PwC firms around the world achieved gross revenues of US$50.3 billion – up 13.4% in local currency and 11.4% in US dollars for the 12 months ending 30 June 2022. Revenue growth was strong throughout the year, following the rebound in the last quarter of FY21 as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic subsided.
“In a year of rapid change and numerous challenges globally, our talented people used their broad and diverse range of capabilities to support our clients and stakeholders and to make positive contributions to society. The results we achieved in FY22 are a direct outcome of our strategy, The New Equation, which we launched in June 2021. Its impact is apparent in our financial performance, according to PwC.
For the first time, PwC firms across the world earned gross annual revenues of more than US$50 billion. During a difficult year for the global economy, we achieved growth in all businesses while also repositioning our portfolio including 17 acquisitions and the disposal of our Global Mobility & Immigration business,” said Bob Moritz, PwC’s Global Chairman.
Strong performance across the world
Across our network, PwC’s community of solvers is bringing our strategy, The New Equation, to life, helping clients with what they tell us they need most – to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes. The growth numbers for the full FY22 year reflect an increase in activity as the COVID-19 pandemic abated and as our firms managed challenges from geopolitical conflicts, including our decision to cease operations in Russia.
Our revenues in the Americas showed strong growth of 16%, after a flat performance in FY21. The US grew by 17%. Revenue growth across South and Central America was strongest in Brazil, which reported an increase of 21%.
Asia Pacific revenues were up 14%, with strong performance from South Korea, which posted a year-on-year revenue increase of 23%, India which posted growth of 21%, China which recorded growth of 13%, and Australia which reported growth of 17%.
Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) revenues were up by 10%. In the UK and Middle East combined revenues rose by 12%, in Germany they increased by 14%.
Growth reflected in all businesses
The New Equation strategy, built on our multidisciplinary model, enables us to bring the breadth of our capabilities from across our network to better serve our clients, helping them build trust for their stakeholders and deliver sustained outcomes. In a challenging and complex environment, The New Equation is delivering results for our clients and growth for PwC.
For example, the strong Deals environment has driven demand across all businesses as we supported transactions and helped acquirers create and preserve value as they sought to move from ‘transact to transform’. Leveraging our broader community of solvers, working with our alliance partners, we have enabled organisational transformations, ensuring change is sustained with the support of colleagues in our workforce business.
Assurance: Revenues from our Assurance business grew by 7.6% to US$18 billion (FY21: US$17.1 billion). Audit remains the cornerstone of our brand and the key driver for growth in our Assurance business. Our audit business continued to grow over the last year as we managed complex market dynamics such as auditor rotation, regulation and intensifying competition. We see increasing demand for assurance over a range of nonfinancial information such as ESG disclosure as companies seek to build trust in new areas. We expect this trend to continue in the future, according to PwC.
Advisory: Our Advisory revenues rose by 23.5% to US$20.7 billion (FY21: US$17 billion). This growth was driven by strong demand for technology-enabled business transformation, both enterprise-wide and within specific business functions, such as finance, the front office and human resources. This included helping many clients migrate to cloud environments. Demand for sustainable and tax efficient supply chain transformation was high, given widespread disruptions.
Tax & Legal Services (TLS): Revenues from our Tax, Legal and People business grew by 6.8% to US$11.6 billion (FY21: US$11 billion). Due to the changing tax landscape, companies continue to face challenges in meeting their reporting obligations, which is driving demand for integrated compliance services and managed services. The current year’s results included only 10 months of our Global Mobility & Immigration business. Its sale reduced year-on-year revenue growth from 8.7%. We expect accelerated growth in the future as the transaction has already enabled increased investment and prioritisation of capabilities to be built in our TLS business and the wider network.
Investing in a sustainable future
Continuing to invest in our business is central to The New Equation strategy. Across our network we invest in our people to build their skills and capabilities, in new technologies that enable us to better serve clients, in the quality of our work and in new products and services. We invested US$3.1 billion across our network in the last 12 months, including US$507 million invested in training and upskilling our people to solve the challenges of tomorrow. We are also investing US$1 billion in a multi-year program to deliver a new audit ecosystem for our next generation audit.
As part of our investment programme in FY22, PwC firms completed 17 acquisitions (FY21: nine) around the world, expanding our professional capabilities in key areas.
Building trust with a relentless focus on quality
Quality is at the heart of what we do. We continually strive to improve and enhance the quality of our services. Across our global network, we continue to foster a culture rooted in our PwC values and emphasise that integrity and quality are everyone’s responsibility. Having partners and staff in PwC with a wide range of talent and experiences, whether it be audit, accounting, tax, actuarial, technology or other capabilities, is key to delivering high-quality work, which is why PwC is fully committed to remaining a multidisciplinary network.
Quality and trust go hand-in-hand. Building trust is central to our strategy and to our clients’ needs. This past year we opened our Trust Leadership Institute in the US as a way to create powerful learning opportunities to embed a culture of trust across organisations. Our Asia Trust Leadership Institute is scheduled to open in FY23.
As part of our Global Annual Review, we publish our internal audit inspection results. For the 2022 inspection cycle, of the 1,615 audit reviews completed to date through our internal inspection process, 58 (3.6%) were rated as non-compliant. We continue to invest in enhancing audit quality, and we remain fully committed to a culture of continuous improvement. We believe that the continued involvement of a broad range of skills and expertise is critical to ensuring audit quality, underscoring the importance of our community of solvers to all of our business areas.
Enabling our workforce
A diverse workforce of talented motivated people is what drives our strategy and our growth. Our global community of solvers grew to nearly 328,000 professionals in 152 countries around the world in FY22. We created more than 32,000 net new jobs, welcoming 148,000 new joiners in FY22 including interns – up 90,273 from the prior year. We are ahead of pace with our target set last year to hire 100,000 (net) additional professionals by 2026.
We are investing heavily in our people both in terms of remuneration and benefits as well as offering flexibility and opportunities for growth. Following the launch of our digital upskilling initiative in 2019, over 206,000 of our people have received digital training.
Today, ESG skills are increasingly like digital skills; everyone needs to have a certain level of competency. To date, more than 100,000 PwC people have undertaken ESG training through our Global ESG Academy. In addition, we are expanding our global ESG Centres of Excellence to better enable our people to learn and to support them in their work.
Key to building a strong community of solvers is making PwC a great place to work. We continue to try to improve the quality of our employees’ experiences with us. We’ve developed new ways to support, care for and upskill our people as the world of work recalibrates to a new normal following the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last financial year, for example, we supported our people with more flexible and hybrid working options, better access to training, more competitive remuneration, and a continued push to enhance inclusion and diversity.
Helping achieve positive outcomes for society
We believe that PwC has an important role to play in helping to address society’s challenges. One of the most difficult situations in the past year has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Along with many multinational organisations, we made the decision to cease our operations in Russia. Further, PwC employees and member firms across the globe have donated approximately US$5.3 million in financial aid to causes that support Ukraine.
Our people give their time and skills every year to support the communities where they live and work, supporting organisations from small local charities to national and global NGOs. This past year, PwC volunteers across our network gave 789,000 hours of their time to good causes. Since 2018, we have reached more than 20 million beneficiaries.
We strive to be accountable for our own performance as a network and in our Global Annual Review we are reporting on the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – both core and expanded – that are relevant to our business. We fully or partially comply with 35 of 42 relevant metrics. In addition, we’re reporting on our global climate performance using the rigorous framework of the Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
We are on track to meet our net zero commitment by 2030, which includes a 50% reduction in scope 1 & 2 greenhouse gas emissions vs FY19 and also cutting indirect scope 3 emissions from business travel by 50% vs FY19. We have transitioned to 100% renewable electricity in our 21 largest firms and from next year, all of our firms have committed to offsetting 100% of energy and mobility emissions.
We are engaged in a wide range of strategic alliances and global forums, shaping strategic discussions while sharing our ESG and climate expertise. In FY22 we convened business leaders and participated in strategic alliances to advance progress on ESG issues.
“PwC strives to be a force for good. We believe business has a responsibility to be part of the solution to society’s challenges. We are dedicated to working together with our clients, communities and all of our stakeholders to have a positive impact, building public trust in society, fueling progress on ESG to create sustainable outcomes, and helping all of our people to reach their potential,” said Bob Moritz.
Economic outlook
Our economists expect the remainder of 2022 and 2023 to be challenging for the global economy. We project that global real GDP will increase by around 3% for the full year 2022 in market exchange rates, with growth slowing in 2023 to just over 2%, though there remains considerable uncertainty.
However, the challenging economic conditions are driving our clients to confront challenges and think of new ways to build trust with their stakeholders. We remain confident in our strategy to support them. PwC’s performance for the first two months of FY23 remains strong in all businesses with a growing pipeline of opportunities.
