Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Darrin Peller: That actually makes a lot of sense. One follow-up on that and related is the cyclicality of business is it’s not surprising, you would see some of the smaller deals get impacted first by pause or concern among enterprise spending. When we think about the larger transformational side, the pipeline is longer. The sales cycle is longer there. So, having that strong still is probably not €“ if you do €“ given how well you guys execute, it’s not shocking, I guess. But on the same side, the magnitude of strength was better than I think we expected. And so looking ahead, what in your experience, cyclically, when do you see that sort of slow down if the economy does take a step down?

Julie Sweet: Look, it’s never say never I guess the economy slowing down and what we do it, but I really stay focused. We try to stay focused on our strategy being relevant across cycles, so €“ and basically growing stronger than the market. And so the market is still faster than market, it’s still kind of hovering around 5%. And so that’s what we kind of watch more than the economy because technology is so core to every strategy that when the economy goes down, what are you seeing, well, people are saying, we got to optimize. We have got a lower cost. We have got to do managed services. So, we watch more €“ the economy can kind of do an uplift, right. But what we are trying to always do is grow faster than the market. So, that’s the big indicator for us.

And you see it’s a very strong market. And it makes sense. I mean I will just tell you like the amount of the just technical debt across these industries and how much work to do, we are still very much in early innings of what needs to be done to take advantage of cool things like generative AI. You got to have data.

Darrin Peller: Yes. Awesome. Alright. Thanks Julie. Thanks KC.

KC McClure: Thank you. Operator, we have time for one more question and then Julie will wrap up the call.

Operator: Thank you. And that last question comes from the line of Bryan Bergin with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Bryan Bergin: Hi guys. Good morning. Thank you. I wanted to ask on consolidation activity. And whether €“ how much of this has helped to really offset some of the areas that have pulled back in the shorter cycle work? And I guess has that picked up meaningfully? And if you were to step back and look at those 35 deals over $100 billion, can you give us a sense of the mix of those that might include an aspect of vendor consolidation?

Julie Sweet: Vendor consolidation is certainly a part of what’s going on in the market, but there are some industries that did that a long time ago in some clients. So, I am not €“ I don’t have the numbers off hand of what we have in our 35 clients. But I am not seeing that as sort of the big driver of our growth. Right now, we are often telling clients who like basically need to get revenue faster, but more €“ it’s interesting, the vendor consolidation for many of our clients is less about cost and more that a lot of the industries, like say, consumer goods, telecom where they have lots of different countries. It’s very hard to move to a platform business and sort of build things consistently if you have a ton of different vendors, right, because you want the stuff done in the same way.

And so the €“ it’s interesting the vendor consolidation play for many is more about how do we actually implement a strategy of kind of moving to global platforms being able to have a single approach to data, super hard to do if you have got 50 vendors to 100 vendors. So, I would just say it’s tied to exactly the kind of strategies that we are advising clients on, but no big theme for us.