Accenture PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Accenture first quarter fiscal 2022 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 keypad. You may withdraw your question at any time by repeating the 1 then 0 command. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star then 0. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Angie Park, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our first quarter fiscal 2022 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 the first quarter. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before KC provides our business outlook for the second 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.

Thank you, Angie, and thank you everyone for joining us. I would like to start by thanking our 674,000 people around the world for your extraordinary work and commitment to our clients. Our results again this quarter reflect how you are living our purpose every day to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. As more and more companies embrace compressed transformation, our clients are turning to us as their trusted partner. as reflected in our outstanding growth of 27% this quarter. We added 15 new diamond clients, bringing the total to 244. Diamond clients are our largest relationships, and to give some context, we added 13 diamonds in all of FY21. We also had record bookings of $16.8 billion, 30% growth year-over-year, with 20 clients with bookings over $100 million. And we expanded operating margin 20 basis points in Q1 with adjusted EPS growth of 28%. While we continue to invest in our business and people, including $1.7 billion in acquisitions. And in just the first quarter, we invested $250 million in learning for our people with 8.6 million training hours for approximately 14 hours per person. The extraordinary demand we see in the market reflects the imperative of digital transformation. Companies are making critical decisions about who will be their strategic partners, and they are selecting us because of our talented people, our deep industry and technology capabilities, and our commitment to both create value and lead with values. We predicted back in 2013 that every business would be a digital business. And we have executed a clear strategy to rotate our business, to anticipate and be ready to serve our clients. And when the pandemic hit, we were ready. With capabilities that scale reflected in 70% of our revenue at that time being from digital cloud and security. with strong relationships with the world's leading technology companies, which in some cases go back decades, with a focus on growing our people through learning, allowing us to rapidly reskill, with an unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity and equality, and caring for our people professionally and personally, making us a talent magnet in a tight labor market, adding 50,000 talented individuals in Q1. And it is our breadth of capabilities across strategy and consulting, interactive technology, and operations, which is unique in our industry that allows us to work side-by-side with our clients to deliver results. And we believe our goal to create 360-degree value for our clients, people, shareholders, partners, and communities is an essential part of our success. Certainly, our commitment to creating vibrant career paths for our people is an important part of this value, and we just completed our annual promotion process. I want to congratulate our 1,030 new promotes to managing director, 143 new appointments to senior managing directors, and the more than 90,000 people we promoted around the world in Q1 overall. Today, we launched our 360 value reporting experience. a new way to show our progress and the value we create in all directions for all of our stakeholders. More on that later. Casey, over to you.