Accenture tops Q1 expectations with rise in new bookings

Accenture reported strong first quarter earnings on Thursday, with new bookings rebounding from pandemic-related declines. The tech services firm said its Q1 net income was $1.52 billion, with non-GAAP earnings of $2.17 a share on revenue of $11.8 billion.

Wall Street was expecting Accenture to report earnings of $2.05 a share on revenue of $11.36 billion. Shares of Accenture were up by over 7% in early trading. 

Meanwhile, the company said consulting revenues for the quarter were up 1% to $6.33 billion. Outsourcing revenues came to $5.43 billion, an increase of 9%. Accenture said new bookings for the quarter were $12.9 billion, up 25% from a year ago.

"I am pleased that we delivered first-quarter revenues above our expectations, with broad-based improvement across industries and geographic markets, reflecting the relevance of our services, the strength of our growth strategy and the advantages of our scale in digital, cloud and security," said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. "New bookings, profitability and free cash flow were all very strong, and we again returned substantial cash to shareholders while continuing to invest in our business and our people."

Sweet also touted Accenture's newest business unit called Cloud First, in which the company plans to invest $3 billion over three years to enable customers to move to the cloud and digitize operations. Accenture is betting that it can grow its cloud revenue faster via software as a service, platform services and migrating customers to cloud infrastructure and applications.

For the outlook, Accenture is predicting second quarter revenue of $11.55 billion to $11.95 billion. Wall Street expects Accenture to report Q2 earnings of $1.81 a share on revenue of $11.35 billion. For fiscal 2021, the company expects diluted EPS to be in the range of $8.02 to $8.25, compared to analyst estimates for EPS of $8.05. 

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