By Arun Sudhaman

NEW YORK: Omnicom Group, the owner of PR agencies Fleishman-Hillard, Ketchum and Porter Novelli, has reported that its public relations revenues grew by 5.2 percent in 2010.

That increase, calculated on an organic basis, took the group’s PR earnings to US$1.146 billion. It also meant that Omnicom’s PR agencies demonstrated the lowest rate of growth of the group’s four units, lagging behind speciality (+10.8 percent), CRM (+6.9 percent), and advertising (+5.3 percent).

For the fourth quarter of 2010, PR revenues grew by 7.1 percent on an organic basis, again behind the group’s other marketing disciplines.

On a non-organic basis, PR revenues grew by almost eight percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, which included Ketchum’s acquisitions of Newscan in China and Maslov PR in Russia.

Despite lagging other units, Omnicom’s PR results demonstrate a solid turnaround over 2009, when PR earnings plunged by 11 percent.

Overall, Omnicom grew its reveues by seven percent in 2010, to $12.54 billion. Fourth quarter revenues increased by almost 10 percent.