How it started
History
WPP was first founded as Wire and Plastic Products plc in 1971, and initially manufactured wire shopping baskets. The company would eventually reorganize its operations to focus more on advertising in 1985 when Martin Sorrell and Preston Rabl, searching for a listed company through which to build a worldwide marketing services company, bought a controlling stake.
In 1986, WPP became the parent company of Picquotware, a manufacturer of teapots and jugs, based in Northampton. In November 1987 a fire destroyed the Northampton factory, so production was restarted at Burntwood in Staffordshire. On 25 November 2004 WPP closed the Burntwood factory and stopped manufacturing Picquotware, with all of Picquotware's assets sold on 14 December 2004.
In the 1980s, WPP began its strategy of growth via acquisitions. In later years, WPP would regularly acquire dozens of companies annually, starting in January 1987, when WPP acquired Scott Stern Associates, at the time Scotland's largest design and advertising company, before acquiring J. Walter Thompson (including JWT, Hill & Knowlton, and MRB Group) for $566m at the same time. The company was listed on the NASDAQ a year later in 1988 (and later switched its secondary listing to the NYSE). In 1989, it acquired Ogilvy Group for $864m.
In 1989, WPP sold the JWT Tokyo office building to help pay for its J. Walter Thompson acquisition. Before purchasing the company, Martin Sorrell had reportedly identified that JWT owned its Tokyo office, rather than leasing it, and it was undervalued in the company's accounts. The building was sold two years after the acquisition and at the peak of the Japanese property market for a record $205 million, offsetting more than a third of the $566m company acquisition cost.
WPP's acquisitions continued into the 1990s, when WPP bought firms in the healthcare advertising, digital marketing, online shopping, digital media, data management, retail and corporate consultancy, and sports marketing industries. This included the 1999 acquisition of Lambie-Nairn. In 1998, WPP formed an alliance with Asatsu-DK Inc. of Japan.
From Wikipedia’s article on WPP plc, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3