(Reuters) -IT services provider Accenture projected annual revenue growth largely above estimates on Thursday, as growing adoption of artificial intelligence offsets sluggish growth in enterprise spending and a strong dollar.
Shares of the company rose more than 6% in premarket trading, after having fallen about 19% this year on market expectations for subdued IT services demand as economic uncertainty and elevated interest rates force companies to rein in spending.
Accenture, however, has been a go-to consultant and outsourcing service provider for businesses migrating their operations to the cloud, partially shielding the company from enterprise budget cuts.
It has also benefited from businesses increasingly adopting generative AI technologies to automate certain operations, helping them boost productivity and save costs.
Accenture’s new bookings, a metric indicating value of customer contracts with a spending commitment, rose to $21.06 billion for the third quarter from $17.25 billion a year ago.
Of that, $900 million in new bookings was for its GenAI services, taking the total for the full year to more than $2 billion.
The company expects annual revenue to grow between 1.5% and 2.5%, compared with analysts’ expectations of 1.6%, according to LSEG data. It had earlier forecast growth of 1% to 3%, but on Thursday flagged a negative foreign-exchange impact of 0.7% for the fiscal year ending August.
It reported quarterly profit of $1.93 billion, while revenue of $16.47 billion missed estimates of $16.53 billion.
Excluding items, the company earned $3.13 per share, missing estimates of $3.15.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
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