Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Accenture's second quarter fiscal 2019 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. Should you require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Trish, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2019 earnings announcement. As Trish just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. On today's call, you will hear from David Rowland, our Interim Chief Executive Officer, and Casey McClure, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the news release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. David will begin with an overview of our results. KC will take you through the financial details including the income statement and balance sheet along with some key operational metrics for the second quarter. David will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before KC provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2019. We'll then take your questions before David provides a wrap-up at the end of the call. Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including our business outlook, are forward-looking and, as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's news release and discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in this call. During our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for our investors. We include reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures where appropriate to GAAP in our news release or in the investor relations section of our website at Accenture.com. As always, Accenture assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this conference call. Now let me turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Angie, and thanks so much to all of you for joining on today's call. Before we get into the quarter, I want to take a moment to acknowledge Pierre and how important he was to Accenture throughout his decades-long career and his leadership as chairman and CEO. From a personal standpoint, it's certainly a different feeling doing an earnings call without him, but as you'll hear in our comments, I'm confident Pierre would have been really pleased with all we accomplished in the second quarter and the first half of fiscal 19. With that said, we delivered outstanding results in the second quarter, and I want to share some of the highlights. We delivered record new bookings of $11.8 billion. We grew revenues 9% in local currency to $10.5 billion, with continued double-digit growth across many parts of the business. We delivered earnings per share of $1.73, a 9% increase on an adjusted basis. Operating margin was 13.3%, an expansion of 20 basis points. Our free cash flow was outstanding at $1.2 billion. And we continue to return substantial cash to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, including $2.7 billion on a year-to-date basis. Today, we announced a semiannual cash dividend of $1.46 per share, which will bring total dividend payment for the year to $2.92 per share, a 10% increase over last year. So with the first half of the year behind us, I feel very good about the broad-based strength of our financial results and the momentum we see across the business as we enter the second half. Later, Casey will mention that we're raising key elements of our business outlook, and I'm confident in our ability to deliver another strong year. Now it gives me great pleasure to hand over to our new CFO, Casey McClure, who will review the numbers in greater detail. Over to you, Casey.