NEWS13 October 2015
UK — Polling and research agency YouGov has reported a 13% increase in annual sales, to £76.1m for the year end July 2015, helped by media coverage of the UK general election and Scottish referendum.
Despite problems among pollsters failing to accurately predict the UK general election outcome, YouGov’s statutory pre-tax profit increased to £2.7m, an increase of 265%.
In its financial statement, the company said that although political polling is only a small part of YouGov’s business, because of its high profile it gets a lot of attention “particularly when the polls prove to be out of line with the election results, as they were in the 2015 General Election in the UK.”
“This was a reminder to the entire industry that we must treat each result as an opportunity to learn and to adapt our methodology, and we will be making a full report on this at our annual Cambridge conference in November.”
Among the company’s achievements in the past year were the launch of its Profiles product in the UK, German and US. It cited its newest markets of Asia Pacific and France as achieving strong growth.
Stephan Shakespeare, chief executive, said: “We are well positioned to deliver the medium term goals that we set out to shareholders last year and see significant opportunities for further growth of our existing data products and services, BrandIndex and Omnibus, as well as high potential for the YouGov Cube and YouGov Profiles.”