Accenture ACN 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%
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