ManpowerGroup delivered Q1 2026 reported revenue of $4.5 billion, up 3% organic constant currency and above the 1% midpoint guidance, with adjusted EBITDA of $61 million and margin of 1.4%, up 10 basis points year over year. The Manpower brand grew 6% on strengthening European and U.S. manufacturing demand, while Experis declined 9% on healthcare IT project timing and gross margin fell below guidance on European bench utilization. Management launched a strategic global transformation program targeting $200 million in permanent cost savings by 2028, extending the back-office redesign into the front office and hiring a dedicated transformation officer. AI is emerging as a growth driver, with a France sales engine generating about $200 million in incremental revenue and new SoundHound and Hubert.ai partnerships. Adjusted EPS of $0.51 came in just above the guidance midpoint, and management expects the U.S. to flip to low single-digit growth in Q2.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us for our Q1 2026 conference call. Our Chief Financial Officer, Jack McGinnis, and our President and Chief Strategy Officer, Becky Frankiewicz, are both with me today. For your convenience, our prepared remarks are available in the investor relations section of our website at manpowergroup.com. I'll begin with a brief overview of the quarter, including how we're seeing conditions evolve across our markets, and then I'll share a few updates on how we're positioning ManpowerGroup to win in any environment. Becky will then provide an update on how we are driving commercial excellence and the opportunities we're capturing with AI, followed by Jack, who will walk through the detailed financial results and our guidance for the Q2 of 2026. I'll close with a few comments before we open the line for Q&A. Jack will now cover the safe harbor language.
Good morning, everyone. This conference call includes forward-looking statements, including statements concerning economic and geopolitical uncertainty, which are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs. Actual results might differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Slide two of our earnings release presentation further identifies forward-looking statements made in this call and factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially and information regarding reconciliation of non-GAAP measures.
Thanks, Jack. Our Q1 results reflect disciplined execution and continued stabilization of revenue trends across key markets. In the Q1, we delivered reported revenues of $4.5 billion, representing an organic constant currency growth of 3%. System-wide revenue, which includes our expanding franchise revenue base, was $5 billion. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 1.4% reflects improving demand trends as well as P&L leverage. We're also encouraged that top-line growth exceeded our expectations, reflecting strong execution of our commercial initiatives. We are expanding our new business pipeline, increasing client engagement, and continuing to win in the areas where growth is strongest and most resilient. At the same time, the manufacturing environment is strengthening, particularly across Europe. Taken together, this is enabling us to drive continued momentum across the portfolio with strong Manpower performance among key markets, including France, U.S., and Italy.
We're also seeing stable underlying trends in Experis and solid performance in Talent Solutions, tap in MSP, and Right Management, even as RPO remains more challenged. Our diversified portfolio, global scale, and specialized brand expertise continue to position us well to win in the marketplace. As we move down the P&L, we have continued our relentless focus on driving operating leverage. During Q1, we reduced SG&A, as adjusted, by 4% in constant currency while delivering continued top-line growth, reflecting the impact of our ongoing efficiency efforts. Something I'll share more detail on shortly. Finally, we're closely monitoring developments related to the conflict in the Middle East. While it is still too early to assess if there will be a broader impact, like many global companies, we have become accustomed to navigating a fast-changing environment that includes geopolitical developments alongside economic and labor market shifts.
In the meantime, we remain focused on staying close to our clients and their evolving needs while managing the business with discipline. Against this backdrop, we're encouraged by the developing short-term momentum and equally excited by the long-term market opportunity. This is supported by improving business confidence in the U.S., as evidenced by the increase in CEO Confidence reported by the Conference Board, rising manufacturing PMI in the U.S. and Europe, and strong business resilience. As conditions improve, we expect sustainable organic revenue growth to build progressively. Our intent is to be the architects of our own future and to proactively take actions that will position ManpowerGroup to lead the industry, win in any environment, and drive long-term value creation. We are transforming our business model to drive growth and expand margins over time.
As part of this commitment, we are announcing a transformation initiative that will reimagine how we operate and deliver value to our clients and candidates and provide significant cost optimization. Over the past year, we have been doing significant planning to launch this work, and we are pleased to share more details with you today. We have made targeted investments in automation and AI and built a modern global technology infrastructure, including our PowerSuite platform, which now serves as the backbone of our digitization strategy.
With nearly 90% of our global business operating on this platform, we have created a unified technology stack with access to global data across all of our global businesses, enabling us to operate at a unique data scale, strengthen our insight, and be better partners to our clients. As a result of these investments, we are launching a strategic global transformation program that we expect will deliver $200 million in permanent cost savings in 2028. There are two major components to our plan. The first, which I've talked about before, is the complete redesign of our back-office operation, which is progressing well. The second is taking best practices and key learnings from our back-office transformation and executing a similar program for the front office. These redesign processes will be industry-leading and enable us to execute more effectively and move faster to fill roles.
In addition to reducing our cost structure, this transformation will improve both client and candidate experience, positioning our brands to win in market share, and better serve clients in a highly fragmented marketplace. We have begun this work in North America, redesigning end-to-end processes, embedding automation and AI where it simplifies work, creating best-in-class local for world blueprints before extending globally. The goal is clear: connect more people to work by filling more orders to drive growth while structurally lowering our cost to serve. I am also pleased to announce that we have recently hired a dedicated chief enterprise transformation officer who has joined our executive leadership team to drive the execution of this plan across the enterprise.
At the same time, we continue to thoughtfully review our global portfolio to ensure that we have the right mix of businesses and brands across key markets, prioritizing investments in core, higher-return opportunities while evaluating opportunities to divest of non-core assets to strengthen our financial position and support our long-term growth and margin ambitions. Ultimately, these actions will accelerate our path back to our historical margin profile and create a structural cost basis to expand margins further over time. Now, before I hand it over to Becky, let me just say one more time how excited we are about the transformation underway to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and create capacity to invest in growth. Core element of this transformation is building new capabilities that align with where the market is heading. This includes evolving how we bring innovative service to market, particularly with AI.
We're also encouraged by the immense opportunities AI is creating as it enables us to shape the future of our industry, including how it is influencing client behavior and how they buy workforce solutions. This shift creates a meaningful opportunity for us to evolve our business model so that AI becomes a sustainable tailwind by operating in new ways and developing new products for our clients. With that context, let me turn it over to Becky to go deeper into our commercial initiatives and how we are leveraging AI.
Thank you, Jonas. Last quarter, I shared that my remit is focused on driving commercial excellence, strengthening and expanding our core capabilities, and accelerating AI across the business. Today, I am pleased to share more on how we are embedding AI as a growth multiplier and will highlight where AI is already driving measurable value in three areas, unlocking effective commercial scale, creating new ways to deliver a best-in-class talent experience, and finally, monetizing new human-plus-agentic solutions for our clients through strategic AI partnerships. Let me start with how we are embedding AI into our processes to unlock effective commercial scale. Today in France, our proprietary AI-powered sales targeting engine has generated approximately $200 million in incremental revenue. It pinpoints the highest probability opportunities so our teams can focus on coverage where sales conversion and revenue impact are the highest.
We expect this incremental revenue to increase significantly as we scale. Second, let me share how we are creating a differentiated talent experience, one that is critical to attracting and retaining the skilled associates and consultants our clients value most. To strengthen our talent experience, we recently announced an expansion of our PowerSuite technology platform to include our partnership with Hubert.ai to deliver AI-powered screening and interview experiences. In the past six months, we've completed over 25,000 AI-led interviews and reduced screening time by 67%. Automating early-stage interviews helps improve fill rates and time to hire and frees our recruiters and talent agents to focus on higher-value, relationship-driven work. At the same time, we are achieving 87% candidate satisfaction, as more than half of this activity takes place outside of traditional working hours, meeting talent when and where works for them.
These responsible, transparent AI capabilities now support markets representing 40% of our global revenue, with plans to scale to 70% by year-end. Third, monetization. I am delighted to share how we are bringing AI capabilities to market and creating a future where people can build more impactful careers and where companies can achieve greater profitable growth. Human-plus-agentic workforces are not a future concept. They are already here. In March, we announced a breakthrough partnership with SoundHound AI, a global leader in voice and conversational AI. Our Experis U.S. business is already helping companies across industries to review and redesign workflows and accelerate the adoption of AI and intelligent automation. This is the lead offering in our Accelerate AI services suite, built on a simple and powerful premise that humans and agents can deliver more when working side by side.
This partnership expands our presence in the human plus AI space, which is central to our strategy. We are starting in the U.S. to drive scale and market leadership and plan to expand globally. Finally, we know we capture the impact of AI by ensuring that our teams are equipped to use it. We are pleased that tens of thousands of our employees around the world have completed AI fundamentals training, and over 80% of our workforce is already using AI in their workflows. Our approach is simple. Automate what should be automated, augment what should stay human, and create entirely new ways to deliver workforce solutions to our clients. We are in progress to capture the full value of these initiatives, and we expect AI to become an increasingly meaningful driver of growth, productivity, and differentiation over time.
Look forward to continuing to update you on our strategic progress and how we will move at pace. I will now turn it back over to Jack.
Thanks, Becky. I'll quickly first touch on the headline quarterly results, and I'm excited to give more details on our expanded transformation savings Jonas announced at the beginning of the call. In the Q1, we delivered reported revenues of $4.5 billion. System-wide revenue, including franchises, was $5 billion. Our Q1 revenue results represented constant currency growth of 3%. US dollar-reported revenues, after adjusting for currency impacts, came in at the top of our constant currency guidance range. We'll talk more about the revenue trend drivers in the business and geographic segment summaries. Gross profit margin came in below the low end of our guidance range, driven by lower bench utilization in Europe and mix shifts impacting staffing margin, while permanent recruitment came in as expected with sequential improvement. As adjusted, EBITDA was $61 million, representing a 5% increase in constant currency compared to the prior year period.
As adjusted, EBITDA margin was 1.4%, up 10 basis points year over year and came in at the midpoint of our guidance range. Organic days adjusted constant currency revenue increased 3% in the quarter, which was favorable to our midpoint guidance range of 1% growth. Coming back to our transformation programs that Jonas referenced, we are excited to announce our path to expected savings of $200 million in 2028. We have previously discussed the implementation of our leading cloud-enabled PowerSuite front and back-office technology platforms. These platforms are now being complemented with best-in-class end-to-end processes. We started with back-office processes and are flipping to run rate savings in IT and finance costs during 2026, which build through 2028, representing 25% of the total cost savings. The strategic transformation will expand to the rest of the world in 2027 to drive expected net savings in 2028.
The front-office transformation, like the back office, will include standardized processes infused with leading automation and agentic AI across all major businesses, driving significant structural savings. We will continue to break out restructuring and strategic transformation program charges as we progress the program. We expect the ongoing 2026 run rate of these charges to be lower than the Q1 amount and estimate a range of $10 million-$15 million on average per quarter through the end of the year. Moving to the EPS bridge, reported earnings per share for the quarter was $0.05. Adjusted EPS was $0.51 and came in just above our guidance midpoint.
Working from our guidance midpoint of $0.50, our results included a slightly lower operational performance of $0.02, a slightly lower tax rate, which had a positive $0.01 impact, a foreign currency impact that was $0.01 worse, and improved interest and other expenses, which was $0.03 better than our guidance. Restructuring costs and strategic transformation program costs represented $0.46. Next, let's review our revenue by business line. Year-over-year on an organic constant-currency basis, the Manpower brand had strong growth of 6% in the quarter, up sequentially from the 5% growth in the Q4. The Experis brand declined by 9%, an expected decrease from the 6% decline in the Q4, largely driven by the timing of healthcare IT projects in the U.S. The Talent Solutions brand declined by 1%, an improvement from the Q4 decline of 4%.
Within Talent Solutions, our RPO business continues to experience a sluggish permanent hiring environment but did see sequential revenue trend improvement. Our MSP business saw continued revenue growth, and Right Management also grew during the quarter. Looking at our gross profit margin in detail, our gross margin came in at 16% for the quarter. Staffing margin contributed a 70 basis points reduction due to mix shifts and bench utilization in the Q1. Permanent recruitment activity resulted in a 20 basis points decline. Other services resulted in a 20 basis points margin decrease. Moving on to our gross profit by business line. During the quarter, the Manpower brand comprised 62% of gross profit. Our Experis professional business comprised 21%, and Talent Solutions comprised 17%.
During the quarter, our consolidated gross profit decreased by 3% on an organic constant currency basis year over year, stable from the 3% decline in the Q4. Our Manpower brand was flat in organic constant-currency gross profit year-over-year, relatively stable considering rounding from the 1% growth in the Q4 year-over-year trend. Gross profit in our Experis brand decreased 11% in organic constant-currency year-over-year, a decline from the 5% decrease in the Q4, largely driven by the timing of healthcare IT projects in the U.S. Gross profit in Talent Solutions declined 5% in organic constant-currency year-over-year, which was an improvement from the 12% decrease in the Q4. The improvement in trend was driven by RPO as the rate of decline narrowed significantly. MSP trends also improved from the Q4, and Right Management had solid gross profit growth in the quarter on increased outplacement activity.
Reported SG&A expense in the quarter was $695 million. SG&A as adjusted was down 4% on a constant-currency basis. The year-over-year constant currency SG&A decreases largely consisted of reductions in operational costs of $23 million. Dispositions were very minor and represented a decrease of $1 million, while currency changes contributed to a $38 million increase. Adjusted SG&A expenses as a percentage of revenue represented 15% in constant currency in the Q1. Adjustments representing restructuring and strategic transformation program charges were $26 million. Balancing gross profit trends with strong cost actions while funding ongoing transformation to enhance EBITDA margin in both the short and long term remains one of our highest priorities. The Americas segment comprised 25% of consolidated revenue. Revenue in the quarter was $1.1 billion, representing an increase of 4% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.
As adjusted, OUP was $26 million and OUP margin was 2.3%. Restructuring charges of $7 million largely represented actions in the U.S. The U.S. is the largest country in the Americas segment, comprising 59% of segment revenues. Revenue in the U.S. was $655 million during the quarter, representing a 5% days adjusted decrease compared to the prior year. OUP as adjusted for our U.S. business was $9 million in the quarter. OUP margin as adjusted was 1.3%. Within the U.S., the Manpower brand comprised 26% of gross profit during the quarter. Revenue for the Manpower brand in the U.S. increased 5% on a days adjusted basis during the quarter, which represented strong market performance with seven consecutive quarters of growth and a slight change from the 7% increase in the Q4 as we anniversary strong growth in the prior year.
The Experis brand in the U.S. comprised 39% of gross profit in the quarter. Within Experis in the U.S., IT skills comprised approximately 90% of revenues. Experis U.S. revenue decreased 15% on a days-adjusted basis during the quarter, down from the 10% decline in the Q4 as the business anniversaried strong healthcare IT projects in the prior year. Excluding the impact of healthcare IT project volumes in the prior year, Experis U.S. revenue decreased 9% on a days-adjusted basis during the quarter, largely in line with the Q4 trend. Talent Solutions in the U.S. contributed 35% of gross profit and saw a 2% decrease in revenue year-over-year in the quarter, compared to a 2% increase in the Q4, driven by lower sequential MSP activity. This was partially offset by strong growth in Right Management outplacement activity and improving RPO year-over-year trends.
We expect the U.S. business to flip to low single-digit percentage revenue growth in the Q2 on an improved Experis revenue trend. Southern Europe revenue comprised 47% of consolidated revenue in the quarter. Revenue in Southern Europe was $2.1 billion, representing 3% growth in constant currency during the Q1. As adjusted, OUP for our Southern Europe business was $58 million in the quarter, and OUP margin was 2.8%. Restructuring charges of $4 million represented actions in France. France revenue equaled $1.1 billion and comprised 51% of the Southern Europe segment in the quarter and was flat on a constant currency basis. As adjusted, OUP for our France business was $21 million in the quarter. Adjusted OUP margin was 2%. France revenue trends improved during the Q1, and we expect a similar rate of revenue trend of flat to slight growth in the Q2.
Revenue in Italy equaled $475 million in the Q1, reflecting an increase of 8% on a days adjusted constant currency basis. OUP as adjusted equaled $29 million, and OUP margin was 6%. Our Italy business is executing well, and we estimate mid-single digit percentage revenue growth in the Q2. Our Northern Europe segment comprised 17% of consolidated revenue in the quarter. Revenue up $790 million represented a 1% decline in organic constant currency. As adjusted, OUP was -$3 million in the quarter. This represents year-over-year OUP improvement during the last two quarters, reflecting cost actions taken to date. The restructuring charges of $5 million primarily represent actions in the Nordics and the U.K. Our largest market in the Northern Europe segment is the U.K., which represents 34% of segment revenues in the quarter.
During the quarter, U.K. revenues decreased 2% on a days adjusted constant currency basis, representing ongoing stabilization. The remaining countries in the region progressed as expected, with largely stable to improving revenue trends. The Asia Pacific Middle East segment comprises 11% of total company revenue. In the quarter, revenues equaled $510 million, representing an increase of 8% in constant currency. As adjusted, OUP was $22 million, and OUP margin was 4.3%. Our largest market in the APME segment is Japan, which represented 57% of segment revenues in the quarter. Revenue in Japan grew 4% on a days adjusted constant currency basis. We remain pleased with the consistent performance of our Japan business, and we expect continued solid revenue growth in the Q2. I'll now turn to cash flow and balance sheet.
Thanks, Jack. In closing, as the market continues to stabilize, we're operating well, staying focused, and executing with discipline. Our team remains hyper-focused on delivering for the now, while a dedicated group advances our transformation initiatives to position us for future opportunities. I look forward to keeping you updated on our continued execution as we build on the progress we've made and capture the momentum ahead. As always, thank you to our talented team for their relentless focus and to our candidates and clients for your continued trust. Operator, please open the line for questions.