A global IT Major Accenture has reported financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2022, ended Nov. 30, 2021, with revenues of $15.0 billion, an increase of 27% in both U.S. dollars and local currency over the same period last year.
Accenture’s revenue beat in Q1FY22 ($600 million) and a strong upward revision in revenue growth outlook for FY22 (an increase of $3.5 billion) indicate a robust demand environment.
Accenture’s financial year ends on August 31.
The company said that its attrition has fallen 200 bps sequentially to 17% in the first quarter of financial year 2022. This was multi-quarter high of 19% in Q4FY21.
Accenture hired more than 50,000 employees in Q1 with total headcounts of 674,000 employees, on the back of 55,000 additions in the fourth quarter of FY21.
Announcing the results, Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture said, “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,” she added.
Sweet further said, “And we expanded operating margin 20 basis points in Q1, with adjusted EPS growth of 28%, while we continued 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.”
Commenting on attrition Sweet said, “One of our eight leadership essentials is caring for our people personally and professionally. And this is a very important part of how we are able to scale and drive our culture and you’ll see in our attrition it again is at the lower end of the pyramid in India and we have significantly lower attrition at the executive and above. And that is very much we believe because of how we focus on our people”
“I want to congratulate our 1,030 new promotes to managing director, 143 new appointments to senior managing director, and the more than 90,000 people we promoted around the world in Q1 overall.” she added.
Industry analysts think that the attrition rates will come down to pre-Covid levels over the next two-three quarters.
