Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Accenture's fourth quarter fiscal 2019 earnings call. Now, at this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you wish to place yourself in queue for questions at any time, please press star then 1. You may remove yourself from that queue by depressing the pound key. As a reminder, today's call has been recorded. I will now turn the call over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Kevin, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2019 earnings announcement. As the operator just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. On today's call, you will hear from Julie Sweet, our 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. Julie 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 both the fourth quarter and full fiscal year. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before KC provides our business outlook for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2020. We will then take your questions before Julie 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 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 Julie.

Thank you, Angie, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. As a company and a leadership team, we focus every day on delivering on our commitments and creating value for our clients. And today, we are proud to announce that we have delivered another year of outstanding financial results, meeting or exceeding each of the objectives we laid out in our initial fiscal 19 business outlook. And I know that Pierre, our chairman and CEO who passed away in January, would have been very proud of the accomplishments this year of our nearly 500,000 people, including more than 7,000 outstanding managing directors. I would like to add a special thank you to David Roland for his inspiring and exceptional leadership during these past several months, and to our entire Global Management Committee, who came together under David's leadership to ensure that we delivered on our commitments. and which also was the ultimate way to honor Pierre and his incredible contribution to Accenture. Let me share a few highlights for the year. We generated record new bookings of $45.5 billion, including our highest ever quarterly bookings of $12.9 billion in Q4. Revenues for the year were $43.2 billion, an 8.5% increase in local currency, We delivered earnings per share of $7.36, a 9% increase on an adjusted basis. Operating margin was 14.6%, an expansion of 20 basis points. We generated outstanding free cash flow of $6 billion. We returned $4.6 billion in cash to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. And we just announced our first quarterly cash dividend of 80 cents per share, which reflects a 10% increase over the equivalent quarterly rate last year. We have demonstrated once again the durability and resilience of our business, and the strong demand for our services positions us very well for fiscal 20. Now, let me hand over to KC, who will review the numbers in greater detail.