Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the HCL Tech's Q3 FY25 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Nitin Mohta, Head Investor Relations. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Hey, everyone. A very warm welcome to HCL Tech's quarter three FY25 earnings call. We have with us Mr. C. Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director, HCL Tech, Mr. Shiv Walia, Chief Financial Officer, along with the broader leadership team to discuss the performance of the company during the quarter, followed by Q&A. In the course of this call, certain statements that will be made are forward-looking, which involve a number of risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements made herein are based on information presently available to the management, and the company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made in the course of this call. In this regard, please do review the safe harbor statements in the formal investor relations document and all the factors that can cause the difference. Over to you, CVK. Thank you, Nitin. Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning to everyone. Wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year, and thank you for joining us for the Q3 FY25 earnings call. We are also celebrating a remarkable milestone: 25 years since HCL Tech became a publicly listed company. Shiv, our founder and CEO, said then as we got listed, "HCL Technologies is dedicated to building long-standing relationships with all our stakeholders and creating outstanding value for our shareholders." From then till December 2024, our employee strength has grown from below 3,000- 220,755 as of end of December 2024. Our revenue has grown from $166 million by the year ending June 1999 to $13.77 billion in the last 12 months ending December 2024, representing a CAGR of 18.9% over the 25-year journey. Our annual profit on similar timelines has increased from $22 million- $2.025 billion, which is a CAGR of 19.4% over a long 25-year period. Since we're talking about public listing today, an important fact: we have delivered a total shareholder return at 20.6% on a CAGR basis from IPO till January 10, 2024. Even more importantly, we also delivered the highest TSR over the last 10 years among the large-cap India-headquartered IT companies and number one in cumulative TSR for the last 24 years. Overall, a remarkable achievement, and thank you. Thanks to the support of our employees, clients, investors, and analysts like you. Thank you all. Now, getting into our business performance for the quarter, historically, Q3 relative to the market has always been a strong quarter for us thanks to the business portfolio mix. Our revenue grew 3.8% sequentially and 4.1% on a year-on-year basis in constant currency. Our operating margins stood at 19.5%. Our services business grew 2.2% sequentially and 4.9% year-on-year in CC terms. This was supported by IT and Business Services growing at 1.5% sequentially and 5.8% year-on-year. Engineering and R&D Services grew 5.4% sequentially in constant currency and 1.1% year-on-year. HCL Software delivered a good performance, growing 18.7% sequentially while declining 2.1% year-on-year in constant currency. HCL Software's annual recurring revenue, ARR, stood at $1.022 billion, a 0.6% decline year-on-year in constant currency. This growth moderation on a year-on-year basis is on the back of good YOY growth for the prior five quarters. The current EBIT percentage of 34.5% is also an all-time high for the HCL Software business. In terms of geographies, Americas grew 6.2% year-on-year and 1.9% sequentially, while Europe grew 3.5% sequentially and 2.6% year-on-year, all in constant currency. The rest of the world remained flat on a QOQ basis, while it grew 2.9% year-on-year on CC basis. As verticals, we had strong growth in technology and financial services with a QOQ increase of 2.5% and 1.9% respectively in constant currency during the quarter. The growth in tech and financial services is in line with our commentary in the past of witnessing increasing spending patterns in FS and tech verticals. Retail and CPG also had even higher growth with a QOQ of 13.7% growth in constant currency terms. This growth was also broad-based, but the strong double-digit QOQ growth was a function of a large project execution, which got completed last quarter. Similarly, we had solid 4% QOQ growth in CC in our telecom and media business, attributed to the closing of HPE CTG acquisition and a contribution of one-month revenue from that business, and during a period of relatively slow industry growth, we continued to grow our top customers. We added two in the $100 million category, added four in the $50 million category, and four in the $20 million category on a year-on-year basis. Our top five and top 20 clients continued to expand their business with HCL Tech. In terms of booking, we won 12 deals, 7 deals from services, and 5 from software in this quarter, and total new booking TCV for Q3 stands at $2.1 billion, with small deals growing stronger than the large deals in an era where large deals are getting broken to smaller chunks. This growth in small deals won is what we would want to see, as it is also in line with the client spend patterns. We're also noticing average duration of signed deals is getting shorter. The shift towards shorter tenure deals naturally leads to moderated TCV, but the more important metric in this context is ACV, and ACV is quite good. On a year-on-year basis, ACV has grown 23%, and sequentially, it has grown 9%. We're also seeing a sizable number of deals influenced by AI and GenAI. Some of our largest wins are enabled by AI-led transformation, and I'll talk about AI-related propositions and the progress we've made in a while. Our pipeline continues to grow and remain strong and is getting closer to our all-time high. You might remember our all-time high pipeline was on the back of a mega deal at the start of the last fiscal year. This time, it's broad-based, and it is back on several deals led by our digital application business, Engineering and R&D Services, and our digital process operations business. Both Americas and Europe have shown strong growth in the pipeline as we got to this near all-time high pipeline. On the people front, our people count stands at 220,755, which is a net addition of 2,134. Our attrition stands at 13.2% on an LTM basis, slightly higher compared to the previous quarter, which is a natural consequence of the demand pickup. Coming to some of our key verticals, our telecom, media, and technology sector is undergoing a dynamic shift, prioritizing more with less, driven by efficiency, measurable impact, and ROI-focused investments. Despite cautious discretionary spending, particularly among OEMs, HCL Tech is leveraging next-generation technologies like cloud and generative AI alongside the acquisition of CTG assets from HPE to deliver transformative future-ready solutions. This deal, while expanding our partnership with HPE, gives us industry-leading IP, engineering and R&D talent, and client relationships with top global communication service providers, especially in Japan and Europe, to strengthen our engineering services capability and to expand the position in the telecom services market. We are spearheading GenAI innovation, leveraging partnerships and dedicated labs to integrate AI solutions for our clients. Our ongoing digital and cloud-related initiatives, along with strategic partnerships with hyperscalers, are driving growth in the tech sector. Relationships with industry leaders like SAP and ServiceNow further strengthen our position, driving innovation and operational efficiency for our clients. I'll also talk about the partnership with SAP in detail a little later. HCL Tech remains focused on network modernization and enhancing digital customer experience, positioning ourselves for sustained growth in the telecom vertical. We continue to see strong momentum with the recent wins. Fortune 50 telecom company expanded their partnership with us to enhance the client operations with automation and AI solutions such as AR/VR, live retail dashboards, and smart hubs for better user and client experience. We strengthened our capabilities in AI-driven contact center transformation by further expanding our partnership with a U.S.-based global technology company to help transform contact centers with generative AI and cloud-based solutions. Coming to financial services, we are continuing to see improvement in client spending. The adoption of AI by enterprises is poised for growth, with financial services progressing from proof of concept to enterprise rollout supported by robust business cases. This advancement encompasses process automation, AI-driven analytics, which will enhance risk assessment, strengthen fraud detection, and offer personalized financial advice. Additionally, we've seen a promising increase in large and medium-sized deals across Europe. The type of deals include platform modernization, whether it is through platform replacement or legacy modernization enabled by generative AI. As organizations embark on their journey towards their ideal operational state, they're actively seeking providers who can efficiently manage their legacy systems for improved efficiency and assist them in navigating the transition to their future state. A number of wins during this quarter in the financial services segment, as we've called out in our investor release. A few callouts would be a leading US-based financial services firm will accelerate their migration to cloud and enhance product engineering and application capability using our cloud smart ecosystem. A Fortune 500 financial services firm selected as a strategic partner for hybrid cloud and network solutions, as well as digital workplace transformation, again leveraging our AI capabilities. In Latin America, a financial services provider will be using our Domino and BigFix solutions to manage the lifecycle and compliance of 19,000 devices and 3,400 servers across more than 600 locations. The Central Bank of Ireland has now signed a seven-year contract with us, with the option to expand for up to a further three years for data center managed services. These partnerships emphasize our commitment to delivering innovative solutions and exceptional service. In engineering services, we have seen decent momentum with our new integrated sales organization fully operational. While Europe continues to remain challenged, specifically in the auto sector, we have a few good wins globally. A Japanese semiconductor major partnered with us to co-develop a next-generation computing SOC for automotive applications, including ADAS and infotainment solutions. A leading Europe-based global automobile major selected us to transform their supply chain with SAP-based solutions. Our engineering work is at the core of clients' business models, making us a strategic partner for them. Clients like Teradyne acknowledge that our support and collaboration have been key in solidifying their position as a global leader in the automatic test equipment market. We also received Intel Partner Award for market acceleration in SI GSI MSP category. HCL Software, while I talked about the revenue and margin performance, in terms of directionally, software-defined services, also called a software as a service, is fast emerging as a change agent which will fundamentally alter the way the world operates, automating tasks and processes in a range of industries and professions. We, as the only Indian service provider, are uniquely positioned for the medium to long term with a dedicated products and platform organization that operates largely independent of the services business, with its own GTM and R&D investments. While the business grew strong QOQ, there was a subpar performance on a YOY basis, with some customers deferring their renewal decisions as well as expansion conversations. During the quarter, we won several deals, including a large one where a U.K.-based retail chain selected HCL Software's BigFix workload automation, the full suite of DevOps, iControl, and iOPS from the HCL DRYiCE suite and AppScan to enhance security, infrastructure protection, development processes, software management, automation, and digital transformation. Our investment in Zeenea for metadata management and data cataloging is showing good progress, and our combined solution is resonating with the market. Multiple analysts are now recognizing the strong propositions we bring by getting many of our products into their quadrants and grids. You may recall that some of these products were taken out a few years ago before HCL Software acquired and decided to refresh them. In terms of our SAP business, there has been healthy growth across commercial and customer applications business. We continue to see strong traction in our SAP business led by S/4HANA migration opportunities. We are investing in this and other commercial platforms. Recently, we inaugurated an innovation lab for SAP Business AI in Germany to enable digital transformation for our clients. The innovation lab opening underscores the strategic partnership between HCL Tech and SAP and will help clients to shift the transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud through RISE with SAP by utilizing SAP Business AI technology. There have been a few wins, notable wins during this quarter in the SAP space. Coming to generative AI, it's getting more real. The cost of using LLMs or conversational AI models is reducing. It has dropped more than 85% since early 2023, making more use cases viable. We are witnessing an increase in momentum in data AI and generative AI opportunities, AI Force deployment, and customer interactions in AI lab. Agentic AI is another big opportunity where we can enable our clients as they empower their employees and customers with more AI-led features. There has been a number of examples of the AI-led wins, which you can read from our investor release. Multiple analyst recognition for our AI GenAI solutions, including endorsement from Technology Business Research of our AI Force platform, underscores the impact that we are creating. Focus from customers is on strategic transformation with AI GenAI in high-impact use cases. We are continuing to invest in repeatable horizontal and vertical solutions to accelerate high-impact use cases. Calling out a few industry-focused solutions are intelligent regulatory and safety platform in pharma, trade surveillance, and financial services, smart tech quality assistant in manufacturing. Horizontal solutions include AI Force-led legacy modernization, contact center transformation using hyperscaler solutions, and agentic AI for IT operations. During the quarter, we also accomplished a few other critical milestones to enable future growth in the space. Integrated AI Force with GitHub Copilot to accelerate value and benefits across software development lifecycle. We launched IBM Responsible AI COE with our AI and cloud-native labs in New Jersey. Two new cloud-native and AI labs launched with partners, ServiceNow in Noida and SAP in Munich. We also established a responsible AI and governance office. We continue to supercharge progress as the fastest-growing top 10 IT services brand and continue to get recognized by media and analysts. Happy to inform that HCL Group has been honored as one of the best Indian brands in ET Now Best Brands Conclave. We are recognized by Newsweek as one of America's Most Reliable Companies 2025. We were also recognized by Forbes as one of the world's best employers for the fifth consecutive year. We are the only India-headquartered company in the professional services category to be among the top 10 for five years in a row. We also received 125+ leadership recognitions from analysts during the last quarter. The Project Ascent is progressing well on various fronts. Teams are working in full speed to drive various actions that have been planned. We've deployed GenAI solutions internally as well to drive these efficiency initiatives. In 2025, we expect companies to increase their IT investments. We've seen improvements over the last two quarters. We do see an overall improvement in the discretionary spending environment. Clients are investing to drive innovation and efficiency, and GenAI and data are at the center of such initiatives. On this backdrop, there could be some significant changes in the global business landscape during the year, which can impact our clients and their spending priorities. While we are confident on the pace of the medium-term recovery from what we have seen, bear in mind our Q4 outlook accounts for certain specific factors, which we will explain a little later. On the positive side, small deals are getting converted quicker, while larger deals are taking time to convert. With that, I'll request Shiv to walk you through more details on the numbers, and then we will come to the Q&A. Thank you, CVK. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and happy New Year to all of you. Thank you for joining our Q3 Financial Year 25 earnings call. Let me walk you through our financial performance for the quarter, starting with the revenue performance. Total revenue for the quarter is $3,533 million, a 3.8% increase quarter on quarter, and a growth of 4.1% year on year in constant currency terms. Coming to the services side, services revenue came in at $3,145 million, which is an increase of 2.2% quarter on quarter, and a growth of 4.9% year on year in constant currency terms. Software revenue for the quarter is $400 million, an 18.7% increase quarter on quarter, and a degrowth of 2.1% year on year in constant currency terms. Moving on to the profitability metric, our EBIT is at $690 million, at 19.5% of revenue, which is an improvement of 93 basis points quarter on quarter basis. Net income for the quarter is $544 million, at 15.4% of revenue. We are pleased to note that this is our highest-ever EBIT and net income in a quarter. Just to give you some color on how our margins have moved quarter on quarter, software business contributed 114 basis points improvement at the company level. I am pleased to note that this represents our all-time high margins in software business. Services margin dropped by 22 basis points quarter on quarter. Our margin improvement plan projected gave us approximately 100 basis points in this quarter, which majorly offset the pay hike impact of 80 basis points, furlough seasonality impact of 40 basis points, and CTG acquisition and impact, including integration expense of 20 basis points. Forex gave us 80 basis points in this quarter. I would also like to spend a minute on our return on invested capital, ROIC. Our ROIC continues to improve thanks to our ongoing focus on profitability and efficient capital management. The last 12 months, ROIC is at 36.6% for the company, up 385 basis points year on year, and services ROIC now is at 44.7%, up 455 basis points year on year. Software continues to improve with ROIC at 18%, up 160 basis points year on year. Cash generation is another highlight I would like to focus your attention on. Cash generation remains strong over the last 12 months. Operating cash flow is at INR 285 billion, while free cash flow amounts to INR 2.72 billion. Operating cash flow to net income conversion is at 141%, and free cash flow to net income is at 134%. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen with gross cash at INR 3.5 billion and net cash at INR 3.24 billion. Cash generation has improved on the back of our improved DSO performance. Total DSO, including unbilled current fee, at 77 days, a two-day improvement quarter on quarter, and a nine-day improvement year on year. This is the best-ever DSO performance in the recent year. Now, moving on to the EPS and dividend. For our shareholders, the delivered EPS for the last 12 months came in at INR 62.91, which is up 8.7% year on year. The board has declared an increased dividend of 12 per share for the quarter, and on the occasion of completing 25 years of listing, the board has also announced an additional special dividend of six per share. The report date is 17th of January 2025, and the payment date shall be 24th of January 2025. That brings our 12-month payout at INR 60 per share, effectively distributing 95.2% of our net income. Now, moving on to the guidance. As mentioned in our investor release, our revised guidelines for the financial 2025 are as follows. The revenue growth guidance is for the full year, it's 4.5%-5% year on year in constant currency terms. This includes approximately 50 basis point contribution from HPE CTG acquisition. Services revenue growth is also expected to be between 4.5%-5% year on year in constant currency terms. EBIT margin guidance is unchanged at 18%-19%. That's all from my side, and now I will pass it on to the operators for the Q&A session too. Thank you. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to please use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Ankur Rudra from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Thank you. Just a quick question on the guidance and also a comment on the ACV up 9%, 20%, why? The guidance seems to be implying a negative at the midpoint for the fourth quarter. Can you maybe elaborate a bit more in terms of where that's coming from? And also, since you mentioned smaller deals are converting faster, could you broadly talk about discretionary spending strength across the industries? Thank you. Yes. Yeah. For services, the organic Q4 guidance was sort of a -1.3 to +0.6 to reach the lower end and higher end of the guidance. Now, Q3 onwards, we see an improvement in the demand. Small deals are getting converted quicker, and larger deals are taking time. That's why you will see the TCV has not changed materially, but ACV has changed materially. While we feel good and confident of the pace of recovery, Q4 outlook accounts for a couple of things. One is successful delivery of a large transformation program, which is coming to an end in Q3. Then there is a planned reduction in the mega deal, which was expected, and the ramp-up in some of the discretionary deals also will take some time because some of the conversions happened towards the end of the year. Now, ramp-up and getting into revenue only partially will get realized, so the underlying momentum remains quite strong, but some of these factors kind of make the Q4 a little soft. Thank you. How does calendar 25 look to you right now, given how you're seeing conversations around budgets and spend perspective? One of your peers highlighted that they are seeing improved deal signings and revenue conversion. Now, you, of course, have some one-offs in fourth quarter, but historically, we've also seen a softness in your first quarter. How should we think about the next four quarters on a momentum perspective? Yeah. See, we've called out the pickup in discretionary spend, and you really look you've seen a broad-based nature of our growth in Q2 and Q3, and we talked about Q4 as well. I think excluding these two factors, which would be visible in retail CPG and the telecom vertical, we expect good growth in other verticals. Our annual guidance released in April when we closed the earlier fiscal, so numerical answer or even a directional answer, you probably will have to wait, and I think the Q1 softness that you saw last year was also specifically due to one large deal getting into the second year. I think that element will not be there, or it will only be there marginally in Q1. Other than that, I think it should be a regular BAU kind of a quarter. Beyond that, pipeline is good, and we think we will deliver a good booking in the next couple of quarters. Beyond that, I don't want to give you any direction on FY26. I appreciate the color and the tangent. Just one last question on AI. You spoke a lot about Agentic AI. Just a quick question, is this the impact of this? Is it different from what you'd highlighted during the Analyst Day back in August? And overall, is Agentic AI adoption going to be additive or dilutive to your service portfolio? Thank you. Yeah. I think it was similar to the conversations that we highlighted during the Analyst Day. Now, I think some of this is getting better enabled, especially in the business process space. Agentic is much more promising. I think the real difference is the cost at which you can do this is going to make a big difference because agentic uses small or very small models and very, very specific models. That makes the whole price performance of what we want to achieve much more compelling, and we think the adoption will accelerate. I mean, at this point, I see it as a net positive because the biggest driver due to GenAI is the legacy modernization programs. I think that is picking up a lot of steam. Mainframes, which clients were very hesitant to touch, at least clients are happy to initiate certain programs around it. The second big element is data, which is also we've seen a good uptake in our data pipeline and the bookings in the last quarter. I think these two and a little more drive towards cloud adoption. I think these are really the core discretionary spends, but it is getting accelerated due to some of the POCs that have been done or early experience on generative AI. Thank you so much, Basundar. Thank you, Ankur. Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Surendra Goyal from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good evening, gentlemen. CVK, can you share the ACV trends on a LTM basis now that HCL has started disclosing that data point again? Surendra, I don't have the LTM trend readily available. We can share it maybe towards the end of the call if you can. Sure. And the second question is on planned reduction. Was it known in October when you reported the second quarter? The reason I ask is the upper end of your guidance was building in a pretty high growth, implied growth in Q3, Q4. In the press conference, you said that Q3 played out, at least for services, in line with what you thought. Yeah. Yeah. So I think our guidance was 3.5%-5%, and the midpoint of that was 4.25%. If you look at our organic guidance now, the midpoint continues to be 4.25%. In this whole, when we provided the guidance, we had assumed Q3 to be stronger and Q4 to be weaker because we knew the anniversary impact of the large deal would kick in in Q2. It's not at the same proportion as we talked about last year. This is a little gradual. In fact, we had a small impact in Q3. There'll be a little more impact in Q4 and maybe a residual impact in the first part of Q1. So we had factored that in, and that's why the second half and also the large transformation project coming to an end where we will recognize the revenue of the completion, that was also factored in. And that's why Q4 was soft. Now, so what was the other part of your question? No, no. It was related to that. My question was more relating to the higher end of the guidance, but I get the point. Yeah. And then higher end of actually, the guidance also factored in our regular performance in the software business at the midpoint. And last two, three quarters, we saw a very good uptick. So if that momentum continued, then we were kind of inching a little bit above our midpoint. Those were the rationale for the previous guidance. Now, also, we are at the midpoint. Organic, it's exactly the same. Yeah. Last question on software, your comments, could you elaborate a bit on that? Is it more a timing issue or you are seeing clients kind of maybe behave a little differently? Thank you. I think the client behavior has not changed, and in fact, there is definitely very good acceptance and our renewal rates, all of that has gone up. Some of the renewals and new closures that we were expecting to happen in December, that did not happen. Now, this should not be interpreted as the numbers, the shortfall will get made up in Q4 because there is no certainty of the outcomes on the transactions, which did not happen in Q3. So we still bake in the low single-digit type of growth for the software business on a full-year basis. Understood. Thank you so much. Thank you, Surendra. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhinav Ganeshan from SBI Mutual. I'm sorry. That's SBI Pension Fund. Please go ahead. Hello there. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. And just wanted to understand one small clarification that do you think there can be any impact on your BFSI vertical going forward due to the forest fires which have happened in California? If I look at it, we are working with three of the large five insurance players which are focused in California. So if you can give some color on that, that would be useful. At this point, I mean, we have not seen any impact. I think it's an evolving situation, and I think when similar things happen, clients definitely want to bring more optimization and things like that. But these are very large nationwide insurers, so we think the business will continue to be robust in these clients at this point. And also, it's a little early to even get a view of what the impacts could be. I think I appreciate that color. And all the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Vibhor Singhal from Nuvama Equities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. CVK, I just wanted to get some color on the manufacturing vertical. I think a couple of quarters ago, we had called out that we had seen some weakness in the German automakers and overall vertical as a whole. What is it that you are picking up at this point of time, and is there still weakness? Do you believe that that will persist for some time? And your overall outlook on how the sector should look at the sector from next 12 months' perspective? Yeah. Manufacturing ex Automotive looks good. We see discretionary spend and some projects. I mean, some of them are driven by SAP. If you look at my open demand for manufacturing, the numbers are higher than what it was at the end of September. Automotive continues to remain challenged. I think there will probably be one or two more quarters of declines before some green shoots will come. And the reason I'm saying this is while there is pressure and there are declines, it's also an opportunity for us to construct large transformative type of deals. And we're seeing some traction there, and however, it is still a couple of quarters away before something meaningful translates. Got it. That was in April. Just my second question is on a different retail vertical. This vertical had typically been quite weak all through the last year for the entire almost industry. We had one of your peers recently talking about the vertical bottoming out, and we too have delivered quite a handsome performance in this vertical in this quarter. So if you could just throw some light on what are the moving parts in this vertical, do you think most of these consumer companies or which pockets are the ones which are seeing this kind of momentum? And specifically, is it more US retail or Europe retail which is kind of showing a stronger performance than the other one? Yeah. Our performance is driven by the U.S. retail CPG client base. Here, I mean, of course, there is one big transformation project which came to an end which created the double-digit sequential revenue growth. But even if I exclude that, there has been some good momentum in three or four large clients in this segment. And the open positions may not be as significantly higher like in FS Tech and other verticals, but retail and CPG is also showing some improvement more in the U.S. And could it be just a quarterly thing that this was a quarter in which there were holidays and a bit of liquid momentum that this vertical catches, or do you think this is, at least at this point of time, appears to be sustainable? I think it's very correlated to the wins. So next quarter, you will see a dip in retail CPG because the big project is over, and that will have an impact. But our general booking is higher, but it is not going to compensate for this dip. But overall, the pipeline in this segment is looking good. Got it. Got it. Great. Thank you so much for taking my questions, and I wish you all the best. Thank you, Vibhor. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rishi Jhunjhunwala from IIFL Institutional Equities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, can you clarify once again? You said minus 1.3 to + 0.642 implied growth. Did you mention it for services, and is it organic, or does it already include the impact of HPE asset? No, I specifically said for services, organic Q4 was great, -1.3% to +0.6%. Understood. Okay. Great. The other question is on just the broad-based nature of the growth, right? So if you look at from a client concentration perspective, our top five clients are pretty much growing at 30%+ for the last four quarters. And so a large part of our growth this year has been primarily attributable to the top five. Just wanted to understand, are you seeing clear signs of growth spreading to your non-top five and even beyond top 20? Given that you've made some comments on the ACV side, but just wanted to understand whether growth is becoming a bit more broad-based versus what we have seen in the last year or so? Yeah. I think at a macro level, your conclusions are correct. But if you just adjust the State Street divestiture and adjust for one large program where we had the second-year impact, then you will definitely see a much more broad-based growth. So these two are some specific items which might kind of compensate for some of the things. We've been across many verticals, you will see the same momentum. So I think with this data point, you should be able to arrive at a slightly different conclusion. All right. Thank you, Vijay. All the best. Thank you, Rishi. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Kumar Rakesh from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Hi. Good evening. Thank you for taking my question. My first question, Vijay, was around the mega telecom deal which we have where there is a planned rundown in the fourth quarter. Is there any other planned rundown or any of the changes which you are aware of over the next one year which may be playing out? Next one year? Nothing that kind of stands out because we didn't do a mega deal outside of that deal last year, so. Okay. And in this mega deal, there's only one planned rundown which will play out in the fourth quarter? Yes. I think a very small piece in the Q1, as I mentioned earlier, but largely it should be done in Q4. Got it. Secondly, on your software business, we have seen, despite revenue coming down, on a YoY basis margin, it was pretty strong. Actually, among the highest which we have seen in this quarter. Similarly, last quarter also, margin was pretty strong. So is there any change in the mix of products which you are selling? Is it just a quarterly phenomenon? Yeah. Maybe Shiv, you can respond, and I'll add something more. The Q3 is a similarly strong quarter for us for software, but the margins this quarter improved because of two factors. One is the reduced cost, and also as well as lower amortization benefits we got in this quarter. These two factors added to the improved margin in this quarter. Also to add, we have discontinued some products as well, so that also helps us slightly improve the margins. Yeah. That should have reflected in the lower amortization as well. That is correct. Yeah. Can you quantify if possible the forms of that benefit is coming from lower amortization? I think we don't want to call out by service segment how much amortization, so. Sure. Sure. Thank you a lot for answering that. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirus Securities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. CVK, if I understood correctly, last year in the first quarter, we called out close to a 2% QoQ dip because of the normal seasonal softness in services business offshoring in one of the large BFSI deals and also some revenue rundowns in the discretionary sales. While entering in the first quarter of this coming financial year FY26, seasonal softness may continue, but the other two parts may not continue. In that scenario, one can directionally believe that the 1Q FY26 as a start would be better than 1Q FY25. Yeah. I think your observation that two of the three factors will not play out in Q1 of FY26, but I'm not wanting to give a commitment on how Q1 will really play out. Qualitatively, the three things that contributed in FY25 Q1, only one of them, which is a normal seasonality productivity benefit, normally that will play out. Beyond that, of course, it all depends on how this quarter goes and the bookings and a lot of other elements would come into play. Okay. Fair enough. And second, on discretionary spend revival, do you see across most verticals or which verticals you believe it has not been happening? Is it more beyond BFSI and tech services? Yeah. I think, I mean, it's across the board, except we still are not seeing any pickup in life sciences and healthcare. And even the segment which we call as public services, which is what energy, oil and gas, utilities, TTL, and then public services. These two we still don't see. All other five verticals we are seeing are open demand from end of September to end of December has gone up, and it's an improving trend. Okay. Thanks. And the last question to CFO. I think you called out 20 basis points impact because of the M&A in this quarter. So I just wanted to know what could be the impact. It looks like for one month. In the coming quarter, it may have an incremental 40 basis points impact or lower than that because some of the non-recurring M&A-related costs may not come in the fourth quarter. Well, it's going to be around the same range because we did have some integration costs also in this quarter, so I don't expect going becoming 40 basis points expansion. Yeah. So you are saying only recurring component will remain because when we acquire, initially you start with amortization of some of the intangible assets also. So that will continue, but not the initial integration cost. Okay. Okay. Thanks and all the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Nitin Padmanabhan from Investec. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi. Good evening. Two questions from my end. So the first one is that, see, if you look at the software revenue in the current quarter and compare it with the first quarter of this year, I compared it with the first quarter because the first quarter revenue in this year and the last year were exactly the same. The differential this time is $67 million versus $87 million during the same period in the prior year. Now, you also mentioned that one shouldn't assume that the shortfall will come back. So does this mean that this is like a lost revenue, and this is a new base revenue run rate for this business? Second, is this really driven by the shutting down of few products, or it is just a client has sort of chosen not to sort of renew something? Yeah. So, I mean, I think when I said that you should not extrapolate the comment that some of the renewals and some new opportunity discussions got delayed, it should not extrapolate to Q4 because those outcomes are still not clear. And these are customers could decide not to renew, or they may decide not to expand on the renewals. So there are many scenarios. So it's still subjective, and it's not like a sure shot it will come in Q4. So I think that's why we called out a caution. And what was the other question? No, I think that covers it. The second question is, I think, see, over the last 18 months, we really have not seen any meaningful spending from clients. So considering there has been a lull, actually, there are two scenarios. One is that do you think that there will be, because there's not been spending and you have increasing technical debt, no matter the macro, there will be a pickup in spending? Is that a fair way to assume things, or do you think that there was an overspending earlier and thereby the 18 months didn't have it? So how are you thinking about it broadly? Yeah. I think I did touch upon this in the investor day as well. I think some of the challenges that the industry faced was also two parts. One is this during COVID, there was a steep increase in spend. A moderation of that created the decline for a few quarters, maybe starting from December 2022, and the second one, of course, because of the macro, there is some tightness in the client budgets and spending and reprioritization that has been happening. I think the reprioritization topic, while still it is relevant, but we are seeing customers at least modernizing data estate, cloud migration, app modernization. These conversations are moving forward with some starting of projects, so I think that is the difference, and that trend, we saw it last quarter in FS, we were seeing some green shoots in tech, and that has really played out well, and now we're seeing in other verticals barring the couple that I called out, so I think with this factor, moderating, customer spending should improve as we've seen in the last couple of quarters, so fair enough. Thank you so much and all the very best. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ravi Menon from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Thank you for the opportunity. C.V.K., you congrats on the broad-based growth and the improvement in ACV. What is your take on how to think about how HCL Tech is positioned in the competitive space when demand's picking up? I mean, historically, it's been thought that you guys are not very strong in applications and not very strong in discretionary spending, or when spending picks up, you will not benefit as much as your peer group. How should we think about that now? So, Ravi, I mean, I think this question has been asked in the past, but if you really see, the proof point was FY23, where when the spending was robust and without a large deal, we delivered the highest organic growth in services across the industry. I think that should put to rest about our ability to maximize when there is a strong spending environment comes up, both in engineering and in application space. We feel pretty confident, and we are gearing up for an environment where there will be improving spend. It may not be so rapid like the way it happened during COVID, but it will definitely, we're seeing the right signals, and we're tracking it with a very high level of precision. I think our conclusions are based on that, and we are well prepared. However, we should just keep in mind that there could be significant changes in the policy environment and the overall business landscape in the coming days and weeks and months, which might change some of the clients' thinking and maybe spending patterns and reprioritization. Barring that, I think we are really good, well prepared to harness the upcoming momentum. Thanks, CVK. Another quick question on the H-1B issue. And I know that HCL Tech historically has moved away from a visa dependency, and I think you had more than 70% of your workforce in the U.S. as local hires. Would that roughly be correct? Yeah. I would request Ram to respond to that, please. Yeah. In fact, it's more closer to 80% of the U.S. employee base is now local. So you're right. The reliance on H-1B is one of the lowest in the industry in proportionate terms. So we don't expect any impact because of H-1B changes. Right. Thanks, Ram. Thank you. One last question for me on the R&D side. I mean, you were talking about how this quarter we might still see some softness in ER&D, but it looks like that's done really well on a YOY basis. I mean, was there some unexpected areas of spend that picked up? Well, I think, I mean, my comment was not on overall ER&D. I think my comment was specific to automotive segment, of course, which has a contribution towards ER&D. But the telecom tech, telecom, the nature of deals are a little different, but tech has got good projects. And even some of the manufacturing, I think our open positions have significantly increased in ER&D. And actually, right now, we are trying to see how best we can fulfill. That is our biggest priority for this quarter because some of this happened towards the end of the last three weeks of the quarter, maybe last four weeks of the quarter. And I mean, the overall ER&D two quarters, we've had good growth organically as well. So we think that momentum would continue. Thanks so much. And best of luck. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as a last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. C. Vijayakumar, CEO and MD, for closing comments. Over to you, sir. Yeah. Thank you for joining this call. And we are looking forward to some exciting times in the overall business landscape. And we'll keep you updated as we progress. And thank you for your continued support. And have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of HCL Tech, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.