As at 9.45am WPP's share price stood at 401p, up 7.1% from yesterday's close.
The marketing services group's 2008 results show the company's post-tax profits fell just 0.2% from 2007 to £513.9m. It bucked the recent trend for companies to cut dividends by increasing its annual payout by 15%.
Revenues rose 20.9% to £7.48bn, driven both by the weaker pound and the acquisition of global market research company TNS, which was counted only for the last two months of the year.
Organic revenue growth was 2.7% at a global level, but the group admitted the rate had slowed in the second half of the year to just over 1%. It did not say what the rate was in the fourth quarter.
North America was its weakest region with almost flat organic revenue growth in 2008.
The UK, which has recently been the group's slowest growing region, has improved and over 2008 performed more strongly than France and Germany, while Spain and Italy were the weakest of the big five Western European markets.
Both the UK and continental Europe notched up organic growth of more than 2%.
WPP, which is headed by chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, said there was relatively strong like-for-like revenue growth at a global level for the first two months of 2009.
However, the company's budgets for 2009 have been set to reflect a 2% fall in organic revenues and its individual units have been cutting costs and jobs accordingly.
The results did not reveal how many people have been made redundant, but did show that staff numbers -- excluding staff at associate companies and TNS -- had increased at the end of 2008 to 112,262 compared with 100,869 at the end of 2007.
WPP is expecting the first half of 2009 to be worse than the second half, while it still believes "there will be a recovery of sorts in 2010" driven by the massive fiscal injections currently underway around the world.
As a result of the inflation government action is likely to provoke, WPP expects capital rich countries, such as Brazil, China, India and Japan, to benefit. It believes WPP's strategic focus on these countries, on new media and consumer insight will benefit equally.
WPP also contradicted speculation that it would write down the value of TNS, for which it paid £1.03bn, and opted to recognise the acquisition as adding £1.13bn of goodwill.
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