Havas has a new positioning -- Growth, powered by desire.
“We are also very pleased to unveil a new positioning for Havas,” CEO Yannick Bolloré told analysts in a briefing.
“After a year of intense work with clients and teams, we came up with this positioning, growth powered by desire.”
“I think it’s very good and very important to start by growth, just to remind everyone that what we are doing at Havas is not just to do great work to win awards, it’s to do work that will create growth for our clients, that will drive their market share up, that will increase their pricing power, that will increase the volume of sales.
“And to do that, what we do at Havas is we create desire for brands. And desire, of course, it’s the way to create more brand preference for our client that will ultimately create growth.”
Bolloré also positions Havas as the challenger in the advertising market.
“It’s clearly giving us an extra boost of energy. In terms of growth story during the past four years.
“The revenue has been growing year after year, despite negative organic growth in 2024. That was due to the loss of an important client in the pharma sector in the US.”
Havas, in its first year as a stock exchange listed company, reported an above expectations 3.1% organic growth in 2025 with an improved profit margin of 12.9%, up from 12.4% on 2024.
Guidance for 2026 is organic growth between 2% and 3% for the full year, and an improved EBIT margin.
He said the end of February looks a little bit like 2025. “We don’t see many changes,” he said.
Havas, rather than cutting headcount, aims to grow at roughly 3% a year with the same number of staff.
In 2025 the headcount, excluding those people who joined us through M&A, fell 1.2%
Havas had 22,641 people at the end of December 2025, of which 303 came from acquisitions.
“We are training our people with AI, we are finding efficiencies everywhere,” he said. “And I believe that we can absorb the growth, quite this kind of growth, with the same number of headcounts.”
A slide from the analyst presentation:
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