At a Glance

With recruitment being driven by the economic cycle and overall business confidence, our strategy of diversification, both by geography and discipline, aims to diversify the Group’s exposure away from any one geographic area or business sector.

During 2010, we achieved growth across all our geographic regions, with both the Americas and Asia Pacific having exceeded their previous peaks. Within each region, different countries reacted in different degrees and timings as their economies and confidence levels recovered. Being in 29 countries at the end of 2010 and now 32 with businesses opening in India, Malaysia and Chile, we now have the benefit of being in many faster growing economies where outsourced recruitment is relatively new and still developing, it is also where competition is limited. Today, the UK, which only 10 years ago was more than 50% of the Group is now 26%. Ten years ago the Americas and Asia Pacific had barely registered; they are now 30% of the Group and growing fast.

As we have benefited from our geographical diversification we have also benefited from our discipline diversification, as different disciplines reacted in the recovery at different times and to different degrees. Finance and accounting remains our largest discipline, as it is the heritage of the business and also the discipline we tend to start with when we enter new countries and cities. As we have diversified into an increasing number of professional disciplines today, these now account for over half the Group’s gross profits. As well as rolling out our Michael Page disciplines, we continue to invest in Page Personnel, our business focussed on the more junior professional recruitment markets. Page Personnel is now a global brand, across 19 countries with over a quarter of our fee earners.

For financial highlights, please click here.