Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Accenture's fourth quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode and later on we will conduct a question and answer session. If you have a question at that time, please press one and then zero on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw your question at any time by repeating that one zero command And if you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the numbers. If you should require any assistance during the call, please press star and then zero. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded, and I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Thank you, operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our fourth quarter and full fiscal 2020 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 releases 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 the 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 2021. 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. Fiscal 20 results demonstrate the relevance of our growth strategy, the resilience of our business and our people, our operational rigor and discipline, the power of the relationships we have with the world's leading companies and ecosystem partners, and our ability to pivot rapidly to meet the needs of our clients and new ways of operating. Fiscal year 20 also demonstrated the unique advantages of our long track record, of focusing on being a responsible business, from our commitment to inclusion and diversity that has helped make us an innovation-led company, to our focus on investing in our people and their skills, to the way we live our core values, all of which help make us the trusted partner that our clients have turned to in the face of the ongoing global health, economic, and social crisis. And if there was ever any doubt, we clearly demonstrated that scale matters. We are unique in our industry for the scale of our digital, cloud, and security capabilities and for our leadership in all the services critical to building a company's digital core, transforming its operations, and accelerating growth with our four services of strategy and consulting, interactive, technology, and operations. as well as our deep industry experience and data and artificial intelligence capabilities. And we are also unique in the scale we have with large client relationships and across 13 industry groups with a global footprint. This scale has been core to our resilience in the second half of FY20. Let me share a few highlights. We are now approximately 70% in the new digital cloud and security. just when the need for these services, already high, accelerated dramatically as a result of COVID-19. In fact, in FY21, we will no longer measure the new, as the new is now our core. And as of March 1st, with the new growth model, we have embedded digital everywhere. We will continue to share color on our growth drivers, including cloud and security, as we continue to invest in these large, high-growth market opportunities. We ended FY20 with 216 Diamond clients, which represent our largest client relationships, a net increase of 15 over the prior year. We transitioned seamlessly to our new growth model with a new global management committee to increase our agility in bringing together the power of our multi-service teams to our clients and to create greater opportunities for our people. and the new model and team successfully passed a challenging test, navigating the pandemic and emerging stronger. More on that later. We committed to stronger bookings in Q4, and we delivered with our second highest bookings ever in the fourth quarter, finishing the year with a record $50 billion of sales. In FY20, we continued to increase our investments for the future at scale, with $1.5 billion in acquisitions, $871 million in R&D in our assets, platforms, and solutions, including growing our portfolio of patents and pending patents to over 7,900 and delivering a 6% increase in training hours for our 500,000 people while reducing our training costs by 11% to $866 million. due to our digital learning platforms. We are now 45% women on track for our 2025 goal of a 50-50 gender balance. And this month, we announced ambitious new goals to increase our African American and Black and Hispanic American and Latinx communities in the US. And despite the unprecedented uncertainty and volatility, With the pandemic declared only a few days before we had to give guidance for Q3, we called it like we saw it for each of Q3 and Q4 and delivered within our guidance. For the full year, we delivered either within or above our guided range and continued to deliver growth ahead of market, modest margin expansion, and record free cash flow. Our resilience begins with an exceptional leadership team and are incredibly talented and dedicated people. Before I turn over to Casey, I want to thank each of them for what has truly been an exceptional year that we should all be proud of. Casey, over to you.