Accenture Conference Call Highlights

Accenture

reported its fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday. Shares of the company are fairly neutral. Below are some key highlights from its conference call: • Strong top line growth of 8%, exceeding our expectations and landing above the top end of our guided range for the quarter. • Our revenue growth is underpinned by continued improved growth rates in many areas of our business. • Second, our profitability in quarter four came in as expected yielding 10 basis points of expansion for the full year. • It's noteworthy that we achieved this result while taking actions to continue to align our head count and labor costs in certain parts of our business. • Third, we generated strong cash flow of $1.5 billion in the quarter. • We continue to return significant cash to shareholders while at the same time investing in our business. • New bookings for the quarter were $8.3 billion resulting in $35.9 billion in new bookings for the full fiscal year • Turning now to revenues, net revenues for the quarter were $7.8 billion. • Our cash balance at August 31 was $4.9 billion compared with $5.6 billion at August 31 last year. • Our board of directors declared a semi-annual cash dividend of $1.02 per share. • This dividend will be paid on November 17 and represents a $0.09 per share or 10% increase over the previous semi-annual dividend we declared in March. • Again, new bookings were $35.9 billion at the top end of our guided range. • Net revenues grew 5% in local currency for the full year at the top end of our most recent guided range and in the upper end of the range provided at the beginning of the year. • We returned approximately $3.8 billion of cash to shareholders, more than $100 million above our initial objective, through $2.6 billion in repurchases and $1.3 billion in dividend payments. Guidance: • For the first quarter of fiscal 2015, we expect revenues to be in the range of $7.55 billion to $7.8 billion. • For the full fiscal year 2015, based upon how the rates have been trending over the last few weeks, we currently assume the impact of FX on our results in U.S. dollars will be negative 2% compared to fiscal 2014. • For the full fiscal 2015, we expect our net revenue to be in the range of 4% to 7% growth in local currency. • For the full fiscal year 2015, we're targeting new bookings to be in the range of $34 billion to $36 billion. • We expect bookings to be a little lighter in the first quarter and build throughout the year. • For operating margin, we expect fiscal year 2015 to be 14.4% to 14.6% • We expect our annual effective tax rate to be in the range of 26% to 27%. • For earnings per share, we expect full-year diluted EPS for fiscal 2015 to be in the range of $4.74 to $4.88 or 5% to 8% growth over fiscal 2014 results. • Finally, we expect to return at least $3.8 billion through dividends and share repurchases and also expect to reduce the weighted average diluted shares outstanding by approximately 2%