highlights

  • Q4 2020 organic growth: -3.6%
  • Q4 2020 underlying EBITA: € 264m
  • FY 2020 proposed dividend per share: € 3.24
  • significant recovery of revenue decline across the group continued in Q4; market share gains in the US and France.
  • Q4 gross margin of 19.5%, down 50bp YoY due to mix effects; stable pricing climate. FY gross margin of 19.2%, down 80bp YoY.
  • strong operational agility and flexibility of our cost base, delivering Q4 EBITA margin of 4.6%; FY recovery ratio of 44%.
  • global market leadership supported by diversified portfolio; inhouse concept performed strongly.
  • strong FY free cash flow (incl. CICE sale in Q3): € 1,132m
  • volumes in January reaching last year's pre-pandemic levels

“2020 was a year like no other,” says CEO Jacques van den Broek. “I am proud of the way Randstad responded with agility and speed to create ‘new ways’ to support our clients and talent in 2020. We generated a strong set of results in the fourth quarter and delivered a solid and competitive performance for the year.

Our revenue trend recovered consistently month-by-month from April to December, with activity momentum in January 2021 reaching last year's pre-pandemic levels, driven by our operational agility and diversified portfolio.

We saw ongoing demand for essential services and our inhouse concept performed strongly, delivering good growth in the quarter. We generated strong free cash flow in the year and our balance sheet position is healthy and solid.

We continue to see good momentum for accelerating investments in growth and digitalisation, whilst utilising the flexibility of our cost base. At the same time, visibility remains limited with ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our digital transformation strategy helped us to pivot quickly to a virtual working environment and continue to support our clients with digital tools and safety protocols through our #newways program.

By harnessing the power of data, we were able to identify and fill relevant existing and new roles, such as COVID-19 medical screeners and staff working in test and trace. We remained focused on talent, seamlessly moving people from declining sectors to those in high-demand through reskilling and redeployment. This focus will continue to be critical in narrowing the skill gaps and preventing unnecessary redundancies in an ever changing labor market.

We emerge from 2020 as a more agile, digital, diversified, and globally empowered organisation and I want to thank all of our employees, as well as our clients, talent and shareholders, for their continued support and trust."

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about Randstad

Randstad is the global leader in the HR services industry. We support people and organisations in realising their true potential by combining the power of today’s technology with our passion for people. We call it Human Forward. In 2020, we helped nearly two million candidates find a meaningful job with more than 236,000 clients.

Furthermore, we trained close to 350,000 people. Randstad is active in 38 markets around the world and has a top-three position in almost half of these. In 2020, Randstad had on average 34,680 corporate employees and generated revenue of € 20.7 billion. Randstad was founded in 1960 and is headquartered in Diemen, the Netherlands. Randstad N.V. is listed on the NYSE Euronext (symbol: RAND.AS). For more information, see www.randstad.com.

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