Accenture PLC

Good day, and welcome to Accenture's first quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Katie O'Connor, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our first quarter fiscal 2025 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, and Angie Park, 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. Angie 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 an update on our market positioning before Angie provides our business outlook for the second 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 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 the 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, Katie, and everyone joining. And thank you to our nearly 799,000 people around the world for their extraordinary work and commitment to our clients, which resulted in a strong quarter of financial results, creating 360-degree value for all our stakeholders. I am very pleased with our performance this quarter and as we delivered on our strategy to position Accenture for strong growth in fiscal year 2025. Here are a few highlights of the 360-degree value we created. Our clients continue to prioritize large-scale transformations, and we are their reinvention partner of choice, as reflected in our bookings of $18.7 billion, including 30 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million. We grew 8% in local currency this quarter, with revenue of $17.7 billion approximately $240 million above the top end of our guided range, and continued 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 had another milestone quarter in Gen AI, with $1.2 billion in new bookings and approximately $500 million in revenue. Operating margin was flat compared to adjusted operating margin last year, EPS grew 10% over Q1 adjusted FY24 EPS. While we continue to invest in our business and our people with $242 million deployed primarily across five acquisitions and with approximately 14 million training hours this quarter designed to help us bring the latest in solutions and technology to our clients, provide our people with marketable skills, and reinvent our services using Gen AI. This averages 19 hours per person. We increased our data and AI workforce to approximately 69,000, continuing progress against our goal of 80,000 by the end of fiscal year 2026. We are proud to be recognized by Fortune as one of the world's best workplaces, jumping from number 10 to number six. This recognition is important as it is based on feedback from our people around the world. An essential part of our strategy is having access to the best people And being an attractive workplace is critical to our success. And in recognition of our strong brand, we are proud to earn our highest brand value to date on Interbrand's prestigious Best Global Brands list, increasing to $21.9 billion and ranking number 31. We continue to invest in creating and maintaining thriving communities, which our long-term growth depends on. This quarter, among other things, Accenture has partnered with the NGO Instituto ProA in Brazil to help transform the lives of low-income youth by providing them with digital skills to enter the workforce. I am very pleased with our results this quarter and our return to broad-based growth due to our strategy to be our client reinvention partner of choice. We also have a resilient business model with diversity across markets, industries, and the types of work our clients come to us for, both consulting type of work and managed services. Over to you, Angie.