Accenture PLC

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's fourth quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press one and then zero on your touch tone phone. You will hear a tone that you, excuse me, you may hear an acknowledgement that you've been placed into queue. You can remove yourself from queue at any time by repeating the one zero command. And should you require operator assistance during the conference, please press star, then zero, and an operator will assist you offline. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded, and I will now turn the conference over to our host, Katie O'Connor, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our fourth quarter and full fiscal 2024 earnings announcement. As the operator just mentioned, I'm Katie O'Connor, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. On today's call, you will hear from Julie Sweet, our Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Casey McClure, our current Chief Financial Officer, and Angie Park, our incoming 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 fourth quarter and full fiscal year. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before Angie provides our business outlook for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2025. 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 as 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, Katie, and everyone joining. And thank you to our 774,000 people around the world who have worked every day to be at the center of our clients' business and deliver 360-degree value for all our stakeholders. Our performance this year clearly demonstrates the resilience and agility of our business model, the power of our scale, and reinvention in action. FY24 was marked by a challenging market environment, and we have rapidly shifted to where our clients are buying, large reinventions that utilize the scale of Accenture's expertise and ecosystem relationships. And we have yet again put reinvention into action at Accenture, with our significant investment and early leadership in what we believe will be the most transformative technology of the next decade, GenAI. As a result, over the last four quarters, we have successfully positioned Accenture for strong growth in FY25. When market conditions improve, we will be well positioned to capitalize them. In FY24, we continue to deliver on our enduring shareholder value proposition to grow faster than the market and take share, deliver earnings growth and margin expansion, while investing at scale with strong free cash flow, disciplined capital allocation, and significant cash return to shareholders. Turning to our results. and the foundation for growth we have built for FY25. With our clients prioritizing large-scale transformations, we doubled down on our strategy to be the reinvention partner of our clients. Our success is reflected in our full fiscal year bookings of $81 billion, representing 14% growth in local currency, including 33 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million in the fourth quarter, bringing the total of such bookings to 125 for the year, 19 more than last year. We are proud to now have 310 Diamond clients, our largest client relationships, an increase of 10 from last year, expanding our base of deep client relationships and the vantage point we have on the market. We delivered revenues of $65 billion for the year, representing 2% growth in local currency while continuing to take market share on a rolling four-quarter basis against our basket of our closest global publicly traded competitors, which is how we calculate market share. We expanded adjusted operating margin by 10 basis points and delivered adjusted EPS growth of 2% while continuing to significantly invest in our business and our people with $6.6 billion in strategic acquisitions, $1.2 billion in R&D, and $1.1 billion in learning and development. We generated free cash flow of $8.6 billion, allowing us to return $7.8 billion of cash to shareholders. We completed the business optimization actions we announced in March 2023 to reduce structural costs. For the full fiscal year, we had $3 billion in new Gen AI bookings, including $1 billion in Q4. And for the full fiscal year, we had nearly $900 million in revenue. The magnitude of this achievement is seen in the comparison to FY23, where we had approximately $300 million in sales and roughly $100 million in revenue from Gen AI. This was an area where our clients continued to buy small deals, and we focused on accelerating our growth here. We have continued to steadily increase our data and AI workforce, reaching approximately 57,000 practitioners against our goal of 80,000 by the end of FY26. We invested in our people to continue to develop their marketable skills and to help us reinvent our services using Gen AI. Our people had approximately 44 million training hours this year, representing an increase of 10% predominantly due to Gen AI training. In addition to being a talent creator through our investment in learning, our talent strategy to succeed over the next decade is to have the best access to talent and to unlock the potential of our talent through, among other actions, ensuring our people feel they are net better off for working at Accenture across four dimensions, marketable skills, working for a purpose, well-being, financial, mental, and physical skills, and relationships where our people feel they belong and can thrive. In addition, our leadership in the market requires that we lead in innovation, which in turn requires access to broad pools of talent that provide the variety of perspectives, observations, and insights which are essential to continuously innovate. These strategies depend on us fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. And our superior execution of these strategies is demonstrated by our global recognition for the third year with the number one spot on the FTSE Global Diversity and Inclusion Index, an objective measurement of over 15,000 organizations, and our recent achievement of having 50-50 gender equality in our advanced technology centers in India, which have over 220,000 people. Our long-term growth depends on thriving communities, and we continue to successfully create value in the communities where we operate, such as our work helping address the United Kingdom's digital inclusion gap, partnering with Tech She Can on a new program, Regenerative AI, that aims to empower people in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities across the country to build their digital skills. Finally, I want to acknowledge how proud we are to have earned the number two spot on Time's World's Best Companies list, and the top spot on the world's best management consulting firms list by fourth. Over to you, Casey.