Analyzing...
So, hi, good evening, everyone and once again, thank you Mohit for setting the context and refreshing our memories on the TechM flywheel. So, over the last one year, as Mohit highlighted in his earlier presentation the focus around growth, organization and operations is what has been driving the organization and the key focus around the delivery and operations strategy is something which is not very new, it's not something which is very unique, right. It's about creating a resilient, efficient, agile delivery and operations organization. How do we realize the vision that we have set forward for FY27? We have obviously seen the progress that we
have made in the last one year through doing a few of the areas that we wanted to focus on.
And now, as we enter into the stabilization year of FY26 so that we can reap the benefits in FY27, there are a series of steps that we are taking as an organization that can help us become more resilient with respect to our margin aspirations as well.
Our operations strategy is not about just improving the margins, it's about also building a world-class delivery organization where we have the right kind of scaling, upscaling, retraining based on the evolving customer needs as well, right.
And this is what I am really going to cover as part of my 5-10 minutes kind of a speech. So, as we look forward, what we have really done in FY25 is look at the parameters that can have an impact for us when we look at our margin aspirations.
One of the key areas that we focused on is how do we look at our fixed price engagements and bring better productivity into those engagements, right.
Obviously, we have Lean, AI, automation, and the technology is evolving at such a fast pace that our ability to infuse that into our fixed price programs and take out and extract some headcount, which basically can be used for other programs, is really about how we have been able to drive the FP productivity. Now, this program has been structured in a way where we look at how we have gone around bidding for a particular deal, what have we committed, how can we leverage technology, AI, Gen AI, now Agentic into multiple of these FP programs and drive that optimization. That is one area which has given us some improvement and we will continuously focus on this.
The other area that we focused on was around pricing, which is around really finding out the right rate for the right role. Now, we obviously did some kind of industry benchmarks and Mohit spoke about also the fact that we are an organization which have a very rich experience. How do we really monetize that experience with our clients taking those capabilities that we have built over the years and be able to charge a premium for the premium and the niche skills that
we are developing. For the entire pricing strategy, which has actually yielded results for us in the last year, when we will continuously look at how we take it forward as well, and this will be also aided by the platform that Mohit mentioned, which is this intelligent skills platform that we have developed where the skills of every single individual in the organization is ready for us with their proficiencies and our ability to have those meaningful conversations with the customers in terms of why do we really need a differential rate becomes so much more meaningful for us.
Last year, we started our process of integrating some of the portfolio companies.
We made some good progress there and this is a year that we will continue on this journey as well. So, the entire portfolio integration is a key part of our strategy for FY26 as we look into this year of our stabilization. One area that we continuously look at and there are a lot of these hygiene parameters which goes into any margin program, right. And as Mohit mentioned, this is not something which is new to all of you but it's about the rigor and the discipline of doing it. It's about how do we do rotation, how do we really tackle the utilization, how do we make sure that our onsite-offshore percentages are properly aligned, and I think that is really the focus of Project Fortius. So, as we look forward to FY26, we obviously have our margin aspirations as to how we want to exit the year with and clearly these are the same parameters that we will be following with the intensity and the rigor that we have done in FY25 to give us the results that we want to achieve for FY26 and FY27.
One of the big areas that we wanted to focus on was how do we really become an organization where learning and development and upscaling and rescaling people is at the core of the organization, right. Obviously, we as a services organization, it's all about the people. And hence, multiple initiatives which came in, Rapid is a platform that I just spoke about, which is a platform where the skills and the taxonomy of the skills along with the proficiency level of every individual is captured, which obviously helps us to go and have a pricing discussion with the customer and not just that, it helps our fulfillment team to be able to fulfill much faster as well. So, the acceptability of these people back to the delivery
organization and the customers improve significantly as a result of the right skills capture that we have done.
It's not just about the delivery organization, right? The upscaling and the rescaling that is required by the sales organization, not just the SBU sales but the practice salespeople on the ground through focused intervention so that we can uplift their capabilities to have meaningful discussions with the customer was part of the Velocity program as well. And one of the key things that we really realized is that as we are entering into this, the customer needs is not just about deliver what has been committed by you. It is about understanding the needs, it's about understanding their uncalled for needs, it's about understanding the value that you can drive through adjacencies that we have identified in other areas. And we went into an intense program of training our project and program managers to really understand not just what how to deliver projects but also how to identify opportunities and take it in a meaningful way to the customers. How do we start leveraging AI? How do we get our project and program managers certified on AI as well, became an integral part of this.
Now, as we look forward in FY26, we continue on this journey, right. We had spoken about how we are going to continuously invest back into the business as part of our FY27 roadmap. And investing in learning and development is also one of the key pillars that we are focused on. This year there's a whole lot of focus on basically making sure that every single individual has an individual career and learning roadmap that is being defined. There is a personalized coaching which has been identified for a lot of the high performers and then this journey of the sales enablement obviously continues as well. So, learning and development at its core will continue.
Obviously, there has been this huge focus around certification. So, we have our own certification programs, be it on AI or be it on different technology stacks or be it on domain as well. But also, the external certifications that we do as part of
our overall process, right. So, I think that focus continues for us for the coming year as well.
As part of our FY27 roadmap, in addition to calling out what are our strategic verticals, industrial verticals, what are the markets that we want to operate in, we had also called out certain service lines or capabilities that we believe we are strong in, and we have the right to win and will continuously develop and take it forward to the customers. The four that you see here are the ones that there has been a significant focus on. The one on the enterprise apps, which really talks about what the work that we do with the SAPs, the Oracle, the Salesforce, the ServiceNow of the world, that's seen a significant progress both in terms of the traction that we are seeing from the customers as well as the wins that we have seen. We have had significant accolades and wins in enterprise applications over the last 2 years, right.
We got the ‘Partner of the Year’ Award for Oracle and Salesforce. We were recognized by ISG as leaders in digital engineering and e-mobility when we look at our engineering services. Next-Gen Services, which is all about the work that we do on data and analytics, AI, cyber, etc., has been at the forefront of most of the large deal wins, right. If you look at most of the large deal wins, they are embedded with the solutions on cyber security, on AI and data, and that continues to be a significant focus for us and as you can see, a significant number of accolades that we have received there as well. And on Cloud, I think if you look at most of the large deal wins, again, that we are speaking about, they have Cloud embedded, I mean, most of the deals are happening on the Cloud as well. And we continuously see our movement in the analyst leader’s quadrant. So, Mohit spoke about the 90 percent that we are seeing there and that's exactly what we are seeing as part of our Cloud movement as well.
Now, over this year, our focus really is to industrialize these capabilities, right.
Industrialize these capabilities and take it in a meaningful way to our largest clients, to our largest deals, convert these capabilities into wins and then really use these wins and capabilities as a competitive advantage. And that's the journey that we are in when we look at our focus service lines. While it's very heartening for us
to see the progress that we have made with respect to NPS that Mohit spoke about, this is really a result of the focused interventions that have also happened as part of the delivery excellence program. So, the delivery excellence was all about how do we ensure that the right talent is allocated for the clients at the right time, bringing in the right capabilities so that the client's needs can be serviced. So, this entire talent planning and acquisition, both in terms of restructuring as to how we think about People Supply Chain, using the platforms which are AI enabled, as has happened in a meaningful way. There is this whole program which we run as part of our large deal review with Rohit and myself, which is making sure that we are getting into the right deals, deals that we want to win. And anything that we think is a high risk or is going to be a margin dilutive, there are enough checkpoints so that we can have those calls so that we don't really enter into those kinds of risky contracts.
And as we have looked forward, the building the right industry solutions to take to our customers in a meaningful way. The good part of our service line construct, when we look at our service lines, we have the verticalized service lines which are really focused on building deep domain solutions and capabilities that can be taken to the customers. We have our horizontal service lines, like Cloud & Infrastructure services, Next-Gen services, Enterprise Apps, Design, etc., which are really focused on building these horizontal capabilities. Now, marrying these 2 and taking these solutions and accelerators in a meaningful way to the customers is really resonating very well. So, when we look at our large deal wins, it's also backed by the solutions and accelerators that we have been able to build which show that the productivity and efficiency that we can drive. So NPS is definitely one way to look at it but there's really no better proof point than what we look at when the customer talks about it.
So, we speak about building a delivery organization which brings in innovation, which brings in agility, which brings in resilience. And this quote from Kate, who is the CEO of Brighter Speed, actually speaks about what we have been able to drive as a business transformation for them itself. This is really what the core and
the heartbeat of any organization is, which is a delivery organization, which is being transformed through learning and development, through the process and quality controls and checks that we have brought in, through the People Supply Chain processes that are getting completely revived to make sure that they become tuned to the latest needs of the industry. And this is how we are really making sure that we deliver to the margin and the delivery excellence goals that we have set for ourselves for FY27.
So, with this, I will take a pause and invite Rohit to walk us through how we are building a more sustainable financial organization as well.
Thank you, Atul, Mohit. So, with the view on the 3-pillars that we had shared, the strategy with you guys a year earlier and the progress we have seen, I just want to reflect that in charts, so that we bring all of this together and what the future looks like for us, right.
So, if you look at deal wins, we have gradually ramped up from the Q4 of last year, each quarter from $500 million to $798 million in the recent quarter. I think the more important point is the diversity of the deals, right, between geography, vertical, type of clients we are servicing, right, that diversity is very important. And second, the rigor we have as Atul mentioned on the deal review qualification process, right. We have a whole contract management team that we have set up which looks at each and every aspect of this deal and makes sure that the diligence is very strong, so that the customer choice as well as the project choice is rightly made. And we are very diligent in that process, so we want to reiterate the qualification of projects is a very important aspect as we grow this deal in pipeline.
So, pipeline as well as deal wins growth with the quality is very important.
When you look at revenue, we were negative last year as Mohit mentioned, we have come to a flattish view this year. I think our goal is, be ahead of the peer average by FY27. That's what we mentioned in FY27, and we are slated to go in
that path as we move forward. We obviously have some macro headwinds that you all know of in the current stream, but we are continuing monitoring that. But our long-term goal of FY27 still continues to be in that path from a revenue standpoint.
When you look at earnings, EBIT percent, we started with 7.4 percent in the quarter ending last year and that was without any unusuals. Through the year, we had some unusuals and I will take you to the full year walk in the next page. But 7.4 percent to 8.5 percent, 9.6 percent, 10.2 percent, and 10.5 percent despite a wage hike that we announced in the recent quarter. So, we have had sustained momentum each quarter that you have seen progress in the margins and various aspects, as Atul mentioned, it's not just one area. There's multiple efforts that are going through Project Fortius that we are working on and I will do a margin walk to you that where do we see the maximum improvement and where do we see a vision from a future standpoint.
And we stay committed on our ROCE goals. We have got to the 22 percent in this quarter. I think long-term commitment, again, to you as a function of profitability and growth is get ahead of the 30 percent mark and we are committing ourselves towards that goal as we move towards our financial journey, which we had clearly laid out to you guys’ last year.
And these are some of the metrics that we also shared beyond the key numbers to see some of the inputs between growth metric, margin, and organization, talent, and how we are progressing on that. I think Mohit already mentioned the growth in accounts which are greater than $20 million revenue for us. It's grown by 2.3 percent against a flattish organization growth, which is year-on-year also a change of 400 basis point plus. So that's a big positive for us with the peak and prime program that we have launched. The focus that we are doing in top accounts, that's very important.
Contribution from the key geographies that we defined for ourselves, I think that's gone up year-on-year. Had it been not the pressure we saw recently in Americas due to which you saw a growth drop off, I think this number would have been
much better, but I think this will anyways take time. This is a long-term makeshift that we are trying to drive. So, it's a long-term trajectory that we will keep on getting better on.
Net new deal wins I already spoke about. In terms of enterprise, there's a segment that's improved year-on-year at 66.9 percent now, improvement of 1.6 percent from our last-year perspective. So, growth, you have seen improvement in pretty much all the metrics we shared with you.
And similarly, margin, entry-level workforce, we continue to drive the program this year as we have committed. So, we get better there. C&B is a reflection of all the efforts we have done on the fixed-price program, as well as overall margin actions. And then percentage revenue from service line, what Atul just shared with you. The growth there is very important for us because these are high-growth service lines. These are differentiating service lines which put us ahead of the customer in all large deal wins, as well as they're better in margin. So, we want to continue to drive focus investment here.
Organization talent, very core of the foundation or the organization we are trying to build, as Atul shared in his pages, learning and development, ensuring that everybody gets reskilled, everybody gets upskilled. We want to encourage that culture within the organization. We have invested a lot already on learning and development. We will continue to invest a lot more in the next few years. So, this is going to be a big focus for us, and you can see the improvement of upskilling that has happened across the organization. I mean, we want to drive diverse and inclusive organization. There's multiple diversity metrics that we drive for. But one of the ones which we shared last time with you was gender. We have improved in that year-on-year also.
And then the clients that we continue to drive, Gen AI, Generative AI is a big focus. Mohit mentioned about it. That will continue to be an investment area and we will continue to track our progress on this as we move forward as well.
So, this is the roadmap for last, the year that just ended. We had reported 6.1 percent margin and we said there were certain one-timers that won't be repeated.
So naturally, the baseline gets a little better. From that comparison, we have had the year at 9.7 percent, and these were the buckets we shared with you. We will continue to drive cost-saving through Project Fortius each year. And the bucket has to be similar each year, so it's kind of linear. Then we will get some positive portfolio mix based on the choices we are making between certain geographies, certain verticals, certain project types. And then wage hikes that we announced in January, including investment. Investment, as I said, when we spoke about it as a team, when we sat around it, we made a plan re-emphasizing that for long term we have to invest in the business and not think about an extra percent margin expansion right now. This investment of a percent plus which we had articulated is very important for us to drive service line capability, to drive investment in tools that give us long term margin improvement, invest in the pyramid of the organization. So, it's an area where it's a long-term vision and very important and we continue to push ourselves to commit to this and we will continue to drive that next year as well. In fact, in a tough macro environment we are even more committed to get better talent, better leadership as we move forward to make sure that we drive from a long-term organization change perspective. So, this is what we delivered last year and same path we have for the next two years. That's exactly detailed into each and every lever that we are going to get into to make sure there's a linear improvement in margin that you will see over the next 2 years.
And these are some of the other working capital and capital return metrics. So, you can see DSO is consistently down over the last few years from 97, 96, 92, to 88.
We still feel we will continue to push this further through various improvement on terms, through various improvements in the way we drive operational project execution so that our unbilled days gets down and hence we can drive more productivity even in future.
From a free cash flow perspective, we generated 122 percent of free cash flow as a percentage of PAT. Last year also we were exceeding as a percentage of PAT
there. We will continue to drive this metric in a positive direction. And then, as committed, more than 85 percent of FCF returned as dividend. That's what we have done for this year. And that's an increase year on year and we will continue to push that envelope as we move forward.
Portfolio integration, Atul spoke about it. It's an important part of our margin as well as growth journey both. Because the capabilities that we had acquired historically, we had kept it isolated in different pockets and ownership. We have now integrated everything in this year in the front office. So, everything is integrated between a sales and a service line structure. Similarly, from a middle office perspective, capabilities are all with Atul and his service line leaders. So, it makes a better portfolio when we go to customer to offer. The differentiated capability is much better. And then we already had spoken to some of you on our back-end integration. We are expanding our ERP system to all portfolio companies. That process is on. We are 60 percent there. I think the next year, we will continue to drive more - 100 percent closure, which will drive more G&A optimization, better simplification, governance, compliance, as we move forward.
So, it's a big part of our integration process and we have already seen the benefit.
We have seen the benefit in BORN, which, as you all know, is a leading service line for us to get into customers, differentiate ourselves with that capability and win large deals. So that's playing out very well. And similarly, in HCI, we were able to pull in, with that capability and relationship, the other service line to get much bigger share of revenue than what HCI themselves got as a delivery unit. So, I think very, very early stages but I feel this is going to grow much more as we move forward and as the integration goes more deeper into back office as well as middle office.
And investment, I mean, this is exactly the same page we showed. We are still committed to these areas. We are going to invest in service line capabilities. We will continue to invest in the ecosystem on our productivity efforts. As Atul mentioned, talent is a big focus for us and then from a sales and key vertical perspective we are doubling down in regions where we have verticalized the
regional structure and we have gotten talent, as I had mentioned. Even in this year, with a tough macro, this is a perfect opportunity for us to get the right talent and we will be very aggressive on that as well.
And just as a key takeaway, I want to leave it with a few points, I mean, it is a tough macro situation right now, but we are confident with the transformation we have made that with the macroeconomic challenges, we will continue to progress in our journey. And we will continue to watch the environment very closely along with that. So, margin growth has been sustained. I think we are very confident with the process and all the pillars of levers of margin improvement that we have laid.
It's an engine that will continue to drive on a long-term basis. We will also ensure that the deal wins are more sustainable as we move forward. Obviously, there's some lumpiness on deals over quarter on quarter. But on a long-term basis with the pipeline we have, with the qualification process we have, with the selection we have, we are very confident that this will move in the right direction. I think Gen AI, as I mentioned in consulting you can talk to Arjun through the dinner. I think we have areas of investment for us along with various service line capabilities. We will continue to double down here. And our reinforcement in our policy to return back capital to the shareholders, that continues to be predominant, and we will stick to that.
So, I just want to leave with these commitments and the progress as we see it today.
I will hand it over back to Atul to wrap up and open it up for Q&A. Oh, sorry, Mohit. Apologize.
Thank you, Rohit. You know we are at the end of the session like I said, really grateful to all of you.... We are really grateful to all of you for the support that we had last year as we were rolling out the plan. Clearly, a lot of things could have fallen through the cracks. But I am really happy that this is a fairly straightforward business. I think we had a fairly simple plan that we presented to you. I am really
happy that it has started to come together really well. And I wanted to thank the team that we have. We just have an incredible team.
Many of them are here today our SBU leaders, Harsh, who leads our APJ business, Harshul, who leads our Europe business, Sumit, and CTL from our US portfolio.
We have a number of our service line leaders here including Sahil, who used to head up our Digital Enterprise Applications business. We have our finance team here. And I feel that in the past one year, the team has really come together well.
It is incredibly aligned. We have a very clear sense of the mission of what we have promised to accomplish by FY27, and we are not deviating from what we have promised. My own sense is, and again, it sounds like a bit of a truism, but if the one lesson in life for me is that people and companies who know what they want to accomplish usually find a way to get there and that is where we are.
Thank you all again for your time today. Look forward to our discussions over dinner. And thank you all for your support. That really gave a lot of confidence and credibility to our plan. The positive reception by the market really gave a lot of confidence and credibility to the plan through the past one year and hopefully you have seen that we have built a foundation to deliver on our commitments. Thank you.
Thank you, Mohit, Rohit, and Atul. We will now begin the Q&A session. We will first take questions from our guests present here followed by guests who have joined us virtually. For in-person guests, we would request you to please identify your name and organization before asking your questions.
So, I had a few questions. One, if you could talk about the margin tailwind from the 1 percent top line reduction from scaling down non-core businesses. Then the Forex margin tailwind in Q4. And the benefit to margin from support functions consolidation of portfolio companies. And how many global Fortune 500 customers did we have in FY24? I know you talked about what we have now but
just for context, how many did we have last year? And how do you define the entry-level workforce, is it 0-3 years or something else? And what's your current offer acceptance ratio for lateral hires?
Thankfully, most of them are for Rohit.
So, sorry, I didn't get the name. Can you just...can you hand over the mic, please?
Yeah, Ravi, can you repeat on the margin walk your question was on mix? If you can just repeat that, please.
The tailwind from the 1 percent top line reduction from scaling down non-core businesses.
Yes, so that's a 1 percent impact on growth that is there in FY25, where as stated, we said we will not focus on non-core portfolio. And it was a conscious effort in certain geographies and areas where we didn't see long-term strategic alignment that we wanted to make sure that we scale it down. I mean, we had already done a lot of that in FY24, and we said a tail of that is left in FY25. That is the portion of the business that we scaled down. That’s the impact of 1 percent on growth for last year.
But that will have a margin benefit, right, that’s what I was asking?
Yeah, yeah of course, that’s the margin benefit that we are getting in this year as well continues as a full year benefit next year absolutely, that’s right.
But you can’t quantify that though.
I mean it is a part of the effort and the project Fortius, so you can look at everything accumulating as one stream of benefit, and this is one of the streams that we have.
So, I mean I would say it is 20 basis, 20 to 30 basis point within the whole scheme of improvement you have seen. But very important because the risk it carried was much more, so it is more a risk and reward decision than really the margin impact.
Thank you so much. And FX margin tailwind in Q4?
So, FX is minor, it is around 30 to 40 basis points that we have seen in this quarter, that’s the benefit that we had.
Okay. And the benefit of margin from support functions consolidation of the portfolio companies?
Not yet, so we have not yet done that so it is FY26 plan. We have already started executing on it and it is a part of the roadmap for this year’s margin.
And, Mohit, how many Global Fortune 500 customers did we add this year?
Look, when we mentioned in the deck that we have added about 45 must-have accounts, now for the must-have account definition it’s…obviously the Fortune 500 clients are within there. But it also includes other clients which may not be Fortune 500, which may be let’s say you know a certain minimum threshold let’s say over $2 billion but where we feel there is significant headroom for growth, right. Now if I look at the 45 clients that we added I would say roughly about a quarter of them would be Fortune 500, so to that degree you can say that 10 percent or so thereabouts of the Fortune 500 clients that we have are added in the past one year.
Thank you. And how do you define that entry level workforce?
Entry level workforce that we define is 0-3 years as you rightly pointed out, that’s the definition that we do. So, we have our internal bands that we use, yeah, 0-3 years.
And what's your current offer acceptance ratio for lateral hires because you talked about how ESAT has improved but at least it is trending up a little bit, so just worried a bit about the lateral hiring.
I think it really varies significantly based on the capabilities that we are having.
Our generic skills it is above 70 percent, for some of the niche and premium skills it comes down less than 50 percent, so it hovers from around 45 percent to close to 80 percent depending on which skills we are targeting there.
In the interest of time, we will only restrict to one question please.
Yeah, thanks. This is Sudheer from Kotak Mutual Fund. So, we have around 42 percent year-on-year growth in deal wins which probably no other, none of our competitors whom we are benchmarking against have at this stage. Secondly, we also have very high exposure to telecom which may be relatively insulated from this tariff situation unlike a retail so on and so forth. So, given these two advantage factors that we are carrying into FY26, can that target of doing better than industry average growth, can that fructify in FY26 itself, number one. And second is on margins given that you seem to be little bit ahead in terms of the target 15 percent rate, if you actually go there faster than what you are baking in at this stage, will you recoup that back into business or will you let it flow into the P&L?
I think as I had shared with Kawal because he had asked the exact same question and I told him the secret of happiness is low expectations. Look, I think we are very happy with the deal wins that we have had. But clearly, you’ve also got to account for the fact that in the past three months I’d say almost from January onwards, right, we have started to see a softness in certain sectors, we have started to see a softness in manufacturing, autos specifically, we have started a softness in hi-tech. So, we have to weigh that against the fact that the large deal wins are very significant and will contribute and will deliver growth in FY26. From a Telco perspective, Telco has not been impacted by tariffs yet because there is still an exemption for tariffs but on the other hand Telco economics continue to be you know, stressed, right. A lot of the expectations from a Telco perspective was driven based on expected declines in interest rates and they have been slower than expected. There is also concern about the consumers slowing down especially in the US and the impact there has customers switch to cheaper plans. So, I do feel
that capex spending from a Telco perspective continues to be very low. So, I don't feel that Telco is really in an expansionary mode as far as enterprise tech spend is concerned. The opportunity for Telco for us candidly is going to be consolidation, right. There is going to be consolidation in the sector, we are already seeing signs of that in Europe and in Asia Pacific where we have delivered a better set of numbers. So, I feel that the opportunity in Telco will be more consolidation driven and for us com-lever driven rather than driven by an increase in spend.
Margin?
On the margins front, look I feel, that as Rohit mentioned, we are moving into a tough macro environment, look I think we had candidly stated when we had presented the three-year plan, this three-year plan is not based on explosive growth or Covid era growth coming back but it is based on normal growth coming back to the industry. Now clearly growth in FY25 was stressed not just for us but for the entire industry. Growth in FY26 also looks like it is going to be stressed. We have to make sure that we will be able to deliver against that headwind, so I am really not, you know, at the end of the day a level of margin growth also requires revenue growth and as of now the overall you know, macroenvironment does look stressed.
I feel that we have a lot that we want to invest in the business from a growth perspective so, we will have to take that call as and when it happens. But as of now I would just account for the fact that there are more headwinds from macro perspective than tailwinds.
And maybe the reason for one question was also that we will be carrying for dinner so we can have more opportunity to talk.
Surendra from Citi. A couple of questions, firstly you alluded to macro uncertainty a few times, did it actually have an impact on your business towards the end of quarter? And anything that you are seeing for say in the immediate near term?
I think it did have an impact, so clearly, we saw discretionary spend in auto being cut during the quarter. We also saw some headwinds in…we called out one of them
from our hi-tech perspective that impacted our BPS business in the quarter. There were also some, you know, BPS ramp ups that we were expecting that have gotten slightly pushed out, they haven’t been cancelled but there is some push out that is happening. So, clearly there is you know 2 or 3 examples about macro impact that we are seeing in the US specifically.
And going forward anything that you are expecting…
Well, we did see, look, I think BPS did see you know some recovery in March, so we are hoping that you know that’s a sign but no, on the whole, look it is very hard to tell, it is very hard to tell. The good news is that we have a very diversified portfolio, right, which really is now our strength because we have very significant footprint in Europe, our APAC business has been growing gangbusters and we also have a strong presence in certain attractive markets in India, Middle East, and Africa. And so, I feel that while obviously there's a lot of focus in the US the fact that we are running a globally diversified business and the fact that we are running a vertically diversified business does provide us with a level of cover as opposed to you know if you were getting 90 percent of our revenue from a single market.
And on the deal TCV while the growth is quite impressive, but Tech Mahindra has done more in FY22 and FY23. So, is there an aspirational number you have in mind which can give you the industry leading growth that you are targeting in FY27 for the deal flow number for FY26.
No, look, I think as far as deals are concerned as we have said you know we are very happy with the momentum that we have. We also want to make sure that there's a lot of discipline that we have in the deals. If you look at not just Tech M in the past but a lot of companies have challenges is where in the sort of… deals are obviously very attractive, we all love deals, we love talking about deals, but we have established fairly strong guardrails. So, to that degree we will always be prudent about the deals that we sign up to because we are very focused on delivering on our margin commitment.
Thank you.
Just, Surendra, to add there the range $600 to $800 million with that we have been articulating for the view we have right now is the range bound sufficient to Mohit’s point of the environment the situation gets better we will obviously up it given the growth that we have to deliver.
Thank you.
Hi, this is Abhishek Kumar from JM Financial. Two questions on deals, one is you know, we have been winning deals despite being little prudent on the margin profile. In an environment where the budgets are constrained and the competition is little more aggressive, do you think that’s a risk --- as a strategy is that a risk going into FY26. And second related question, did we see any change in the deal closure momentum towards the end of March or in April. Thank you.
Yes, I think what we have been---- the reason why we have been winning deals despite the greater prudence, I mean you would say you are being more prudent, but you are winning more deals. I think the thing is that we realize there are certain strengths that we had as a company, and we are able to articulate that quite effectively. And this environment the fact that for instance that our pyramid is less broad based than our peers, the fact we are effectively running almost a diamond in terms of the talent structure is very attractive to clients. We just have not been able to articulate that story you know maybe in the past. We have been articulating the story of the fact that there is a deep engineering strength in the company, the fact that our average years of experience are much higher than our peers. The fact that we have differentiated software capabilities from a telecom perspective, the fact that we have deep relationships because of Mahindra Group. So, beyond being price comparative I think these factors are helping us maintain that deal momentum. There's always a balance that we need to draw between being aggressive in a marketplace. I feel that where we are being especially prudent is being on the contracting side where we are not taking on open ended liabilities, where we are very clear about defining the scope of what needs to be done, and
making sure that the solutions are fleshed out to a level of detail where there are fewer suppliers. So, that’s been the focus not just prudence in terms of price but also prudence in terms of contracting.
And just to add as well, Abhishek, it is also around the capabilities that we have built as part of our strategic solutions team which we spoke about - deal architects and solution architects. I mean combining the capabilities from consulting to engineering to BPS to IT and solutioning it well enough so that it is valuable to the customers, right. Using the focus drive that we have built in building the deep capabilities on AI, automation, etc., using its part of the deal construct. I think the focus that we have is not just being going away from deals which are large, it is about making sure that the deals that we are getting into we can actually execute it and better during the deal execution phase. So, that’s the approach that we are taking.
Maybe one more point I want to add, maybe, Mohit, with something that I have a personally observed in my four years here, I think the individual involvement of each and every SBU leader on deals that we are seeing is much than higher than we have seen before so that’s something. And maybe it is driven by what Mohit comes back with a background and he has been personally involved in deals I think everybody is getting in that depth probably that is also differentiating, and obviously we have added sales talent across the geographies you know that’s an investment we did. So, those are supplemental factors that are very important, right, there's no substitute to the depth that you want to go into each deal and know the solution yourself as leaders. And momentum -- to your question I think this is significant we saw towards the quarter end of the deal closure of the momentum.
No, I think look we have not seen any deals being cancelled or being delayed, if anything you know there is pressure on clients from a cost perspective. So, we feel that will be helpful for us you know we have our BPS leader, Biren, here as well and we are seeing traction in deal activity in that segment also apart from IT services that we referenced previously.
In the interest of time, we will take one last question offline.
Thanks, hi. Vibhor here from Nuvama. So, Mohit, my question was on the manufacturing vertical I think you mentioned that’s what the vertical, which is probably likely to face, we have heard commentary from the peers also. And in the last couple of days most of the ER&D companies have also been basically talking about that. How are or what are we seeing in that vertical at this point in time, do you see that as a potential headwind which kind of mitigates the growth that we could get from telecom or large deals.
Sure. I think Manufacturing is an interesting run rate because our exposure, for instance, to European auto with the exception of Pininfarina is somewhat limited so our exposure there is somewhat limited. We do have exposure to US auto, but we have also one other deals that we referred to in our commentary was a large aerospace win, right. So, we are also diversifying across beyond auto into aerospace as well. We have a large process manufacturing footprint, and we won a very large deal with a German chemical company on that side. I do feel that our portfolio is balanced enough. So, while we are calling out the auto exposure, I also want to point out that our manufacturing is not just auto, we are seeing good traction in Japan, where historically it’s been a very difficult market. One client for instance did 22 site visits before they signed us up for an ODC but again they told us that look it is going to take a long time but then this is a relationship for life, so we expect to ramp that up.
Our engineering team under RV’s leadership and our manufacturing team under Mani’s leadership and obviously the market leadership that we have with Krishna and with you know Mukul and the others, we are building out very deep solutions.
So, for instance we have built out a vehicle recall and safety solutions. We have built out warranty management solutions, we have built out Factory of Future solutions that we had we spoke about at Industry 4.0 solutions for the group itself.
So, I feel that depth of the solutions with diversified manufacturing portfolio should protect us even in the phase of a slowdown and there clearly is a slowdown,
right. H1, we had grown in manufacturing, in H2 we shrank. But maybe less exposed enough appears to Europe auto.
Got it, thanks.
We will now take questions virtually.
The first question is from Rodd Bourgeois at Deep Dive Research. Are there certain types of services that are best resonating with clients amid today’s heightened macro uncertainty? Are you more actively emphasizing certain offerings to clients in order to help them respond to their macro challenges?
Yes, thank you, Rodd. So, I think, look one is obviously there is a focus on consolidation and cost, right, and the fact that we have been seen as a credible player historically, the fact that we have a diamond shaped talent structure is very attractive to clients because while they want to take out costs, they don't want to take risks either. So, clearly consolidation and cost take out opportunities are going to be significant. The one other area I’ll call out is GCCs, as you know we announced GCC strategy about a month or so ago even though we have been working it for a long time. But we have created at the end of the day TechM itself came out of a GCC, right. We were initially a JV with BT, so it is a space we understand very well. So, building out specific solutions for GCCs, hiring new GCC leadership under Sahil and working on solutions that go all the way from build, operate and transfer to a build out option to you know supplementing them on their variable capacity. These are all solutions that we are working on, and we have had some interesting recent wins in the GCC space. Apart from that you know across the board for all of our vertical sectors whether it is Lifesciences, whether it is Manufacturing or Financial Services, we continue to see pockets of opportunity.
The next question is from Ankur Rudra – JP Morgan. Your revenue growth chart did highlight an acceleration versus deceleration perhaps for the industry. Where do you see industry growth heading to give the pushes and pulls this year? If
normal industry growth doesn’t come through in FY26 or FY27 which of your margin levers to lift margins to 15 percent would be at risk? What level of quarterly or annual deals do you need to get, to say, mid to high single digits growth in a year?
Hi, Ankur. Lots of questions, let me answer some of them and maybe I will pass it on to Rohit for some of the others. Look as far as the industry growth rate is concerned candidly you know, we have been studying your estimates as I am sure you are studying our estimates. We have seen from industry growth expectations in November where we have single digits, moderated in January mid-single digits moderated again now to I think the average has come down to low single digits.
So, I think it is a discovery process, there is still not enough clarity about where the industry growth rate will be. Obviously, we are working on our own plans, clearly, we have got some deal wins but clearly equally we see some headwinds as well. We are trying to make sure that despite wherever the industry is that our focus remains very clear on making sure that we are winning market share and that we are focused on our Fortius transformation journey. As Rohit mentioned we continue to believe that the $600-800 million range is a good range for us to be in, again large deals are lumpy so we may fall out of this for a particular set of quarters.
But we feel that is a reasonable aspiration for us to have, to meet the expectations that we have from our revenue growth and margin perspective.
And I think nothing to add more, Mohit, all I would say is that the environment is obviously evolving and I think we are very close to our customers and I think the team who is here, people who are here should interact with what you are hearing from them, from the field that’s why we have called everybody here, that’s a good opportunity. Rather it is evolving, and we are very close to our clients to make sure that we are creating our plans which are accomplishing the goals we have set for ourselves. So, I think it is an evolution and we have Plan A and Plan B, so we are very committed to what we set for ourselves towards the FY27 goals. And revenue wise the way you should look at it is our aspiration is to closing in the gap, right, historically organic growth of us was always trailing the peers, I mean this is a
chart one of the analysts had shown to us as well that we’ve always lagged the peer growth with this fair degree of range. I think our aspiration is to close that range over this year, and FY27 as we have already stated be ahead of the peer growth average.
We will now take the last question from Yoggesh Agarwal from HSBC Securities.
What percentage of loss-making businesses have already been pruned? Is there more to go or mostly done last year? Can you provide some color on the BPO business composition percentage of voice and non-voice? What could be the potential impact on Gen AI on this business as BPO is usually the first target area for Gen AI optimization?
Yeah, so look I think from a BPS perspective the business has really evolved over a period of time, right, and you know I feel that Biren and his team have put together a great strategy making sure that we are building out vertical capabilities but also end to end horizontal capabilities rather than purely voice and contact center capabilities. I feel the shift has been from a business which was historically almost 70 percent voice and contact center to a business that maybe is slightly over a third voice and contact center so that’s a transformation we have driven. I also want to point out that in the even in the contact center space we have created a huge set of agent assist and you know agentic AI solutions that is now able to offer clients a package which consists of you know agents plus human effort. So, it is not purely a bums on seats model anymore. I do feel that the BPO business has been through multiple rounds of automation, multiple rounds of technology interventions, but the demand is still there, and I do feel that we are doing a good job in winning market share because clearly, we are seen as a technology enabled player. So, I continue to remain optimistic about our potential as we transform the BPO business to be more of a agentic AI plus human exercise rather than purely a sort of a FTE driven model.
You know, from a loss-making business perspective we have done I think some actions in FY24 that you know, we had few actions that I mentioned this year
around 1 percent that we have not taken or walked away from. I think as we move forward these are all mostly now recovery portfolios for us. I think we have given examples about some of the portfolio companies which were underperforming and had strong alignment with BPS, we have given it to Biren. We are working with a strong margin improvement plan. And I think we are midway already in that journey through the year I think we will see improvement in their profitability as well. So, I think it is still there, but it is more a correction of what the entitlement is for them versus just giving away that revenue now.
Thank you, Mohit, and Rohit. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to our IR team, we will now conclude this stream for those who have joined us virtually. For our guests present here we invite you to please have dinner with us. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.