Today we are going to be discussing EY’s new 2017 partner class. Ernst and Young announces their partner classes globally unlike most of the other big 4 accounting firms.

In 2017 E&Y promoted 669 individuals to partner. This is down when compared to 2016 where EY promoted 714 people globally. That is a decrease of 45 partners. That’s a pretty significant drop.

30% of the class or 109 partners in the class were women and 36% of the partners are from emerging markets. Last year EY promoted 208 women to partner which was 29% of that class. This is trending in a good direction for Ernst and Young.

EY promoted 266 individuals in the Americas region and I’m sure a substantial amount of that is related to the United States. Last year EY promoted 287 people to partner in the Americas region.

Now let’s go over the service lines. In 2017 the partner breakouts by line of service are as follows

  • 255 partners were made in Assurance
  • 171 were in Tax
  • 154 were in Advisory
  • 78 in Transaction Advisory Services
  • And 11 partners were made in business support

So what does this mean for Ernst and young? I think this means it’s going to be a bad year for them. When we receive EY’s 2017 revenue numbers I think we are going to see them being down. You know me. I like to predict the future with the big 4. I use the partner results to predict this. For example, I think that PwC is going to have a down year because of their low promotes this year. So let’s look at the numbers for EY. They went from 714 partners to 669. This represents a 6% decline in the number of partners made this year. Transaction advisory and tax had the biggest drops in promotions so they will likely see the biggest drops in revenue. Make sure to stay tuned so that you can stay up to date on the latest big 4 revenue and promotion news.