From our Chair & CEO

With record bookings and record revenues, we continued to take market share, grow profitably and invest in our business and our incredible 721,000 people around the globe. We expanded our largest and longest client relationships, many of which include the world’s leading companies and governments, while building new ones. We are proud to have achieved our highest brand value and rank to date on BrandZ’s prestigious Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list, increasing 28% to over $82 billion and ranking No. 26.

We promoted approximately 157,000 of our people, delivered more than 40 million training hours and added nearly 100,000 people to our global team. Today, we are 47% women with a goal of gender parity by 2025. We have set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2025, and now power our offices and centers worldwide with over 85% renewable electricity, on our way to our goal of 100% by 2023.

We create value for communities around the world, ranging from creating jobs to developing digital skills, supporting refugees and enabling young entrepreneurs. For example, we are leveraging our expertise in digital learning and collaboration, partnering with UNICEF's Generation Unlimited on the new Passport to Earning platform program to equip 10 million young people ages 15 to 24 across 10 countries with digital skills to prepare them for work.

We measure our success by both our financial results and the broader 360° value we create for our stakeholders. We believe transparency builds trust. To share our progress, we launched our digital 360° Value Reporting Experience last year with all of our expanded reporting and data in one place. For more information on the 360° value we are creating, please visit the Accenture 360° Value Reporting Experience, which reflects new information each quarter. In December 2022, we will also publish our progress and performance against our goals and the frameworks on which we report.

As we begin the new fiscal year, we believe the depth and breadth of our services have never been more relevant. We look forward to the future and will continue to pivot to capture new opportunities, create 360° value, operate our own business with operational excellence and deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity for all.

Strong financial results allow us to deliver more 360° value for all our stakeholders. In fiscal 2022, we delivered revenues of $62 billion, representing a record 26% growth in local currency, adding $11 billion in revenues for the year. We again gained significant market share, expanded our operating margin by 10 basis points, increased earnings per share to $10.71, a 22% increase over adjusted fiscal 2021 earnings per share, and returned $6.6 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.

Our strong financial results reflect our unique ability to serve the needs of our clients across their enterprises and over time. Our clients include more than three-quarters of the FORTUNE Global 500. Of our top 100 clients, 99 have been with us for more than a decade. Our capabilities range from creative to consulting, strategy to systems integration to managed services, across functions from finance, HR and IT, to marketing, supply chain and manufacturing, across our five industry groups and all major markets. Our managed services have become increasingly strategic as companies seek to move faster and leverage our digital platforms and talent as well as reduce cost.  

The range of these capabilities and accompanying insights have enabled us to help our clients achieve compressed transformations. Compressed transformations are bold programs on accelerated timeframes, often spanning multiple parts of the enterprise at the same time. In fiscal 2022, we had 100 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million compared to 72 last fiscal year. We ended the year with 267 Diamond clients, our largest client relationships, which is up significantly from 229 last fiscal year, demonstrating the trust and confidence our clients have in us.

By staying close to our clients, understanding and anticipating their needs, and investing in solutions to help them, we are able to create tangible value for our clients. In today’s environment, industries, markets and companies are being affected differently—and whatever the opportunity or challenge, all strategies lead to technology. Our strong ecosystem relationships are critical to the value we create with our clients. We are proud to be the No. 1 partner for nine out of our top 10 ecosystem partners, all leaders in the technology industry.

We believe that the companies that will lead in the next decade need to harness the five key forces of change we have identified—total enterprise reinvention, talent, sustainability, the metaverse continuum and the ongoing technology revolution. We are investing and co-creating with clients and partners to lead in helping our clients thrive across these forces, which we expect to have different time horizons. Today, the strong demand we continue to see across our geographic markets, services and industries is being primarily driven by the first two, as companies are in the early stages of harnessing these forces. We have summarized below each of the five key forces as we currently see them evolving.

• Total enterprise reinvention
  as we believe every part of every business must be transformed by technology, data and AI, with new ways of working and engaging with customers, employees and partners, and new business models, products and services. We are helping clients build their digital core, optimize operations and accelerate growth.
• Talent
  as companies must be able to access great talent, be talent creators not just consumers, and unlock the potential of their people—from the ways they organize and work, to their culture, to their employee value proposition.
• Sustainability
  as consumers, employees, business partners, regulators and investors are demanding companies move from commitment to action—we believe every business must be a sustainable business.
• The metaverse continuum
  moving seamlessly between virtual and physical, which we believe will provide even greater possibilities in the next waves of digital transformation.
• The ongoing technology revolution
  from the rich innovation to come in the powerful technologies being used to transform companies today, to the new fields of the future, from quantum computing to science and space technology.

We believe that helping clients navigate these five key forces of change will, in turn, drive our growth.

We are able to deliver value for our clients because of our people. One of our eight Leadership Essentials is to care deeply for our people personally and professionally. We want each of our people to believe they are net better off because they are a part of Accenture. This year, we were recognized as a top 10 Great Place to Work^® in nine countries—Argentina, Brazil, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States, which jumped 38 spots to rank No. 6—which represent approximately 76% of our people. These recognitions reflect a tangible demonstration of our commitment to our people and help build our brand among potential recruits.

We seek to offer our people vibrant career paths, meaningful opportunities to grow and continuous learning. In fiscal year 2022, we invested $1.1 billion in training and development of our people. Our investment in learning and our people also helps us be more resilient, allowing us to more easily pivot to new areas of growth as markets and our clients change.

Another leadership essential, which is also tied to caring for our people, is that we ask leaders to live our unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity. Our commitment to inclusion and diversity unleashes innovation and we believe creates an environment where all of our people have an opportunity to feel they belong, advance and thrive. In connection with our priorities around inclusion and diversity, we set goals, share them publicly, collect data to continuously improve and hold our leaders accountable. We are proud that for the third time in five years, we ranked No. 1 on the Refinitiv Diversity & Inclusion Index of more than 12,000 publicly listed companies globally.

We believe our commitment to inclusion and diversity makes us more attractive to top talent. From innovation, to unlocking the potential of our people to giving us access to more great talent, this commitment and expectation of our leaders is critical to our ability to deliver strong financial results.

As part of our commitment to creating a place where people can be successful both professionally and personally, we take a holistic view of well-being. Well-being includes physical, mental, emotional and financial well-being—providing specially defined programs and practices to meet our people’s fundamental human needs.

For example, in fiscal year 2022, we have continued to elevate our support for the well-being of our people, led by our Chief Health Officer and with digital tools and initiatives to help them cope and to strengthen their mental resilience.

Those programs include access to in-person and virtual counseling and support, to digital tools like Calm and Wysa, to our Mental Health Ally program and to our many Thrive Global programs, which collectively bring science-based solutions to lower stress, enhance well-being and productivity, and build resilience and belonging. Specifically relating to COVID-19, our people continue to benefit from the robust support established since the beginning of the pandemic.

We seek to build a culture of shared success—with our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. We have mentioned two of our eight Leadership Essentials. These eight set the standard for what we expect from all our people. They are core to our ability to lead across market environments and uncertainties and achieve shared success. They are so important that we wanted to summarize them this year.

Our sustainability commitments in how we operate our own business, in addition to helping our clients, are an important part of our commitment to shared success. We hold ourselves accountable to clear and measurable objectives, including reaching net-zero emissions by 2025 with 100% renewable electricity by 2023, moving towards zero waste including reusing or recycling e-waste by 2025, and planning for water risk by 2025.

Our purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity for all. And more than ever, we are committed to creating 360° value in the year ahead and in every direction for all our stakeholders.

In closing, thank you to our incredibly talented people around the world for their commitment and hard work to deliver value every day. And thank you to our clients, shareholders, partners and communities for your continued trust and support.

Julie Sweet
Chair & Chief Executive Officer
October 12, 2022