The COVID-19 crisis has had a major impact on every one of us – on our personal lives, on the economy, and on society as a whole. We’ll still see the consequences for some time to come, but the crisis has also shown us the importance of solidarity. We’ve seen how much we need one another and that we are there for one another.
Connection is at the heart of our transformation. We are proud of what we have achieved together in the past year. We report about this in our annual report. More information about our quality policy and the progress we have made you will find in our transparency report. In our public report, we dive deeper into the social themes we have chosen and the challenges facing our customers.
PwC wants to provide an anchor in changing times. With our knowledge and expertise, we implement a wide variety of ideas, lenses, or perspectives in support of our clients and other stakeholders. We do this together, for a better tomorrow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I truly became more aware of the latter. Working from home put us at a physical distance from each other, but it brought us closer together as a collective.
As an organisation, we learned that you can only move forward by working together. We were there for our clients from the very beginning and took the first blows together. Through the power of our combined services, we are now looking at ways to get organisations through this crisis in the best possible way. It is wonderful to see that connection and that drive in our people. This makes me really proud.
Ad van Gils - Chair of the Board of Management PwC Netherlands
In these uncertain times, we also talked about values and what we think is important in life. We need to become more comfortable talking about uncomfortable subjects such as inequality and racism. Only then can we have those difficult but very necessary conversations and challenge each other to do the right thing. This is a logical part of the transformation that we have started at PwC several years ago. A transformation that has only been accelerated by global developments. Only by being connected, we can use the full potential of the newly arisen opportunities. We have started to look more outwards, listen more attentively to our clients, and we have let ourselves be more vulnerable. We will continue with that transformation unabatedly. Because a new tomorrow we create together. Let’s create tomorrow_.
We see in our services the needs of the market and the customer gradually evolving and shifting from sector-specific themes to more cross-sectoral themes. This year, we have defined four social themes that fit our clients' challenges.
These themes are sustainable development, risk & regulatory, future of work and future of finance. Of course, these challenges also play a role for our own organisation. For our public report we asked external experts to discuss each theme with each other. In this way, we also encourage ourselves to look at each topic from different perspectives.
In the first nine months of the fiscal year the financial performance of PwC NL was very good and then the COVID-19 pandemic required our full attention. Like any other company we did not face a challenge like this before. As a result of the stable financial basis of PwC NL no use was made of any of the support packages as made available by the Dutch government.
Despite the challenging circumstances the net revenue increased compared to 2018/2019 by 7.4% to € 949.8 million (2018/2019: € 884.1 million). Advisory and Tax & Legal have shown a growth in revenue, benefiting from a higher demand for our services and due to large projects. The operating profit increased by 0.7% to € 164.5 million (2018/2019: € 163.3 million).
On these four important topics, we would like to show what we focused on in the past financial year and with what results.