PwC Australia delivers $2.6bn revenue

PwC Australia has today announced its full year results to 30 June 2020, delivering revenue of $2.6bn, which is flat on the prior year.

Across the firm’s three businesses, revenue for Financial Advisory, comprising Deals, Infrastructure & Urban Renewal, Private Clients, Legal and Tax was down by 2 percent. The firm’s Consulting business was down by 4 percent. Assurance was up year on year delivering revenue growth of 6 percent.

The results reflect the varying impacts of COVID-19 on different parts of PwC’s three businesses and underpin the decision to restructure to ensure the firm is in a strong and resilient position as it navigates the current economic environment, able to make significant investments into innovation and developing our partners and staff.

CEO Tom Seymour said: “The past five months have been unprecedented for our firm, as they have been for every business across Australia. This is affecting revenue and profitability, with varying impacts on different parts of our business. It’s difficult to predict the rapidly changing environment and we expect significant volatility to continue throughout the course of FY21.

“The Victorian stage four lockdown announced by Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday highlights the continued level of uncertainty every business is dealing with during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Notwithstanding these challenging times, the necessary hard decisions PwC has taken over the past months puts us in a strong position. The restructure and redesign will enable us to sharpen our focus on our clients and their business needs as well as position us strongly for growth in FY21.

“In particular for our consulting business, we have redesigned the way we operate, aligning around four industry groups, to be even more connected with the major agendas of our clients and better tailor our services to the specific context of particular sectors as they move to new ways of working which blur the lines between business, digital and technology.

“Our resilient businesses driven by our amazingly talented people are ready to navigate through this uncertainty and come out the other side positioned for growth. In doing so, PwC is poised to play a key role in helping the Australian economy respond to current challenges.”

Business Growth

“Our Assurance business delivered a strong result in FY20, continuing a four year trend of revenue growth of between 6 and 10 percent despite the impacts of COVID-19. While demand has slowed in areas of discretionary spend, we’ve seen a continued strong demand for audit, risk and governance advice in a time of unprecedented complexity and judgement for management teams and Boards.

“In Financial Advisory, our Infrastructure and Urban Renewal business had very strong growth. The slow down in major market transactions has impacted our Deals business this year, albeit we are well positioned for uptick in M&A activity expected via industry consolidation as part of the COVID-19 recovery.

“The impacts of COVID-19 on differing parts of our Consulting business has been varied. In particular, we’ve seen a reduction in growth off the back of larger transformation programs being paused or stopped.

“We’re also seeing positive growth in some areas like Health and Wellbeing, Risk and Regulation and technology offerings such as Cyber Security services, Software Engineering capability and Cloud-Based services, and have continued to invest in building our capabilities in these areas.

“As a leadership team, our focus has been firmly on the health, wellbeing and safety of our people and responding to the impacts of COVID-19 across our businesses and this will remain front and centre.

“I look forward to helping our people continue to grow in confidence and ensuring we come out the other side stronger, more agile and better able to support our clients,” Mr Seymour said.