Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's third quarter fiscal 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you have a question at any time during the call, please press 1, then 0. Once again, for questions, please press 1, then 0. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Greg, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our third quarter fiscal 2020 earnings announcement. As Greg 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 the third quarter. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before KC provides our business outlook for the fourth 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 thank you, everyone, for joining us. Since our last earnings call, the world has continued to face unprecedented challenges, health, economic, and social. And throughout Q3, we saw rapidly deteriorating economic conditions globally. I am proud of and want to thank our people and our leaders around the world for coming together in Q3 to continue to deliver on our commitments to our shareholders, our clients, our people, and our communities in the face of this crisis. Before turning to our delivery on these commitments, let me provide a bit more color on the context. Within days of our earnings call on March 19th, we continued to quickly mobilize our people to work from home, and during the quarter, we had approximately 95% of our people enabled to work remotely. For all of April and May, other than China, virtually every country in which we operate was in lockdown. In addition, As you may remember, in January we announced that as of March 1st, we were implementing a new growth model and making leadership changes. We seamlessly implemented this new model, demonstrating our agility at massive scale, which is a testament to the talent of our over 500,000 people and the strength of our leadership team. So in terms of delivering on our commitments to our shareholders, We delivered Q3 revenues in line with the range we provided only eight days after the global pandemic was declared, and we hit a new milestone of approximately 70% in the new, which is digital, cloud, and security. We delivered $11 billion in new bookings, a 6% increase over Q3 last year, which demonstrates the relevance of our services and our ability to sell in a remote everything world. We continued to invest in our business for the long term, closing an additional $742 million in strategic acquisitions for a total of $1.3 billion year to date. We delivered operating margin expansion of 10 basis points, and we continued to strengthen our balance sheet, closing the quarter with $6.4 billion in cash. In terms of delivering on our commitments to our clients, our clients rely on us for mission-critical work. 95 of our top 100 clients have been with us for over 10 years because we are a trusted partner. And during this time, we have deepened that trust yet again because of our ability to deliver seamlessly. including how we transitioned our people from the delivery centers in India and the Philippines to work from home without service interruption. For example, we closed the books on time for more than 70 public companies in operations, and we continued our pre-crisis track record in technology with around-the-clock go-lives on new releases every 15 minutes on average. In both technology and operations, we were able to execute entirely remote knowledge transfer with great success. In terms of delivering on our commitments to our people, we continue to invest in training and development and the continuous reskilling of our people. We are on track to deliver the same training hours as last year while pivoting completely to a digital learning experience built on our platform, Accenture Connected Learning. We continue to promote people mid-year, although at a reduced level compared to last year, to ensure that our very best talent continues to build a vibrant career and is recognized and rewarded. In terms of delivering on our commitments to our communities, we believe strongly in our responsibility to contribute to the well-being of our communities. In addition to our teams who have supported our health and public service clients with extraordinary COVID-19-related work, we also wanted to make a unique pro bono contribution that leveraged our strengths. In addition to our many local activities, we are very proud that we are helping put people back to work around the world with the People Plus Work Connect platform that we created together with Lincoln Financial Group, ServiceNow, and Verizon. This platform is a global online employer-to-employer initiative to bring together, at no cost, companies that have laid off or furloughed people with organizations in urgent need of workers. Designed by CHROs, including our own extraordinary CHRO, Ellen Shook, Accenture built the platform in only 14 days. The response has been overwhelming. as more than 1,300 organizations across approximately 80 countries have engaged, with currently about 400,000 positions already on the platform, which are balanced between open needs and availability.