KPMG announces FY20 revenue of US$29.22 billion

Focusing on strategic priorities while responding to transformational change.

Focusing on strategic priorities while responding to transformational change.

  • FY20 global revenue of US$29.22 billion

  • Pre-pandemic growth rate of 5% fell to -1% by end of financial year

  • Despite slight fall in gross revenues, underlying net sales and billable hours continued to grow

  • Asia-Pacific region continues to be fastest growing region

Through a year of economic and social turbulence, KPMG International today announced KPMG firms’ annual aggregated revenues of $29.22 billion for the fiscal year ending 30 September 2020. FY20 growth had a strong start with gross revenue growth slowing in the second half of the year. Overall billable hours and net sales increased throughout the financial year as firms continued to support clients in their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

  • Strong demand for Regulatory Driven Transformation, Cyber and Legal Services.
  • KPMG announced its intent to become a net-zero carbon business by 2030, as part of its continued focus on delivering growth in a sustainable way.
  • Global total headcount of almost 227,000 people across 146 countries and territories.
  • KPMG reinforces focus on Values and building an inclusive and diverse culture.
  • Global revenues for FY20 of $29.22 billion, compared to $29.75 billion in FY19.

Delivering on our strategic priorities

Digital is driving increasing demand for services, as we align our business to support all aspects of the digital journey. Our management and risk consulting services have experienced growth as clients seek insights on structuring a digitally-enabled enterprise. Notable is our suite of Powered Enterprise solutions, designed to transform legacy business processes to help enterprises achieve top 10% functional performance. Our Cyber Security services continue to experience strong demand as trust becomes an ever more valuable commodity in a digital world.

Our global alliances, with leaders such as Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAS, ServiceNow and Workday, are vital in delivering our growth ambition, and revenues experienced as a result of our alliance relationships continue to see a significant increase.

Technology is making the regulatory and legal environment more complex and is increasing demand for our Regulatory Driven Transformation services as clients seek to automate compliance programs and better manage risk. Legal complexity is also rising, leading to increased demand for KPMG Legal services which is now realizing 6% growth. Our investments to bring greater digital capabilities and enhanced quality execution to Audit, especially with our KPMG Clara smart audit platform, are continuing to strengthen demand for our Audit services.

Watch a video of Global Chairman & CEO, Bill Thomas, for more on how we’re delivering against our strategy.

Responding in a transformative year

KPMG professionals have worked alongside organizations around the world in taking on the challenges posed by COVID-19. We’ve contributed expertise and resources to public health initiatives, both on the front line and broader operations, helping organizations respond to the overwhelming demand on health systems. Around the world, we are involved in initiatives from improving the efficiency of COVID-19 testing to developing and assessing government ‘track and trace’ apps.

When financial institutions were inundated with requests from businesses for emergency government funding to stay afloat during the pandemic, thousands of KPMG people stepped in to help manage programs and process applications, so funds could be distributed more quickly. 

Strong sector and industry approach

Across all services and lines of business, KPMG professionals bring deep industry expertise together with tailored global resources to help clients address the specific challenges facing their organization. In the past year, our industry focus has driven growth in key sectors, including: Financial Services; Infrastructure, Government & Healthcare; and Technology, Media & Telecommunications.

Read more about how we supported clients and communities through COVID-19.

Resilient regional performance

KPMG firms delivered resilient performance across all three geographic regions, with the Asia-Pacific region being the fastest growing:

  • Asia Pacific delivered strong results with revenues of $5.26 billion in FY20. Australia saw particularly strong growth with the economy starting to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis and continuing to invest in key areas like digital transformation.
  • Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMA), including India, revenues reached $12.74 billion in FY20.
  • Americas revenues reached $11.22 billion in FY20. Canada was notably resilient through the year, achieving significant growth driven by cloud, data and cyber demand and investment across all KPMG business lines.

Continued strategic investments in Audit, Tax and Legal, and Advisory services

Audit

Audit revenues for the year globally reached a total of $11.07 billion in FY20.  

Our relentless focus on audit quality is at the heart of our business and who we are. It is more critical than ever in these uncertain times for enhancing trust and confidence among investors, regulators, our clients, our people, capital markets and the communities in which we work and live.

We are investing across the business in our processes, methodologies and systems to make sure every audit and every piece of work we do consistently meets the standards expected of us and our profession.

For more on how we’re maintaining the highest levels of quality and integrity across our business, read KPMG International’s Transparency Report 2020, which launched today.

Tax and Legal services

Tax and Legal services for FY20 achieved total global revenues of $6.48 billion, driven by demand for Tax services, particularly as clients seek help in managing increasingly complex, cross-border tax obligations, and work to transform their compliance processes and implement new technologies to address current challenges.

KPMG’s Global Legal services continued its strong growth at a rate of 6% in FY20. Our network now has more than 2,700 legal professionals across 81 jurisdictions with the capability to advise on a much broader range of business issues than traditional law firms. We launched a Global Legal Operations Transformation services offering to help clients as they move to transform operations and digitize and automate their legal function processes for the new reality.

Advisory

Advisory achieved global total revenues of $11.67 billion in FY20.

Our clients need to adapt to an ever-changing digital world. We’re investing in a suite of solutions that combine our multidisciplinary expertise and technology capabilities to meet clients’ most pressing needs. Our Connected Enterprise capabilities help our clients rebuild around their customers to create borderless organizations, where people and technology interact to create new levels of productivity and value. Our Powered Enterprise framework helps businesses become more nimble and scalable, enabling clients to harness the latest technologies, leading business practices and tested solutions for a smarter path to the right operating model.

Our innovative technologies include building predictive analytics and intelligent automation into our tools and methodologies.

We continue to work with our ecosystem of strategic alliances to deliver the most advanced solutions to meet the needs of our clients. In the past year, we celebrated many achievements and to name a few:

  • Launch of our global alliance with Salesforce
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) awarded KPMG its coveted global Security Competency recognition
  • Appian recognized KPMG with its Transformation Award
  • Ivalua named KPMG its Partner of the Year for second year running
  • Microsoft named KPMG its Global SI Digital Transformation 2020 Partner of the Year
  • The expansion of our alliance with SAS, jointly committing to opening three Cloud Acceleration Centers, in North America, Europe and ASPAC
  • ServiceNow’s 2020 Global Industry Solutions Partner, 2020 Americas Transformation Partner, and 2020 EMEA Accelerated Growth Partner.

A workforce of motivated people

KPMG is attracting more highly-skilled and motivated talent than ever before and in FY20 we employed close to 227,000 people globally.

In 2020, we refreshed our Values to make sure they fully reflect our aspirations and beliefs as an organization. We continue to foster communication across KPMG to share, discuss and reinforce our Values with all of our people. In a global, virtual event, ‘Courageous Conversations,’ more than 17,000 of our people provided their perspective on their lived experience at work and thoughtful ideas on how we can more effectively progress toward our goal of improved racial equity within KPMG. This is an integral part of our continued commitment to inclusion and diversity (I&D) and we will report further on this commitment in May 2021.

Read more around how we’re creating a workforce of motivated people.

Our ESG approach

Delivering on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) commitments is a global imperative and at the top of the agenda for our people and clients. In 2020, we launched KPMG IMPACT, our new ESG and sustainability initiative, dedicated to supporting clients in building a more sustainable and resilient future. We also collaborated with the World Economic Forum and came together across the Big Four to agree upon a set of universal ESG metrics and disclosures that can be adopted by companies.

In addition to our support for communities and businesses through the pandemic, we have strengthened our global focus on SDG4: lifelong learning and literacy. At the height of the pandemic in March, KPMG became a founding partner of UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition to support countries and territories in scaling up their best distance-learning practices and reaching the youth who are most at risk during this time.

In early 2021, for the first time, we will share ‘Our Impact Plan’, detailing our strategy and targets against ESG themes, including: committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030; adopting science-based targets in line with the 1.5 degree Paris Agreement; moving to 100% renewable electricity; and investing in Gold Standard carbon removal projects.

Read more on our commitment to serving the public interest and look out for Our Impact Plan in early 2021.

Other FY20 highlights

  • ALM Intelligence placed KPMG as a global Leader in Sourcing Strategy Consulting
  • Forrester named KPMG a Leader in its Forrester Wave™ Digital Process Automation Service Provider and Enterprise Insights Providers reports
  • Fortune 100 named KPMG in the US one of the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’
  • Gartner placed KPMG as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Service Providers
  • HFS Research named KPMG a leading Enterprise AI services provider
  • IDC MarketScape ranked KPMG a global Leader in Risk Consulting as well as its Worldwide Intelligent Automation Services 2019 Vendor Assessment
  • ITR awarded KPMG with its Asia Tax Firm of the Year, with KPMG scooping 15 national and regional awards
  • Stonewall Workplace Equality Index named KPMG in the UK its top-ranked professional services firm
  • Universum’s ‘World’s Most Attractive Employer Rankings 2020’ placed KPMG 12th  globally among business students
  • KPMG in the UK was the first of the Big Four globally to adopt science-based targets in its journey to become a zero-carbon business.

About KPMG International

KPMG is a global organization of independent professional services firms providing Audit, Tax and Advisory services. We operate in 146 countries and territories and in FY20 had close to 227,000 people working in member firms around the world. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity and describes itself as such. KPMG International Limited is a private English company limited by guarantee. KPMG International Limited and its related entities do not provide services to clients.

For further information, please contact:

Mark Walters
Global Head of Communications
Global Corporate Affairs, KPMG
+1 212 872 7679
mgwalters@KPMG.com

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Notes to editors:

KPMG FY20 member firm revenues (US$ billions)

Regions Current Prior Local Growth (%)
Americas 11.22 11.72 -3%
Asia Pacific 5.26 5.14 3%
EMA 12.74 12.89 0%
Total 29.22 29.75 -1%
Functions Current Prior Local Growth (%)
Audit 11.07 11.18 0%
Tax and Legal Services 6.48 6.62 -1%
Advisory 11.67 11.95 -1%
Total 29.22 29.75 -1%

The financial information set forth represents combined information of the independent KPMG member firms, affiliated with KPMG International Limited, that perform professional services for clients. The information is combined here solely for presentation purposes. KPMG International Limited performs no services for clients nor, concomitantly, generates any client revenue.

FY20 revenues, throughout this press release, reflect KPMG’s financial year between 1 October 2019 and 30 September 2020 and are expressed in US dollars.

Local growth percentages are based on maintaining consistent FY20 exchange rates within the prior year and are based on gross revenues, including travel and other client reimbursable expenses, which are excluded from the net revenues growth calculation.

Headcount figures are expressed as FTE (full-time equivalent) and are based on average headcount for the financial year.

Legal services may not be offered to SEC registrant audit clients or where otherwise prohibited by law.

Throughout this press release, “we”, “KPMG”, “us” and “our” refers to the global organization or to one or more of the member firms of KPMG International Limited (“KPMG International”), each of which is a separate legal entity. 

KPMG International Limited is a private English company limited by guarantee and does not provide services to clients. No member firm has any authority to obligate or bind KPMG International or any other member firm vis-à-vis third parties, nor does KPMG International have any such authority to obligate or bind any member firm.