“We’ve had a great year,” he said. “The market has been really good and the nicest thing for us is that we’ve gotten the company back on a really strong growth trajectory.”
Partner, staff salary increases
PwC’s profits grew 21 per cent in the year, with partners receiving an increase in revenue of around 10 per cent. Partner salaries at the firm range from $374,000 to more than $4 million, compared to $380,000 to $3.9 million in 2019.
The company also converted its non-equity partners, who made up about 20 percent of the partners, into equity partners.
“Although in many respects, equity and non-equity partners are the same, there are differences such as non-equity partners cannot vote for the CEO, [and] they may not have received dividends in certain circumstances. We wanted all of our partners to be in the same group, and we think there is a real benefit to all of our partners being treated the same way,” said Mr. Seymour.
He also emphasized that the company had rapidly increased revenue by increasing the size of its existing business rather than buying smaller companies.
The firm increased staff pay by an average of about 9 percent and also paid bonuses worth about $75 million, up from $36 million a year earlier. The company’s total staff bill for the year came to nearly $1 billion.
This means that the average salary for a full-time employee at the company is approximately $120,000, while the average bonus for eligible staff was more than $8,000. The company has approximately 9,300 employees.
In April, the firm was the first of the Big Four to disclose salary bands internally and publicly as part of an effort to establish benchmark salary ranges for the sector.
PwC also made numerous changes to improve how junior and mid-rank employees were treated during the year, ranging from reducing the number of ranks, increasing and disclosing staff pay rates, and sending some 2,700 employees to a four-day retreat “The Outside”. at a cost of approximately $5500 per head.
Staff turnover ‘too high’
Despite these changes, PwC still saw an increase in employee turnover, up 6 percentage points to 22 percent, with roughly 1,500 professionals leaving the company during the year, which Seymour said was “too high.”
“The long-term [turnover] The average in our industry would probably be closer to 12, 13, 14 percent, but we’re in such a hot [job] market right now,” he said.
”Now, one way to look at it, which is good for the community and our customers, is [more than] 20 per cent of our people left just to go and work in the Australian business community. We are a big contributor to skills, and Australia has a skills shortage.
“So we’re hiring 1,500 graduates, investing heavily in their skills, and a lot of them go off and do other things, which is great for our clients, the community, but that’s tough on our business. We’re working very hard to try and reduce that turnover rate. And low adolescence is where we want to get to, but it’s also a reflection of the tighter job market.”
Consulting business grew 21 percent to $740 million, financial advice rose 20 percent to more than $1 billion, and insurance, which includes auditing, grew 11 percent to $730 million. PwC’s ASEANZ (Australia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand) consulting business, which is majority-owned by the Australian company, grew 19 percent to $250 million. All revenue figures exclude expenses that are passed on to customers.
Consulting Reconstruction
Seymour was particularly pleased with the uptick in business at the consulting division, which has rebuilt itself after the departure of dozens of partners to rival consulting firms in 2020.
“We’ve really worked hard to develop our technology practice… Focusing on delivering ‘better business results’ is really starting to catch on. We were not where we needed to be two or three years ago, and we have worked hard to build that practice,” Mr. Seymour said.
“That then ties in with our alliance strategy with organizations like Microsoft, SAP or Salesforce, the big cloud providers. [like Amazon Web Services].”
The most high-profile project delivered by the firm’s consultants during the last fiscal year was last year’s census. The project was high risk to the company and the Australian Bureau of Statistics because it followed the failed 2016 census when cyber attacks caused the survey to go offline on census night.
More than 100 PwC partners and staff worked with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Amazon Web Services professionals to develop a new online digital platform for the census that remained online and functional despite repeated cyberattack attempts.
“We are very proud of the census. I was actually there with our team and the ABS team on census night in Canberra. As head of the ABS [David Gruen] He said he wanted the most boring night possible, and we got it, which was fantastic,” Seymour said.
Amid the threat of cuts in the use of contractors and consultants by the Labor government, the chief executive said the census project showed how consultants can work successfully alongside the public service.
“Our role is not to replace [the public service]. It is to help and support the delivery of really complex projects. Public Service and that ABS team deserve a great deal of credit.”
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