PwC announced 2017 revenues on October 4, 2017. Their revenue release comes after releases from EY and Deloitte.

PwC announced revenues of 37.7 billion which represents a 7% revenue growth rate.

This is a record year of revenues for PwC. Unfortunately this keeps PwC as the second largest big 4 accounting firm in the world. They are still behind Deloitte who announce $38.8 billion of revenue earlier this year.

The $37.7 billion in revenue represents an almost $2 billion increase in revenue from their 2016 revenues of $35.9 billion.

Let’s drill down into PwC’s revenue numbers a little further.

First let’s go over their revenues by line of service.

$16 billion of their revenues came from their assurance practice.

$12.3 came from their advisory practice

$9.4 billion came from their tax practice.

The fastest growing practice was pwc’s advisory practice at about 6% growth rate. PwC didn’t really see an impact from the GE acquisition on their topline as their tax practice did not grow that much,but that didn’t stop Bob moritz from highlighting the acquisition of GE’s tax department in the release. We covered the acquision of GE’s tax department heavily on our site. We’ll include links to those articles in the show notes.

The impact of the ge acquisition will likely have a larger impact on the tax practice next year.

PwC 2017 Revenue by Region

Now let’s take a look at PwC’s revenue by region

  • The largest region for PwC was their Americas region with 16.8 billion in revenue
  • The second largest region western Europe with 12.2 billion in revenue
  • Next up was Asia with 4.9 billion
  • The next region is Australia and Pacific $1.7
  • Then it’s the middle east and Africa region coming in at 1.4 billion
  • The smallest region was central and eastern Europe with 776 million in revenue.

The fastest growing region was the central and eastern European region with 14% growth.

PwC 2017 Number of Employees

PwC announces a number of other things in these releases so let’s go over a few of those items

First up they like to announce the number of employees hired.

PwC announced that they had   236,235 employees at the end of 2017. This is a growth of about 13,000 employees from their 2016 number of employees of 223,468. When we tried to estimate PwC’s 2017 numbers we estimated that they would have about 241,000 at the end of 2017 so we were off by about 5,000 employees. PwC having 236,000 puts them as the third largest accounting firm in terms of employees behind Deloitte and EY. Deloitte has 263,900 employees while EY has 247,570.

Audit Inspection

Another thing that PwC discloses in their release was their compliance of their audits based on their internal audits. This is a new approach by PwC. They have historically not announced these numbers. They announced 93.3% compliance of their audits based on the standards that they apply to their internal reviews of their audits.

Another thing that came out of this release were some comments made by PwC’s global chairman bob moritz

He made the following statements

Our strategy of investing heavily in technology, quality, innovative new services and recruiting top talent paid off with strong revenue growth across all our lines of business, both new and established, in FY17.  While we remain optimistic about the future, we – along with clients – are planning for a wider range of economic and geo-political scenarios as we reflect on and learn the lessons of the past year.

“Innovation is the foundation of our success and we are embracing artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning as we work to deliver success for our clients and stakeholders going forward. We’re also investing in areas such as our data privacy practice. As more and more data is generated and shared, and companies are exposed to new digital vulnerabilities, we’re helping clients to develop their cyber security and privacy programs, and respond to incidents.

In conclusion this was a good year for PwC with $37.7 billion in revenues, but it wasn’t good enough for them to pass up Deloitte with $38.8 billion. We now have numbers from 3 of the big 4, and PwC is solidified as the second largest big 4 in the world at this point.

Another thing that we learned after this release is that the big 4 are all heavily invested in technology as all the global CEOs have mentioned huge pushes in technology that have allowed them to achieve this level of success.