Accenture PLC

And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Accenture fourth quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press 1 then 0 on your telephone's keypad. To remove yourself from queue, please repeat the 1 then 0 command. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star then 0. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Angie Park, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our fourth quarter and full 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 Chair and 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 2022. 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 everyone for joining us. Before diving into our results, thank you to our 624,000 incredibly talented people around the world, including over 8,500 managing directors. This past fiscal year, your hard work and dedication to creating value that matters for our clients was unwavering, despite the ongoing and sometimes quite extreme challenges of COVID. We've had a truly extraordinary year, as reflected in our outstanding financial results and in the 360-degree value we delivered beyond our financials. From the over 120,000 promotions and over 31 million training hours, an increase of 43% for our people, to increasing our workforce by approximately 118,000 people, creating significant employment opportunities in our communities, to achieving 46% women on our way to our goal of gender parity by 2025, to our top three ranking in the Refinitiv Global Diversity and Inclusion Index for the fourth consecutive year, to the number one position with our largest ecosystem partners, to the exciting accomplishments of 50% renewable energy now powering our offices and centers globally, to the donation of $54 million in COVID surge relief. In December, we will publish our first-ever annual 360-degree value report to more fully describe the FY21 value we created in all directions, and we'll report against three additional key ESG frameworks, SASB, TCFD, and WEF IBC. We believe that the trust we have from our clients and partners, our continuous innovation, and our ability to consistently attract the best people, including the 56,000 net new hires this past quarter, are directly linked to our commitment to measuring our success by how well we create this 360-degree value for all our stakeholders, clients, people, partners, shareholders, and communities, and on our culture of shared success. Here are some key financial highlights of the year, which position us strongly as we begin FY22. FY21 demonstrated our leadership in helping our clients achieve compressed transformations. with 72 clients with bookings greater than $100 million compared to 53 last year, and 229 Diamond clients, our largest client relationship compared to 216 last year. With a 20% increase in bookings to $59 billion, we have strong momentum across all dimensions of our business, across geographic markets, industries, and services. Reaching revenues of $50.5 billion, a significant milestone representing 11% growth, we added $6.2 billion in revenue this year, gaining significant market share with 40 basis points of operating margin expansion, demonstrating yet again our ability to grow profitably and at scale. We achieved this profitable growth while investing at a higher level than ever before, with $4.2 billion in acquisitions, $1.1 billion in R&D in assets, platforms, and industry solutions, including growing our portfolio of patents and pending patents to more than 8,200, and total training investment of $900 million. And according to BrandZ, our brand value increased 56% to over $64 billion this ranking us number 27 on the prestigious BrandZ's top 100 most valuable global brands list. Finally, I want to highlight cloud and our ability to move with agility to serve our clients' needs and capture momentum in the market. At the beginning of FY21, after investing in cloud for a decade, we saw that the pandemic would dramatically accelerate our clients' move to the cloud. More than technology, the move to the cloud would be about the adoption of a new operating system for the future enterprise. A dynamic continuum of capabilities from public to edge to everything in between. Opening up radically new ways for companies to work, compete, and drive value. Just over one year ago, we created Accenture Cloud First to capitalize on this momentum. bringing together all of our capabilities from migration to cloud native development, data, AI, industry, talent, and change. Accenture Cloud First was the biggest driver of our overall cloud business growth from $12 billion to $18 billion, a 44% increase. Casey, over to you.