departure have produced a striking pattern in the Kenyan and East African advertising landscape. Some of the most successful independent and challenger agencies operating in the market today are agencies founded by, or substantially staffed with, former Scangroup employees. This is not coincidence. The talent the Group had aggregated through the acquisition decade did not simply remain in place after February 2021. Some left immediately. Many left over the subsequent two or three years. They started or joined boutique agencies, took client relationships with them where the relationships were primarily with them rather than with the institutional network, and have been competing against their former employer ever since.

The most visible example of this dynamic operating against WPP Scangroup is The Partnership / Publicis Groupe Africa, which has captured a number of high-profile accounts over the last two to three years — most symbolically the Airtel Africa account after approximately fifteen years with Ogilvy/Scangroup. But the more significant development is the proliferation of mid-sized and boutique independent agencies that, individually, do not threaten WPP Scangroup but collectively are capturing significant addressable demand with fewer overheads, faster decision-making, and the personal continuity of senior account leadership that WPP Scangroup, in the throes of its own leadership transitions, has struggled to provide.

Simply put: the Group that for two decades built its dominance partly through aggressive talent acquisition is now experiencing the mirror image of that dynamic. The talent that once moved toward WPP Scangroup is now moving away from it, and clients are following.

WPP Scangroup’s Three-Year Financial Decline 

The numbers confirm the narrative. In FY 2023, WPP Scangroup delivered a profit after tax of KES 130 million. In FY 2024, the Group swung to a loss after tax of KES 507 million, on revenue collapsing approximately 23.6% to KES 2,442 million. In FY 2025, the loss has deepened to KES 714 million, with gross profit compressing another 27%. Over two years, gross profit has fallen approximately 34% from KES 2,225 million to KES 1,468 million.

The KES 130 million profit reported in 2023 year was enhanced by a one-off KES 238 million capital gain from the sale of Kantar. If you remove that then the 2023 underlying result would itself have been a loss. What looks like a shift from profit to loss is, on a cleaner basis, a deepening loss accelerating across three years. A one-off cost — severance in 2023, divestments of Hill+Knowlton in Nigeria and South Africa across 2023 and 2024, the further KES 176 million severance charge in 2025 — that recurs three years running is not really a one-off. You cannot cost-cut your way back to growth when the revenue base is being eroded by client losses and senior-talent departures.

There is a further detail worth direct attention. On 19th December 2025, six weeks into Akua Brayie Owusu-Nartey’s tenure, the Company issued a regulated profit warning stating that FY 2025 earnings would be “at least 25% lower” than FY 2024. The actual outcome — a 41% deeper loss — was worse than what the Board itself was forecasting only four months earlier. Either client spend deteriorated further in the closing weeks of 2025, or the full restructuring cost was not fully yet known at the point the warning was issued. Either way, it doesn’t look good at all. 

Elevate28: Why Yesterday’s Results Cannot Be Read Without WPP PLC

The single most important document for interpreting WPP Scangroup’s FY 2025 results is not yesterday’s press release. It is the announcement from London dated 26th February 2026 — the WPP PLC Preliminary Results and Strategy Update, in which the new Global CEO Cindy Rose unveiled the multi-year plan she has named Elevate28.

The numbers at the parent are worse in absolute terms than anything happening in Kenya. WPP PLC reported revenue of £13,550 million for 2025, down 8.1% reported and 3.6% like-for-like. Reported operating profit collapsed from £1,325 million to £382 million — a decline of 71.2%. Reported diluted EPS swung from a positive 49.4 pence to a loss of 20.0 pence, a 140.5% reversal. The Board booked goodwill impairments of £641 million — including £393 million on the Ogilvy cash generating unit, £123 million on AKQA, and £58 million on legacy Grey. The dividend was cut from 39.4 pence to 15.0 pence, and will be held at that level through 2026.

That £393 million Ogilvy impairment is the single piece of information from the 26th February announcement that most directly bears on WPP Scangroup. It is, in accounting terms, a formal statement by the WPP PLC Board that its projected forward cash flows from the Ogilvy CGU are lower than they were previously modelled to be. The Ogilvy CGU at parent level includes Ogilvy Africa, which sits inside WPP Scangroup. The agency at the centre of the Nairobi-listed entity has just been quietly written down at group level.

Elevate28 itself is more ambitious than a cost-reduction programme as WPP will “transition from a holding company structure to a single company,” simplified into four operating units — Media, Creative, Production, and Enterprise Solutions — across four regions: North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC, with £500 million in gross annualised cost savings by 2028 at a cash cost of approximately £400 million phased over two years. The very holding company model that allowed Bharat Thakrar’s WPP Scangroup to build dominance through acquisition is the model that the parent has now formally announced it is dismantling.

Africa Is A Sub-Component Of EMEA In The New Architecture

The four regions into which the new WPP is being organised do not include Africa. Africa sits inside EMEA, alongside Europe and the Middle East. I am not arguing WPP is abandoning Africa — Africa & Middle East at holdco level actually returned to growth of +2.3% in Q4 2025, one of the few positive regional signals. I am pointing out that Africa is a small part of the overall business, and is now being managed as such. The United States alone contributed £4,675 million of revenue in 2025; the entire AP/LA/AME/CEE bucket combined contributed £3,638 million. 

Going forward, what it means for WPP Scangroup in the middle of a three-year loss-making situation is that the architecture of Elevate28 is being designed to stabilise North America and Europe first. A subsidiary in a smaller region that is itself in deep operational difficulty during the first 24 months of a parent-level Stabilise phase is, in practical terms, on its own for the duration of that phase.

Akua Brayie Owusu-Nartey’s Inheritance

Akua Brayie Owusu-Nartey’s three pillars are, functionally, the local-language articulation of Elevate28’s stabilise-build-accelerate logic. That is the right posture for a listed subsidiary whose parent has just announced a wholesale reinvention. On execution, she has a genuinely strong personal record — eighteen years across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, prior leadership at Ogilvy Africa and Scanad Kenya, experience across both WPP and Publicis networks. The Board has described her as “a strategic leader and turnaround expert,” and the specifics of her career do not contradict that framing.

What she has inherited, however, is a situation in which the normal drivers of a turnaround are severely constrained. Revenue growth in Kenya is being fiercely contested by rival agency networks and by independent agencies — many staffed by former WPP Scangroup talent. Cost reduction is getting extreme. Capital allocation from a parent in its own Stabilise phase is constrained. The AI productivity thesis, while real, will deliver its benefits to clients (as lower project prices) at least as much as to the agency (as higher margins).

The WPP Scangroup Verdict & Future Prospects 

WPP Scangroup is not a failed company. It remains the only listed integrated marketing communications group on the NSE, with deep East African and Pan-African relationships and agency brands — Ogilvy Africa, GroupM, Scanad, Squad, Burson — that retain genuine equity with clients. But it has now lost KES 714 million on top of KES 507 million on top of what, once the Kantar one-off is stripped out, was already an underlying loss. 

It has turned over its CEO three times in twelve months and four times in five years. It has missed its own profit warning by a large margin. It now competes, in the Kenyan market that built it, against a growing collective of independent agencies, many of which are staffed by people who once worked at WPP Scangroup themselves — and who left, at least in part, because of how the events of 2021 and after were handled.

If you step back and look at the bigger picture, the story is in some ways the story of how Kenyan corporate institutions are built and unbuilt. A founder builds a small business in 1982. He grows it through the 1990s. He takes it public in 2006. He uses the listed status to consolidate an entire industry. He brings in a global partner that becomes a global parent. The combined entity reaches dominance. Then, over a period of weeks in early 2021, a process driven from London by people who had not spent twenty years in Kenya or Africa for that matter removes him from the company he founded — on allegations no investigation has substantiated, through a process a Kenyan regulator subsequently found to have breached Kenyan data protection law. Five years later, the founder still owns 10.49% of the company. The Group has booked three years of losses and is in its fourth Group CEO of the period.

I am not claiming everything that has gone wrong at WPP Scangroup since 2021 traces directly back to the way Bharat Thakrar’s tenure ended. The challenges the Group faces — AI disruption, holdco-level restructuring at the parent, Pan-African competitive pressure — are real and would have presented difficulties under any leadership scenario. But it is equally not credible to argue that the manner of the founder’s removal, the senior-talent outflow that followed, the splintering of the Kenyan agency landscape into independent challengers, and the institutional softening of the Group’s commercial intensity are unrelated to where the Company stands today.

Full recovery to FY 2023-level profitability is, in my honest opinion, a 2028 or later proposition. Further footprint optimisation announcements beyond Tanzania are likely through 2026 and 2027. Further senior departures and account losses remain a real risk. WPP Open, the AI platform and strategy will not on its own be the key driver that improves WPP Scangroup’s P&L. What will really matter going forward is the retention and winning of Tier 1 client relationships on the basis of trust and confidence. That requires key talent who are committed to staying at WPP Scangroup. 

That is Akua Brayie Owusu-Nartey’s job now. She has been given it at the hardest possible moment, with the least possible support from a parent focused on its own much larger problems, and against a competitive environment partly constituted by people who used to work where she now works. Whether she is given enough time, runway, and client stability to execute will determine whether WPP Scangroup’s FY 2025 results are remembered as the low point of a difficult chapter — or as the moment one of Kenya’s and Africa’s most storied advertising groups quietly stopped being able to reclaim its dominance, and a new generation of independent challengers permanently replaced them. 

The story that began on the streets of Nairobi in 1982 is not over. But it is, very evidently, in a chapter no one who lived through the dominance years of WPP Scangroup could have predicted.