Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Happiest Minds Technologies Q3 FY23 results conference call hosted by Axis Capital Limited. 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 an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, operator. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on the Q3 FY23 earnings call of Happiest Minds Technologies Limited. On behalf of Axis Capital, I would like to thank the management of Happiest Minds for giving us the opportunity to hold this earnings call. Today we have with us Mr. Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Mr. Joseph Anantharaju, Executive Vice Chairman and CEO, Product Engineering Services, Mr. Venkatraman Narayanan, MD and CFO, Mr. Rajiv Shah, President and CEO, Digital Business Services, Mr. Ram Mohan, President and CEO, Infrastructure Management and Security Services, Mr. Aurobinda Nanda, President, Operations, and Deputy CEO, Product Engineering Services, Mr. Sridhar Mantha, Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Sunil Gujjar, Head of Investor Relations, and Mr. Praveen Dashankar, Company Secretary and Head of Legal. I'll hand over the call to Sunil for the safe harbor statement and to take the proceedings forward. Over to you, Sunil. Thank you, Manik. Good evening to all participants in the call. Wishing everyone a very happy New Year. Welcome to this conference call to discuss the financial results for the third quarter ended December 31st, 2022. We trust all of you are keeping well. I'm Sunil, Head of Investor Relations. The financial results, statements, quarterly fact sheet, investor presentation, and press release have already been uploaded on our website. Please do go through when you get a chance. The agenda for this call is as follows. Ashok will begin the call by sharing his perspectives on the business environment and our results. Venkat and Joseph will then speak about our financial performance and operational highlights, 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 consider the environment we see as of today and 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. All right. Thank you, Sunil. Good evening, friends. Thank you, Manik, also for hosting the call. Let me convey my best wishes for the new year to all the participants in the call. I am happy to share with you that Happiest Minds has delivered yet another quarter of excellent performance on all fronts. Our year-over-year growth of 26% in constant currency continues to be industry-leading. The solid growth in revenues is accompanied by a superior margin profile, which continues to be strong at 26.3%. On revenue growth plus EBITDA, a metric which we closely track, we are at 55.2%, which reflects our ability to drive consistent profitable growth. We remain on track to achieve 25% year-over-year growth for FY 2023 in terms of our guidance. During the quarter, we have had many significant milestones. We inaugurated our new development center in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, with a seating capacity of 150. This center will strengthen our delivery capabilities across our business units with a new pool of talent from the region. We are simultaneously procuring land in Bhubaneswar to expand our capacity for our own campus in due course. Happiest Minds was selected the winner of the Best Governed Company in the medium category for 2022 by the Institute of Company Secretaries. You will recollect we also won the Golden Peacock Award for corporate governance last quarter. This dual sweep shows how deeply corporate governance is ingrained in the DNA of Happiest Minds. We were yet again recognized amongst India's top 25 workplaces in IT and IT BPM 2022 by the Great Place to Work Institute. This is the fifth year running that we have been in the list of best places to work. We continue to get recognized for our disclosure and annual reporting practices, with Happiest Minds winning gold for its 2022 integrated annual report at the League of American Communications Professionals Spotlight Awards for 2022. Venkat and Joseph will share with you both the financial highlights and our business positions. Looking to the year ahead, we continue to see strong demand. We have positioned ourselves better to fulfill this demand by enhancing our delivery capacity in every location. Our traditional areas of strength, such as EdTech, high-tech, and retail continue to show sustained growth. We are increasing our presence in healthcare and BFSI with a view to sustaining our industry-leading growth rate. With this, I conclude my observations and I will now pass this over to Venkat. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ashok. A very good evening to all on the call. Best wishes for a new year. The next few minutes, I'll share with you financial and operational highlights for the quarter and the 9 months ended December 31st, 2022. Starting with the quarter, our revenues for the quarter were about $45.3 million, which showed a growth of about 2.1% on a sequential basis and about 20% on a year-over-year basis. In constant currency of US dollar, the growth was 2.8% and 22.6% respectively. 2.8 on a sequential basis and 22.6 on a year-over-year basis. As you all know, Q3 is generally a seasonally weak quarter, mainly due to leave and furloughs. On top of this, we also had an unusual increase in vacations and leave taken by Happiest Minds. I would call this sudden increase or unusual increase as work from home effect, as many of our Happiest Minds have come back to office and now are working from office at their base location. Having worked from home for more than a year, at every instance they get, they are more likely to return home to spend time with family. That's what I refer to as a work from home effect. We also had 1 lesser working day in the current quarter compared to the previous quarter and the previous year. Loss of revenues due to the above unusual circumstances, which is that one less working day, and the leave was about $1.5 million. If you adjust for that, our growth would have been well above 5.5%. Total income in INR for the quarter was INR 375 crores, which showed a sequential growth of 4.3% and a year-over-year growth of 28.2%. EBITDA at INR 97 crores remains strong and steady at 26% of our total revenues. Growth in EBITDA was sequentially 3.1% and 26.5% on a year-over-year basis. We managed to address certain increase in costs, mainly people related, through increased volumes, billing rates and of course a favorable exchange rate. Between EBITDA and PBT, for this quarter we had an exceptional expense for the quarter, this was on account of the fair valuation of warrant liability in our balance sheet. As you will recollect, we had issued warrants based on earn-outs, performance-based earn-outs, for the PGS acquisition that we did in January of 2021. We had recorded the original liability of these warrants at about INR 7.25 million, payable over three years on achieving certain revenue and profit targets, and then valued it on a fair valuation of INR 5.1 million per Indian standards and recorded the same in our balance sheet. The same Ind AS requires us to evaluate the performance of the acquired asset and revalue the warrant liability based on the probability of payment. The original liability of INR 5.1 million, like I said, was recorded in the balance sheet, while any subsequent changes to the same based on actual payout or improved probability of payment needing to be routed through the P&L. Based on the performance of FY 2021, that's for the last year, we had paid out earn-outs identified for that year in full. We had taken that impact in Q2 of last year as an exceptional item. We are happy to state that based on the performance on the earn-outs for FY 2022, we have also become payable in full. We are very happy that earn-outs are payable in full as it reflects the good performance of the acquired asset. From an accounting standpoint, the difference between the actual payout and the fair valued original liability has to be taken as a charge to our P&L. This is what we have done now and have taken an exceptional charge of INR 6.34 crores. The exceptional item has had an impact of approximately 1.5% on our PBT. The above adjustment for the last year was in Q2. I referred to that earlier. Our PAT numbers on a quarter-on-quarter basis, such as Q3 over Q3, are fully not comparable. We continue to generate healthy cash flows with almost 95% of our EBITDA finding its way into our financials as free cash. Free cash flows for the quarter was about INR 93 crores, and our cash and cash equivalents were at about INR 690 crores at the end of the quarter. Our financial return ratios continue to be very healthy. ROCE and ROE are at 35% and about 29.4% respectively. Coming to our performance for the nine-month period ended December 31st, 2023. Our revenues in constant currency of US dollar grew by 26%, while our EBITDA was at 26.3%. As you can see, both these are in line and ahead of our guidance on revenue growth of 25% and EBITDA range of 22%-24% respectively. Our revenue growth and profitability continue to be industry-leading, and we continue to beat our own expectations on margins. Some of the operational highlights for the quarter and the nine months are: we ended the quarter with 4,611 Happiest Minds, that's our people. A net addition of 30 for the quarter and 443 for the nine-month period. Our utilization levels continue to be steady at 80.1%. Attrition-Are trending down and is now at about 20.9% compared to the 23.5% in the prior quarter, considered on a trailing 12-month basis. Diversity and inclusion ratios at the end of the quarter stood at 27.7%. On the business front, all our verticals and geographies continue to do well. We had a slight reduction in the share of BFSI, primarily on account of the loss of billing days that I referred to earlier. We ended the quarter with 230 active clients. 40 of them were million dollar plus clients. 92% repeat business and average customer revenues of about $792,000. In this quarter's presentation, we have included a data point which correlates revenues versus length of client relationship. Interestingly, 50% of our revenues come from customers with whom we have had relationship of more than five years. It, it proves that we have been able to hold on to our customers and we have been able to go deeper into them. Before I conclude, I would also like to address the question many of you may have on the enabling resolutions we had taken from our shareholders on raising funds through a QIP process. Work is still in process on this front, and we'll keep you updated in case of any progress. In conclusion, we had a good quarter despite certain unexpected fluctuations, as explained earlier. Attrition trending down reflects easing in supply side constraints. We continue to attract and add talent both on offshore and on-site. We have also strengthened our delivery capabilities, like Ashok mentioned, both within Bangalore and at Bhubaneswar. I now request Joseph to share his thoughts on customers and the demand environment. Thank you, Venkat. A very good evening to all. Best new year wishes to everyone on the call. I am pleased to share with you all the results of another quarter of good performance for Happiest Minds. Our business units, centers of excellence and operating geos continue to grow even in a seasonally weak quarter, caused by furloughs and leaves. Without these furloughs and leaves, as Venkatesh mentioned, our growth would have been much higher. We continue to show progress on our customer metrics, with billion-dollar customers increasing by 1- 55. We added nine new logos during the quarter, ending the quarter with 230 active clients, of which 40 were more than million dollars in revenue. At a broad level, from a demand perspective, clients continue to invest in their digital initiatives while ensuring priority to projects with strategic and immediate returns. Across verticals as well as within verticals, we see companies showing different spend proclivities based on the success of their strategy and performance. For example, a retailer may have greater propensity to spend on quicker ROI areas like driving efficiency in the supply chain or a better user experience. A manufacturing customer would prioritize how to recalibrate the broken supply chain or plant automation. Resilience ability and scalability play a very important role when it comes to identifying and winning digital engagements. About six months back, we created a value proposition and solution to increase the efficiency of the order management system for a large bottling plant in North America. The impact of this engagement was so deep and strategic that we have been called by players in multiple other geos to help solve their order management problems. We were also chosen by another leading bottling company in North America to set up a center of excellence leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform. Our depth in EdTech is helping us solve some of the most challenging problems our customers are facing. The sector experienced significant disruption due to pandemic, and we have been developing various digital solutions using technologies like analytics, AI, computer vision, NLP and ML to increase the adoption and efficiency of online student engagement and learning. Customers are also exploring newer technologies like Metaverse Web 3.0 to give better student experiences and provide hybrid and immersive learning. Last quarter, we won a deal to help a workforce development company to build a platform for exclusively connecting with mentors for personalized career guidance. Our CTO organization started building expertise in the low-code/no-code space a couple of years ago. We now have built strong capabilities both in Microsoft Power Platform and OutSystems, which are in the leadership zones of leading industry analysts. Last quarter, we signed a deal with a leading labor and employment law firm in North America to automate and drive efficiency in their workforce deployment processes using a low-code/no-code platform. Another instance, Happiest Minds is digitally transforming a trading platform, again, using a low-code/no-code platform for a Danish bank. Looking forward, our pipeline is very strong with several large deals in discussion. We continue to get called for engagements such as helping formulate digital strategies, platform engineering, transformation, modernization and enabling connectivity needs through IoT and 5G, customer experience and analytics AI. As Ashok alluded, we are confident of meeting our revenue guidance on growth based on a strong pipeline and deals signed in Q3. With this, I conclude my commentary, and we can now open the floor for Q&A. Over to you, Operator. 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 touchtone 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 sandals. The first question is on the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Just wanted to get more clarification regarding the annual growth outlook that Ashok recreated, given the moderation in terms of growth that we've seen in the third quarter, and Venkat called out that there were certain one-offs around higher holidays as well as lower number of working days. Even if I were to take that into account, for us to get to a 25% growth for the full year in constant currency terms would mean that the fourth quarter has to be much stronger on a sequential basis. We just wanted to understand the visibility that we have on that front, and then I'll come back in the queue for further questions. Venkat, go ahead. Yes. Hi. Hi, Manik. Yes. We have considered that, parts of the leave are lost. They don't come back, so that impact has also been considered. We have looked at our pipeline and, it's on that basis that we are still holding because right now we have 26% and our guidance is 25% with respect to the top line number. We are reasonably confident of meeting that number, Manik. Sure. Just one clarification on that. This current 25% is in CC terms, and in the first. Yes. -first nine months, what was the YY CC growth that we've achieved? 26%. Okay. Okay. Sure. Thank you. We do have a little cushion in effect still, but we don't think we'll even need the cushion, to tell you the truth. Sure. Thank you. The next question is on the line of Abhishek Bhandari from Nomura. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity. You know, Happy New Year to the management team. Sir, I just have 1 question. You know, our margins are tracking much ahead of what we thought, 22%-24% band. You know, with supply side easing, likely there'll be more, you know, positive slip on it. Have you considered, you know, dropping the margins and investing in sales, you know, to possibly accelerate growth more from a medium term? You know, why or why not would you take that approach? Sure. You know, I'll just take this first, and then if either of you wants to add. You know, I don't think these are either/or issues. We are generating as much as we can, and we're investing as much as we need to. If you see our strategic discussions, we're all the time looking for new areas in which we can make strategic investments. If you look at it over the years, look at the things we've added. We create and incubate new technologies. You don't get a return immediately on those. Even in this last year, I think as Joseph pointed out, we've invested in LCAP, MXDP, no-code. invested in Metaverse, and so on and so forth. We are always doing new things. Earlier we were amongst the earliest to get into IoT, and then we did blockchain. We keep developing new capabilities. When we build them up to a certain level, we move them from an incubation mode into a center of excellence, and we create new centers of excellence. That process has not stopped. We are not saying here we are looking at margins, and if we reduce something... Because that's actually, if I may say so, sometimes the wrongest thing to do. If you think you can get more business just by reducing your price, I think you'll hurt yourself terribly. But if you can use your margins to keep on investing, which is what we do, then you're in a good place, you're in a happy place, and that's exactly where we are. Just to add on to what Ashok said, you know, there are a couple of other areas where we've had to invest in. In the last couple of years we've been building up our domain capability and we've brought on board seasoned domain heads, and they've been building their business analyst team because we feel that it's gonna be in the next phase of digital digitization, it's gonna be extremely important to understand and speak the customer's language and have these business analysts who can be interpreters for our technical team. We've not hesitated to make that investment. Again, from a sales angle, we've been bringing on board client partners and account managers to help grow our accounts. Abhishek, we'll continue making investments. Thank you, sir, and all the best for 2023. Thank you. Thank you, Abhishek. Thank you. The next question is on the line of Vimal Gohil from Alchemy Capital Management Private Limited. Please go ahead. Yes, sir. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Sir, I just wanted to understand a bit on our costs this quarter. If I were to look at our employee costs, and we sort of deployed or rather we hired quite a few freshers over the last few quarters. We do see that as a percentage of sales or rather the quarter-on-quarter growth in employees has been slightly faster as compared to revenues despite the fresher addition. While our margins I do agree our margins are trending well ahead of our own expectations or guidance, do we see this as an additional margin lever, going forward, given the fact that, you know, the more freshers will get deployed and, you know, that could see some benefit on the margins? Hi, Vimal. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. We've added about 220, 15-20 freshers in the last quarter, typically they go through a standard training cycle, and it takes anywhere between 9-12 months before they can touch billability. That cost gets absorbed for the next, I would say two more quarters. They would be in our, they're going through the training session. That's not going to impact profitability the next two quarters. Whereas there will be a cost of both training and their pay cost. Yes, you are right. Post that, slowly they will get into the available workforce and we'll soon be able to find jobs and positions for them, and then build them. In the long run, that's a way to manage our pyramid. Until now, we have... This is after about a gap of three or four years, we are going and getting so many number of freshers and trying to build a pyramid basis the competition. Sure. Also, Vimal, don't forget that the last two quarters, on one side we have hired freshers and you might say, yes, the cost of your pyramid has improved. It's also the two quarters where we gave very generous increments. We've absorbed that and still kept our margins at the same level. One thing is balanced with the other. Understood. Understood, sir. I just wanted to check on Product Engineering Services. It is, it's one of the largest portions of our business. If you could comment on how client product roadmaps are panning out. I have been asking this question to other peer Product Engineering Services companies as well. They have given quite a positive review. Just wanted to get your sense as to how our clients are looking at product development projects given the current macro environment. If you could just highlight that. Thanks. I think, you know, I addressed this question last time as well, Vimal. I don't Satya, you know, we have seen maybe in the second or third quarter, one of our companies that was more in the early stage, they took a little bit of precautionary measure and ramped down. Outside of that, we've not really seen any of our customers affecting major ramp downs. We've seen some seasonal trends in November, December, in terms of activity easing up because of holiday season. We're again seeing, you know, uptick. As I mentioned in my earlier commentary, the pipeline continues to be strong, cutting across all three views. What customers are doing is they're keeping a very close watch on what they're investing in and how it will be used by the end customers, how quickly they'll be able to monetize it, and therefore prioritizing features, functionalities, and modules which will help them get quicker revenues or make a bigger impact from a customer acquisition standpoint. Understood, sir. Sir, there's last question if I may from my side. If you just quantify how much we will be spending on our acquisition of land and delivery center from how much of the balance sheet cash outflow could we see in over there? Any idea there? Yeah. That's a state-sponsored scheme, so where they are giving me land under the SEZ in Bhubaneswar. We have been allotted... That's an in-principle allotment. We are going through the terms and conditions. It's at a favorable price. It will not be a significant cost in terms of land, and it'll be a 100-year lease, 99-year lease kind of an arrangement. To give you a number, they I think they've said about 40 lakhs an acre kind of a thing. There are other costs that you have to add on with it. We won't be able to give a number, sir, at, at this point. It's not also appropriate. You know, we haven't even signed the deal. We've seen plots. In fact, I myself have seen a plot or two when I went to Bhubaneswar for the lovely inauguration we had with the chief minister. They're very, you know, pleasant people out there, very eager to get us in. It'll take us a few weeks, I would imagine, maybe a month or two, to finalize the specific plot. With that we'll get the idea of what the exact cost is. It's not going to be a cost which is material in context of any of our future plans. I mean, the sort of money we may have to spend on a future acquisition will obviously far outweigh anything we spend on this. I mean, there's no comparison at all. Understood, sir. Thank you so much. All the very best. I'll return to the queue. 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 on the line of Faisal Hawa from HJ Hawwa. Please go ahead. Can you hear me? Yep. Yes. Sir, this question is to Mr. Ashok Soota. If there's, you know, that just one or two adjacencies that you feel are, you know, very much necessary and which you would like to fill up, I mean, which are those two or three adjacencies that you would like to fill up through an acquisition or, you know, what, whatever it takes and where you feel that the company is really lacking? You know, see, I'll tell you, that is a beautiful part of where we are. We could fill up and strengthen a vertical. We could fill up and strengthen a horizontal which we believe is growing and we don't have this thing. We could go and fill up a geo where we don't have adequate presence. The requirements are actually, if you ask me, or the potential is more a question of getting the right target. In any of these things which I just mentioned to you, be it a vertical, be it a horizontal, be it a geo, if we got the right target and we're able to close at an appropriate price and we feel there's a good culture match, we would just go ahead. We have plenty of what I might call as potential choices. To get the right choice in an acquisition is always the challenge. As I mentioned before, you start with 50, you bring it down to a short list of five, and then you will be able to manage one or one, maybe two. That's the process we're on. I must say we have taken a little time. We are able to achieve this year's growth rate so far. You know, really it's organic growth. I'm sure we are approaching close enough to saying hopefully we'll conclude some deals as we go ahead. Anshul, you are almost, you know, the, you know, elder statesman of the industry. I always, you know, see so much youthfulness and so much enthusiasm in you. Where do you feel, you know, your experience is really proving to be invaluable in the, this industry is, you know, so rapidly changing? Yeah, well, I'll tell you one thing. If you notice this year, when we defined our vision, we said that this industry will go through more change in the next 10 years than it has done in the previous 10, which is making a very sweeping statement. When you look at the degree of change in this last 10 years, look at the things we've had. I've already enumerated the new technologies which came in, the new solutions which came in and so on and so forth, the new business models we have to create. We are saying we will plan and prepare for that change, and that is why we've created that 10-year vision. We are looking ahead. I can't give you the specifics of it, firstly, because they're not going to get articulated in a few months. Also, we'll consider multiple scenarios where the change will take place. Within that, we'll select a few potential opportunities. We'll go ahead and zero in on what we think will be the business plan to meet that change. There, I think when we do it, because we are doing this methodical process, I believe we'll be ahead of the industry in examining that because we are anticipating. We're saying, "Where is the change? Where will we be proactive about it?" Just as we have been as when we started Happiest Minds. We after all then became the first company which could say we are born digital. In the same way we want to be on the forefront of what we think is going to be the next future change. In your opinion, it is possible to create another behemoth in the IT industry in the next 10 years itself, provided you track the change constantly and execute it, very methodically. Yeah. You know, what do we mean by behemoth in a sense? You know, frankly, I mean, we're not going to become either a TCS, Info or... It takes time. Frankly, I'm not sure that we are even saying here that's what we are targeting. Today with many of them, I don't have to name the companies. There's only one out of all those companies whose profitability is a little higher than us. When you consider all of the factors, their size and ours, that means operationally we are making as much as them. In a sense to me, that is what we really need to do to continue to sustain a high value company commensurate with our size and not yearn after growth for the sake of saying, "Hey, we want to be $ billions." Yes, we have set a target of saying by the end of this 10-year vision, we would like to be $1 billion. That doesn't sound very ambitious also, I must say. At the same time, if we can do better than that's even better. If we go and set a number and then start trying to achieve that number, and for that we do things which are not functional, then it may turn out to be a disadvantage. We've set a vision, and like in the past, we'll try and improve on that. Thank you, sir, for answering my question so articulately. Thank you so much. Sure. Thank you. A reminder to the participants, anyone wishing to ask a question, you may please press star and one. Participants on the conference, if you wish to ask a question, you may please press star and one. The next question is on the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity once again. Ashok, just wanted to pick your brains around our operating metrics performance and the performance that we see in certain verticals. Given what one is hearing around the high tech vertical and the retrenchments going on in that, in that vertical, how do you see this vertical performing for both us and the industry over the next 12-14 months? There is an expectation that we might probably see significant amount of large cost optimization deals in this particular segment. If you could help us understand what your thoughts are on this front. The second question was, at a broader level, the industry faced significant labor cost pressures and was able to pass on the labor cost pressures in terms of higher pricing, given the customers were also seeing higher inflation in their own markets. How do you see that situation evolve when you think about calendar year 2023 and calendar year 2024? Sure. You know, on the first question on high tech, I think the best person to really answer that is Joseph, but I'll give you one or two perspectives. Again, on how those various macro factors may affect margins, I think Venkat is the better person to respond. I may add to it after his reply. Here, let me lead with this. See, I'll tell you, actually, a lot is made of the play of what's happened to the large high-tech companies. They grew enormously during the pandemic, maybe disproportionately so. Everybody suddenly seemed to need to get on the Teams calls and Zoom calls and travel stopped. Travel, by the way, is booming. It's a vertical that we should all be looking at. You can, see this from the way the planes are running jam-packed, full capacity. Markets change. We were never in the market that these guys were. We were using some of those platforms to deliver our solutions. That wasn't our business anyway. We are not impacted like, in a sense, the top five companies. They have Top five high-tech companies, they have a disproportionate impact on the what you may call is the technology index. Our technology plays, the way I see it, our technology businesses are driven by one, startups. All of them, in one form or the other, create a platform. That platform then becomes the means to deliver the solution, and that's all high-tech. That has not slowed down. If anything, it's accelerating every day. We are not seeing any of the slowdown in that sector at all. Let me turn this over to Joseph, who'll give you perhaps a more lucid answer also. Sure, Ashok. I think you've covered a fair bit. You know, just providing a little bit more clarity to the first point that Ashok made. If you see some of the large high-tech companies that made disproportionately large investments in terms of headcounts for some new initiatives which really haven't taken off in the market, and I think that's one of the areas that they're rationalizing. The second is all of these companies, they have an annual process of, you know, looking at moving out or weeding out a percentage of their workforce, and that's also getting reported out here. I think we need to look at it from that context. If you look at companies in specific subsegments of high-tech, whether it's networking companies or security companies, there are several subsegments where they continue to invest and continue building their products because there's still demand out there. As I mentioned earlier, we've not seen, really seen a flag off in demand. It's just that companies are being very strategic and careful about where and how they invest. In terms of cost optimization, I think the cost optimization that we are seeing is that when companies are reducing their workforce, they are looking at their partners or their offshore centers to actually continue because the work is still there and it needs to get done. They're looking at their partners or offshore centers to continue delivering. lower impact. In some cases, they've actually increased their team sizes. So we've not really seen huge cost optimization exercise. We've seen more of moving to lower cost centers, and that in a way is actually helping, you know, some of our customers, helping Happiest Minds out. On the margins front, Manik, you talked about how the price and it's linked to inflation. We have largely moved away from a cost-plus pricing or a people cost-plus pricing model. It has been right from the start, a demand-based pricing based on the technology and the demand for that particular technology kind of a pricing. Suffice to say, we have always been at a premium compared to a cost-plus pricing model, maybe followed by our bigger brothers around. That's on the pricing model. It's never been negotiated saying, this is the cost of the person, we charge a margin on that front unless, you know, there is some small sort of an infra deal or something of that. For a large part of our business, it's been demand-based pricing. With respect to inflation and how it affects us, until now, we have seen it being positive because we are largely offshore. 95% of our people continue to be offshore. To that extent, when there is a huge, you know, cost increase in the US, the largest geography where there is an inflation of 8%-10% in wages and there is a huge number increase on the wage cost. Obviously, the offshore offshore center and ODC model or work with an offshore service provider looks that much more attractive. That's continuing. Even if it eases, I think, all the other positives for working with us offshore partner will continue. Margins on top of these two levers, there are so many other aspects like, you know, the competency, the pyramid, the on-site offshore mix, geography mix. All of them seem to be we building on what we have until now. Don't expect any margin shock from that side except for maybe the exchange rate. The way the rupee has moved has been favorable for the export industry from India, it continues to help all of us. Hi, Manik. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you for that detailed response. Also wanted to understand, given the underlying macro volatility, how should we be thinking about this impacting players of our size, given the fact that we're spread across multiple verticals and multiple segments? That was question number 1. The second question was, do you think while you've talked about a 25% CAGR in line with our $1 billion revenue target over multiple years, do you think there is a possibility that our growth rates in the near term essentially end up being lower to that trend line growth? Okay. Shall I just take that at an overall level first, Venkat, and then maybe you can come in. Let me take your second question. You know, see, I'll tell you, when we guide towards, let's say, $1 billion at the end by 2031, and we also say we'll grow compounded 25%, there's one factor which we never state. You might say it's like the elephant in the room, but it's there. That is, what is the impact of acquisitions in that? So far we've been able to do this with marginal, you know, contribution from acquisitions. Going ahead, there will always be a lumpy impact. When you say, will we go lower, but if we do a good acquisition, we may go higher. I don't think we can predict like they're saying year to year. We are not seeing a slowdown in demand, so we're therefore not saying that we actually even see a slowdown taking place even in organic growth, but there may be adjustments. At the same time, those adjustments we will more than make up by the acquisitions we will do. Here, so far, I would say fortunately, we've been able to sustain it on a virtually organic basis. That was the response to this thing. There was a question on volatility, which maybe, Venkat, you can respond to. On volatility, we have to look at the repeat business, Manik. 92% of our business is repeat. The second thing is the metric that I talked about. 50% of our business coming from customers who've been with us for greater than five years. One, we look at our customer base, we look at the number of global corporations, 40 of them, 56, 50+ of them. Million-dollar customers, 40 of them. Length of relationship, five years+, giving you 50% of our business. Average repeat business is 90%+. Your average customer revenue per customer is about $792 thousand. It's about $792 thousand-$800 thousand. All of this shows how we are closely working with our customers who are of a certain consequence for us, and how we are growing with them. Volatility will be there. Within your customer base of 230, you could have ups and downs. You could have issues with a certain customer. I think the way the sales teams work, the BUs work, they are quickly able to cover it up with either a new customer in the pipeline or trying to grow, eke out growth from an existing customer. We are not saying that everything is hunky-dory and everybody is growing in a particular manner. There are cases. Sorry. There are cases where there can be, you know, adjustments in one customers, which is there in the number of customers that drop off on a quarterly basis. Volatility is there. We manage to manage it with the relationship that we have with existing customers and the new and then pipeline that we create. Just to add to what Venkat mentioned, Manik. If you look at many of our customers, you know, we've been working with them for five years. 50% of our revenues come from customers who have been with us for more than five years. Repeat business, 92%. What this means is that we've been working on, you know, multiple versions of their platform. So there's core knowledge and IP that our team has built, which is critical and essential for them to continue adding functionalities and delivering what their customers need. That, in a way, leads to stickiness in terms of the team and the revenues. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Naganand Puranik from Enam Holdings. Please go ahead. Hi, Ashok. I have a question. Hi, Puranik. How are you? Good. Good. I have a question on your size, scale, and strategy on building the billion-dollar goal. This is how do you create annuity towards building billion-dollar goal? In terms of services, solutions that you have, what more you need to add. Sure. The old school of scaling was very different. You used to have, you know, AS/400 mainframe, then you have the ERP systems. Many of those things, including IMS, all helped them to get into a $100 million big pharma quickly. Sure. How you... What's your strategy to... Sure. Venkat mentioned that there are relationships which are greater than five years. Are you happy with the way their growth rate have scaled? Is there anything that you need to do better? You have a strong horizontal, you can build good verticals on that foundation. Sure. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of fundamental things you've asked in that question. One is, of course, as you yourself are noticing, the definition of annuity changed. Yeah. All those so-called multi-year contracts, barring IMS, they actually have virtually disappeared. What has happened is that, yes, annuity may be in the context of a project which may last for life length. More importantly, it is in context of how long you've kept your customer and you know how long that business grows. Venkat gave you an average for how much% of our business comes in five years. Yeah. There are many customers we've had for 10 years for that matter. It's not that any of these customers come and disappear, and some of them are amongst our largest customers. We've got tremendous continuity in those customers, and that, to my mind, is the best form of annuity. I'm sure IMS has, of course, been continuing to grow. There by definition, it's like the old definition of annuity. Mm-hmm. Which said, all right, you can get a multi-year contract. Venkat or Joseph, do you want to add to that? No, Ashok. I think I also touched on my previous response. Sort of also gives the basis for annuity. You know, the fact that when you start building platforms, whether it's in the high tech space or cutting across, because most of the customers are building platforms now, if you look at from a digital perspective. Unlike SAP implementation, you don't build a platform and stop. You got to keep adding new features, functionalities, because the demands from customers and employees and other stakeholders keep coming in, and they keep changing. You have newer technologies that, you know, and the pace has increased, and you have to adopt these technologies. There's constant work going on on successive versions of platform. Once you build a platform, you have the IP and the knowledge, and the relationship, working relationship, which allows you to keep working on successive versions. The relationship continues, which in effect becomes annuity. Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly it. You know, the key difference, Puranik... Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That happened in the old days is really the fact that Joseph mentioned. Mm-hmm. Is really that the business has moved into platforms. Once you start, you never stop. There are new features, there are new models, there are newer applications sitting on the platform, and it continues. When you say platform, is it the generic platform or is it the monetizable platform you're talking about? No. Joseph, you might want to just clarify with a few examples. I just want to understand is, are there powerful platforms which can be significant revenue earners over time? Yeah, yeah. Sure. Are there any $100 million platforms? Oh, there are many different types, sure. Just to answer that question, Mr. Puranik, you know, we, the customers that we are working with and building platforms for, many of them are platforms that are generating half a billion dollars, $1 billion, $2 billion-$3 billion in revenue. You know, the customers are building it to monetize and to make revenues of them. Most of them are in the SaaS model, you know, you can have a wide range of customers. The implementation cycles and the implementation cost involved is lower, you'd be able to onboard customers more quickly, and customers would have a higher propensity to adopt these platforms. As Ashok pointed out, the work doesn't stop. You need to keep adding new products and, sorry, new applications, new customer experience and things like that. You are constantly working with the customer on engineering and, you know, building, additional functionalities into the platform. These are the customer-specific platforms. They're not replicable platforms. Yeah. I'll give you two, three examples, actually, Mr. Puranik, that would help. One of our customers is, you know, they have in their tech space, helping providing content and various other educational materials to nurses, including pre-certification assessment, et cetera. You know, they build up a end-to-end platform that will help them to build the content and deliver the content to these nurses. They're tied up with the nursing institutes. They have to capture all of this data that, you know, the way the nurses are going through the test results, et cetera, into a data platform, which would then allow them to give feedback back to the nurses, help them in their learning journey. That is a platform out here, right? That's one example. Another example is a customer that we're working with. They built a platform to help measure whether in online advertisement, the efficacy of the advertisement, whether there's fraud happening. They go back to, you know, the companies that are hosting these advertisements, whether CPG, retail or any other company. That's a platform which all of these advertisers would be able to use to make sure that their ad strategies are efficient and there's, you know, that there's integrity in it. That's why I take a couple of examples to. Mm-hmm. To give you what kind of platforms we work with. The interesting thing is that what you can pick up from this experience is to design and architect a platform of your own for different industry. Is that? That's a different issue. That's a completely different business. Different. You know, I'll tell you one thing. Puranik, let me just address this. You're asking of numbers, can it generate revenue $100 million, $500 million, et cetera. Actually, Joseph answered that. Our customer may generate $100 million, $500 million, even become a $1 billion-dollar entity. Yeah, I understand. Let's assume in our case, the platform we develop for the customer- Yeah. Let's assume that it leads to It may, the ranges may vary from $1 million-$8 million or $10 million or whatever. Mm-hmm. Let's assume the average is INR 5 million. It lasts us for 10 years. Mm-hmm. We are generating from that single platform $50 million of revenue. Yeah. We keep enhancing it. That gentleman and the customer may go and generate INR 100 million, INR 200 million, INR 500 million. That's their business. Correct. Now, can we create a platform which we can sell? You're virtually saying as a platform, as a service. Yeah. That's a different business altogether. You must appreciate that when you do these platforms in today's day and age is the customer's crown jewel. They're not wanting you to go and share and sit around. You can make a platform as a service. It could be a new business altogether. We would be doing this not with a given customer, but we would be doing it with a view to saying, "Hey, are we entering into that business?" That's a different issue altogether. Okay. you don't have any plan to develop your own platform? They're all our own platforms. I see it when every business we are doing nowadays is a platform. Platform. Okay. My question is a little different because you have your own platform with your own IP. Say, the customer where the services can be sold to many customers. It's replicable in terms of applications. Yes. Yeah. It will be a different business altogether. Definitely. We really have to examine that. Okay. If I can... I think you. Even if I can just add one more thing, here. Maybe, Ashok, if I can add. Yes, yes, please. Yeah, we do have what we call the solution accelerators for IP, right? Mm-hmm. When there are several platforms, we work on the digital content management, for various large research company, which is replicable across other research. There are sets of solution accelerators as well as IPs or smaller sets of platforms that we have which are replicable across customer organization. As you look at from our numbers itself, about, 10% of our revenue comes from those solution accelerators for IP business as well. Oh, excellent. You license it out or how do you use it as a productivity tool or as a directly license? We provide it as a service. Provide it as service. How do you bill them? What is the way to monetize that? Yes. I think that, again, the example I gave you for digital content management, it is based on the number of reports they generate, right? Oh, I see. It's interesting. You're already in a platform path already. Yes. Yes. That is true. That is true. Multiple executive creators can create a platform, plus platform. Correct. Correct. You have a separate platform team or is it a team for particular verticals who generates all this? Again, Joseph, Venkat, Rajiv, if you want to speak, either of you. Even so I think that we do. Yes. Yeah. As part of the. Please go on. Sorry. As part of the overall organizational structure, we do have a small R&D team that will continue to explore what we can develop as our own solution accelerators. Mm-hmm. This team will constantly keep looking at and identify small white spaces, as Rajiv has explained. We keep looking each year what more new solution accelerators we can build and how do we enhance. Just like a product roadmap. Each of them will have their own roadmaps. This can be eventually a platform as a service as you develop your own. We cannot be forward-looking. Yes, that's true. Like, it is strongly tied with our annual strategies and each year, we'll be looking at them. Sometimes they collaborate, we can work together. As Rajiv shared, we can actually take it as a 60% prefabricated and build the remaining components and features as client request. One question I've been wanting to ask you, Ashok, is about why you aren't present in BFSI. You know, if you heard me out here, I have said that, you know, we've been able to sustain our growth, through very strong presence in a few verticals. Yeah. I added that there are a couple which we are now going to focus on a lot more. One of them is BFSI and the other one is healthcare. In both of them we've added very strong domain presence, and we believe that this will now become the focal point to take us forward in those. Mm-hmm. Because it's a very large vertical. I know. That is true. Very true. They're both very large verticals. Healthcare is growing at a rapid rate. BFSI has been very, very large and- Ah. obviously the largest. At the same time, the newer opportunities require a very, very specific strategy because we are not in the game of we have 500 people working for X bank and 1,000 people working for another. That's a different business altogether. Why you are late in the BFSI vertical? Firstly, we are not interested in the market. Let's be clear. That is not our digital strategy. Okay. Core business was very difficult to penetrate when we came in. Ah. Now we've built capabilities where we are able to take these to the market through, let us say, the FinTech offerings that we are developing. Very interesting. Thanks a lot, Ashok. Thank you. Thank you very much. Wish you good luck and great health. Same to you. Same to you. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Manik Thanawalla for his closing comments. Thank you, operator. On behalf of the entire team at Axis Capital Limited, we would like to thank the management of Happiest Minds Technologies for giving us the opportunity to host this call. I'm going to pass over the call to Sunil for any closing comments. Over to you, Sunil. Thank you all for joining us today. We thank Axis Capital for hosting this call. We look forward to interacting with you. You can reach out to us on Investors@happiestminds.com. Have a good evening. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you. Thank you too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Axis Capital Limited, that concludes this conference call. We thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.