The German member company of the international network of auditors and consultants PWC reported strong growth for the financial year just ended.

In the twelve months from July 2021 to June 2022, total revenue increased by almost 14 percent to 2.6 billion euros, as the company announced.

Mark Fehr

Editor in Business.

  • Follow I follow

PWC is the largest provider of auditing and consulting services for companies in Germany and grew only weakly by 1.5 percent in the previous year, which was shaped by the corona pandemic.

But now PWC has recovered strongly from the Corona crisis.

The international PWC network also increased its total sales in 150 countries around the world by more than 13 percent and even reached a record $50.3 billion.

Adjusted or unadjusted?

Because of the pandemic effects in the previous year, a closer look at the current figures is appropriate.

Because the industry usually measures its turnover based on the overall performance, i.e. including the travel expenses billed to customers, because auditors and consultants are often deployed to clients on site and are therefore on the road a lot.

Because there were hardly any business trips in the previous year from 2020 to 2021 due to the corona lockdowns and the auditors and consultants mainly worked from home, PWC had included fictitious travel costs within the overall performance at the time and thus corrected the real value upwards to 2.39 billion euros .

Nevertheless, PWC is now calculating the growth compared to the unadjusted figure for the previous year of only 2.3 billion euros, which contains few travel expenses due to the lockdowns at the time.

That flatters the currently reported growth somewhat.

However, PWC describes the consideration as correct.

"We're comparing apples to apples," said the new head of Germany, Petra Justenhoven, on Tuesday during the presentation of the business figures.

Protection against hacker attacks

Justenhoven has been spokeswoman for the management of PWC in Germany since July 1st.

Despite the looming recession, she still sees good business prospects, because the major challenges for PWC customers have persisted beyond the current crises.

Justenhoven referred to digitization, decarbonization and the shortage of skilled workers.

These developments require companies to make a strong change, which they can be supported by consultants.

The law on more ethical care in international supply chains, which will come into force in January, will also demand a lot from the corporate world and its consultants.

A rapidly growing new service from PWC and other auditing companies is also the fight against hacker attacks on companies and, increasingly, on critical infrastructure.

In the course of these developments, the management consultancy has grown the most of the PWC business areas and generated a total output of 1.12 billion euros, almost a quarter more than in the previous year.

However, auditing and audit-related consulting services also increased by 9.7 percent to EUR 841 million.

With tax advice and legal advice, PWC was able to earn 2.6 percent more in Germany with 588 million euros.

Despite the weaker growth compared to management consulting, auditing is a flagship for PWC.

The provider was able to win the Dax giants Siemens and Mercedes-Benz as audit customers and has received orders for the audit of 17 of the 40 Dax companies.

The market share in the leading index has thus grown to 42 percent.

"We see ourselves as the winners of the rotation," said Justenhoven.

However, she emphasized that not only listed companies are an important customer group, but also medium-sized companies.

Because of the growth, the testing and consulting network is creating numerous jobs.

In Germany alone, PWC hired 3,449 people and employed an average of 13,095 people in the financial year.

In total, the PWC network even created 32,000 new jobs around the world.

PWC also wants to continue to offer auditing and management consulting from a single source, unlike its competitor EY, which is currently working on a large split of both business areas.

With this step, EY wants to generate more growth, because up to now audit customers have not been allowed to be advised by the same provider at the same time.

This is intended to strengthen the independence of the auditors, but can lead to the auditing and consulting divisions of the same company chasing customers away from each other.

Some in the assurance industry are crediting EY with its preparations for a spin-off of its advisory business as the first of the four largest assurance and advisory networks to anticipate potentially tightening regulatory pressures across the industry.

According to Justenhoven, PWC, on the other hand, sees no “first mover advantage” in such a split, i.e. no advantage on the part of a pioneer.