Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Happiest Minds Technologies Q2 FY 2022 earnings conference call hosted by ICICI Securities. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal the operator by pressing star then zero on your touch tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Heenal Gada from ICICI Securities. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am. Thanks, Lizanne. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today on the Q2 FY22 earnings call of Happiest Minds Technologies Limited. On behalf of ICICI Securities, I would like to thank the management of Happiest Minds for giving us the opportunity to host this call. Today we have with us Mr. Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Mr. Joseph Anantharaju, Vice Chairman, President and CEO, PES, Mr. Rajiv Shah, President and CEO, DBS, Mr. Ram Mohan C, President and CEO, IMSS, Mr. Venkatraman Narayanan, Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Aurobinda Nanda, President, Operations and Deputy CEO, PES, Mr. Sridhar Mantha, Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Sunil Gujjar, Head of Investor Relations, and Mr. Praveen Darshankar, Company Secretary and Head of Legal. I will now hand it over to Sunil for the safe harbor statement and to take the proceedings forward. Thanks, and over to you, Sunil. Thank you, Heenal. A very good morning to all. Welcome to this conference call to discuss the financial results for the Q2 and half year ended September 30, 2021. We trust all of you are keeping well and staying safe. I am Sunil from the investor relations team. Ashok will begin the call by sharing his perspectives on the business environment and our results. Venkat will then speak about our financial and operational performance, after which we will have the floor open for Q&A. Before I hand over, let me begin with the safe harbor statement. During the call, we could make forward-looking statements. These statements are considering the environment we see as of today, and obviously carry a risk in terms of uncertainty, because of which the actual results could be different. We do not undertake to update those statements periodically. Now, let me pass it on to Ashok. Thank you, Sunil. Good morning to everybody. I trust everybody is keeping well and staying safe. I am grateful that in India we have avoided a possible third wave, thanks to the government and the medical fraternity for their commitment and actions in providing vaccinations at such a rapid pace. At Happiest Minds, we are now approaching a mark where about 90% of our teams will have had at least one dose of COVID vaccine. We have got a task force which we call as Back to Smiles for preparing our teams for getting back to work from office, and this will be done in a measured and careful manner, beginning from approximately the middle of January. On the business front, we continue to see a very strong demand for digital services, and this is reflected in our stellar results, which Venkat will cover. I would like to focus on only two areas today. First is our two significant milestones we've had in this last quarter. We completed a decade of existence as a company. Secondly, we completed one year of being a listed company. I would like to express my gratitude to all the stakeholders for their continued trust and confidence. In my last interaction, I spoke about our plans to create a vision statement for 2031 and beyond. I am happy to say that we have completed this exercise. Instead of talking about our results and numbers, I want to give you a view of our vision because this is going to lay out the chart and the directions in which the company will be moving, not just up to 2031, but for many years ahead. The first vision is designing Happiest Minds for perpetuity. Many of you may have already seen some articles in the media which have covered this with some interest. The statement has three dimensions, ownership, leadership, and business strategy. For ownership, essentially, I will create a framework whereby a very large majority of my shareholdings at Happiest Minds will be parked in a private trust. The dividends from this, which will go completely to sustain SKAN, my medical research trust. Voting mechanisms will ensure that the trustees will vote in line with the management of the company. The leadership will be charged with a stipulation that controlling interest in Happiest Minds will not be allowed to go below 40%. Through this framework, Happiest Minds and SKAN, two mutually dependent entities, can conceptually flourish for 100 years and beyond. Second is leadership. The Executive Board of the company has been the driving force for growth and providing thought leadership. In fact, another milestone, the Executive Board has now completed four years. It has proved its credentials through delivering sustained excellent results. Coming to business strategy, the third aspect of designing an organization for perpetuity is to define business strategy, which is not cast in stone, but continuously adapted to embrace evolving technology landscape. As well as to follow a few basic principles, which means to be always on the leading edge of technology, to never bet the company, and follow the highest standards of corporate governance. The second vision is to accelerate profitable growth, and I think this is something that we will continue to do as we have been doing already for the last three years. The third aspect which the analysts may like to really look forward to for the future is how do we build and sustain a world-class team by establishing succession plans across leadership, career development opportunities for all Happiest Minds, and improving on our diversity metrics. We aim to have a gender diversity of 35%, with 30% of leadership positions being held by women. Our fourth vision is to be the ambassador of happiness, where we will be guided by our mission of happiest people, happiest customers. We are already achieving, I'd say, industry-leading results, whether it is on Glassdoor or Great Place to Work and in terms of customer feedback. Like in all other vision elements, we have defined a very definitive measurement criteria, and the Executive Board will be continuously tracking these, reporting these, sharing them with our entire teams as well as with our board. The fifth vision is to be recognized for thought leadership in our focus areas of technology and solutions. This is self-evident for a technology and solutions company, and we will continue, for example, to have a very large proportion of our sales as being IP-led and consulting-led. The sixth vision is to be known for our ESG practices. We aspire to be carbon neutral in operations by 2030, and drive sustainable behavior amongst Happiest Minds, establish the Happiest Minds Foundation with a clear charter that by March 2022 we will really be known very well for our ESG practices in the way that we've already got to be known for our business practices and business results. I think these are the really important directions which the company will take. With this commentary, I'd like to hand this over to Venkat. Thank you. Thanks, Ashok. Good morning to all of you on the call. I trust all of you are doing fine and keeping safe. I would like to start by thanking all our investors, analysts, market participants for the amazing support you've provided to us over the last 1 year. It's been really great, and thanks. Coming to the quarter and the results, happy to share that we've had yet another great quarter driven by good delivery, multiple customer appreciations and a robust demand environment. On the revenue, we have touched $36 million for this quarter, showing a sequential growth of 8% and a year-over-year growth of 45%. In rupee terms, our total income was INR 274 crores. Again, a sequential growth of 8% and a year-over-year growth of 46%. Our growth numbers for the quarter put us right on the top of comparable companies who have declared results thus far. On our EBITDA, we continue to show steady EBITDA margins at 25.6%, and absolute EBITDA stood at INR 70 crore. This was a sequential growth of 6% and a Y-o-Y growth of 42%. Here I would like to draw attention to a small fact. The EBITDA was after considering cost of about INR 1.4 crore allocated to be paid to beneficiaries of those amongst us Happiest Minds who lost their lives during the COVID pandemic period. On PBT, we ended the quarter with a number of INR 59 crore, which is 21.7% of revenues compared to INR 51 crore and 20.2% in the previous quarter. For the same quarter in the previous year, we had an absolute PBT of INR 43 crore. As you can see, it has been a steady growth in PBT numbers. Coming to PAT, we are currently for the quarter at 16.2% of revenues and about INR 44 crore. This is compared to 14.1% and INR 36 crore in the previous quarter and INR 34 crore in the same quarter in the previous year. The growth story continues as far as absolute PAT numbers are concerned. As I've been mentioning in my earlier calls, this fiscal we are subject to tax at full rates compared to the last year when tax credits were available, and we also had a huge deferred tax credit coming up from an accounting standpoint. Our average tax rate has steadily progressed and now has come to 25.1% compared to 20.1% for the same period last year. That's been the story on the tax front. Diluted EPS is INR 3.06 compared to INR 2.45 last quarter, and INR 2.42 a year before. Now I'll highlight a few operational aspects prior to opening up the call. Supply side constraints are across industry. Our attrition has increased to 18.5% on a trailing twelve-month basis. That said, coupled with our strong brand positioning and robust hiring and training engine, we are trying to effectively address the above challenge. During the first half of the year, we have added on a net basis 568 Happiest Minds to our family, taking our total strength to 3,796 Happiest Minds. Our utilization for the quarter declined slightly to 79.7%, 80% I should say, from 82.1% in the previous quarter. The slight drop was due to new hires and the consequent lead time to billing. On diversity, our metrics improved to 26% compared to 25% of the previous quarter. Ashok had referred to diversity being a key number that we'll be focusing, and we have stated that in our mission statement also. We were also recognized by Great Place to Work Institute as India's top 50 best workplaces for women in 2021. While talking on awards, we are very happy to state that we were also awarded the Asiamoney's Award, which was conducted through a poll among market participants and financial consultants. It's a poll based on which we were awarded two awards. One was the most outstanding company in India under the small and midcap category, and the second was the most outstanding IPO in India. Thanks a lot for all the support that you have given. We ended the quarter with 186 customers, a net addition of eight. Most notably, our 5-10 million clients have increased from three to six in the previous quarter, so that's an addition of three. Similarly, our average revenue per customer, which has been an area of focus for us, has increased to $783,000, which is an increase of approximately $124,000 from the same quarter last year, showing that the effect of our account management mining that we do with customers is bearing fruit. We have had some notable project and customer wins during the quarter, and we have given details of that in our press release. Our capital return ratios continue to be very healthy. ROC at the end of the half year stands at 33.8% and ROE stands at about 27.5%. We continue to generate healthy cash flows with free cash flow of about INR 67.4 crores compared to INR 65.7 crores in the previous quarter. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter stands at about INR 557 crore. Basis the strong cash generation and in line with our dividend policy, the board of directors of the company have declared an interim dividend of INR 1.75 per equity share with a record date of November 10, 2021. Cash outflows on this count will be about INR 26 crore. On our first half this year versus the previous, we have shown revenue growth of about 43.2% in dollar terms. Our EBITDA and PBT growth were 40% and 32% respectively. The growth story again continues if you look at half year over half year. I request you all to go through the press release and the investor presentation deck on our website for more information and metrics that we have given on our financial results. Looking a little into the quarters ahead, yes, we see significant traction with existing customers and our new customers. Demand and growth for growth opportunities for digital services continues to be very high. With this, I will end my commentary on the financial results and open the session for Q&A. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone wishing to ask a question may please press star and one on your touch tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Vimal Gohil from Union AMC. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity, sir, and congrats on good set of numbers. Firstly, I'll get done with some data points that I require. If you could just highlight what has been our subcontracting cost for the quarter? This number last quarter was about INR 35 crore. Can you help me with that, please? Vimal, I'll just give you a trend. Yeah. Subcontractor costs was in Q2 of FY 2021, 7.6%. Q1 of FY 2022 was 14.3%, and Q2 of FY 2022 was 13.1%. Quarter-over-quarter, a slight drop. Year-over-year, it has gone up by about 5.5%. You should also look at that in conjunction with our employee costs, which year-over-year has gone down from 59 to 55.6%. Got it, sir. Would it be just looking at, you know, your EBIT margins in that connection because subcon cost has come down. We are looking at while there has been a reduction in utilization, but the reduction in subcontracting cost would have sort of some impact on your margins. If you could just help me quantify what was the impact of reduction in subcontractor costs. I believe there were rate hikes as well in this quarter, if I'm not wrong. If you could just quantify the impact of these two on the margins. Vimal, I'll have to get back to you separately, or I would be happy to share this separately, because that would require us to do a rate variance and a volume variance. Keeping in line with the demand scenario for people, what we are seeing is people cost is obviously on a trot upwards, and that also applies to the subcontractor costs. Subcontractor essentially is to meet any talent gap or a supply gap or a specific country requirement, because when you go into a separate country, visa requirements, given travel restrictions, we are looking to hire from local people. That's how the subcontractor and the people get interchanged. While I say that, on subcontractors our efficiency is much better, or I would say better than employees because they are mostly laterals fit for purpose, immediately deployed on billing, compared to employees who have to go through the training however senior lateral they are. There are some puts and takes, which is why I said I would not be able to give you a quick offhand remark on the one. As far as utilization is concerned, like I touched upon it briefly, we have had 568 Happiest Minds joining us during the half year and 288 during the quarter. What ends up happening is basically the talent supply and the technical capabilities, we have to go through a small training period, and that's about it. While you know, the growth has been very strong for us. You know, if I would just want to play the devil's advocate here. If you look at our peers, and some of these peers are not as digitally native as we are, despite that, you know, they have been able to report, and I'm talking, let us not assume the period last year in terms of growth, because maybe the COVID would have impacted different companies differently. If I were to look at, on a two-year CAGR basis, the organic growth for us is probably broadly in line or slightly lower than some of the peers. What I would typically expect is for a digitally native company like Happiest Minds, and with the kind of, you know, scale that we are at right now, the growth could have been faster. Any comments there? Venkat, can I just intervene on this one? Yes, sir. Vimal, your data is completely wrong. Our year-over-year growth is significantly higher than anybody else in the industry, and not just marginally. Again, there can be a mix-up between the dollar and rupee numbers, which I've given a statement here, which is a constant currency of 45%. It's more than 15% higher than the next large-cap fellows, players. There happens to be one exception which has certainly shown a pretty good growth in the mid-size players. Even there, our numbers are much higher. With respect to everybody else, we are more than 20% higher. I'm not sure where you got that data from. Yeah. Mr. Soota, I do take your point. The data that I was referring to is the two-year CAGR number. From 2020 to 2022, that was the number. I was not taking the COVID base into account because I felt that that would have impacted different players differently, which is why I took the two-year CAGR number, which is at 20% for us versus, you know, other players are at similar level, if not higher. That is what I was referring to. It may just be that the numbers you've chosen have given a little distorted trend, but maybe, Venkat, you want to comment on this two-year CAGR. I don't think we track it. We always track, let us say, either five years or- Yeah. Sometimes a three-year. There was clearly this distortion in between. Venkat, do you think even those numbers, they still look suspicious to me, though we don't have. If you take FY 2018 as a base, our CAGR for this year would be 21%-22%. If you take last year as a base, like you mentioned, it's about 45%, which is really top of the chart, which I also covered. It also depends on the base, Ashok, which is we have to see. Yeah. You know, Vimal, if I may just leave you with a thought. Frankly, I don't think that two-year data is relevant at all. You picked it up and plucked it here. What is really relevant is we've seen year after year we are reporting that we are growing higher than industry. I don't know where that two-year number came from because we go back to last year. I don't think we ever recorded a period where we were not year-over-year higher. Clearly, what is relevant in the last 12 months, which is the year that we've gone public, is that we've grown at 45%. Out of the larger players, the next one has only grown at 28%. Vimal, there is also the aspect of acquisitions which come into play. When you do the comparison, for example, we had referred to this in the earlier calls as well. If you look at peer companies, they've been acquiring quite a few companies in the last 1-2 years. That also tends to kind of distort the numbers a little bit. Right. Fair enough. One question. I think last conference call we had referred to, you know, our efforts on consulting and, you know, which will help us, you know, in terms of engaging with the clients at a much better level. If you could just give us some update on that. I think one data point that I noticed is your increase in the 5-10 client pocket, $5 million-$10 million client pocket, which has gone up to six. Whereas the $3 million-$5 million has declined. We have effectively mined those clients, right, and they are contributing a higher sort of a revenue for us on a steady-state basis. Would that assessment be right? Yeah. I'll take the metric one. Yes, you're right. 3-5 has become 6-3, whereas 5-10 has gone from 3-6. It's essentially they're going from one notch up from below. Overall numbers, we are at the same $31 million customers. Right. Apart from consulting, if I will add one more. Maybe if you will just help us to understand the higher DSOs. The DSOs have gone up to 88. Anything to read into that? Should we assume that will normalize going forward? DSO, you have to split it between build and unbuild. Sure. Unbilled is at about 30, and the billed is at about 58. It's primarily because of one or two customers where we are getting the billing and collection cycles straight. It's a new geography in the Middle East, so there the collection procedures and processes are likely slightly different. I'm happy to state that we have made significant progress and, post the financial period we have been able to collect that. On the consulting, I will hand it over to Joseph and Ashok. I think Joseph and Rajiv. Rajiv is on the call. Yes, Ashok. On the consulting front, we continue to make good progress. During the quarter, some of the new logos that we won that have also been reported have been on the back of our ability to engage with the customer in a consultative manner. For one of the European customers, we did help them with, you know, who's in the mechanical and electrical drive system space and looking to, you know, to implement a digital strategy. We're able to go and help them define the strategy and roadmap, and right now we are in the implementation phase. Again, similarly, one of the customers I've listed out, who's one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, we've led the engagement with a consultative approach. The strategy or the approach that we've taken is to build our consulting capabilities both in our COEs and practices, both from a technical perspective and within our domains, to go understand the customer's business, to help them flesh out some of their objectives and then work with them to build a roadmap or a strategy to get them to where they need to be. Rajiv, do you wanna add anything, Rajiv? Yes. Look, a couple of things. One is that when we look at the consulting side of it's both technology consulting as well as domain consulting. Both areas we have made significant progress on interacting with the customers to drive digital transformation. That shows up in the absolute metrics that Venkat talked about the large account growth, accounts moving from $3 million, $5 million bucket to $5-$10 million dollar bucket, et cetera. I think both from the technology as well as the domain consulting, we continue to add capabilities. At the same time, I think that our integration with BGS also has helped us quite a bit to take the journey to the next level of discussion. Overall, we continue to make progress by hiring business analysts as well that continue to look at disruptions, and we are seeing a good traction with our customers. Yeah, just to add on, this is Ram Mohan. Majority of the new deals which we have won both in the cloud infrastructure and security has come through our consulting-led approach. Specifically on security, almost all the deals have come because of our consulting capability. Perfect. Thank you so much, sir, and all the very best. Thank you. Thank you. A reminder to the participants, anyone wishing to ask a question, may please press star and one. The next question is in the line of Ashish Singh, an investor. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, sir, and like thank you for giving such an extraordinary result. My question is, like for the long term, just wanted to understand how you are going to make sure, like this legacy, what you have built, Soota sir, will continue and, this kind of results we will keep on seeing, every year on year. Now, you know, there are two almost separate parts of the meeting, and one is the legacy. The legacy is what I really described in great depth already to you, where there's a framework created. A key part of that obviously is to ensure that a minimum amount of the shareholding never goes down. See, the question that used to come up earlier is that what is the plan for succession to me? That plan has actually got resolved in two ways. One is there's a executive board which is functioning, and we're saying the executive board will continue to be renewed with, let's say, one new addition every five to seven years. We don't therefore get any turmoil in the system that happens. In many organizations when you bring on a new CEO, my theory there is every third or fourth person or fourth or fifth person will turn out to be a disaster. Maybe that's a very strong word, leads into a downward spiral at times, and it takes a lot of difficulty to recover. We are avoiding that. There's the financial aspect of saying a minimum amount of my shareholding will always remain there. That will go there to support SKAN. In turn, the people who succeed me will be required to cast their votes in favor of the EB. I mentioned minimum 40%. There'll always be another 4 or 5% that you might say we will control through internal, you know, people in the company and so on and so forth. That's a very good percentage to ensure that there will never be any hostile takeover. Your next question, Ashish, was really on how do we ensure the same sort of stellar results, you know, literally quarter to quarter, we can say, yes, we are very confident we'll do it. Year after year, I think the approach is fundamentally, if you've got your basics right, you've got your fundamentals right, you don't take your nose off, the wheel, results will follow. Now, at this stage, nobody can guarantee. I did say in this case, the business strategy is the most difficult one to legislate upon. You can only give the team guidelines for the future, of saying, "These are some of the things we won't do or these are some things we will do." I will always be on the leading edge of technology. Make no mistake, we will be among the first to enter into any new space which is going to gather scale. There we will build our own intellectual property so that we straightaway show that we've got capabilities in that area. It is things like this that we will continue to focus on, and then the results should follow. Obviously, nobody can guarantee this saying year three, year four, year five, we'll continue to be, I say way and above better than anybody else. We have defined a very interesting index which we follow. Though it may not fit into the lexicon of the analyst community, it is well worth taking a look at. That is a growth plus EBITDA index. You know, in a way, because sometimes a lot of organizations may sacrifice growth to say, "Hey, we must be more profitable." Others say, "We've got to be profitable." At the same time, the other parameter goes down. In pursuit of growth, the profitability comes down. How you balance the two is why this number has been created, and it's not that we've created the number. I think one of our bankers gave us that as an index that we could look at when we were planning to go public, and we found this very useful. We have stated that we will always be in the top three amongst comparable companies on that index right through our ten-year vision period. I would say you could watch out and look at the number. At the moment, I might say that we are number one on that index, but you know, you can't always say you'll be number one. Top three looks like a pretty good target to aim for. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Of course, no one can guarantee that numbers will be always on the top-notch. Yeah, I understand that, sir. Yeah. Again, I congratulate all the investors and the board members, whole company for such an excellent results. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is on the line of Mitesh Kothari, an individual investor. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for providing the opportunity. My question is, with respect to, you know, million-dollar customers, we've seen that that has remained sort of stable quarter-over-quarter. Any guidance in terms of, you know, how are we trying to increase that? Because, you know, I'm tracking some other IT companies where we have seen a lot of, you know, increase in million-dollar customers, in this environment. Thank you. Hi. Hi, Mitesh. Just want to give you input on the numbers front. We started the year with 26 million-dollar customers. We are at 31, so we have added five during the year, during the H1 of the year. It has been our consistent and constant endeavor to keep that number going. It's. You've got a multitude. I talked about 186 customers in our client roster, and there are quite a few who are just below the million-dollar number and gravitating towards becoming a million-dollar plus, and then they enter into that club, the million-dollar club, as far as we are concerned. Very, very large names. 50+ Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 1000 billion-dollar corporations. They are all primed to move up into that million-dollar segment, as you can see. that will be the next year, Venkat. I mean, all of those numbers. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Just in terms of, you know, if you look at a very long term, if we sort of, maybe quarter and quarter, it might not be right thing to compare. If you look at, let's say over, you know, medium to long term, where do you see, you know, in terms of your $10 million customers, let's say in FY or, you know, end of FY 2023, 2022, 2025. I mean, what is the sort of, you know, guidance or internal target in terms of, you know, moving up the value chain, higher number of $1 million customers? Some color on that. In our vision statement that Mr. Soota talked about, we also have a growth objective of becoming a much larger company or a billion-dollar company in 10 years. That's through a combination of both organic and inorganic means. While we came up with that number, that was just not a back of the envelope kind of a thing. We had certain calculations in terms of how we would reach that number organically and inorganically, and also how it would contribute. How the $1 million and the $10 million, $20 million dollar customers contribute to it. If you are to ask me, we'll not come out with a statement of X number of $50 million dollar or a $100 million dollar customers. That's been the assumption that we have penciled in during making this calculation. I might add, firstly, there's no $100 million plan. I don't think we are really seeking those large giant customers. I'll tell you what happens when you look at the history of all the large players. Sometimes you may have $100 million or $200 million. One of the leading companies I remember over the previous decade, they had a $200 million customer. When that customer starts ramping down, look at the impact it has on your growth during that period. What we want is a healthy mix. We want. What are the things we really want to track? This average revenue per customer must keep going up. Whether we move too many people beyond $20 million itself doesn't matter to us, because sometimes those bids are also very highly competitive, and you don't necessarily make the best margins on those. If those customers come, well and good, and sometimes it may be in response to an RFP. We'll get included in larger and larger RFPs as we get bigger. We don't always get invited. Many times we do. These will lead to those large customers. I think the overall trend that you will see is that all these parameters will keep growing us very significantly, the revenue per customer, the number of $1 million customers, the number of $5 million customers, and the number of $10 million customers. When we reach the first $20 million, we can start setting goals even for that. Understood. The average revenue per customer is growing at a healthy rate that is quite visible. Just one confirmation more. This, you know, between $3 million-$5 million and $5 million-$10 million, there is a shift from 3-5. Can we assume that, you know, the 6 customers we were in 3-5 have now shifted to 5-10, and that is also getting reflected in your increase in average revenue per customer? That's right. It's a progression from 3 to 5 to 5 to 6. Yeah, that's encouraging. Probably, you know, over two quarters we can also expect some of these customers to graduate into $10 million+. That's a trend which we can- I think more importantly is the lower one. You know, when one category went up, the other came down. We will have more people moving into the next category also. One, the 1 million can move to the 3 million. The 3 millions will move to the 5 million. When we come to, as I said, we are not hankering to say that we want some people to necessarily move into 10 million plus. When it happens, we'll report and let you all know. Understood. Thank you. All the best. Thank you. A reminder to the participants. Anyone wishing to ask a question may please press star and one. The next question is from the line of Devendra from Invest Yadnya. Please go ahead. Devendra, your line is in the talk mode. Please go ahead. Devendra, we are not able to hear you. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Please go ahead. Thank you for providing me an opportunity to ask a question. Congratulations on- Sorry to interrupt, sir, but the audio from your line is not clear. Hello. Can you hear me? Much better, sir. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for providing me opportunity to ask the question, and congratulations on a great set of numbers. Can you provide me guidance for the next two years' growth rate? Revenue growth rate, if it's possible. We don't give guidance, Devendra, but we have said that our aspiration is to continue growing at about 20% on an organic basis, CAGR of 20% over the next 5 years. Okay. Over the next five years. Okay. That is good. Yeah. Can you explain me the automation. You have also listed that automation as a percentage of your revenue. In automation means what exactly so you do? Can you explain that component? Ram, you'd like to take this up or? As we know, as you know that we have a center of excellence, which is digital process automation, and this covers variety of automation, you know, processes. We look at test automation, which is bulk of our automation activity. We look at industrial automation. We also do business process automation and RPA, which is robotic process automation. Apart from this, there are IT operations also which we consider with respect to IT operations automation and security operations. All these services put together constitute our automation services, which today stands up to 24% of the overall revenue of the organization. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Bye-bye. A reminder to the participants, anyone wishing to ask a question may please press star and one. The next question is from the line of Heenal Gada from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for the opportunity. Two questions from my side. One is on our growth strategy. I mean, it's always, you know, scaling up of our customer accounts. So where are we in terms of that strategy? What are we targeting going forward? Some sense on that. Secondly, in terms of margins, I mean, you know, with hiring picking up across the industry and a lot of you know, companies actually are alluding that the cost has been increasing because of increased demand and shortage in supply. Where are we, you know, on that? Are we also expecting, you know, maybe our employee benefit expenses to increase going forward? Heenal, I'll take the growth strategy question and then let Venkat and have my colleagues, you know, Vidya, Rajiv around, jump in, with their comments. Then Venkat can take the margin-related question. From a growth strategy perspective, we look at our customers. We do have the focus on new logos that's driven by our domains and our centers of excellence. We use our centers of excellence, which are the digital process automation, IoT, and the analytics slash AI COEs as a way to break into some of our accounts using a more consultative approach. This is backed up by the various domains that we have. The other element of our growth with our customers has been the land and expand strategy, where, you know, while we break in using some of the more pointed offerings into our customers who are larger ones who have potential. We then go in and make sure that using a consultative approach, again, become trusted advisors to our customers. Post that, start expanding our presence within the same customer organization across the various BUs out there through our, you know, execution and implementation, as evidenced by the high customer satisfaction scores that we've been able to get the last couple of years. This is the approach. I think the things that are underpinning, as I said, are the centers of excellence, the domain depth that we are building, ensuring that we have a good set of account management, account managers. Ensuring that we adopt an account development plan approach for all our customers with potential, where you have domains, technology folks, delivery and the sales or account management coming together and ensuring that we understand the customer better and are able to chart out a strategy to increase our wallet share and expand. Rajiv, you wanna add anything? Yes. Yeah. Sorry, Ram, go ahead. Yeah. A couple of things which is actually in addition to what Joseph mentioned is that we always track as Venkat informed about you know the average revenue per customer. We always measure that. Obviously, when the average revenue per customer increases, that means we are growing at a steady rate. That is number one. Number two is that you know Joseph talked about cross BU. We leverage a single customer in terms of providing the services of the other BUs once the specific BU lands. That actually adds to the growth strategy. The third most important thing is that, you know, we use our ability to provide the good services, thereby creating goodwill of our customers, and that is used as a reference for getting a new deal. Many of our customers are willing to provide the reference. As you know that, you know, we have one of the highest NPS in the industry, and this actually helps us in terms of, you know, getting the help from the customers to provide reference so that we can go and win new deals. Over to you, Rajiv. Joseph, I think that most of the areas are covered. We have very rigorous account development plans and which we review at the EB level on a regular basis. Where we have defined the top 15 accounts that we need to go after and what are the investments we need to make. The matrix for us is really that, are we moving in the right direction, as well as hiring of account managers. I think one aspect that we also have enhanced is our partnerships. How do we work with the advisory companies to technology leaders for us to really have a larger penetration in the accounts as well? I think those two areas that we wanted to highlight. Sure. Can I just add to what my colleagues have said? You know, there's an area of domain focus where I think we move into new areas by creating those specialized groups within the company as like domain heads. We've taken action on two fronts in the recent quarter, I would say, to help us grow in the healthcare space as well as to grow in the travel space. I think this domain focus will also help us and add to the growth momentum because we are very strong in certain verticals, and these ones we've been Yeah, not as strong as we would have liked to be, obviously. You will see the difference coming up in the years ahead. Yeah. Thanks, Ashok. This was on the coming back to the question on EBITDA, sustainable EBITDA, we've been answering that. If you look at how some of the costs that we saved during the pandemic period, once we get back to office, which we are in a measured way planning to from early next year, January, we should see some of the costs go back, like travel and maybe rental costs and visa costs. That'll be one adjustment. The second is, like you mentioned, the staff costs, the people cost, because there is obviously a demand and supply mismatch out there. We are doing what is to be done by the industry. Some of it will be made up through rate adjustments, with the help of our discussion and in discussion with our customers. If you take all of this, considering the long-term investments into new technology areas, COEs and all of that, we should be looking at about 22%-24%. That's been the kind of long-term average EBITDA number that we have been talking about. Sure, sir. Thanks a lot. That's it from my side. Thank you. We'll move on to the next question that is from the line of Vimal Gohil from Union AMC. Please go ahead. Yes, sir. Thank you for the opportunity once again. I just wanted to probably know more on your plans on hiring more and more freshers in order to sort of, you know, broaden the pyramid at the bottom. If at all you are planning to sort of increase that, improve that, how do you make sure that, you know, some of the fresher talent that you are getting is sort of available in time? Because some of the work that we are doing is cutting-edge digital work. How do we make sure that, you know, once we hire a fresher, he or she is sort of ready in time to be billable? Are we sort of facing any challenges to, you know, get the kind of talent that we want in freshers? Sure. Maybe Nanda can take that. Sure, Ashok. Hi, Vimal. Good morning. Hiring is really at an all-time high today, and we have been hiring fresher grads quite a lot compared to our previous years. Roughly in this particular year, we have been primarily hiring freshers from an off campus mode. For the next year, we have already been to campuses and making offers out there. We have a pretty strong L&D team, and we have a plan in place as to how we bring in these freshers and train them and put them into our customer projects. Because, you know, we work in the digital technologies, our L&D team kind of creates a curricula which kind of meets that need specifically to train those freshers. Typically, what we have seen is it takes anywhere between 3-6 months to make the freshers into a billing mode. For some of the really niche skills, it might take a little bit more, but on an average, we are able to train freshers and get them into roughly within the 6 months period. Great. Thank you so much, and all the very best. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of N. Puranik from Anand Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, Ashok. Congratulations for- Hello, Puranik. I was just happy to hear your name after a very long time. a long time. Congratulations for creating such a wonderful company. You know, I've seen a lot of founders create great companies, but one thing they don't do well, they don't mess up, is the succession. While they create a great legacy, that legacy to take forward, you need a fundamentally defined succession with a great governance and fairness and no conflict. In that architecture, you need the creator to be around for inspiration, for guidance, and for solving any resulting conflict. You need the founder to be around and not moving away. You need that architecture. Plus you create a team, like what you said, I need to create more senior management team in place because you don't know who succeed, who doesn't succeed. That, that's a wonderful architecture. On top of it, you created a great business, and congratulations for that. I have a few questions to follow. These are about how, at the end you talked about you know what happens when you have $100 million revenues and the risks to $100 million revenue. But at the end of the day, if you want to scale your businesses, you need lot more $10, $20, $25 million revenue. You may not necessarily have to get into the $100 million bucket. But I want to understand from the business model perspective, the offering perspective, the service line perspective, whether you have enough service lines to create more $20, $25 million accounts. Because you have been doing brilliantly. Important to understand what created those 100 million, 50 million clients in large companies were the domain competency, like you rightly said. The technology. They understood legacy very well. They understood mainframe, AS/400, client-server technology, Internet technology, and now the cloud. Everything they understood. I want to understand from you, and plus also from a cloud architecture, where do you see the industry itself growing? From a cloud itself, are we how far away from the migration process, client experience process? You are beautifully positioned in the cloud security, because that's going to be the most durable stuff, and most importantly, the big data. This business will survive greater than the enterprise itself. This whole architecture, you will fit in nicely. I want to understand your legacy presence, legacy connect, and then taking that forward. Yeah. I'm sorry for long question. That's all right. You raised a lot of pertinent points. You know, I'm glad that you liked our basic architecture for keeping things going in which I keep saying is perpetuity. You mentioned a statement here which I must disagree. You said the creator must be around. The whole idea here- No, not at all. What I meant was not actively around for your guidance. The point I'm saying is Yeah. When you are physically around, you're. Because the inspiration has to come from you. You don't have to be actively- Yeah. That can only happen for a finite group. We may see, God knows, how many years I may have. You have to be actively managing the- That is exactly the point. I think it's a very important point for everybody to understand in future. Correct. Yeah. I remember I started this company at the age of 69. I know. There's a finite number of years that I can be around. Uh-huh. The idea is to create something which will continue with the same passion. Uh-huh. Without suddenly someone coming and rocking the boat. Yeah. Right. What Paramis calls as the CEO monarchs. Mm-hmm. I'm trying to avoid that situation. If you just look at, and I won't name the companies, but you'll have a very good idea of what happened in two entities. Yeah. Absolutely. The founders or the promoters were around. Yeah. They both began to go through a negative spiral. Yeah. Certainly. The promoter was around to correct it. In the other case, the promoter couldn't do it through a, let's say, diktat, but managed to get the change done by creating a lot of external pressure in the market. Mm-hmm. then got the change brought about. Of course, luckily here there was another promoter who was in a position to step back in. Mm-hmm. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Correct. You know, these sort of situations are very unusual. Even there, those promoters won't be around forever. Next time somebody goes through a suddenly a downward spiral, who will take care of it? Absolutely. Therefore, the issue is to create a system which will take care of itself. I believe the system we've created with the Executive Board, the voting arrangements, the continuous, let us say, renewal of the EB, these are the critical things which will ensure that suddenly this thing doesn't go through those downward spirals. Yes. You see it even in multinational companies. Look at the people who were absolutely yesterday's stars, and suddenly those industries, they may be still surviving. That is not the issue. Because if you become multi-billion dollars, yes, you will survive, but they're not even a shadow of their former self. Yeah. True. I'm trying to avoid that situation. Now, in the end, time alone will tell what has happened. The second thing is, you talked about $10 million-$25 million. Here also you're spot on. If you ask me the number of those accounts is what is going to be far more important for us than having the odd $100 million or $50 million account. Correct. You know, I am very comfortable with our top account or the top two accounts, how much they contribute to our business. I wouldn't want that to keep going up, because then you feel insecure. If you get multiple $20-$25 million accounts as we go larger, which we will. When you're $1 billion, you'll have many of those. Mm-hmm. That is really key, and it's a number that we should certainly report on as we go ahead, rather than saying, "Right now we predict it will be like that." It's an important thing. We'll keep watching it. A certain amount will actually happen literally by serendipity, if you ask me. Mm-hmm. Let's see what happens, how that evolves as we go ahead. What about the legacy technology connection to the new technology connection? Understanding legacy systems to understanding new systems, that puts a player in an advantage vis-à-vis someone who is totally new. Because you have the best of both worlds. You can connect with that. Sridhar, you want to address this one? Sridhar is our CTO. Sure, Ashok. Now, of course, even though our focus is on the disruptive technologies, it is always required sometimes for us to understand the underlying technologies, right? For example, with RPA, Robotic Process Automation, invariably, we are trying to create automation across the legacy systems, right? Very similarly, when we are looking at modernizing the existing solutions as new digital products or new digital solutions, in that case, we may have to do some migration. Slowly we are encroaching into the required level of legacy, right? As time progresses, depending upon how the digital technologies play with the legacy technologies, we will expand our understanding. As, Mr. Soota said, our focus always will start with the disruptive technologies, and from there to the degree of necessity that is there to understand legacy, we have been doing, as with RPA, for example, and as with modernization, we'll continue to do that way. RPA is a productivity tool or is it a business, service line product? It is a robotic process automation where. Understand. You use it mainly to make the deal attractive for yourself because in a competitive world you need to seek out the greater margin. Use it for that purpose or use it as a service line? Both. Both. I see. What percentage of your business is RPA? As Ram already said, like we Mm-hmm We combine RPA along with other kinds of automation. Ram has listed the Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If you have the number, actually, we can give the number if somebody has it readily available. Uh. That number is growing. It is 24%. Sure. 24%. Also, Ashok, I want to understand from you because since you understand the automation and you also understand the big data and analytics very well. If you can highlight your presence in the big data and AI particularly in terms of using the various skills, skill sets and the number of people around and the projects delivered, it'll be useful. Sure. Can I just clarify one thing? The number we gave you just now is the total automation. Total automation. Not the RPA. RPA is a part of that only. Yeah. At the moment I'd say a relatively small part. We're growing very rapidly. A lot of it is RPA projects and some of it are productivity tools. Yeah. Okay. Who would like to take on the next question from Puranik among you all about big data and analytics? I can do that. We don't have Ajay, I guess, on the call. No, sure. You can take. I can take the question, Ashok. Sure. Mr. Puranik, you know, one of our, in an earlier reference I had mentioned three centers of excellence, right? Mm-hmm. The IOPBPA. Right. That's the digital plus automation. The third center of excellence is the analytics and AI center of excellence. Correct. Initially, this capability was distributed across all our business units. Four or five years back, we pulled it together, initially with a focus on big data engineering and analytics, and very quickly added AI as well. Because what we started seeing is that in all our customer situations where there was a lot of data being harnessed, AI was becoming, you know, using ML and other techniques. Right. Sure. NLP, et cetera. We were seeing that AI was becoming a core part of, you know, what we were doing with the data if you Without AI, big data is many detail, lot of. Yeah. You get some value out of it, but not. Some value out of it. Not much. What you're doing basically then is you're getting reports and visualization to take decisions, but it's not happening in an automated manner. You use it as a filter or an insight builder? What this center of excellence has done is. Pardon? No. You do use AI as a filter or an insight builder? You use it as both, right? Both. Mm-hmm. You use as a filter and you use it as an insight builder, and in some cases you use it for your, you know, automating a lot of the thinking that you would do. Sure. For the instance that I was giving, when you have some data and you are processing it and taking some decisions, you can actually automate that and Automate that. Make sure that, you know, those decisions are taken automatically. Mm-hmm. Initially started with a few verticals. We're seeing it across all. You know, there was a little bit more in retail and other areas. Mm-hmm where you have personalization, recommendation, et cetera. Mm-hmm In the high-tech space. Now if you look at industrial, you look at media and entertainment, CPG, EdTech, cutting across all the verticals. Mm-hmm There's a heavy usage of artificial intelligence. Every single use cases keep increasing. This team of dedicated people is around 200 people strong in the analytics AI center of excellence. Oh, I see. They're supported by, you know, people who build platforms and other things. Mm-hmm ... from the other business units. Explain how this will grow to what in the next growth year? Area for us. Oh, right. Right. No, how will it grow over time? We hope to continue growing aggressively. Uh. We hope to continue growing aggressively, and this will be a major growth area for us. As I said, this will be a tip of the arrow and a growth area for us and will be an area of focus. The idea is to do more projects or build platforms in this, or how do you take this forward? To get more customers. Okay We will build some solution accelerators. Solution accelerators. We'll not build platforms. Right. We'll build solution accelerators. Uh-huh ... which will help customers adopt platforms or build their platforms more quickly or do their projects. Mm-hmm execute their projects more quickly. Okay. Excellent. On the cybersecurity? Ram can take. Yeah. Ram, you wanna take that one, Ram? Our cybersecurity, you know, today is standing at 12.1% of the total revenue. That's very good. It is steadily growing. Mm-hmm. As you know, for the size of our company. Yes We have more than 300 people. Wow ... who are cybersecurity experts- Fantastic in the organization. Oh. Uh. That is substantially high, in comparison to- Very high. you know, the size of the company. That is what we Is the consulting derived from consulting practice or how? Can you explain this, the team architecture and the people? We have a separate security practice. Practice. Oh. which is Infrastructure Management and Security Services. Uh. This practice caters to all the security needs of an organization. Vertical. Basically, we look at ring-fencing the entire IT infrastructure and applications of an organization with the security, you know, services, what we provide, starting from. Network security to endpoint security complete. To governance with Uh Governance risk, endpoint security, threat analysis, security operations center, application security, and the identity management. End-to-end whole life cycle consulting. Absolutely. Any special focus area in this? All these areas are focus for us because we have at any point of time. Uh. You know, each company has a requirement in one of the areas. Mm. Holistically, we are looking at all security aspects. What is the single largest project you have done on the cybersecurity? Oh, it's multiple. I mean, in the sense that in the past we have executed, you know, one of the world's largest security operation center- Mm-hmm. Mm. Oh. for a large telecom company. I see. Today we are winning the deals anywhere from, you know, $1 million plus on the security area. This part of your SOC or the SOC NOC center? Yeah. Interesting. We have a separate SOC and a separate NOC. Very interesting. I think you are so relevant and current in this space. The only thing I want to, Ashok, next time I want to meet you. I want to understand your journey to analytics going forward. Sure. Your love and passion for the product I know. Sure. From that, how do you take it forward? I want to understand. Puranik, whenever you come, you should. Ah. the real people you should meet, and I'm increasingly saying, "Hey, these are the guys who run the company. They've got the future. Ah. There's one person who's today not on the call. All right. That is Ajay Agrawal, who's our COE head for analytics. Oh. I think he would add a lot of value to you for a discussion of this sort. Okay. Really, as Joseph said, it's going to grow for us well above our own growth rate as a company. Wonderful. I would love to catch up with you and my wonderful friend, Venkat. When I- Sure. Come there next time. Take care. Will do that. Thanks. Thanks, Ashok. Bye. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the last question. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sunil Gujjar for his closing comments. Thank you all for joining us today. We thank ICICI Securities for hosting this call on our behalf, and we look forward to interacting with you in the coming days. You can reach out to us on ir@happiestminds.com. Advance greetings to everyone for Deepavali. Stay safe. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of ICICI Securities, that concludes this conference call. We thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you.