Ernst & Young Australia (“EY Australia”) has announced revenue has grown to a record $2.75 billion – a 19 percent increase over the prior year.
David Larocca, EY Region Managing Partner and CEO Oceania said, “By any measure this is an outstanding result, particularly given the ongoing disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic. It is a testament to the hard work, innovative-thinking and dedication to exceptional client service from all of our people. The results we’ve achieved in recent years demonstrate the very strong momentum we have at EY Australia.”
“We are extremely proud of this result and grateful to everyone at EY for the role they played in achieving it.”
EY Australia appointed 90 new partners, including 48 promotions to partner and 42 direct appointments. Forty-five percent of newly promoted partners are women. EY Australia also appointed 24 associate partners during the year, 38 percent of whom were women.
EY Australia completed a number of strategic acquisitions throughout the year including consulting firms Blackdot Consulting Pty Ltd and Cadence Australia Pty Ltd, cyber security company SecureWorx Pty Ltd and forensic accounting specialists Axiom Forensics Pty Ltd.
David Larocca, who has just had his first anniversary as EY’s CEO in Oceania, says EY Australia’s continued focus on its people has been a major factor in its successful year.
“These results have enabled us to invest an additional $150M in our people, including upwards of $70M across record bonuses, bringing forward promotions and salary rises by 3 months, additional COVID leave, parental leave and home office assistance. We also granted an additional 3 ‘EY Unplugged’ leave days throughout the year which involved proactive engagement with our clients and teams to shut the firm and give our people more time to focus on their wellbeing. We also created more than 900 new jobs.”
Across our service lines, growth was strong in all parts of the business. The Consulting practice achieved 24 percent year on year growth, Strategy and Transactions 26 percent, Tax and Law 18 percent and Assurance 8 percent. All service lines delivered an increase on the strong growth results achieved in FY21.
Growth in Assurance services has been driven by our market-leading audit practice where continued investment in audit quality has delivered further improved results from internal and external reviews. This has been demonstrated by ASIC external reviews and internal global and Australian reviews. Strong growth was also delivered by Forensic Services team and our leading Climate Change and Sustainability Services practice who are helping organisations with one of their biggest strategic challenges, the ESG agenda.
Our focus on quality and continued investment in data and technology has maintained our market-leading position, serving the public interest by anticipating and independently assessing risk and identifying opportunities to enhance trust in business and the capital markets, in support of sustainable, long-term value creation.
Strong results in Consulting demonstrate EY Australia’s unique approach to transformation - value focused, business led, people-powered and technology enabled - is delivering results for our clients.
Momentum across our Strategy and Transactions (SaT) practice has been delivered through sustained activity in M&A and broader transactions activity, across the Corporate, Private Equity and Government sectors, with our distinctive and holistic offering of end-to-end strategy and transaction advice enabling us to deliver exceptional outcomes for our clients and provide fantastic growth opportunities for our people.
Growth in our Tax and Law services was driven by our market leading capability in transactions and private clients, building our law practice and our best-in-class digital tax compliance and legal managed services approach, leveraging process improvement enabled by technology to help our clients transform their tax and law operating models.
As clients have had to quickly transform their businesses and embrace new ways of working in an ever changing and complex environment, including looking overseas for talent, an increasing number have also turned to EY’s People Advisory Services.
Our financial services business continued to perform strongly in FY22. In an increasingly complex and evolving operating environment for the financial services industry, our team supported clients across a range of key areas such as business change and transformation, top end governance and assurance services, process automation and digitisation, technology and data solutions, cyber security, actuarial and risk management, complex transactions and sustainable finance.
“Building out our ecosystems through successful alliances is also an important part of our successful strategy and this has also been reflected in 7 Microsoft awards including Australian partner of the year.
“We continue to focus on being a more diverse, inclusive and safe workplace. We also have a great leadership team in place, and the diversity of that team, across gender, cultural background and different experiences, along with all our people, will ensure we continue to deliver long-term value for our clients, people and society.
“The addition of Mat Nelson, our Chief Sustainability Officer to the Executive Leadership Team has elevated our focus on our purpose of Building a Better Working World. In line with this commitment, we released our first ever EY Oceania Value Realised Scorecard in 2021, which took a deep and transparent look at EY’s performance to support these values. Gender diversity is a critical part of this, and this year 52% of all our people in Oceania are women, a slight increase on the previous year, and we hired more women than men this year which is an important and continued step in the right direction.
“We will look to build on the Scorecard when we release our 2022 report later this year.
“We’re well on our way to achieving own our target of net zero by 2025 and further to our purpose, we were proud to launch the Net Zero Centre this year to help our clients accelerate their transitions to net zero by 2050.”
Mr Larocca concluded: “It’s been a challenging but extremely rewarding 12 months and I’m excited by the future. We predicted strong double-digit growth for this year and have more than achieved that. By maintaining our strong focus on investing in our people and in future growth, I have every confidence these outstanding performance results will continue.”