The FINANCIAL — For the year ending 30 June 2018, PwC firms around the world earned total gross revenues of US$41.3 billion, topping US$40 billion for the first time. In local currency revenues grew by 7% and in US dollars by 10%.
Impact on Society
“We believe business has a key role to play in solving societal challenges alongside other stakeholders. One of the ways in which PwC is doing this is through collaborating with the T20 (a network of Think Tanks that provides policy recommendations to the G20) and Global Solutions, a multi-stakeholder initiative. Together we are highlighting the need to bring economies, business and society back into greater alignment. We are also helping facilitate a Young Global Changers programme, which brings together 120 future leaders from around 80 countries to develop mutual respect and understanding.”
“Our community investments are an important part of our work. By sharing PwC’s greatest asset – the skills, knowledge and talent of our people – we focus on education, building the capacity of NGOs and supporting social and micro enterprises around the world.”
In FY18, we set an ambitious new global target: to invest in the future and growth of 15 million people, NGOs and social and micro enterprises to help them maximise their potential by 2022.
This year, more than 60,500 PwC people contributed over 850,000 hours – 619,920 of which were spent sharing their professional skills. As a result of this contribution, we reached 3.2 million people, NGOs and social and micro enterprises – a solid step towards our new 15 million goal.
Our most significant environmental impact is the carbon emissions from powering our offices and air travel. This year, we are announcing a new global commitment. While driving efficiency to reduce our absolute carbon impact, we commit to offsetting air travel emissions from FY19 and to sourcing 100% renewables for our electricity consumption and offsetting residual energy use by FY22.
While our priority is reducing our absolute carbon impact, offsetting is an important part of our strategy to mitigate the impact of our unavoidable emissions.
Sustainable Growth
For the 12 months ending 30 June 2018, PwC’s revenues were US$41.3 billion – up 7% – while investing and repositioning our portfolio. Revenues were up across all PwC’s operations, boosted by continued significant investments in quality, new technologies, services and talent.
In the Americas, revenues grew by 4% with a particularly strong performance from operations in the United States. Growth in Western Europe was stronger than the previous year, up by over 6% in FY18, and remained very buoyant in Central and Eastern Europe where revenues were up 10%. Revenue growth from the Middle East and Africa was impressive at 12%.
Across Australasia and the Pacific, revenue growth was 7% while PwC’s strongest growth was in Asia where revenues were up 15%.
“Demand for our services continues to grow across all regions and industries, which is testament to the quality of our work, and the investment we have made in anticipating the changing needs of our stakeholders with the introduction of new and enhanced services.
“We continue to make strategic acquisitions in key areas of growth, especially blockchain and data analytics and to invest in new technologies including artificial intelligence and robotics, as we work to increase the effectiveness of our core services such as audit,” said Carol Sawdye, PwC’s Global Chief Operating Officer.
Assurance: PwC’s Assurance operations have continued to grow; up 4% to US$17.1 billion which is very impressive given the intensely competitive nature of the assurance market around the world.
Our audit business has grown in all our major markets including those impacted by mandatory audit firm rotation. The market has been attracted to our market-leading audit technology.
The increasing complexity of business, the emergence of new technologies, the regulatory environment and increasing stakeholder interest have driven demand for our broader assurance services, particularly in areas such as cyber security and privacy, advanced data analytics, as well as enterprise systems solutions. Companies are seeking broader digital solutions and insights to address governance, risk and compliance.
With 107,000 people in our practice, PwC is the largest audit and accounting network in the world.
Focus on Quality and Innovation
The quality of our work is at the heart of our operations across the globe and we invest very significant and increasing resources in its continuous enhancement across all of our businesses. We are also investing heavily in new technology to drive continuous improvement in the capabilities and effectiveness of our audits, along with all our other businesses.
In our assurance business, in the last year alone our state of the art information testing technology Halo was used to examine more than 105 billion lines of data. In the year ahead our award winning GL.ai artificial intelligence tool, designed to identify anomalies in organisations’ financial records, will be available for the PwC network.
PwC’s Advisory business grew 10% to US$13.8 billion in FY18; a very strong result on the back of high growth in FY17. We saw particularly strong growth across our Deals businesses and our Strategy, Management and Technology consulting practices which demonstrates our success in providing value to clients across strategy-through-execution.
Building on our traditional strengths across business and technology, digital services in Advisory were accelerated in the past year with a focus on creating an engaging customer experience to drive innovative solutions and outcomes. We’re embedding this new Business, eXperience & Technology (BXT) methodology across our Advisory operations to help clients solve the needs of tomorrow’s customers. And the market is paying attention. Advertising Age now ranks PwC Digital Services as one of the largest digital networks in the world and the analyst community that reviews professional services has awarded 40 new ‘Leader’ ratings to PwC Advisory in the past year alone.
While PwC works across all sectors, we experienced particularly strong demand for our Advisory services in financial services, consumer markets, private equity, technology, media and telecoms.
Tax & Legal: PwC’s Tax & Legal revenues grew by 8% to US$10.4billion, driven by the scale and complexity of change in many domestic and international tax systems, including the impact of US tax reform.
This change and complexity has driven demand across the whole range of our services from domestic compliance advice to international tax and transfer pricing. We have experienced particularly strong demand for indirect tax advice such as value added tax and customs, underpinned by our new suite of cutting edge technologies in this area. In addition, our deals tax business experienced very strong growth, driven by our market leading position for M&A advice around the world.
Revenues from our global Legal Services business continue to grow as our reach and capabilities in this area expand. We now have over 3,500 lawyers serving clients in over 90 countries. In the last few weeks we have also announced an alliance with leading immigration lawyers, which will augment the breadth and depth of our capabilities.
Demand for our services on HR transformation and labour mobility also grew strongly across the world with over 10,000 people now working in our People and Organisation network.
With over 50,000 professionals – who are enabled with the latest technologies – PwC has the largest tax and legal network in the world, focused on advising our clients in line with our Global Tax Code of Conduct and contributing to the dialogues about much needed change to tax systems locally and globally.
Recruiting and developing talent
In FY18, our global headcount grew 6% to more than 250,000 people. We saw the largest headcount increases in Asia (14%) and Central and Eastern Europe (10%).
Globally, 64,776 people joined PwC firms around the world – including 27,016 graduates and 32,924 experienced professionals. In FY18, nearly half of all the people who joined PwC were female.
PwC firms admitted a record total of 739 partners across the world. Thirty percent of our firms’ new partners in FY18 were female. Female representation in the PwC member firm partnerships has gradually increased from 13% in 2006 to 20% in 2018.
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