The firm has once again proved its resilience as we’ve delivered growth in a more challenging market while maintaining our client focus and moving towards our goal of becoming the pre-eminent firm.
Across the group, which includes the UK, Middle East and the Channel Islands, revenues increased by 9%, with the UK seeing a 3% rise overall. This is a solid performance in an economy still recovering from the pandemic, the energy crisis that followed and the UK’s prolonged fall out from the 2022 mini-budget.
Following a strong performance in 2023, our Audit practice grew by 10% as we continued to deliver against our long-term strategy.
With the global transactions market slowly picking up, Deals performed creditably with a 5% increase in revenue, while Tax saw a 4% rise.
The challenging macroeconomic conditions were most keenly felt by our Advisory businesses where the subdued nature of the UK market saw a fall in revenue offset by the Middle East’s investment in public infrastructure projects.
The latter helped increase total Middle East revenues by a strong 26% year on year.
Despite these tougher trading conditions overall we continued to invest in areas essential to the long-term success of our business - notably our AI investment in artificial intelligence and in our graduate programmes.
In the UK, on average staff pay rises were 3% - for those eligible - with a bonus pool broadly similar to last year’s, while distributable partner profit reduced by 5% to £862,000 per partner.
As with any responsible business we keep the shape of our business under review to respond to changing client demand, attrition rates and new opportunities. While this did result in some changes to the overall size of the firm over the year, it’s important that we were able to act and that we continued to recruit where different skills were needed. This sets us up for long-term success and is important as we seek to maintain and build our high performance culture.
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