Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Accenture's first quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference 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. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero. 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, Ms. Angie Park. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks everyone for joining us today on our first quarter fiscal 2021 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. Casey will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet, along with some key operational metrics for the first quarter. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before Casey provides our business outlook for the second 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 items. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on 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.

Today, we are very pleased to announce strong financial results for our first quarter. I will begin by thanking our 514,000 people for their hard work and dedication to delivering value for our clients, which is what these results represent. Last quarter, I shared that as we began our fiscal year 21, we were turning a page. no longer navigating a crisis, but facing a new reality with a laser focus on delivering value to our clients at this time of great need and on returning to pre-COVID growth rates by the second half of our fiscal year. I also shared how we began fiscal year 21 stronger than pre-crisis. Our results in Q1 make clear how we have strengthened our market position as well as our ability to pivot our business with agility. Not only have we delivered a strong quarter, but we took exciting new actions to continue to strengthen our market position for FY21 and the future. Let's start with our financial results. We delivered revenue growth of 2% in local currency, well ahead of our guidance with broad-based improvement across the globe. We continue to extend our leadership position with our growth estimated over the trailing four quarters to be more than four times the market, which refers to our basket of publicly traded companies. We delivered exceptionally strong new bookings of $12.9 billion, a 25% increase over Q1 last year, including 16 clients with over $100 million in bookings. We continue to invest substantially in our business, including closing 10 acquisitions this quarter in strategic areas such as cloud, intelligent operations, and industry X. And as Casey will walk through, we delivered strong profitability and returned substantial cash to shareholders. Now let me highlight the actions we have taken in Q1 to better serve our clients, attract the best talent, and extend our leadership as a responsible business and trusted partner. We created Accenture Cloud first with a planned $3 billion three-year investment to help clients in what has become a once-in-a-digital-era replatforming of global business in the cloud. We launched our new purpose, our growth strategy to deliver 360-degree value to our clients, and our largest and most significant new brand campaign in a decade. In our annual cycle in December, we promoted 605 managing directors with a record 39% women, and I appointed 63 senior managing directors, including a record 29% women. I am excited to announce today that we met our previous goal of of 25% women managing directors globally by the end of 2020, and have raised the bar again, setting a new goal of 30% by the end of 2025. With 45% women overall, we are on track to meet our goal of 50-50 gender equality by 2025. We set external goals in the US, UK, and South Africa to achieve greater race and ethnicity representation overall, and among managing directors in these countries by 2025. We remain the only major professional services company in our industry around the world, public or private, to set these types of external goals and to have our level of transparency. We believe our diversity and commitment to inclusion and equality have been and will continue to be critical to our success and a differentiator in attracting the best talent. And building on our longstanding and well-recognized commitment to the environment, we announced industry-leading goals for 2025 to achieve net zero emissions, move to zero waste, and plan for water risk. As you can see, we have been busy moving forward in our new reality. Casey, over to you.