Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q1 FY 2024 earnings conference call of Happiest Minds, hosted by ICICI Securities. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in listen-only mode. 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 will now hand the conference over to Mr. Sumeet Jain from ICICI Securities. Thank you. Over to you, Mr. Jain. Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today on Q1 FY 2024 earnings call of Happiest Minds Limited. On behalf of ICICI Securities, 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 from the Happiest Minds management, Mr. Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman; Mr. Joseph Anantharaju, Executive Vice Chairman and CEO for Digital Services; Mr. Venkatraman Narayanan, Managing Director 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, CCO; and Mr. Sunil Gujjar, Head of Investor Relations. With that introduction, I will hand it over to Sunil for a safe harbor statement and to take us through. Thanks and over to you, Sunil. Thank you, Sumeet. Good morning to all participants in the call. Welcome to this conference call to discuss the financial results for the first quarter ended June 30, 2023. I'm Sunil, Head of Investor Relations. You can review our financial statements, quarterly fact sheet, and press release, which are uploaded on our website. 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 this 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. Thank you, Sunil, and thank you also, Sumeet and ICICI Securities for hosting this call. A very good morning to all the participants on this call. I am pleased to share with you the results for the first quarter of fiscal 2024 for Happiest Minds, which has consistently and yet again delivered industry-leading performance, both on total income growth and profitability. At 44.7% quarter serial growth and 25.5% EBITDA, our EBITDA margins have surpassed the upper end of our guidance band for 13 quarters in a row. The performance reflects our strong value proposition, which we bring to our customers. During the quarter, we achieved and crossed many significant milestones. Our headcount crossed the 5,000 mark during the quarter, and we are now 5,038 strong Happiest Minds. I thank all Happiest Minds for their continued commitment and dedication over the years. I also express my gratitude to over 200 Happiest Minds who crossed a decade of association with us in this quarter. We closed a very successful qualified institutions placement, QIP, issue of INR 500 crore, with strong support from reputed institutions across both domestic and international. I thank the financial community for their continued trust and support. As shared with you in my earlier conversations, we have set forth a goal of achieving $1 billion in revenues by FY 2031. Our guidance of 25% growth is based on the premise we are on course to achieve that goal. I would like to reemphasize that the guidance of 25% doesn't make a distinction between organic and inorganic contribution. Our organic story continues to be strong, as can be seen from the positive swing from the prior quarter. As we speak, our pipeline also remains strong, and Joseph will cover more on this in his remarks. On our inorganic pursuit, though our pipeline is good with multiple opportunities, we have not been able to take any one of them to closure as yet. Hence, if need be, we will update our revenue guidance later in the year, depending on the progress we make on the M&A front in the next few months. With this, I end my commentary. Over to you, Venkat. Thanks, Ashok. Good morning to all. I'll, in the next few minutes, take you through certain financial highlights and hand it over to Ashok for our business update. Our operating revenues for the quarter was $48 million, and this was a QoQ growth of 3.5% and year-over-year growth of 12.7%. In functional currency, growth was 3.5% QoQ and 13.8% YoY. Both numbers leading has showed a strong positive swing, swing from a low quarter of last year, fourth quarter of last year. In rupees, our total income was INR 405 crore, which has showed a sequential growth of 4.7% on a year-over-year basis, on a quarter-over-quarter basis, and 22.6% on a year-over-year basis. Our EBITDA and resulting cash flow as we define it, for the quarter reached a INR 100 crore mark and stood at INR 103 crore and INR 101 crore, respectively. As Ashok mentioned, it was the 13th quarter in succession we have delivered 25% plus on EBITDA. At 25.5% of revenues, our EBITDA continues to be the top deck when compared to almost all other industry participants. Our EBITDA has grown 17.4% over the previous year. I would like to believe that our strong profitability numbers are a validation of our value proposition and disciplined execution. Our profit before tax was INR 79 crores, which achieved at 19.4% of revenues, while after tax was INR 58 crores and at 14.4% of revenues. We have grown 3.5% on this metric over the same period last year. Our capital return ratios continue to be strong, return on capital employed is at 33.2% and return on equity, 36%. Our cash conversion ratio also continues to be strong at 98.4% of revenue. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of about INR 810 crores, which now, after the QIP, has moved up to INR 1,200 crores+. During the quarter, we raised INR 45 crore through issue of NCDs and INR 500 crore QIP case by placing equity shares with qualified institutions. We received strong institutional support for our QIP, and I thank all our stakeholders for their continued support and trust in us. The capital issue was predominantly to support our working capital requirements and also fund growth opportunities. Coming to certain other highlights for the quarter, extremely happy to report that during the quarter, the Happiest Minds family has crossed 5,000 with a net addition of 130. Utilization for the quarter stood at a steady 74.6%, while attrition levels have been nicely trending downwards, and we see that we saw that at 13.6% on a trailing twelve-month basis. As we speak, that number has come down to below 14%. During the quarter, we expanded our Pune and Noida centers. During the quarter, we also added 18 new logos and 2 billion-dollar corporations into our 55 existing billion-dollar logos, taking the total to 57. Our repeat business was 86%, signaling the good growth that we are seeing in new business. If I recall, we had signed up 17 new logos last quarter, 18 new logos this quarter, and that's contributing to the good growth in new business. We ended the quarter with 253 active customers, with an average revenue per customer of about $793,000. This is kind of been constant and has been trending very close to this number over the last few quarters, reflecting on our land and expand strategy. In conclusion, I believe we have had a good start to the fiscal industry-leading growth and... On a metric that we closely track, which is revenue growth plus EBITDA margins, we are consistently above all other industry participants and players. Q2, we'll be rolling out pay increases, covering a large part of our Happiest Minds family, which will be effective first of July. This could have a temporary effect on margins. As mentioned by Ashok, we'll provide an update on revenue guidance during our quarter Q2, while we continue to hold on to our EBITDA margin guidance of 20%-22%. This concludes my update. Over to you, Joseph. Thanks, Venkat. Good morning to all the participants in this call. I'm very pleased to share with you the results for the first quarter of the fiscal year, 2024. At 4.7% quarter-on-quarter growth in total income, performance continues to be the best in the industry. This growth was led by our engineering services and analytics CoE, Americas and India geos, and BFSI and EdTech verticals. At these times, when businesses are looking for compressed timelines for execution faster results, our results demonstrate that we continue to be a partner of choice in their journey to stay relevant and enhance efficiency in their operations to our customers. I'm proud to share with you that we now have our first customer contributing more than US $30 million in revenues. We have been working with this customer for the past eight years, and this is a validation of our land and expand strategy, as well as the quality of our execution. What started as a product engineering work for their platform is now well entrenched into all our business unit offerings and also leveraging our CoEs of analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation. We now work with 57 large enterprises that have more than $1 billion in revenues. This count has increased by two in the last quarter itself. In the past quarter, we have acquired 80 new logos to add to the 60 new logos from Q4 of last year, which has driven up our share of new business. It's gratifying to see several of these new logos are already on a million-dollar annual. To give you a flavor of conversations we are having with customers, starting with the US geo. Jeditech [audio distortion] continues to leverage digitally channelized efforts through the changing needs of key stakeholders. In the reported quarter, we were the beneficiary of a major consolidation exercise with a U.S. client that [audio distortion] space, who chose us to be the sole provider for end-to-end Product Engineering Services. We started focusing on healthcare and life sciences a couple of years back, and we built expertise that we had already gained from providing engineering services to some of the large corporate and global companies. In this quarter, we have started calling out this separately on the fact sheet. In the reported quarter, we were chosen to provide cloud-based lifecycle management solution for a global leader and innovator in the bioscience industry. The acquisition [audio distortion] has provided further impetus to our growth story in this space. In the Europe geo, we did see some impressive wins during the quarter. For example, for a global high-tech engineering group based in Europe, we were chosen to design and implement their modern data platform on Microsoft Azure. In another instance, a global talent fulfillment enterprise chose us to implement Microsoft's Power Platform to improve employee experience and provide actionable intelligence for decision-makers. We are pleased to be working with some of the large businesses out there. In one instance, Happiest Minds was chosen to provide consulting-led operational technology solutions for a large enterprise in the oil and gas industry. We continue to get called for strategic initiatives from large enterprises in our backyard. Through our consulting-led approach, we are helping a large automobile service company in India to build and develop, deploy their B2C platform. In another instance, we were chosen by one of India's leading education groups to build their platform for medical student PG test preparation. In Generative AI, which is a highly strategic area for us, we are setting up a GenAI division with the chance of driving significant GenAI business, including organization capability on OpenAI and guardrails, developing multiple use cases in each domain, working with the GTM to take these offerings to market, and working with customers to build these use cases. We're building an initial team of 100+ people with rich expertise in GenAI, which can expect to scale further shortly. Besides helping customers realize the full potential of this technology, these engineers will be building their own solutions. We've already engaged with multiple customers on various use cases and also helping them to take advantage of Copilot for productivity improvements. We're also deepening our partnership with other hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS in this space. We believe that technology can have a positive impact in three areas: automation to improve processes and enhance employee productivity, transform to enhance customer experience, disrupt and create new business models by leveraging large language models on proprietary data. With our deep domain knowledge and technology depth, I'm confident that our difference of opportunity potential of GenAI for our customers, engineers, and programmers. Moving on to other updates, our integration of SMI is now complete. I'm happy to share that we're able to cross leverage teams and key companies in both directions and achieve synergies together as one entity. To give you some flavor on the demand environment, our pipeline remains strong. As you speak, we are chasing several large opportunities cutting across geos. Our clients remain focused on executing bold transformation to achieve cost optimization, stronger growth, more agility, and greater resilience. We believe in the world we live in, all strategies lead to technology. Happiest Minds is the core of decision-making. We are all used to our customers' changing needs and being relevant across the enterprise, from the frontline to core operations to corporate functions. I strongly believe that our ability to advise, shape, and deliver value-led transformation, leveraging the depth of our services across all industries, geographic projects, and geos, is what differentiates Happiest Minds. With this, I will turn my commentary and open the floor to Q&A. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask questions may press star and one on their 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. You may press star and one to ask questions at this time. We'll take the first question from the line of Sumeet Jain from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Thanks. Congrats on a good growth this quarter. My first question is on the margin side. If I look at your employee costs that are a bit elevated this quarter, despite no wage hike rounds this quarter, any particular reasons for the elevated cost of living this quarter? Venkat, I guess it's for you. Hi, Sumeet. Yeah, yeah. Hi, Sumeet. We had-- Yeah, we had a slight increase in our on-site, on-site, people cost. That's one reason, because, you know, the mix changes quarter to quarter. The campus joining cost also has come in. Some of that cost has also come in at its full force this quarter. Other than this, we have not seen any other change, Sumeet. In fact, we are optimizing on the subcontractors reasonably well, and that's been the reason. Can you also comment around your hiring outlook for the year? I guess you mentioned around 300 fresher hiring for the full year. The headcount both for you. Can you just comment around the both fresher hiring target as well as lateral hiring plans in the morning? Yeah. Can I just give the overall numbers? I'll ask Joseph to add to this. We had talked about a 25% growth guidance, as Ashok had referred to in his comments earlier, and which translated to about 1,300 people we added during the year. In that addition, we have we've had a pipeline of freshers as well, which was about 400+. 240+ will be joining this month as we speak, and the rest is scheduled over a period of time going over the financial year. Again, I should caution you that our growth of 25% has both an organic and inorganic element to it. The number of people that we hire will also function of the people that we add from the company that comes into our fold. For example, last year in December, our numbers went up by 400, coming in from SMI. This year we are focusing well on the pipeline that we talked about earlier, and this will also have will impact the number or will add to the number that we will add to the Happiest Minds family over. We had talked about 1,300. It will be a function of laterals, it will be a function of the campus joinees, and also the new additions of members we'll add to the family through M&A. Just a couple of more points I wanted to add there, Sumeet. One is, you know, I think we will be looking at increasing the utilization, and therefore, some of the additional business would come from the people we have. Secondly, we also want to take a little bit more of an agile view, because there's a plurality of skill sets required, and we want to make sure that, you know, the numbers that we hire and the skill sets, we take a more agile and nimble approach to our headcount addition. Got it. Thanks. Thanks for the clarity. Another question is on more of your longer term outlook. I think you gave a target of around $1 billion by FY 2031. Just want to understand how much you want to grow by, by buying existing clients, where you already have 40 customers, and how many number of more clients you want to add. Within this client context, if you also give us a brief highlight as to how many Fortune 500-2000 clients you have, which you can scale up substantially over the next eight-10 years. I guess, Venkat, again, both you and Joseph. Yes. Sumeet, I'll, I'll just give you the certain data points after which Joseph can add. We have, we have got 55 billion-dollar corporations in our client roster right now. We've added two more to this count this quarter. The number of clients that we have in the billion-dollar corporations, which has got the deeper pockets to spend on IT, is consistently on the increase. Second is, when you scale up to $1 billion, you have to have more of the million dollar, 10 million dollar, 20 million dollar number of clients. As Joseph remarked, the first client of ours has moved to the $50 million bucket. Whereas we have added a nice slew of list of clients to the $1 million-3 million, which is about 43 right now. Those clients have to now increase, and they have to get into the, you know, 3 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 20 kind of a range. At the same time, we should also add that $50 million, 100 million, $150 million, or 100 million, 150 million clients to this journey that we have towards billion-dollar. Existing client, business, repeat business is about 86%, like I said. Mining your existing clients so that they grow to become these larger clients and towards your revenue contribution is something that will be the area of focus. That's nicely planned out in our, you know, long-term planning. We have, we, we look at the account development plan and how each of these clients contribute to the problem. Plus, and to that, we'll add the inorganic part that we have been talking about. Joseph? Yeah. Yes, just to add to what Venkat said, Sumeet, we will also obviously focus on both signing our existing business and new logos. The new logo focus will be on billion-dollar corporations or Fortune 2000, which can give us the ability to mine and go further once we invest in acquiring these logos. You know, and the percentage of repeat business would fluctuate a little bit, but we'd like to see the 92%. This will ensure that we have enough new logos and business from new logos coming in, which will allow us to mine these accounts and grow them. As you would have seen from my commentary, a couple of examples that I gave, you know. customers that have been around for eight or nine years, where we've successfully implemented our land and expand strategy. This will continue to be an area that we will invest and focus on acquiring these new logos and ensuring that we put in place the right processes and approach to sign these accounts. I think that's what will allow us to reach the billion-dollars goal that we have by 2031. [audio distortion], just last question from my end is, I mean, in the scaling up of business, how will be your focus on different industry verticals, given that, you know, right now, the global IT services space is a very small vertical overall, and BFSI and the Retail verticals, which are, you know, very big locally, but are still small for you, the competition is very high, but then the scalability opportunity is there for you. I just want to understand, you know, how you want to scale up your individual industry vertical sectors. JR, if any inorganic opportunity you get, what would be your focus on the M&A side? Well, let me take this one for a start. Sure. Hand it over to the two of you. You know, Sumeet, one of the things that I'd like to highlight is, as you grow, you also begin to span different verticals. I won't give you the exact numbers here, but you can see how healthcare has taken off for us in the current year. It's become fairly significant. Maybe Venkat or someone can give you the exact percentages. It is a huge growing area to start with and clearly a new platform for us in terms of adding to whatever organic growth that we had. As far as M&A, you know, it's really much more a question of saying, really speaking, there are opportunities everywhere. We are not saying here we want to do the M&A to increase our presence in BFSI. We will have a look at the opportunities as they come and see to what extent there's a strategic fit. Anybody with a very strong technology offering, which cuts across multiple verticals, is also a very good candidate. Just that as a comment, and then maybe over to Venkat and Joseph to see if they'd like to add, and maybe even Rajeev might want to have a comments on this. Yeah. Just want to give healthcare number. We have, we have done a little bit of reclassification, but, thanks to a new customer that we added from the last quarter, it's currently at 12.9% of our revenue. You see how it's become a substantially large part of the vertical focus. It was always there. We had not called it out separately, and we have started calling it out from this quarter, as we had mentioned in the last quarter. Just to add to that, Sumeet, you know, over the next eight years or so, till we get to 2031, we'll be looking at trends in, you know, each of the industries to grow. As the opportunity, we make investments. Plus, you would see movement of revenue share of different verticals going up and going down. You know, for instance, healthcare and life science, we see a lot of, and, you know, the capabilities that we are bringing in are on the leading edge and allow us, you know, impact time takes and devices. That will allow us, you know, to, to, to differentiate and build business. That it gives us an opportunity. Again, you talked about BFSI. We've, we've, placed a, a, a strong team of domain experts to focus on that area. As we speak, you know, there's a lot of GTM activity and a couple of new logos that I've got attached. This will be something that will be more of a journey. You know, in this fast-paced world, we have to look at opportunities, disruptions taking place in each of these verticals and jump as quickly as possible onto these. You know, for instance, three, four years back, it was Chip Tech, and that's how we were able to grow significantly by helping the customers in this space lever from more of a page-based approach to a digital approach. Now, you know, the next would be adoption of GenAI and other technologies, that this, you know, vertical would, would, would benefit from. Rajeev, if you want to add anything, please? Just one more thing as well. Joseph talked about BFSI industry group and capabilities. We did a similar thing for Retail CPG as well. We brought a very senior person, industry leader, to head up that unit in the last quarter. At the same time, I think that we've been very focused on the areas that we are strong in, right? Like in the BFSI world, what can we do with security services? What can we do with the risk management side of things? What can we do with using the newer way of looking at Generative AI or ChatGPT, et cetera, in the private segment? I think that we are very focused on utilizing the newer technology, disruptive, business model, especially on the Retail CPG side, how we work on connected devices, et cetera. I think by adding the capabilities, with the industry group leader, at the same time, staying focused on the niche technology areas we are strong in, I think we'll continue to grow those businesses as well. Great. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. Thanks a lot. Thank you. A reminder to all the correspondents, anyone who wishes to ask questions may press star one now. We will take the next question from the line of Dipesh from Emkay Global Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions. First about the Q1 performance, whether it was in line with what management expected, because last time you said you had right shifting of revenue, which impacted fourth performance, and you expected Q1 performance to be in line with your full year guidance. Just want to get clarity about it. If I want then why year-over-year growth is in single digit? Just your perspective, whether Q1 played out the way you expected. Second question is about, just want to get perspective on your high-tech and travel, media, and entertainment vertical. There seems to be some kind of softness, partly high-tech because of the classification, but otherwise also seems to be. Give some perspective. The last question is about top two to five clients, seems to be weak. Last time also, I think it was showing some kind of softness, but it seems to be temporary, but I think the weakness persists. Thank you. Yes, Venkat. First and the last part, and then on the specific vertical oriented, again, can be both Joseph and, Rajiv. For, for starters, if you look at it, Dipesh, repeat business has come down to 86%, and it was 90%+. We had signed up 17 logos, I said 18 logos this quarter. 17 logos, you know, it takes time to ramp up, build, build the muscle, build up a team around it and start building. So that, that's what we had referred to as certain right shifting, and that's shown up. 86% is what our repeat business has come down to from the 91, which means the new business is picking up from this quarter, which is, which is what we had referred to. With respect to year-over-year growth, that tends to happen. We added about INR 2 million, 2.5 million from last in the last quarter from the acquisition. That continues to be part of our top line this quarter. It gets adjusted. Like I said earlier, we look at these acquisitions, which are more capability-based and focused on clients as organic growth than inorganic. Just, just, shift in thinking on that front. Sir. Sir? Sir, I have a request. Sorry, Venkat. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, sorry. So the high-tech vertical, as you, as you pointed out, Dipesh, there was a reclassification because many of our health tech accounts were previously classified under high-tech. So that's the reason why you see the drop in the high-tech percentage of revenue. On travel, media, and entertainment, most of the revenues is from the media and entertainment space. One of our customers in the As you know, that segment, especially the area that we are focused on, which is streaming media, is going through a little of recalibration right now. One of the customers that we have, one of the largest customers, you know, which, which is a movie and parks company, they are looking at, they are going through an internal, I would say, kind of a recall and re-strategizing. That has delayed some of the decision making, and they've, they've also optimized costs, but it's also throwing up opportunities for us. We expect that, you know, over the next couple of quarters for some of this trends to in the TME space to reverse. Rajiv, do you want anything on any other verticals? No, I think that, I think the question was high-tech, media, entertainment, right? Sure. I think that other one was the top 20 accounts, if I recall correctly. The growth is, compared to the previous quarter, has picking up, and I think you see quite a bit of progress on the top 20 accounts as well. Overall, while there was a little bit of right shifting in the last quarter, we continue to be, the good news is there is no cancellation of contracts. There is still a little bit of delay in signing. Overall, the acceptability of the solutions we provide, continue to see good, positive vibes from the customer. Understood. Just last question is about the demand environment. Compared to, let's say, over the last few months, any improvement you are witnessing or you are still witnessing more of the same kind of client behavior in terms of elongated sales cycle, as well as clients are very cautious in terms of spending efficiently? I guess here, all three of you could say something. Ram may get a chance also on this one. Ram, you want to start? You want to start, Ram? Yeah. If you really look at the demands from the infra and security perspective, we are seeing a continuous growth in terms of security. As the threats have increased, you know, people are looking at ring-fencing their environment with security-related services and tools, so we are seeing the growth there. With respect to cloud, we are seeing, you know, consolidation has happened, and many, many customers have already moved to cloud. At this point of time, they are looking at cloud optimization and also multi-cloud environment management. That is what we are seeing, growth in terms of, you know, multi-cloud management. The third area where we are seeing growth is in terms of automation, where, you know, and especially enterprises are looking at automating their operational aspects. So that means, you know, their IT operation automation is another area where we are seeing some work coming from, especially from U.S. Joseph? Yeah, and, you know, a few broad panel, Dipesh. I think there are a few areas where customers continue to invest. If you look at the broad digital space, customers are putting money from or investing money from other areas and investing in digital. As I mentioned last time as well, it's, it's an imperative for them, a strategic imperative, and they need to continue to invest in their digital infrastructure to just stay on pace with their competition. In fact, a few areas where we are seeing increased interest. One is on the modernization space, where they're looking at taking their existing applications and converting them more to platforms on the cloud. The second is in terms of analytics and usage of AI. A lot of data platforms being built and data science being applied to leverage this data. We're also seeing customer, customer interest in low code/no code to optimize some of the development costs. Another area is on the process automation space, where again, they can extract some savings which can be used elsewhere. Of, you know, the last 6 months, as I mentioned, we've had quite a few of our customers start exploring the potential of GenAI. That's an area, again, with their customers, and we feel very bullish about opportunities that are coming and will come from this in this area as well. Just a couple of things to add. This is Rajeev. While we continue to be vigilant on the macroeconomic environment, there are just in terms of numbers, and I think when we mentioned, we did sign 18 new logos this quarter, 17 logos the previous quarter. Our ability to sign new logos and selling the digital transformation services continue to be attractive. Just adding couple of areas, analytics side, Joseph touched off, and especially on the predictive analytics side, we continue to see traction. ESG has been, we have signed at least three customers over the last three months or so, on the ESG side, helping companies become not only ESG compliant, but at the same time looking at different ways of doing business. This is just adding to what Ram and Joseph said. Dipesh, does that answer your question, sir? Yes, thank you. We'll take the next question from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity. While on the revenue growth side, as you said, that you will essentially look to update us after second quarter numbers. My question was with regards to the way we should be thinking about the medium-term outlook for our margins, given the fact that in Q1 2024, et cetera, margins are probably down about 50 basis points on year-on-year basis, and we are yet to simply implement wage increments. I do understand there is an element of investments in pressure, but how should we be thinking about our medium-term operating margin outlook? Sure. I just make one comment and pass it over to Venkat. The key thing here is that while margins may have some variation here or there, because of some things we've pointed out going ahead, the compensation increases and so on, the fact is we've sustained our EBITDA margins, and we remain actually second only to one, obviously very large company in the entire industry. With that overview, for more details, I think it's a good idea to pass this to Venkat. Thanks, Ashok. Manik, you know, we have conducted those simulations, and that's how some 10 months of the margin guidance of 22%-24%. There will be ups and downs, and like Naveen saying, there were quite a bit of credits that we used to get during COVID and post-COVID because of work from home and all of this. Just, just mentioning that we've got a substantial part of our business coming back to work, which, which I, which I covered in our, in my commentary as well. We are adding to our centers in Pune, Noida. We are also we expanded in Bhubaneswar. We are seeing people come there, and we are trying to make investments to get more people to office there as well. As we talk about expansion in Madurai. These are all things which cost M&A on the front of rent and associated costs, which was not there during the COVID time, and people were working from home. That's what we talked about, talking about a 22%-24% margin. The real health of the business from a margin is on the gross margin or on the contribution from business. That except for these wage increases and the 1% up or 2% that goes up and down, we are looking reasonably consistent on that front, Manik. Sure. The second question was with regards to just a reflection on the way number of days essentially impacts our sequential growth, given the fact that almost 75% of the business actually is on chain and billing. How should we be thinking about, or what, what impact does it have in, in Q1? Since then, how should we be thinking about the higher number of working days in September quarter? Yeah, very valid point. In fact, if you remember, in Q3, we, we, we came back and said that we had more than expected holidays and, you know, the election day and everything, which, which really played spoilsport Q3 of last year. So compared to that, we have got 61 days in Q2... Q3 this year. So we have to plan in advance to see how we can take away that, you know, variability in our revenue stream. Because as we grow larger, each day is $1 million. I'm just giving you a number. And so in order to manage that and also leave plans, the, the extreme calendar and all of that, it has to, it has to be managed a lot better. Huge amount of focus needs to be there on the operations front. Yes, there is going to be, Q3, you know, there is, there could be potentially 1 day, 1 billing day less, and we need to plan ahead for that. Q2, hopefully will continue to be the same number of 62, 63 days that we had traditionally seen. Sure. Would there be some higher working on a sequential basis between July, August, September, and June? No, it's 1 lower, right? For September, for Q3, it's 1 lower, Manik. July, August, September, which is the growth calendar year. July, August, September will... July, August, September would be the same. Joseph, 62, right? Yes, yes. 63, yeah. 62. 66, correct. 66. Yeah. In fact, I think, Q3 will be 60 days, actually. So, we are only- Sixty-one. 61, yeah. 61, and the leave, leave calendar leave is hitting us currently. Sure. Thank you for that, Vishal. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Utkarsh Katkoria from PGIM India Mutual Fund. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking my question. I'm sorry to interrupt. Utkarsh, your audio is too low. Could you please increase the volume a little bit? Sure. Thank you for, for taking my question. I'm sorry if I missed the first few minutes in the beginning. I just wanted your thoughts on your long-term revenue growth outlook, you know, where we see the company, let's say, you know, 5 years from now and, you know, beyond. What would be the drivers, which verticals and, you know, how we try to get there? Sure. Can I just take the one first part, which, as you said, you probably missed the beginning, and I stated that we have a $1 billion goal by 2031, and we are very much on target to achieve that. I did also make a distinction that our guidances have not made a distinction between organic and inorganic growth. Obviously, it's our size. You know, an organic growth can be very lumpy, therefore, it's very difficult to be able to state those numbers. However, we also did say that we may restate that guidance for the current year based on the way M&A progresses, and so far, we've not been able to do a deal. That doesn't mean it won't happen. We have got a good, strong pipeline, but we have to be very selective in the way we go and select our deals. It doesn't overly concern us simply because we are still very much on target for achieving our long-term goals. We've got the verticals, where, you know, we have actually addressed that point a bit in the earlier part, but I can get Joseph and Rajiv again to speak a little bit about that. I do want to highlight that as we progress, we do continue to grow new verticals in a way, and then they begin to get focused on. Healthcare is where. Life sciences is one example. It's come on now to our fact sheets, and, it's grown very significantly. It will be a new growth driver because we've got many segments within that, where we believe we can take a very unique positioning. With this, let me hand this over to Joseph and Rajiv. Thanks, Ashok, and, you know, just to point a little earlier that, you know, we would, we would constantly be... The first point I want to make is that, you know, the last couple of years, we've been building, in some of the domains that we are presenting and also focus on healthcare two years back. Recently, Rajiv Shah mentioned that we brought a Retail CPG head, a seasoned industry veteran in tech deck, and me and [audio distortion] as well, we built a team of BAs who understands the domain, and this will be a driver for our growth going forward, you know, taking the lead and getting more stream engagement. Having said that, I think we will have to continue looking for disruptions in each of these industries. They may happen at different points of time. Therefore, to, to name a specific vertical right now, well, that would sort of sustain us for the next 10 years, would not be right. I think we have to take a more nimble approach. Ashok did talk about healthcare. As we speak, there are several opportunities in different subsegments of healthcare. If you look at all the verticals, they're still in, in, you know, depending on the certainty, they're either starting some of the different initiatives or midway. So there are opportunities in all of these verticals. If you look at analytics, AI, if you look at automation, and I think GenAI will touch all of these verticals. The strategies that we're putting in place will allow us to take our offerings, with a twist of, you know, the main capability into all of these verticals. You know, I, I think that the growth will be broad-based. It can be. The revenue share of different verticals could vary depending on where we get more success, where we are able to expand quickly. The third point is that account expansion and land and expand will continue to be a critical strategy for us. We will continue trying to break into accounts with very fine-tuned offerings, and then make sure that we use our land and expand strategy to grow these accounts. As we mentioned, we have 57 billion-dollar customers right now, and we will continue adding more. This will be another avenue for growth. Got it. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Thank you. Participants, if you wish to ask questions, please press star and one now. We'll take the next question from the line of Ritwik of Freelancer. Please go ahead. Hi. Hi. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. This is an amazing quarter. The results have shown consistency. My question is that, this Sri Mookambika Infosolutions, will it have any possibility to the bottom line of Happiest Minds as well? I'm not sure I got that, Venkat. If you have, then just go ahead and answer that. No, I did not get it. No, it happens at the bottom line. The recent acquisition of Sri Mookambika Infosolutions. Okay. adding the profitability of the company. Yeah, Venkat, go ahead. Sir, Venkat, sir, has been disconnected. Maybe request you somebody else from the management to answer this question. Yeah. Also, you know, is Venkat not available on this at the moment? Something wrong with the line? Yes, sir, he is not disconnected. Okay. You know, I can very briefly take this up, and maybe, Joseph, you can. I think that what I understood from your question is, you wanted us to tell you if the SMI acquisition will have an impact on our profitability. Is that the right one? Yes. Yes, sir. Yes. Yeah. Two things. You-- We've clearly seen the first quarter after that acquisition, and you've seen that we've sustained our position as being the second highest in the entire industry, in spite of the fact that there are many $ multi-billion companies, and we've been able to sustain that data. That's one point. Second is that overall, when you look at the size of the acquisition, this is really very small, either way, it could not impact. Thirdly, it's coming like we look at all acquisitions as entities which deliver good margins. We never look at loss-making. We don't look at medium profitability. We are looking at people who are typically in the range of, say, 20%, even if we are 25%. Therefore, the, on a percentage basis, we don't expect any dilution. When we do these acquisitions, maybe a marginal 1% or something, but we've always taken position by saying that our guidance is really 20-24%, so we've been delivering above 25%. So we are in a good shape as far as that recent acquisition is concerned, and also our plans for future acquisitions. Joseph, I don't think you need to add anything more, do you? Sure, Ashok. No, no, Ashok. The only thing point I would have made is that, you know, synergies, which we are already extracting out of the acquisition in terms of, healthcare and supply, chain, expertise, that will help us in, in, in acquiring more business from the other side. My second question is: What is your take on the de-dollarization of the world economy on Happiest Minds books? The many countries are doing away with the US dollar. How does it make an impact? I've seen the subscriber, you have made a INR 8 crore profitable currency hedge. How do you see the de-dollarization of the world economy? Sure. Is Venkat back on the line? Yes, sir, he's available. Yes. Venkat is back. I'm back on. Sorry, I, I don't have an immediate answer. This is something that we, we are tracking. The Indian IT industry has always benefited from the way dollar has moved versus the rupee. That's, that's been something that's been factored into our model as well. De-dollarization- I'm not too sure how to answer because 32% of my business comes from America, so it has to be dollar. [audio distortion] is 15.5%, so that, that gives me the balance on the rupee front. Other than that, I, I don't know. Venkat, actually, I don't see how this can impact us. I really just put in here. If you just look at our sales between U.S. dollar, which is clearly U.S. dollar trade, look at us in sales in Indian Rupee, which is huge. You know, we sustain our profitability in spite of having such a large percentage of our business in Indian Rupees, because most other large Indian IT companies don't get this percentage. Therefore, all, all of this is really not linked with how world order is changing, frankly. There is a change, but that is much more in terms of people sorting out a lot of bilateral deals, are saying we'll do trade with X, Y, or Z country in their currency or our currency. Frankly, we're not even in that business. I have a last question. My last question is about the take on the blockchain technology. You've spoken about automation, you've spoken about having a regulated workforce in the like in the segment AI. What is your take on the blockchain technology? Any plans about it? Sridhar, do you want to tackle? Yeah. Sure, sure. Now, of course, blockchain, we started actually working on the blockchain, around 4-5 years back. At this point in time, our point of view is, as a technology, blockchain is well-proven. However, it has more of a narrow set of use cases compared to AI, which has much broader set of use cases. That is, whenever there is a distributed ledger and trust is required, in those kind of use cases and architecture, we continue to use blockchain, and it will continue to be one of the disruptive technologies that we are focusing on and we'll try to incorporate, as well as based on the artificial needs and the client needs. Wherever there is a trust and distributed ledger is required as part of the solution we're incorporating. It will continue to be part of our arsenal as a disruptive technology. Thank you, sir. Sir, the participant has left the queue, that was the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Sunil Gujjar for, from Happiest Minds, for closing comments. Over to you, sir. Thank you all for joining us today. We thank ICICI Securities for hosting this call on our behalf. We look forward to interacting with you. You can reach out to us on ir@happiestminds.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, members of the management. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of ICICI Securities, this conference, we thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.