Q2 2020: resilient and competitive performance amidst covid-19.

highlights

• Q2 2020 organic growth -25.2%
• Q1 2020 underlying EBITA € 67m
• Q1 2020 EBITA margin 1.5%
• revenue decline in Europe and US softening through Q2, in sync with easing lockdowns; resilient topline in Rest of the world.
• gross margin 18.7%, down 130bp YoY impacted by significant COVID-19 effects and slowing perm.
• positive EBITA margin of 1.5%; recovery ratio of 42% driven by agile cost management and governmental schemes.
• global market leadership strengthened by resilient and diversified portfolio; digital field steering driving competitive growth.
• resilient countercyclical Q2 free cash flow € 530m.
• June organic sales growth down 21%; volumes in early July indicate further positive momentum.

'During the unprecedented COVID-19 situation, our key priority remains the health and safety of our employees, candidates, clients and other stakeholders,' says CEO Jacques van den Broek. 'I'm incredibly proud of my Randstad colleagues given their everlasting commitment and dedication with which they are responding to these challenging times. Our Q2 results demonstrate the strong operational agility of our highly experienced management teams, while underpinning the resilience of our diversified portfolio and free cash flow generation.

Trading conditions in the second quarter reached the low point in April when country lockdowns were most intensified. Since then, the revenue decline started to gradually ease into May and June in most of our geographies. Visibility remains very limited, with ongoing high macroeconomic uncertainty and some recent signs of regional lockdowns again. We were pleased with our positive EBITA in Q2, reflecting a strong recovery ratio of 42%. Our free cash flow came in high at € 530 million, marking the countercyclical nature of our working capital requirements, and hence the resilience of our free cash flow generation through the cycle. This further solidifies our strong liquidity and solvency position.

Building on the 'safely back to work' alliance with our industry peers and supported by governments, employers and trade unions in 26 countries, Randstad has ensured the safe and healthy return of more than 90,000 people to the workplace since the start of COVID-19. The great spirit amongst our workforce and successful roll-out of our digitally enhanced activity-based field steering model will be instrumental to our performance going forward. We are certain that Randstad has never been better positioned to further strengthen its global market leadership.'

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David Tailleur - Director Investor Relations

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Steven Vriesendorp - Investor Relations Officer

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Karl Hanuska - a.i. Media Relations Manager

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about Randstad

Randstad is the global leader in the HR services industry. We support people and organizations in realizing their true potential by combining the power of today's technology with our passion for people. We call it Human Forward. In 2019, we helped more than two million candidates find a meaningful job with our 280,000 clients. Furthermore, we trained more than 350,000 people. Randstad is active in 38 markets around the world and has top 3 positions in almost half of these. In 2019, Randstad had on average 38,280 corporate employees and generated revenue of € 23.7 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, seewww.randstad.com.