Welcome to the Dentsu 2023 first quarter earnings call. This is a reminder that today's call is being recorded. This call will be held in Japanese and English with simultaneous translation for those joining online. Please choose your preferred language from the bottom of the Zoom screen. For those joining on the telephone line, you will only be able to hear the original language spoken. Today's presentation materials are available on the Dentsu Group website. Joining me today, CEO Dentsu Group Inc., Hiroshi Igarashi.
Igarashi
CFO Dentsu Group Inc., Nick Priday.
Hi, this is Nick Priday speaking.
Dentsu Chief Global Client Officer and dentsu Americas CEO, Jacki Kelley.
Hello, everyone. This is Jacki speaking.
CEO dentsu Japan, Norihiro Kuretani.
Kuretani
The agenda for today will start with business update from CEO Hiroshi Igarashi. CFO Nick Priday will then present the financial update, followed by CEO strategic update from Hiroshi Igarashi. We will invite you to ask questions after the presentations. Mr. Igarashi, please go ahead.
Thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call today. In the first quarter, we saw net revenues increase by 4.5% year-on-year, but organic revenue decline of 1.6% given the strong prior year comparables. Despite a slightly slower start to the year than we expected, we reiterate the net revenue, operating margin, and underlying EPS guidance we issued in February. We now expect a greater contribution from acquisitions to achieve the net revenue growth of 4% for the full year we guided to in February. A reduction in financing costs gives us confidence in the full year EPS figure of JPY 461. We continue to grow revenues in customer transformation and technology, reaching 35% of group net revenues in the first quarter, growing at 6.7% year-on-year.
Moving to some of the highlights from our first quarter. In Japan, we won several new CT&T remits from clients in the service, technology and telecoms, and financial sectors. In APAC, we secured the media business from foodpanda. In EMEA, we won creative work from Prime Video, Heineken, and Benetton. We also welcomed TELUS, one of the largest telecom companies in Canada, to our roster. We have also recently launched Mugen AI, a Dentsu solution for our clients that comprehensively supports the creative production process using AI. The AI capabilities include conception, generation, and continual improvement of creative work, as well as forecasting advertising effectiveness. Mugen AI sits within the Dentsu Creative Intelligence initiatives led by Dentsu Digital. We announced three acquisitions in the first quarter, Omega, Tag, and Shift7, all of which support the expansion of capabilities in the CT&T area.
On sustainability and ESG. We have updated our target for female leaders across the group to 45% by 2030, defining leaders to include directors and executive officers demonstrating our commitment to DEI throughout the group. In April, we held our group-wide volunteer initiatives titled One Day for Change with over 8,000 employees participating. In terms of industry awards, we have recently won three of Asia's most prestigious advertising awards at ADFEST 2023, One Asia Creative Awards and Spikes Asia 2023. Dentsu Digital, Septeni, and CARTA COMMUNICATIONS jointly won the highest platinum award at the TikTok for Business Japan Agency Awards 2023. I will now hand over to Nick to talk us through the Q1 financials. Over to you, Nick.
Thank you, Igarashi-san. Hello, everybody. This is Nick Priday speaking, and I'm going to provide an update on our financial performance for the first quarter. I will be pausing throughout my presentation to allow for the Japanese translation to catch up. I'm going to start with the three key metrics you can see on the screen. I'll give you an update on the first quarter performance, and then at the end of the presentation, I will provide an update on the outlook for the full year. As you've just heard, the organic revenue decline in the first quarter was -1.6% due to strong prior year comparables that ease significantly as the year progresses into the second half. The group operating margin was down significantly year-on-year at 14.2%.
However, this was mainly due to the very strong revenue performance in the first quarter last year and a change in timing of recognition for incentives. Profitability is in line with our expectations for the first quarter. Underlying basic EPS for the first quarter was JPY 86, down more than 30% year-on-year. However, we are confident of achieving the full year guidance of JPY 461, thanks to a reduction in financing costs being implemented in 2023. This next slide shows the main items of profit and loss. Net revenues increased by 4.5% to JPY 268.8 billion, despite the organic decline. Acquisitions and foreign exchange had a positive impact on revenue growth. Underlying operating profit was JPY 38.2 billion, down 30% year-on-year.
As mentioned, the timing of incentives impacted Japan and the restart of face to face activities increased travel and entertainment costs. As a result, underlying net profit was JPY 22.9 billion. As a reminder, the first quarter is our smallest revenue quarter internationally and therefore profitability can fluctuate. We remain focused on annual margins and profitability and remain on track to deliver our guidance. I would like to talk about the main driver of our growth, CT&T. In the first quarter, we successfully expanded our revenue mix and capabilities through acquisitions, leveraging our strong financial position. We have announced three acquisitions since the start of the year, Omega, Shift7, and Tag. Tag was the third largest acquisition in Dentsu's history. It will give us scale and dynamic creative production capabilities as well as an AI powered technology platform, Digital Interact.
The deal is expected to complete in early quarter three, resulting in an increase to the CT&T ratio by a further one percentage point. Our M&A pipeline remains healthy. It was almost 18 months ago that we shared our plans for an M&A fund of JPY 250 billion-JPY 300 billion to be spent over the three years from 2022 through to 2024. We're almost halfway through that three-year period, and the run rate of spend is in line with expectations. We closed the first quarter with a net debt to EBITDA ratio of 0.52 times, and we will continue to consider further opportunities to grow our capabilities in CT&T with a disciplined and rigorous valuation approach. Turning to our regional view.
In summary, EMEA grew more than 3%, Japan was flat, and the Americas and Asia Pacific declined organically. Highlighting the markets that delivered more than 5% organic revenue growth in the first quarter, they were Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. Markets that saw organic revenue decline include the U.S., China, Germany, and India. dentsu Japan, our largest region, maintained flat organic revenues despite strong double-digit comparables in the previous year. CT&T continued to report double-digit organic revenue growth led by ISID. Towards the end of the first quarter, we saw some conservatism in advertising investment in both online and offline media. The Americas faced strong prior year comparables with Q1 2022 reporting over 13% organic revenue growth. Against that, we saw organic revenue decline in media due to lower client investment from technology sector clients, partly mitigated by new client wins.
CT&T recorded an organic revenue decline due to a lengthening of the sales cycle seen in Q3 and Q4 last year, triggered by interest rate hikes and client conservatism on investing in longer term projects. We also saw some slowing down from the financial sector clients where we have strong exposure in U.S. CT&T in particular. Creative grew due to expanding remits from existing clients. EMEA reported the highest organic revenue growth rate across all four regions at 3.4%. CT&T reported double-digit revenue growth in the first quarter, and we're seeing particularly strong CT&T growth in Northern Europe and the U.K. market. Media was flat in the quarter, and Dentsu Creative reported negative growth for the first time in 2 years due to project delays in the U.K. and Italian markets.
Asia Pacific, ex-Japan, reported organic revenue decline of over 7%, with weakness across much of the region against tough comparables. CT&T saw slower client spend in both Australia and India. Media and Creative were impacted by client losses and lower spend from existing clients, particularly in the tech sector. The region has seen success with some new business wins, and we recently welcomed key leadership appointments, including a CEO in India and a new CEO for the strategic clustering of Southeast Asia markets. Moving to our full year guidance for 2023, we have lowered our full year organic revenue growth outlook to 1%-2% from circa 4% due to a slower than expected start to the year.
We remain confident in our ability to deliver the absolute revenue target for the year, as well as the operating margin target of 17.5% and the EPS guidance of JPY 461 issued back in February. Acquisitions will support revenues, meaning growth will be skewed more towards inorganic rather than organic revenue growth this year, and finance cost reductions will ensure we deliver the EPS guidance. This leads to no change in our dividend forecast at JPY 157 per share. In conclusion, we maintain the absolute revenue margin, EPS, and therefore dividend per share guidance issued in February. Our payout ratio will be 34% this year in line with our medium-term guidance. Our leverage is 0.52 times at the end of Q1, providing the flexibility to invest for growth in acquisitions as opportunities arise.
We remain confident in our positioning at the convergence of marketing, technology and consulting with our ability to deliver integrated solutions, creating real competitive differentiation for our clients and driving shareholder value over time. Thank you. I will now hand back to Hiroshi Igarashi .
Thank you, Nick. At Dentsu, we take the long-term view. As a company with over 120 years of history, ensuring we recognize the structural shifts within our industry and society is in our DNA. Ensuring we meet our clients' future needs is our focus. As the slide shows, we have got the big calls right. In the age of scale, we expanded overseas with the acquisition of Aegis, which was one of the top advertising agencies in the world at that time. Since 2013, Dentsu has had a truly global footprint to service our multinational clients.
In the age of digitalization and data, we secured the first mover advantage against our peers with the acquisition of Merkle back in 2016, allowing us to build the foundation to shift our focus to the structural growth area of CT&T, further advanced with the launch of Dentsu Digital and our consolidation of Septeni Holdings in Japan. More recently, we have been clear on our view that the future of our industry is greater convergence of marketing, technology, and consulting. We began positioning ourselves for this since 2020 with the comprehensive review, the simplification agenda, and more recently with the One Dentsu philosophy. We believe clients want fewer partners solving much bigger problems. This has been the resonant principle in every decision that we have made over the past three years. How can we become simpler, more connected and more integrated?
In January, we launched our clients and solutions team, the next step in our integration efforts to ensure we scale our deep long-term client partnerships. We have identified a number of accelerator clients where we believe we have the most potential to scale our relationship going forward by providing integrated services and have seen success in the U.S. market where this has been trialed. Our latest announcement of Tag's acquisition positions us well to deliver the integrated solutions our clients are looking for as we position ourselves at the convergence of marketing, technology and consulting. The acquisition of Tag, the third largest acquisition in our group's history, future-proofs our client offer. The deal is expected to close later this year, pending regulatory approvals. We look forward to welcoming 2,800 new colleagues to the group. Tag's digital infrastructure and services will provide high-quality content at speed and scale.
Tag brings a scale personalization engine, adding power to media and bringing our customer transformation and technology strategies to life.
The deal will increase our CT&T ratio by 1 percentage points, taking us closer to our long-held 50% target. More importantly, the deal will unite the group's service offerings like never before. I believe will improve our ability to win global integrated accounts, scaling our client relationships further. Moving to our customer transformation and technology business. In the first quarter, both Japan and EMEA delivered double-digit organic growth as demand for digital transformation enabled by centralized data strategies grows. The U.S. saw a sluggish quarter as we highlighted in February. The sales cycle lengthened as a result of the macro uncertainty caused by interest rate rises in the U.S. However, we are already seeing some encouraging signs. The CT&T pitch pipeline internationally is 8% higher than this time last year, with gross in number of larger sized deals.
We saw greater momentum in new business wins in this quarter versus the second half of last year, indicating that client confidence is slowly returning as they look to invest in large-scale customer experience transformations. The acquisitions made over the past six months are growing on average 25% organically, and we remain pleased with their progress and level of integration. Finally, we have seen a successful launch of our Accelerator Clients program in the U.S. as part of our clients and solutions initiative we launched at the start of this year. The win rate we see with our Accelerator Clients in the U.S. is higher than that of other clients. We are encouraged ahead of the global rollout of this program. Our focus is on converting the growing pipeline of opportunities we see in the second half of the year as the pitch environment remains highly active.
We reiterate the net revenue, operating margin, and basic underlying EPS guidance we issued in February. Given a greater contribution from acquisitions and also the reduction in financing costs that allow us to reconfirm the underlying EPS of 461 JPY. Thank you for listening. I will now hand back to the operator.
We will now begin the Q&A session. For questions, please use the raise your hand function on Zoom or press star nine on your telephone. I will ask you to unmute, then please introduce yourself. We are confirming several hands being raised. Please keep your hands raised as we are confirming your names. Thank you for your patience. Mr. Maeda from SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., please unmute and introduce yourself.
Thank you very much. This is Maeda from SMBC Nikko Securities. I have 3 questions. Is it okay if I ask the 3 questions together, or should I actually ask a question at a time?
It's okay to ask three questions at once.
Understood. First question, the capabilities regarding Tag, you talked about Tag's capability, but for the group's existing business, what are the benefits expected? One then is global technology platform is what you refer to, but can you be a little more concrete and give some examples of the benefits? The benefit, how early can we see that surface, if you could also talk about the potential timing of the benefits being achieved. The second question is that the organic growth was lower than expected, but because of the acquisition benefits, you are going to achieve the net revenue target.
Normally, when you're growing top line based on M&A, normally the costs also increase at the same time, we expect the operating margin to come down lower than the expected level. Operating margin, I understand, is on track. The acquired companies, do they have higher margin to your existing business, or the strategic cost has been reduced to keep operating margin vis-à-vis what you planned for at the start of the year? If you could also talk about why the operating margin target is not changed. The third is organic growth, the difference to the start of the year. What were the factors in what regions?
When we look at the Q1 result for your competitors, the competitors seems to be maintaining strong performance relatively. Is it the case that you are losing market share? The Q1 the organic growth was tough. If you could also touch on the reason as to why you have downgraded the full year forecast. These are the three questions.
Thank you very much, Mr. Maeda, for your question. Have received three questions. The first question is related to the Tags capabilities. What type of benefit can we see on our existing business? You would like to hear about the specific examples. Specifically, when and what way will we start to see benefit be registered?
In this regard, I will respond to the question and also add Nick to support me as well. The second question, organic growth. You said that this is low, but despite that, because of the acquisition benefit, the overall net revenue is maintained. The operating margin, when you consider the acquisition cost, normally the operating margin would be expected to come down. What is the background to the company maintaining operating margin? Is it because the acquired companies have a high operating margin? In this regard, I will ask Nick to respond. In regards to the third question, organic growth coming down, and in what region, what were the situation? In comparison to our competitors, are we losing market share?
I will, as Igarashi, I will respond to the third question. First of all, the capability of Tag. As I've already explained, it is based in the creative domain, but it has advanced digital solution, and that's one of their strengths. More recently, AI, a advanced digital solution is included, and in many sense, have a high level of execution capabilities. Also, it's not only for the creative domain, but for us media domain, we feel that there are a lot of these synergies expected here. Contents creation, they have a very high capability in that area. End-to-end, our service for our existing clients, and, we expect, this to be strengthened quite significantly as a result of the acquisition.
In that sense, for many of our clients, though, being an independent, the relationship, but already have a lot of relationships. We want to meet the conditions required by the regulatory authorities. The end-to-end, the service for our clients will be enhanced more and will also lead to acquiring new clients. I think the company will be a very strong existence in that way. When can we see the benefit of the acquisition BC? On that point, I would like to ask Nick to respond.
Thank you, Igarashi-san, and thank you Maeda-san for the question. Look, I think, we'd expect to see benefits in terms of revenue synergy quite quickly from the acquisition of Tag. We do consider the acquisition to be kind of the last mile to deliver services to our clients. We want to make sure we've got a full range of capabilities which we can offer to our clients. The dynamic content production piece means we can deliver personalized messages to the right person at the right time at scale. That's a key part of the benefit of the Tag acquisition for our existing client base. We can be more competitive in integrated pitches, better service our existing clients, and as Igarashi-san said, hope to win new clients too.
We expect those benefits to come pretty soon after acquisition. Obviously, we can't commit to exactly when that would happen yet because we're still awaiting regulatory approval, but we do expect that to happen for the deal to close early in the third quarter. If I move to the next question, which was margin, I think in terms of the margin question, you were asking given the profile of the revenue growth being more skewed towards acquisition to explain why we were still confident in terms of the margin delivery on a full year basis. We do retain confidence on the 17.5% margin target for the full year. That's for a number of reasons.
We've been very focused on a simplification agenda now for several years. We've been very focused on our networked talent across the globe. TAG will actually contribute further to that networked talent capability across our business to better service our clients. Q1 margins were also lower, largely due to timing related items such as the timing of recognition of incentives. Obviously, on a full year basis, we don't have any such issue in terms of which quarter those incentives get recognized in. We do focus on full year margins and I would say that at the end of the first quarter, we're tracking in line with our internal expectations in terms of where we would be on margin at this stage of the year.
My final point would be that the other benefit of growing our profile in CT&T, not only do we access the higher structural growth areas going forward, but it does mean that there's more consistency in terms of revenue and profitability on a quarter-by-quarter basis during the course of the year. As I've said, the top line is expected to recover in terms of that part of our business in the second half of the year, which means we will have greater confidence in margin delivery in the second half too because of the nature of the comparable performance in 2022, first half versus second half. For that reason, we're comfortable to reconfirm our margin guidance on a full year basis. Thank you.
In regards to the third question, this myself, Igarashi, will respond. The organic growth decline, how should we understand the situation on per region basis? Well, as Nick has explained, EMEA +3.4% maintaining strength, and the background to this is the double-digit growth in CT&T. In the case of Japan, we had a very strong performance last year, but despite that, we remain flat. Towards the second half of the year, we are expecting recovery. Now, large decrease was APAC and Americas. In regards to APAC, China and India, they end up with greater than expected declines.
Now, in this regard, China, the recovery in the economy was not as strong as was expected, and that is essentially the reason. In the case of India, over the last six months, we did have the management change. There were client losses caused by that. In May, a new management, the new CEO has assumed the office. He has a lot of experience in business development. He has a lot of track record in India and is well-versed in new technology. We have this new CEO assuming office, and so we expect recovery to be driven by him.
In the case of Americas, particularly North America, as Nick has also explained, the impact of interest rate to the real economy, particularly the tech sector and the finance sector. The impact towards these large sectors did have a large impact to us as well. Media, CT&T, both of these areas and also CXM domain, they were impacted by this. Particularly in regards to CT&T, the sales cycle, we assumed 90 days, but it has actually lengthened to 120 days or even 150 days. This lengthening of the sales cycle did have quite a large impact to us. Mr.
Maeda, in your question, you've asked as to where whether we are losing market share to our competitors. Well, rather, it's not really that we have lost market share, but because of this background, the number that we had assumed were lesser than we had expected. It's not really that we have lost market share to our competitors. We are starting to see signs of recovery. Towards the second half of year, we will certainly work towards making improvements. That completes my response. Thank you.
Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much. For the next question, Ms. Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison Group, please unmute and introduce yourself.
Good morning. It's Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison Group. First of all, in terms of conversion of the pipeline, you talked about the delays there. Do you think that's actually a structural change in the way that the market has changed in terms of you're having larger, more complex, contracts to negotiate? That's my first question. My second question was that, in February, you talked about the situation with the technology clients easing slightly. Was that perhaps a bit of a false dawn? Perhaps you could take us through that. Third question is about AI, which is forming quite a lot of the discussions for everybody at the moment.
In terms of what sort of investment you need to make to realize the benefits, perhaps you could give us some idea of the scale of what you think is achievable. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Fiona-san, for that. In terms of the delay in the pipeline, I have mentioned about the CT&T and the CXM in North America. The lengthening of the sales cycle that is impacting this. Perhaps Nick, if you wouldn't mind adding onto this point. Also, the second part of your question about the tech companies is restraining from the investment. I believe the nature of your question was you'd like to have more details. Perhaps I would like to answer that. This is Igarashi. Also, the third question relates to more of a discussion related to AI. As far as Dentsu Group is considered, how much shall we invest in AI? If we can give sort of a magnitude, what sort of impact are you expecting?
Myself, Igarashi, and perhaps Jacki, and also Kuretani-san, if you can actually add on to this question. Let us hear about the delay on the pipeline. Nick, please.
Thank you, Igarashi-san. Just very simply, Fiona, in terms of that question, in terms of delays to the pipeline and whether that is structural, I think it's certainly the case that in terms of CT&T deals, we're hoping to assist clients with larger scale transformation projects. Because of the nature of those type of projects to support clients, it can result in more complex contracts, which take a little bit longer to negotiate, as we're seeing. I think a lot of the areas where we're assisting clients are quite new for both parties because they're transformation projects.
I don't know whether I would say it was structural and be likely to be sustained over the over the long term, but it's certainly having an impact in terms of the speed with which we can close contracts and close negotiations at this current time. Thank you.
Second question related to the spending, the restraints on the tech sector. The background to that, as you know, especially centered in the United States, the tech sector, performance is somewhat worsening. That is definitely one of the background, and because of that, we have seen some large scale restructuring underway. I believe all these you are familiar with. Related to that, the investment is somewhat suspended at the particular moment, and that we are seeing that as a more conspicuous phenomenon. Therefore, the tech sector's performance overall has been on the decline. Accordingly, there's been revisiting of the structure and as well as their businesses. We are definitely seeing some impact on our advertising sector as well.
As you mentioned about the third question related to AI, that is definitely a perspective, and that could be one of the initiatives that we expect to have reinvigoration of the activities, and we definitely would like to capture those demand. Related to discussion related to AI, for Dentsu Group, how much and where and how shall we, how should we engage in the investment going forward? In order to effectively make use of our clients' budget, we believe AI can definitely assist us in this effort. Also at the same time, it can help in our own activities. There's definitely possibility there, for instance.
For instance, how we can actually deep dive on the insights of the consumers or perhaps for the automatic generation of the internet advertisement and also forecast the click rates and so forth, and also improvement on creative. We have many areas that we can expect to receive improvement because of AI. How much of an investment will we make towards this AI? Right now, we don't have definite number right now, but obviously right now we are focusing on the R&D. We are working together with our partners to further explore the possibilities and the capabilities of AI. In fact, just a couple weeks ago, I myself had the opportunity to visit our clients and also tech companies in the West Coast of the U.S. We have Mr.
Nadella from Microsoft as well. As we get involved in, we will commit to more than $100 million of business that we committed to. With Adobe, we have engaged in a fairly positive forward-looking projects with Mr. Nadella. With clients, we do believe there are many areas of possibilities. Perhaps, Jacki, if you can also add on some information related to our AI activities.
Yes, of course. Thank you, Igarashi-san, and thank you Fiona for the question. As you might expect, Dentsu Group has been using AI technology for our clients' business as well as transforming ourselves for quite some time. While it is certainly a topic right now, it is not new to us. Our AI and machine learning capabilities focus on delivering personalized customer experiences, predicting customer behavior, and providing operational insight. We have found by utilizing these technologies, we're able to drive better image recognition and next best actioning and decisioning, which has helped in our creative performance. We can use this to predict customer lifetime value as well, and identify churn risk, which is very helpful to our clients.
The one important note to make is that we are stressing ethical AI, using artificial intelligence, in a very responsible way. This means creating a clear framework for ethics and holding ourselves and working with our clients as well to ensure that those standards are in place. The ethics include things like legal requirements around topics like privacy, as well as values that are important to society. I'd also like to just make one comment on both your question, Fiona, around, whether or not the change, the organic changes we're seeing are structural for CT&T, as well as, Maeda-san's question on losing share. By simply saying that, in the US specifically, we could not be more confident in the capability of Merkle.
We remain confident because in the U.S. we remain the strongest agency partner to Salesforce and Adobe with 5,000 Salesforce certifications and 2,500 Salesforce certified employees. Merkle continues to be called out as a leader in the space. Most recently, one of only eight listed as a leader in the Everest Group PEAK Matrix report, which analyzed 28 companies in the space, and Merkle was the only one listed as a star performer. We see our positioning to be incredibly strong. It's simply a moment in this market where we are seeing longer sales cycles, and we expect that to return shortly. I'll turn it back over to Nick for the AI question.
I think we've answered the AI questions.
Oh, sorry.
I'll hand back to the moderator. Thank you.
Yeah. I'll turn it... Okay. Sorry about that.
Since the response ended up being somewhat long, we have Mugen AI, which we are working with actual clients, but we'll talk about this using a separate, a different opportunity.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press the Raise Your Hand function on Zoom or star 9 on the telephone line. For the next question, Mr. Rajesh Panjwani from J.P. Morgan Asset Management, please unmute and introduce yourself. Please wait a moment.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Thank you very much for this opportunity. Two questions. First for Nick. Nick, you mentioned a couple of times the reduction in finance cost. Can you please help explain how did you achieve that reduction in an environment of rising interest costs? Given that, you know, some of the cash of the company has been deployed in M&A, will that reduction in interest costs continue? Second is, given the, you know, reduction in organic growth guidance for the first quarter, how does this impact the midterm organic revenue growth guidance of 4% to 5%? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rajesh, for your question. I will ask Nick to respond to your first question regarding reduction of finance cost. With regards to the organic growth, how will this impact in the organic growth for the midterm? I will respond to that question.
Hi, Rajesh, this is Nick speaking. Thank you for the question. As part of moving to One Dentsu and applying consistent governance across a single leadership team, we've been able to reduce finance costs, specifically interest costs via the unwind of cross-currency swaps, which means that we now genuinely benefit from our strong balance sheet in Japan and access to low-cost financing in Japan. This was part of a recommendation which was approved by the board in April. We've already started to execute against this new approach, realizing savings already as part of being one company, One Dentsu, and those savings are permanent in nature. Thank you.
The second question regarding the organic growth target for the mid term. Of course, the organic guidance on this occasion has been changed to 1%-2%. That means that the expectation for the next fiscal year is higher. Of course, we need to make even further efforts, but for us, we have various initiatives to enhance our competitiveness and the current state of the pipeline and also the accelerator, a program that we've mentioned before. In other words, for a specific client, we have a model to enable them to accelerate their growth. We have all these initiatives that we are working on. Of course, as CT&T at the core is growing steadily.
At this point in time, in regards to the 4%-5% of organic growth rate over the medium term, we feel that we'll be able to maintain that target. That completes my response.
Thanks, Igarashi-san. Thanks, Nick. Nick, can I have a quick follow-up question? What is the magnitude of savings you have achieved in the finance cost?
Hi, Rajesh. Look, we're focused on confirming the guidance around the numbers which we set out in today's presentation. Really around the margin and the profitability, and the earnings per share. I think, look, as I said, it's very positive. It enables us to reconfirm the earnings per share guidance on a full year basis. In terms of the impact, as I've said, it's permanent in nature, so there'll be a benefit not just in the current year, but in subsequent periods. We'll guide further on 2024, at a much later stage, and I'm not going to do that today. Thank you.
Thank you.
With that, I would like to conclude today's earnings call. Thank you very much for joining today. You may now disconnect. Thank you.