Welcome to our 2022 Global Annual Review, ‘A Year of Solving Together.’ This is the story of how PwC’s global network team of nearly 328,000 people – our community of solvers – managed the challenges and opportunities of the last 12 months and helped our clients and stakeholders navigate a successful path forward.

This year, the war in Ukraine, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, rising inflation, an energy crisis, supply chain disruption and the pressing need to address climate change have combined to produce the most difficult set of global circumstances in my career. Managing such tough global challenges is possible only when we come together: when people with diverse skills combine forces to solve complex problems, and when business steps up to take responsibility for its impact on the society of which it is an inseparable part.

I’m so proud of the work that our talented community of solvers has delivered around the world this year to support our clients and to make positive contributions to the society we all share. I would like to thank each and every one of them for their hard work, enthusiasm and perseverance. Our people, and the wide range of skills and experiences they bring to work every day, are the engine of our success.

Our strategy in action - The New Equation

Launched in June 2021, our global strategy – The New Equation – is being implemented by PwC firms around the world. This strategy responds to what clients and other stakeholders across the globe tell us they need most: help building trust and achieving sustained outcomes. In this year’s Global Annual Review, we share some of the ways our people have applied that strategy to help solve important problems facing business and society. Specifically, we’ll share how our community of solvers is helping to address these four problems:

• How can we build trust in business and society?
• How can companies build a productive workforce and organisation?
• How can companies transform for enduring success? 
• How can business and society do the right thing on ESG?

We’ve achieved significant progress on the commitments we made when we launched The New Equation in June 2021:

• In the last year, we created 32,000 net new jobs, taking our workforce to 328,000 people across our network.
• We’re well on the way to our target of creating 100,000 net new jobs over five years.
• We invested US$3.1 billion across our network in the last 12 months, including US$507 million invested in training and upskilling our people to solve the challenges of tomorrow.
• We are investing $1 billion in a multi-year programme to deliver a new audit ecosystem for our next generation audit.
• Our Trust Leadership Institute in the US is up and running and, to date, over 1000 senior executives have benefitted from its programmes.
• We’re refocusing our service offering to build the broad skillsets needed to solve today’s evolving challenges. As part of this, we’ve made multiple acquisitions and strategic investments to expand our professional capabilities in key areas such as cloud, emerging technologies and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance issues).
• We’re building our people’s capabilities to address the challenges of the 21st century. For example more than 93,000 PwC people have undertaken ESG training in FY22 through our Global ESG Academy.
• We sold our global mobility business allowing further investment in areas of strategic priority.
  

These actions strengthen the capabilities of our community of solvers, enhance the quality of our service, and equip us to help our clients build trust and deliver sustained outcomes.

Key to building a strong community of solvers is making PwC a great place to work. We’re delighted to be recognised in surveys as one of the most attractive employers, particularly for graduates. But we never stop trying to improve the quality of our employees’ experiences with us. We’ve developed new ways to support, care for and upskill our people as the world of work recalibrates to a new normal following the pandemic. In the last financial year, for example, we supported our people with more flexible or hybrid working options, better access to training, more competitive remuneration, and a continued push to enhance inclusion and diversity.

We seek to have a positive impact on society

We believe business has a responsibility to be a force for good in society, accountable not just to shareholders but to all stakeholders: staff, customers, communities, policymakers, regulators and society at large. This is necessary for companies to maintain a social licence to operate, but more importantly it’s crucial to maintaining the healthy societies on which we all depend.

In this year's Global Annual Review, we share some of the ways we’re helping clients achieve positive outcomes for society by, for example, reducing their carbon emissions, increasing their diversity and succeeding as businesses so they can create shared prosperity for their staff, investors, and communities. We discuss some of the ways we’re helping business and society work together to produce positive social outcomes, from our advocacy for rigorous sustainability reporting standards to our work on how the tax system can serve the public interest.

We strive to be accountable for our own performance as a network. This year, for the first time, we’re seeking to report on all of the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – both core and expanded – that are relevant to our business. We fully or partially comply with 35 of 42 relevant metrics, and we are seeking to improve on this in the future. In addition, we’re reporting on our global climate performance using the rigorous framework of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Though only a handful of countries where we operate require TCFD reports, we believe organisations should deliver robust climate disclosures - regardless of where they do business. So that’s what we do. 

We are rightly accountable for the decisions we take in difficult situations such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I am moved by the selflessness and care shown by thousands of PwC people who welcomed refugees into their homes, collectively donated millions of dollars to help Ukraine, and even helped to evacuate hundreds of children from active war zones. As a network, we determined that if sanctions are applied to Russian individuals or entities anywhere in the world, we would apply those sanctions everywhere we operate. In March, we announced that we would no longer have a firm in Russia and we ceased operations there by early July. We believe this is the right thing to do.

Throughout this Global Annual Review, we share some of our efforts to have a positive impact on society, for example:

• We’re on track to reach all our net zero commitments by 2030.
  
• This year, PwC volunteers across our network gave 789,000 hours of their time to good causes.
  
• We collaborated with UNICEF in support of Generation Unlimited to help young people across the world gain the skills they need to realise their potential (see our People chapter).
  
• We help to build public trust in society and its institutions, for example through our support for robust audit standards that are key to faith in capital markets (see our Trust chapter).
  
• We engage in a wide range of strategic alliances and global fora on ESG issues, helping to shape strategic discussions, advocate for change and accelerate the global policy agenda (see our ESG chapter).
• We help businesses to succeed which in turn supports employment, contributes to the tax base and enhances communities’ quality of life (see our Transformation chapter).  

Delivering quality

Delivering quality work is core to everything we do. Quality is at the heart of The New Equation. It is the bedrock of building trust and delivering sustained outcomes. We consistently work together to deliver quality, independence, excellence and integrity for all of our clients - from delivering quality work that helps our clients build trust to applying a deep and broad understanding of our clients’ businesses and the environment in which they operate to drive sustained outcomes. 

We know there’s always more we can do, and we strive to learn lessons from our past and improve for the future. Quality has been a primary focus of our investments in the last 12 months and will continue to be in the years ahead. We’re always exploring potential improvements, ranging from reinforcing our culture of independence to onboarding new technologies to deliver the audit of tomorrow. We have invested significant time and resources to maintain and continually enhance quality, and we’ve seen continued positive impact on our inspection results.

Our diverse community of solvers is key to our quality. All of our people – including our auditors – can call on a vast network of experts in tax, technology, law, deals, policy, risk, infrastructure, transformation, and much more – not to mention our experts in dozens of sectors. Delivering quality audits and solving complex business problems require a multitude of skills and perspectives, and that’s just what our global network offers. Our strength comes from our breadth and depth. That’s why we’re fully committed to operating a multidisciplinary model at PwC. 

Record financial performance

The impact of The New Equation is apparent in our financial performance. For the first time, PwC firms across the world earned gross annual revenues of more than US$50 billion, up 13% from our last financial year - our highest growth rate since 2005. During a difficult time for the global economy, we achieved growth in all our major firms across the world and in all lines of business. 

This growth is testament to the attractiveness of our focus on building trust and delivering sustained outcomes, and to our clients’ continuing preference for the diverse skillsets provided by our communities of solvers. It is also the product of the investments we’ve continued to make over the last few years in training and recruiting the best talent and in enhancing our services.

In conclusion

Despite the world’s challenges, we look to the future with hope because we’ve seen firsthand what’s possible when a community of solvers comes together. We hope you enjoy reading about some of what our people have achieved this year on the big issues that affect us all.

If you have any comments or questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’ll be delighted to hear from you. 

Bob Moritz