Accenture PLC

Good day and welcome to Accenture's third quarter fiscal 2025 earnings 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 Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our third quarter fiscal 2025 earnings announcement. As the Operator just mentioned, I'm Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director, Head of Investor Relations. On today's call, we 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've 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 third quarter. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before Angie provides our business outlook for the fourth quarter and our 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 risk and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, those factors set forth in today's news release and discussed in our annual reports 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 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.

Thank you, Alexia, and to everyone joining this morning. And thank you to our more than 790,000 people around the world for your extraordinary work and commitment to our clients, which resulted in another strong quarter of reinvention across industries, companies, and countries. Starting with our quarter, we are very pleased with our results as we continue to deliver on our strategy to be our clients' reinvention partner of choice and lead in Gen AI. Our clients continue to prioritize large-scale reinventions as reflected in our bookings of $19.7 billion, including 30 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million. We grew 7% in local currency with revenue of $17.7 billion above our guided range, and we continue 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 are a leader in Gen AI with another milestone quarter of $1.5 billion in bookings and over $700 million in revenues, bringing our Q3 year-to-date Gen AI bookings to a total of $4.1 billion in and revenue to $1.8 billion. Operating margin expanded 40 basis points compared to adjusted operating margin last year, and we delivered EPS growth of 12% over Q3 FY24 adjusted EPS. We continue to invest significantly in our business to drive additional growth in highly strategic areas. We invested in our people with 38 million training hours year to date, up 18% over the same period last year. We increased our data and AI workforce to approximately 75,000, continuing progress against our goal of 80,000 by the end of FY26. We invested over $297 million across four strategic acquisitions and investments. We are expanding our LearnVantage capabilities through this quarter's acquisitions of TalentSprint in India and Ascentient in the United States, enhancing our ability to deliver industry-relevant certifications and tailored upskilling and reskilling programs. In Japan, we acquired Umemi, which strengthens Song's ability to craft, launch, and scale digital products that are both intelligent and impactful. We are also investing in our Industry X capabilities with the acquisition of Sobin in Scotland, expanding our infrastructure and capital projects expertise globally and across Europe. We are proud to have earned the number six spot on the Great Place to Work list of the world's best workplaces, and to have been recognized as a great place to work in 12 individual countries representing nearly 80% of our people. And in recognition of our strong brands, we are proud to have earned the number 20 position on Cancer Brands' prestigious list of the top 100 most valuable global brands. Our brand value has increased by 27% to $103.8 billion, up from $81.9 billion last year. A key component of our long-term strategy is investing and maintaining thriving communities and creating pipelines of talent, the skills we need, which are important for businesses to thrive. In the UK, one of our largest markets, we are supporting a government initiative to create a coalition with 10 other companies focused on upskilling 7.5 million people, one fifth of the UK workforce in AI skills, breaking down barriers to opportunity and unlocking economic growth. I'm also thrilled to congratulate our 97,000 people who were promoted this fiscal year, including more than 800 who were promoted to managing director. In summary, we had a strong quarter. Over to you, Angie.