Accenture Earnings - read through to Saul stocks

Accenture knocked the cover off the ball this morning and the stock rose ~7%. It’s a behemoth at a $175B market cap.

I’ll cut and paste a few of the quotes from CEO, Julie Sweet. I view these results as an affirmation that digitization trends will continue/accelerate.

From an overall demand perspective, the trends that we discussed last quarter are continuing. Companies need to accelerate their digital transformation across their enterprises and move to the cloud, address cost pressures, build resilience and security, adjust their operations and customer engagement to a remote everything environment and changing expectations and find new sources of growth.

What is becoming even more clear however is that we are in an era of compressed transformation in which the winners by industry will be those who are earliest to replatform their businesses in the cloud and have the digital core and new ways of working that allows them to continuously improve their operations and find new sources of growth, which for most leading companies is requiring them to simultaneously transform multiple parts of their enterprises and their talent.

For the pre-COVID digital leaders, they are racing to widen the gap. And for the digital laggards, they are racing to leapfrog. We are uniquely positioned to help the leaders and the laggards because of the depth and breadth of our capabilities. We bring the trust, experience, speed and scale that are essential to achieve compressed transformation.

Now let’s bring some of these demand trends to life to the lens of our Q1 and look at our own broad-based improvement. First, replatforming to the cloud. In fiscal year '20, our cloud revenue was approximately $12 billion with low-double-digit growth, which accelerated in Q1 with significantly higher double-digit growth, driven by Accenture Cloud First. In fact, across low to highly impacted industries and all geographic markets, we saw strong double-digit growth. The race to replatform to the cloud and create new business value is clear across all our services.

…snip…later in the call in response to an analyst question

…The first part of the crisis, people were getting their footing, getting back up and running. And it’s interesting, we did some research in July across 10 markets. And nearly 80% of the executives that we surveyed said that they were planning on investing in digital transformation and that was up from 50% in May. And we’re continuing just to see this recognition of the need to get there faster.

Thanks to the Fool for the transcript

https://www.fool.com/premium/coverage/earnings/call-transcri…

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Thank you for the good post Jputter. To me, the Assenture analyst Q/A from their Q1 FY21 earnings call is yet another good validatation that we’re barking up the right tree(s)in the foreseeable future with our companies in cloud and security.

“…Answers to analyst que?stions during earnings calls for Q1FY21 really focus on Assenture’s bullishness re: continued growth drivers in their consulting business around cloud and security as follows.

?..And if you look at the services, again, no surprise based on cloud, security and Industry X tech services, very strong…

…And then finally, you have this area of Industry X, and not to mention, security and data, which will all continue to be growing engines for us…

…And then just on the other strategic priority on security, low-double-digit growth. Does that – is that about the right growth rate for that too or does that also accelerate as we get into the back half and we see the pickup in the growth rates?

Julie Sweet – Chief Executive Officer

Look, I think on security, we’re super pleased with that – of that double-digit growth. So whether it’s going to be low or strong, it will probably ebb and flow. But the consistency of that double-digit growth in security has been impressive to date. And we continue to see that to be the trajectory.”

Prepared remarks and analyst Q/A from Assenture’s Investor Relations page:
https://investor.accenture.com/~/media/Files/A/Accenture-IR-…

sjo

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