Accenture reported strong second quarter earnings on Thursday, with new bookings continuing to rebound from pandemic-related declines. The tech services firm said its Q2 net income was $1.46 billion, with non-GAAP earnings of $2.03 a share on revenue of $12.1 billion.
Wall Street was expecting Accenture to report earnings of $1.90 a share on revenue of $11.83 billion. Shares of Accenture were up by over 3% in early trading.
Meanwhile, the company said consulting revenues for the quarter were up 4% to $6.44 billion. Outsourcing revenues came to $5.65 billion, an increase of 14%. Accenture said new bookings for the quarter were $16 billion, up 13% from a year ago.
In prepared remarks, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said the company has returned to overall pre-pandemic growth faster than expected.
“With our outstanding second-quarter financial results, we have returned to overall pre-pandemic growth ahead of expectations while continuing to take market share faster than before the pandemic,” said Sweet. “We have seen another quarter of strong, broad-based demand for our services across geographic markets and industries, and delivered record new bookings as well as excellent profitability and free cash flow.”
For the outlook, Accenture is predicting third quarter revenue of $12.55 billion to $12.95 billion. Wall Street expects Accenture to report Q2 earnings of $2.16 a share on revenue of $12.18 billion. Accenture is raising its guidance for fiscal 2021, and now expects diluted EPS to be in the range of $8.32 to $8.50, compared to analyst estimates for EPS of $8.23.
A key focus for Accenture is its 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.
