Executive Director and President, Global Markets, and Mr. Vinit Teredesai, Chief Financial Officer. We will begin with a brief overview of the company's Q1 FY 2023 performance, after which we will open the floor for Q&A. During the call, we could make forward-looking statements. These statements are considering the environment we see as of today and carry risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements made on this call. I now pass it on to DC for his opening remarks. Thank you, Vinay. Good evening and good morning to everyone on the call. We are excited to report yet another quarter of robust performance and a solid start to FY 2023. Thanks to the confidence placed in us by our clients and the dedication of our teams. Our industry-leading performance yet again speaks to the growing relevance of our value proposition, strong demand of our capabilities, and disciplined execution. For the quarter, our revenues were $399.3 million, up 5.5% sequentially in constant currency, making it our sixth consecutive quarter of more than 5% growth in constant currency, even in the face of rapid business and technology shifts. Our EBITDA margin, a measure of our growth potential and profitability, came in at a healthy 21.1% while we continued to invest aggressively in our people and partnerships. Our order book, comprising a healthy mix of annuity and transformational deals, stood at $570 million, up 13.1% year-over-year. I am pleased to note that this marks the highest ever TCV in our history. The pandemic and its aftermath have further reinforced belief in the long-term potential of digital transformation. Organizations across sectors have had first-hand experience of its value in separating the winners from the rest. It is clear by now that digital transformation is an ongoing business imperative. It is neither a one-off project nor a short-term quick fix. Against this backdrop, what has continued to give us an edge is our ability to service clients through all phases of their digital transformation journeys. Digitalizing processes for better efficiencies, reimagining processes for greater effectiveness, redefining business models to maximize growth and market share, and harnessing digital technologies to become future ready and future relevant. This positions us well as a partner of choice to clients pursuing digital transformation to improve revenue streams as well as realize cost efficiencies. This dual objective underpins every transformation initiative, but tends to be more immediate and pronounced during macroeconomic shifts. Let me cite an example. We began our relationship with a leading U.S. insurance provider as a full stack partner for digital data, cloud, and infrastructure transformation. Through our end-to-end integration capabilities, we are also now helping the insurer modernize its systems through a cloud migration factory with automated migration management and infrastructure build. The goal is to enable the insurer to drive engaging customer experiences and innovative services while optimizing cost, scalability, efficiency, and agility. Likewise, an Australian wealth management group has selected us as a partner of choice for its core modernization as well as digital transformation program. In our mission to help businesses not just keep pace with change, but actually get ahead of it, what we call getting to the future faster. Our strategic call to focus on full stack engagements, hyperscaler partnerships, product-centric models, edge-to-experience solutions, industry convergence, and next-generation delivery capabilities is delivering solid results. For example, a leading U.S.-based airline chose us as a digital product development partner to transform its value chain to a next-generation product-centric operating model. We are leveraging our next-generation delivery capabilities to help a healthcare technology provider enhance its claim system and decision making while also transitioning to a product-centric model and creating integrated solutions across the value chain. Through our strong hyperscaler ecosystem partnerships, we are helping a global professional services firm build a data management platform for a multi-year core transformation journey. With technology increasingly at the center of both enterprise transformation as well as value maximization, we continue to consolidate our leadership position in delivering superior outcomes and differentiated experiences by using emerging technologies. For example, for a pharmaceutical company, we are using blockchain capabilities to create smart digital contracts to track drugs through their supply chain from raw material to distribution. We are helping an insurance provider build a custom end-to-end insurance platform in partnership with a low-code development platform as a service. We are very pleased with our progress on our growth levers, resulting in our rapidly growing portfolio and capabilities across industries, markets, and technologies to help clients unlock greater value from digital transformation at scale. We are also helping a growing roster of clients drive transformation at scale while also optimizing their technology footprint. During the quarter, for example, we won a number of multi-year managed services deals in areas such as cloud, application development, infrastructure operations, production support, and security with a diverse set of clients ranging from a global travel company and a specialty insurer to a leading hyperscaler and a leading audio technology company. With that, let me turn to our industry groups, where we continue to grow focused accounts and scale strategic new logos through our end-to-end integrated offerings. Our Communications, Media, and Technology business grew 5.9% sequentially and 24.7% year- over- year. We supported at scale transformation of some of the leading technology enterprises with our product engineering, digital marketing, e-commerce, enterprise IT platform development, and cybersecurity services. Our Retail, CPG, and Manufacturing business was down 8.7% sequentially, but grew 15.6% year-over-year. The sequential decrease was because of a continuing ramp down in a retail account, as well as deferred spends by a few clients in consumer-facing segments. The reported growth was also impacted by a significant cross-currency headwind. While we see continued demand for solutions to reimagine and enhance customer intimacy, customers are also looking to modernize their data ecosystem and generate real-time insights to improve decision-making. Our Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance business grew 6.5% sequentially and 31.7% year-over-year with our strategy to expand full stack capabilities across our focus accounts and recent Tier-1 wins, as well as strength of our partner ecosystem continuing to deliver results. Our wins validated our success as a transformation-at-scale partner with clients increasingly seeing us as the right, as the right partners for their future state. Our Travel, Transportation, and Hospitality business grew 11.2% sequentially and 48.9% year-over-year. Our diversification strategy continues to deliver results with our wins in the newer subsectors scaling up well and contributing to the growth. With the recovery and rebound in our core subsectors of airlines and hospitality, clients continued to focus on customer experience, data intelligence, and lean operations to drive efficiency. Our youngest industry group, Health, continued its strong growth trajectory with a 43.5% sequential and 170.4% year-over-year growth. We see good traction with the investment we made in COPE Health Solutions, and it is helping us play at the intersection of health and technology. We are seeing good client traction in the areas of value-based care, clinical workforce management, and population health management. In terms of geographies, North America contributed 76.8%, Continental Europe, U.K. and Ireland contributed 14.6%, and APAC and Middle East contributed 8.6% of our revenue during the quarter. Among our service lines, Customer Success contributed 40.8%, Data and Intelligence contributed 15.9%, Cloud contributed 19.5%, and Enterprise IT contributed 23.8% of our revenue for the quarter. Our commitment to the highest levels of quality and excellence earned us the British Standards Institution or BSI certification for seven ISO standards across 18 locations, including five new ones added this year in the U.S., the U.K., Poland, and India. We owe our consistent growth to our passionate and talented Mindtree Minds. Through the quarter, we continued to sharpen our employee value proposition by building upon our highly engaged people-centric culture through more creative, agile, and personalized approaches to employee care and development. We were recently certified as a Great Place to Work in India for 2022, 2023. This is the second consecutive year we have received this certification from the Great Place to Work Institute, considered the gold standard for workplace excellence. During the quarter, we onboarded more than 4,700 Mindtree Minds, including more than 1,500 fresh graduates. We closed the quarter with global headcount of more than 37,400. For the quarter, our LTM attrition was 24.5%, consistent with our earlier view that it will take a few more quarters for the situation to stabilize. Our program aimed at identifying and grooming critical talent on an ongoing basis continues to produce good results. It revolves around a framework underpinning our one-size-fits-one employee engagement and career enablement strategy focused on monetary as well as non-monetary elements such as role rotations, upskilling, and workplace flexibility. These are facilitated through a number of initiatives such as intelligence staffing application for more efficient internal job search and fulfillment, and opportunities for Mindtree Minds to acquire skills and certifications aligned with both organizational needs and individual aspirations. As a part of our revamped training program to prepare early career talent for client projects, more than 2,500 candidates studying in the last semester of their engineering degree program are being trained in various technology tracks and will be ready to be billed within days of joining us. We continue to work towards expanding our offshore and nearshore delivery footprint. Within India, we are in the process of setting up full-fledged offices in Coimbatore and Noida and satellite offices in Bangalore. All Mindtree offices are now operational. Over the last couple of months, the footfall at our facilities has steadily increased with the fully vaccinated minds working from our office on at least two to three days a week in a COVID-appropriate manner. I will now turn over the call to Vinit for Q1 financial highlights. Vinit? Thank you, DC. Good evening and good morning to everyone on the call. We are pleased with a strong start to the new fiscal with yet another quarter of profitable growth. Our sequential revenue growth was 5.5% in constant currency. This is the sixth consecutive quarter of 5%+ revenue growth in constant currency terms. Our sequential revenue growth in dollar terms was 4%. We reported a strong EBITDA margin of 21.1% compared to 21% in Q4 of FY 2022. Excluding a one-time impact of merger-related expenses, our EBITDA margin was 21.7%. Reported EBITDA margins this quarter had an impact of 50 basis points from the visa, 50 basis points from merger-related expenses. This was offset by 50 basis points of operational efficiencies and 70 basis points from Forex benefits. Our reported EBIT margin for the quarter was 19.2% compared to 18.9% in the preceding quarter. Excluding a one-time impact of merger-related expenses, our EBIT margin was 19.7%. Net Forex gain for the quarter was $0.6 million compared to $6.2 million in the previous quarter. PAT margin for the quarter was 15.1% compared to 16.3% in Q4 of FY 2022. The gap between the EBITDA and PAT increased primarily due to the lower Forex gain on our hedges and lower investment income due to the spike in yields. The effective tax rate for the quarter was 24.6% compared to 24.5% in Q4 of FY 2022. Earnings per share was INR 28.60 for the quarter as compared to INR 28.70 in Q4 of FY 2022. Excluding the merger-related expenses, the earnings per share was INR 29.70. Our DSO for the quarter significantly improved and stood at 50 days. Our robust cash management led to cash and investment balances at an all-time high of $500 million. For the quarter, operating cash flow to EBITDA was at 67.2% versus 92.2% in the previous quarter. Free cash flow to EBITDA was 60.7% versus 82.7% in the previous quarter. Annualized return on capital employed for the quarter was 41.3%. Return on equity for the quarter was 33.6%. Our utilization in the quarter was 81.2% compared to 83.1% in Q4. As of June 30th, 2022, our cash flow hedges were at $1.7 billion. Hedges on the balance sheet were $147 million and options of $3 million. We continue to sharpen our focus on sustainability with an ESG vision for 2030 built around bolder goals and clearer timelines. We are proud to share that we have been accorded the leadership position in CRISIL's Sustainability Yearbook 2022 based on an evaluation of more than 575 companies in India across 53 sectors. Mindtree won the prestigious Golden Peacock Award for Risk Management in 2021 for its commitments to business excellence and maturity in the enterprise risk management. This is a strong recognition of our ongoing efforts in the direction of establishing a robust, reliable, and responsible business. I'll hand it back to DC for an update on the Mindtree-LTI merger and our business outlook. Thank you, Vinit. As you will recall, on the 6th of May, Mindtree and LTI announced a merger that will see the two companies join strengths to create an efficient and scaled-up IT services provider exceeding $3.5 billion. The merged entity proposed to be named LTIMindtree will combine the complementary strengths of both companies to better serve customers by unlocking scale benefits, a stronger portfolio of offerings across verticals, enhance customer engagement, and streamline delivery processes. This will boost the ability of the two companies to participate in large deals, strengthen partnerships with ecosystem players, and create a more distinctive employee value proposition. The stock exchanges provided their observations later and a no objection on June 16th, 2022. The merger is now awaiting other regulatory approvals. A steering committee has also been set up and is meeting regularly to oversee the integration plan. Both Mindtree and LTI have delivered market-leading financial performance and created value for their shareholders. Synergies between the two companies are already producing results. A case in point is a large deal we recently won in partnership with LTI to manage end-to-end development and support for the customer services applications of a Europe-based global travel technology company. The deal is driven by a differentiated value proposition, combining Mindtree's extensive travel and transportation domain experience with LTI's deep expertise in core modernization. It exemplifies how the two organizations plan to unlock their full potential by becoming a combined at-scale player to gain from recent industry shifts around large deals and end-to-end offerings. Organizations across industries continue to accelerate digital transformation for innovative outcomes, continuous differentiation and sustainable growth. Technology is embedded ever deeper into competitive strategies around market relevance and business resilience. Digital transformation is not necessarily constrained by market cycles. While they may momentarily affect the pace of decision-making, that too in certain sectors, they are unlikely to reverse or stall the larger wave of business-critical technology modernization that is increasingly becoming key to survival. Our experience shows that technology and technology-led innovation are often the antidotes to macroeconomic challenges. In fact, economic headwinds are known to spur organizations to free up dollars from pockets of inefficiency and redeploy them on initiatives with assured ROI. A robust first quarter performance has reinforced our confidence in our ability to continue our growth momentum through the foreseeable future. While there are no indications yet of any significant change in client behavior, we are closely watching near-term macroeconomic developments and continue to be cautiously optimistic about the opportunities created by the need to balance cost and digital imperatives with an eye on the future. With that, let me now open the floor for questions. Thank you, DC. A few points while we wait for the question queue to assemble. All participants will be in the listen-only mode during the Q&A. If you would like to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand option on your screen. You will then be prompted to unmute your line and ask the question. Please state your organization's name before asking any question. I request that you each keep one question and a follow-up to allow as many participants as possible to ask questions. We'll take the first question from the line of Mukul Garg from Motilal Oswal. Thank you and good evening. I hope I'm audible. Yes. Great. DC, a really good quarter. You know, obviously, given the things on the concerns on macro, would be great if you can share, you know, what you are viewing in different verticals from clients on their spending over next three to four quarter. Especially, you highlighted that, you know, you are seeing deferment and a ramp down in RCM. If you can give some color on, was that something which was regional or segmental in nature or, was more, you know, company specific, given that there are concerns on budget cuts in the vertical? Thanks, Mukul. Let me take a step back in terms of how we do our planning. I mean, we work with our clients, we try to understand their priorities and, obviously, you know, our growth, our plan depends on the portfolio of clients that we have. Now, we have always been saying that, the first half of FY 2023, we are extremely confident about our ability to deliver growth, or rather profitable growth. We had built a nice pipeline, so on and so forth. Now, when we are talking to our clients across the industries, barring RCM, and that too within RCM only, you know, specific clients, where they are impacted in a certain way, and I'll come to that in a while. Most of my clients are not really changing their big plans. Whatever the plans they have made for the full year, they are not really changing their plans. We are continuously in touch with them because if they change their plans our plans also change. So at an overall level, I don't think we have come across a scenario where clients are changing their plans drastically for the full year. They are also cautiously optimistic watching the macro situation and if they change their plans our plans will change and we'll definitely come back to you when we get to know that. There are a couple of scenarios in you know a couple of clients in you know in the Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods, where we have seen that the clients have got impacted from their market standpoint. The market. They had markets in Russia as well as in Ukraine. Even on the supply chain side, they were reliant on China and the fresh set of lockdowns that China had impacted their supply chain as well. In those scenarios we have seen some deferments. As I articulated in my commentary, every client is in some phase of digital transformation. And this is something that they are doing consciously so that it can be a revenue enhancement for themselves. In that scenario, I think it's very difficult to stop all these initiatives because that will take them back again. I don't think they are gonna do that. There is maybe a temporary slowdown in certain areas. What we are talking about is, you know, a few cases where we have seen those conversations, where there is a bit of deferment and, you know, probably a little bit of slowdown in terms of the projects they had committed earlier. At this point of time, at a broad level, we have not seen any significant changes. Venu, do you want to add anything? No, I think I'll probably just add, you know, an additional commentary is that when you look at the digital transformation, to the point that when DC spoke about deferments on the whole. Look, digital transformation happens in sprints, right? You have an option to defer a certain sprint which is supposed to deliver a certain functionality and an outcome. What we are seeing is a very select few, clientele base that some of the sprints are either slowing down or getting deferred. That's really in few pockets. It's, you know, I don't think we can generalize it as an industry or a sectoral trend. You know, that's something which I just wanted to add over and above what DC said. Sure. Thanks for the very detailed answer. If I may just, you know, add a bit on the TCV side. It would be, you know, this was a really big quarter in terms of TCV deal wins. You know, how are you seeing the mix of annuity versus project business here? Because, you know, these six examples you have given in the presentation, they are all multi-year in nature. You know, is there a big portion which is annuity or there are some near-term projects which are, you know, also picking up? Just to clarify, is it fair to assume that your top client, you know, would not be very different from a contribution perspective to TCV compared to the revenues? What is it? Oh, it's started. As far as, you know, TCV is concerned, you know, if you just look at the pattern, there are certain renewals that happen, you know, during this time of the year, and that's something which helps us in terms of the TCV for this quarter. But having said that, it's significantly higher than it was around about, you know, $500 million, same time, same quarter last year. It's almost like a 13% improvement in terms of year-over-year in terms of TCV. Your observation is right. I think though I may not have the, you know, right, numbers in terms of the percentage, but it has been our endeavor to look at some of the TCV which can be more multi-year rather than just, within the particular year. From that perspective, yes, there is some component of this TCV which will actually carry over to the following year. It's a multi-year opportunity. That will always be there. I think if I understood your second question in terms of the TCV as a percentage of, I mean, as a share of the overall business. Yeah, I think fairly in line with the overall revenues as well in terms of the top client. Great. Thanks for taking my question. I'll get back into the queue. The next question is from the line of Vibhor Singhal. Hello. Yes. Am I audible? Yes. Yeah. Hi, DC. Hi, Mindtree team. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Congrats on a great performance, yet again. Just a couple of questions from my side. One thing that I wanted to ask you, DC, is that our top line has shown very strong growth, yet again in this quarter. What we see globally is that our top line and of course similar other companies, the hyperscalers, the global tech companies, they're all sounding words of caution. They're all resorting to basically employee firing and they're basically raising concerns on their growth trajectory over the next couple of years, especially driven by the inflationary and discretionary concerns. In that environment, how do you think that top line will behave for us? Does that mean that, okay, if the top line is facing recession and, basically, input cost pressures, would that mean that it could lead to better growth for us, or do you think it could actually flow down to us also in terms of growth on the top line? Vibhor, great question and, probably you will hear the same answer from me what you have heard before, is that our strategy is to grow the top client. Our strategy is never to slow down the top client. Our strategy is to make sure that the rest of the organization, or at least the top 20 clients or two to 20 can grow faster than the top client and faster than the overall company. The other thing is that we will never, you know, I think I have explained this earlier, that our top client is nothing but, you know, multiple LOBs within the top client, which itself is like a, you know, pretty large client. Whenever the client is going through, you know, various changes, it is very unusual that, you know, every LOB is going to be behaving in the same way. I think, from that perspective, you know, we keep an eye in terms of what's happening. Overall, you know, invariably one or two LOBs always fire and they kind of give us the opportunity for the overall growth for the top client. Venu, do you wanna add anything? Yeah. Probably I'll just add extra comment with regard to the hyperscaler, you know, the sort of a commentary on what hyperscalers would expect. Look, you look at it, you know, the cloud penetration in the global markets is still, you know, probably at an early stages. So there is still a significant headroom for the hyperscalers to grow. So in general, you know, we shouldn't read any quarterly trend with regard to the hyperscaler growth. I mean, there's you know, most of the hyperscalers are sitting on, you know, billions of dollars worth of backlog of orders, you know, that has been booked over the years. So there's a huge amount of heavy lifting to be done on digital transformation and actually realizing those booked orders into the revenue, right? We continue to be bullish about, you know, the opportunity that is there with regard to the cloud and, you know, all the hyperscalers that we do business with. You know, I thought I'll just call out, you know, how do we sort of look at the hyperscaler, you know, trend with regard to some of these market headwinds. Got it. My next question is just on my favorite vertical, the Travel vertical, which has again seen very strong growth. DC, as you mentioned that we have diversified actively in this vertical, and we've seen that playing out over the past few quarters as well. If I were to ask you that the core part of our travel vertical pre-pandemic was both airlines and hospitality, how far are we from the pre-pandemic level of business from those parts? I mean, I'm not asking you for an exact number, but in terms of, let's say a directional number as to let's say we are not yet at the potential that they were giving us business pre-pandemic, or they're already there, or some discount to that. Just to gauge the kind of room that we have to grow in the vertical, especially from this core set of travel companies. No, that's a great question, Vibhor. I think the simple answer is we have actually exceeded the pre-pandemic revenues within this vertical. Even that will broadly cover the most of the clients in the pre-pandemic where we have managed to cross the revenues that we used to have. Now, having said that, you know, as a strategy, you must have seen that we have been very focused in terms of account mining. I mean, even for this quarter, the top focus 100 accounts that we have in the company that contributes to almost 90% of our revenues. Given that scenario, and that is happening because we are able to do a lot of cross-selling and upselling and creating the full stack capabilities or full stack accounts, as we call them, where we can sell all our capabilities and services you know, across the board. From that perspective, we feel that there is still significant headroom in terms of most of the clients that we have. And that's why we call it focus 100 clients, where we can create the more and more full stack accounts from our perspective. Definitely we have crossed the pre-pandemic levels. Still, you know, headroom's there because our strategy is to go on mining those accounts. Of course, you know, with the futuristic capabilities that we'll be acquiring through the merged entity, that will only, you know, give us a stronger positioning. Again, Venu, you want to add anything? No, DC. You covered most of it. Oh, great. It's been great. Thank you so much for taking my questions and wish you all the best. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sulabh Govila. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Am I audible? Yes. Congrats on a great execution. So, with respect to the deal wins that we've announced this quarter, while the booking number has grown by 13% YoY, the trailing twelve-month book-to-bill ratio is sort of continued to come down. Given that we have more mix of annuity business that we've been trying to increase in the whole pie of things, does that change our near-term growth trajectory versus what would you have anticipated at the beginning of the quarter or beginning of the year? Or is it in line with your expectations? I mean, if you could share any color on that. All right. Let me take that question, right. Sulabh, you know, the book-to-bill ratio, if you actually look at it, we've always been sort of floating on a 1.2 kind of, you know, book-to-bill ratio, and that's been, you know, always been a trend for us. The fact that we have delivered six consecutive quarters of 5%+ growth, that means it actually shows that our. You know, the timeline that is there from book to bill, you know, that has actually fundamentally not changed, right? Given that context, I don't think we should read it anything more than that, because within a year there is going to be one or two quarters which may be a bit seasonally weak quarter from an order booking point of view. You know, it all depends on when you look at the last trailing twelve months, right? If you had looked at it from Q4 onwards, you would have got a different picture. If you look at it from Q1, you sort of account for the Q3 of last year, which is seasonally a weak quarter even from an order booking point of view, so you might get a different narrative. If you look it from the whole year-on-year perspective, you know, the order booking is, you know, we're confident that it'll continue to increase. We've already shown that sequentially from, you know, from Q4 to Q1. The fact that it's getting translated into, you know, 5%, Q on Q revenue, I don't think materially there is any change on book-to-bill ratio. Got it. Next bit is on the employee costs. Over the past three, four quarters, our employee cost per capita has come down quite a bit. Just trying to understand if it's purely a function of number of freshers being added to the system and increase in offshoring, or is something else also played out here? Given that offshoring is already at record levels, would you say that there is more room left here for us to improve? You've rightly highlighted one of the reason why it's happening is mainly because we have been increasing our fresher intake. As you can see, we have been telling that this is probably our fourth quarter whereby we added around 1,500 freshers in a quarter. Now if you add that up, the rough math sort of indicates 20% of our overall population is now in that fresher category. You know, we are doing very, very extremely hard efforts to balance our pyramids and keep our overall employee cost at minimum. Sure. Thank you. I'll get back into the queue. The next question. I will read out the next question from Abhishek of Nomura. The question goes, Congratulations on a good quarter. Can you please talk about your margin outlook for FY 2023 and Q2 in particular when you have your salary increases? That's the first part. The second part is, with strong growth, do you think our margins are structurally headed towards 20% EBIT margin in the medium term? And the margin work for Q1. One minute. Yeah. We don't you know give any typical guidance about our forward-looking margin outlook. We have constantly been saying that 20%+ seems to be a good place whereby we think our business we would like to place our business. Anything excess, we would like to invest back into business, and does not mean that every quarter it will be 20%. Some quarters it might be low, some quarters it might be up, but our endeavor is to sustain this 20% margin. Yes, there are headwinds, but we are also on the other hand side, continuously ensuring that cost discipline is very well managed, and we are able to leverage some of these benefits in our favor. In terms of the wage inflation and the impact it can, again, if you look at our Q1 margins right now, the reported margins are at 21.1, and if you take off the one-off expenses on merger, it is around 21.7% EBITDA level. We have a sufficient gap available to absorb the wage inflation. We have mentioned this in the past also that our wage inflation may not necessarily have an impact on all the employees because one of the positive side of attrition you may want to call, that there's a good amount of population that has also joined us in the last 12 months, which may not necessarily need the same amount of correction as what probably some of the people, tenured people may need. We do feel that while there's a little bit of an inflation pressure is there, but at the overall level, we should be able to sustain and absorb that impact and should still be able to sustain our margins in the 20%+ range. The next question is from the line of Mohit Jain. Yeah. Just to follow up on the same. You are saying with the wage hikes for the second quarter, your margin outlook basically remains same, and you should be able to absorb given the growth that you are seeing. Mohit, as I said that it's not an outlook, it's our endeavor to. Correct. Have our profitable growth story and 20% seems to be the place whereby ours is to be. Right. Sir, second thing was on this, fresher intake. I think you shared some numbers in your opening remark. Can you repeat those numbers in the management work? No, it's- For fresher hiring. This is the fourth quarter whereby we have added around close to 1,500 freshers per quarter. If you just total them up and look at our overall population, it sort of represents around 20% of our population, which basically is in line with our flattening the pyramid strategy that we have adopted. We would like to continue with this and our outlook of adding more and more freshers in the coming quarters will continues to remain the same. Right. This merger cost is a one-time in nature, so I'm assuming the 60 basis points is the one-time fee and we should not see a repeat of it in the coming quarters. Is that fair or do you think something may come up into view as well? No. It is all with relation to the merger-specific expenses. There will be some integration and other expenses that may come in, but those may not necessarily come in the next quarter or the quarter after. It will be typically after the effective date and after both the companies come together. The impact of that may not necessarily be felt only on Mindtree. It might be felt more on the combined entity. This may come up, but you will split it accordingly. Right now it is the 60 basis points that you referred to. It will be a part and parcel of the combined entity. I'm sorry, sir. Part and parcel meaning will it, like- It will get- We should build some No, no. What I'm saying is that the merger expenses, the one-time merger expenses are already done. As of- Okay. The company, the merger becomes effective, right? Mm-hmm. There will be integration expenses that will get incurred, but the impact of that will not be felt only on Mindtree P&L. It will be felt on the combined entity P&L. As a percentage, the numbers may look lower. Yes. That's right. All right. Perfect, sir. Thank you very much and all the best. The next question is from the line of Sandeep. Yeah, hi. Can you hear me? Yes, I do. Yeah. Good evening, and congrats on an excellent execution. DC, I have two questions, right? One, when we got into the pandemic, right, it came as a shock to everyone, and there was not much information about how things will play out. Obviously, you know, there was a big shift from offline to online, which led to, you know, very high amount of awareness, or recognition that the enterprises needs to spend big money, to make up their infrastructure in a way where, you know, they can handle the sudden spurt in transactions. And probably the world will move much faster towards online in future. They need to ready up their infrastructure, which earlier was a gradual move, and got expedited. Now, when you see, people returning back to office, people going back to the old means of doing business to some extent, and it will not go to pre-pandemic level ever because there is a change in behavior. Still some normalcy will return. Are you seeing that kind of urgency in the mind of the enterprises which they. It was a panic situation, right, during the pandemic that they wanted to they just wanted technology at any cost and immediately. Are you seeing same kind of urgency today, or at least you are seeing that, you know, they have learned a lesson and they will probably now this time not delay or postpone and they will build their tech infrastructure, they will build their omni-channel and all those things? Do you think there is still probably the recognition is fading away with time? What is your sense on that? The reason I'm asking this is that, you know, if the macro worsens the way the global economists are predicting, then will it give some discretion to, you know, postpone or delay the spends? This will be the last thing to get cut because of the tough lessons the pandemic has taught the enterprises. If you can help me on this, will be great. Let me take a stab at it. I think it's a great question, but I probably have to give you a very long answer. See, we need to understand what happened in the pandemic. The pandemic was unexpected. Nobody knew that this will, you know, come and stay for so long. Initially, when the pandemic hit, people thought it's a one month, two months, three months phenomena, but nobody realized that it's a two-year phenomena. As a result of which everybody, every client, they tried to reimagine their business models. They were looking at opportunities by which they can do their businesses in different ways. That is how you have the contactless, you have the, direct to consumer, you have the omni-channel. All these things started flourishing. In order to get all those things executed, you obviously had to have a good backbone. The backbone was nothing but cloud. Cloud has kind of completely changed the way we deliver. That's why the hyperscalers become very important. Keeping all these things in mind, I think every client was in a hurry to transform their ecosystem and get into the cloud. They'd accelerated their journey to the cloud. The purpose of accelerating their journey to the cloud was they can continue to do the transformation at the front -end so that they can also change their business model. They can reimagine their business models. In that scenario, you know, every client is at a different phase of their transformation. I mean, just to, you know, give you an example, there may be a particular hotel chain that may be doing contactless implementation across their, you know, suite of, or the number of hotels which could be running into thousands. They may have done it only, say, 500 as of now. They cannot stop that. They need to go on, because each of these transformations need to be taken into completion. That is where I feel that today, that is something which we have to acknowledge that, you know, our view is basically working with the clients that we have in our portfolio, is everybody is at a very different phase of transformation, and they will continue their transformation. There can be some temporary slowdown, but they cannot derail their transformation from the journey they have embarked on. The only thing that can happen is, you know, in some situations, maybe they will have to find those dollars also in some way. That is where the opportunities of cost optimization also come in. That's what we talk about in terms of dual behaviors, where you want to take cost out of the system, create more efficiencies, and divert the same dollars into, you know, fueling the transformation which has to be completed, which has been embarked on. I think that's what is going on right now, and that's, you know, that's what we anticipate will be the behavior for some time. At a broad level, what we have seen in the last two years during the pandemic is a lot of discretionary spend, which was never seen before. Probably that discretionary spend, and again, it can relate it to the transformation that will probably in specific cases slow down a little. In those cases, there should be some way to finding those dollars to continue those, you know, those like engagements on the transformation. Venu, do you want to add anything? No, DC, you covered it very well. It's just that I want to sort of clarify that the technology was not bought at any cost at any point of time. I think there was always, you know, the right value that was created. Yeah. I just wanted to clarify that so that. Technology is enabler. Thanks. That's very helpful. Thank you. Best of luck for the current quarter. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Dipesh Mehta. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of question. First of all, I think earlier you indicated about top 100 client contributing 90% of the revenue, and you have now processing this. Can you help us understand how, let's say- Can you repeat the? Dipesh, your line is not very clear, Dipesh. Is it better now? Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yeah. I just want to understand about, let's say, top 100 account. What changes we made at account level planning perspective in terms of empowering account manager. Whatever you can, let's say, share with us, what changes we made in, let's say, last two, three years to drive better client intimacy, drive better client mining, and how it is playing out for us and what changes or tweaking you made. That is question one. Second question is about deal pipeline. Let's say we have now record deal closure for last few quarter. Deal closure remain healthy. How the deal pipeline is shaping up. Whether we are seeing, let's say, deal pipeline is getting some kind of declining trend or maybe stabilizing trend rather than growth trend. If you can provide some sense about how deal pipeline is shaping up. To some extent, related question is about pricing trend. If you can help us understand how the pricing is shaping. Thanks. Let me just start off with the, you know, what we have done, what we mean by. First of all, we don't specifically call out top 100. We just said focus 100. At any point of time, we feel these are the 100 accounts where we need to focus, and we need to cross-sell and up-sell into those accounts, leveraging the service line sales capabilities that we have built over the last two, three years. And we feel that there's significant headroom in terms of going and cross-selling and up-selling and creating the stickiness with those clients. And that's what we have been doing, and that's how the sales teams have been incentivized. Finally, what we are also doing is, and if you have been following us for the last three years, our number of clients that we have been supporting has been coming down. One of the reason is that we have also been doing a long tail rationalization at the same time. Just to share with you, the number of clients we had when the management change happened was in the range of around 360 +. Almost 50% of that, those accounts belonging to the long tail have been rationalized. At the same time, we have been adding a lot of strategic logos instead of that. At this point of time, it's around, you know, 260+ active clients. The strategy has been rationalize the long tail over a period of time. We don't need to kind of set a timeline and do it because when we rationalize the long tail, we are also quite considerate that clients should not get impacted because we have been supporting them. Now take those efforts and move those efforts into maintaining the focus hundred clients, focus hundred accounts. That's why you see that the focus hundred accounts are able to contribute to almost 90% of the revenues. That's the way we have been doing. It's a very simple strategy, and it's a, you know, disciplined execution by the sales and the account teams. I think that is working out well. Venu, do you want to add anything, and if you can just get into the deal questions? Yeah. Probably I'll just comment on the pipeline, you know, part of the question as well. You know, just one additional commentary to the point that DC said is that, look, you know, the clients, you know, wants to buy solutions, right? If clients wants to buy solutions, your go-to-market team should be equipped actually to connect the dots to create solutions. That's where the point of what DC mentioned about having a vertical sales team which focuses on industry, you know, context and bringing the industry solutions. You have the service line or the horizontal sales team, you know, which comes together and, you know, they go together to the customer with the complementary skill sets, and thereby you're able to connect the dots and also deliver the business context. That's really been our biggest, you know, secret sauce, if I may say, to actually, you know, cross-sell and up-sell and, you know, grow this 100 accounts. With regard to the pipeline, we are actually seeing, you know, an increased traction in demand, overall at an aggregate level, if I look at it. While there may be pockets of softness that to the point that DC mentioned in the opening commentary as well. At overall level, you know, the demand still is positive. Some question on pricing. Look, the pricing, you know, as we mentioned in Q4 as well, for the niche skills, in fact, all of last year, you know, for the niche skills, we were actually able to get some price change, a positive price change, you know, or increase on certain skill sets. The appetite to actually pay a premium price for those niche skills is still there. You know, I think for most of the customers, we covered it in the last year. We don't see any significant downward pressure on the price as such at the moment. The cost saving mandate is always there, right? It was there during pandemic also. It's just that it didn't come out much in the front. Now because of, you know, the inflation and, you know, potential recession people are talking about, there's always that cost saving mandate is sort of coming at the top of the agenda. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's gonna put pressure on the price. You know, you address the cost saving through more than one way. You know, use of productivity, automation, bringing solutions which can actually modernize the legacy technology, moving to cloud. All those things will actually help you to get the cost saving to the customer. Understood. Thanks. Oh, thank you. If I can squeeze one question. What would be the effective tax rate, if Vinit can help us, for us? Our effective tax rate should be in the range of 25%-25.5% going forward. The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja. Hi. Good evening. I hope I'm audible. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. DC, I just wanted to pick your brains about the fact that while we've continued to hire a significant number of freshers through the last five to six quarters, our utilization rates continue to be fairly sticky. Despite the fact that across the industry, and including for us, we've seen this shift towards more offshore delivery, just wanted to get your thoughts as to what's driving this phenomenon. Our ability to essentially keep utilization rates high despite hiring a large number of freshers. Because for peers, we are seeing some cool off in terms of utilization because of the fresher binge, but we do not see something similar happening for us. The second question was for Vinit. Just wanted to understand how should we be thinking about our DSOs going forward. You've done a fairly good job in terms of cash collections in the current quarter. Should this be the new level that we should probably think about? Thank you. Look, Manik, I think, you know, it's all about how do you plan and execute. If there is something that we have done well as a team, is our ability to plan and execute to the plan. Even on the freshers standpoint, I think you know first of all, we have a very clear view in terms of how many freshers we can train and absorb in a particular quarter. When you train and absorb, we are also able to manage the skills in such a way that we can get them deployed in the right way, in the right engagement. I think that's what we are doing. It's not to say that we will always you know, there could be some issues in some quarters. At a broad level, I would say that the team is doing a phenomenal job in terms of staying focused, and it's just a disciplined execution in terms of how we are. First of all, we did not have a very robust freshers intake program. We have done a lot of work. We have a new CPO who has come on board, who has been helping us in terms of the entire fresher strategy. Once the plan has been in place, we are also putting the skilling and the, you know, the skilling program in place, the training program in place, so that we can absorb them into the projects in the most effective way. That's all we are doing. I don't think there is anything different that we are doing. That's if you can continue doing that, we'll get the same results as we go forward. Vinit? Yeah. DSO, you know, our cash collection machinery is working absolutely to its best. I would say this is a good benchmark for us. Our endeavor will be to at least sustain this, if we can't beat this. Honestly, at a if I have to make an assessment, even if we are able to sustain our DSO below 60 days, I think so that will be a good outlook to consider going forward. Sure. Thank you. One last clarification. In your annual report, you've described that you'll be looking to add 30% more freshers in FY 2023. Does that mean we'll be probably looking at closer to 7,500-8,000 more freshers for FY 2023? Yeah. That's the right now expectation. Thank you, and all the best for the future. The next question is from the line of Sameer Dosani. Yeah, hi, DC. Thanks for taking the question. You know, just question on utilization. Utilization has normalized to 81% levels. Now do you see this going back to 84% levels, what we have done in the past? Also offshore mix, our offshore mix has significantly improved in last three quarters. Do you see this normalization happening as we go forward in the next few quarters? Follow the question. I would say utilization at this point of time, given the way our fresher program is working, whereby we are able to get people trained and getting deployed into the project and getting them billed, we do believe that utilization we should be able to sustain around the 80%, 81% level at this point of time. In the next short term, I don't anticipate it will drop down. From your offshore mix perspective, again, at this point of time, we are not seeing any pressures from the customers saying, you know, have your people return back on site in a big way. There is a very pocketed, sort of a demand that is coming whereby people have to travel back to the on-site locations and, work from there. At this point of time, it's likely to remain within the same range, in the short term. Lastly, one thing, we spoke about this last quarter that, you know, we have a very good visibility of the next two quarters that is FY 2023. Now at the end of Q1, next two quarters, how do you look at it? Do you see similar robustness in terms of your performance and the demand that you will be able to execute? Yeah. Look, guys, I think that DC mentioned in the opening commentary that in the near term, and we used that, you know, when we spoke in Q4 as well, that in the near term, which is essentially the first half, you know, we have done the part of first half, if I may say. You know, we are confident of continuing, you know, the same growth. You know, things are sort of changing so dynamically in the macroeconomic level. You know, we have to look at it, you know, in terms of how these things will come into impacting our clients for the second half. I would probably say, you know, for the second half, it's best to take a perspective of being cautiously optimistic. In the near term, you know, in the first half, we maintain the same commentary as that we mentioned in Q4. Thanks. That's a provision. Cool. We'll take a final question from the line of Abhishek Shindadkar. Hi. Am I audible? Yes, please. Okay, thanks for the opportunity and congrats on a good quarter. Two questions. You know, Venu, you had a comment about, you know, pieces of digital transformation could be deferred if required. Can you just elaborate that, you know, from the perspective of service lines, you know, to get us a context of, you know, what can be deferred and, you know, what remains critical. The second question is on the visibility of, you know, the retail vertical growth in the second quarter, in the context that, you know, retailers have to be ready for the holiday season. You know, what is the visibility there from that perspective? Thank you for taking my call. No, thank you. Great question. You know, firstly, with regard to, you know, talking about parts of digital, I use the word sprints because, you know, I'll probably take an example to explain that. Look, if a client is doing, you know, what I call as an omni-channel platform implementation, right? It's a platform implementation to enable the e-commerce, whether it's for manufacturing, retail or for any customer for that matter. You know, you develop new features, you know, you develop new experience zones on the platform and so on, so things. You know, there comes a point where, you know, either because of the revenue pressure or because of some of the macroeconomic aspects that we spoke of, you have an option of deferring certain features to be deployed at much later part of the year. That's what I mean, you know, you know, deferring certain aspects of digital, you know, spend to the later part. You know, if that is not really business critical, you can actually look at, okay, can I do it two months later? Can I do it three months later? When we spoke about softness in certain areas, you know, this is exactly what's happening. You know, you can think of deferring certain things, but you don't stop it. You know, you just think of doing it at the later stage. The second is with regard to the, you know, the retail aspects of it. Look, absolutely. That's why I don't want to. If you remember, I made a comment saying that the softness is not a sectoral trend that we wanna talk about. It's happening in few pockets. It depends on which business you are in. You know, if you are in a retail business of electronics retail, you know, the way you're gonna get prepared for your peak seasons, whether it's Black Friday or, you know, Thanksgiving and then to the Christmas is gonna be completely different. You know, but if you are in, let's say, in an apparel, you know, retail business, you know, you prepare yourself differently. I think within the retail sectors you have a different, you know, attributes on how these things gets done. Second thing is that it also depends on where the client's markets are. You know, if the client has a market dependency, let's say in Russia as an example, or do they have a supply chain dependency to a larger extent in China, you know, then those are the aspects as well that will impact the particular client. If a certain client doesn't have an impact either in the Russian market or even the supply chain dependence in China, you know, there seems to be in a better shape to actually, you know, cater to the peak season or the holiday peak season demand. It depends on the sub-segment within retail, and second is how their value chain or supply chain is sort of built as well. Thanks. That is helpful. If I can just ask a follow-up to your answer. So, you know, based on our retail client portfolio, you know, how much percentage of them, if you can, just, you know, help us understand, are more aligned to, you know, the troubled geography and, you know, the supply. Obviously, supply chain would be largely China, but from a geography perspective, any color if you can give. Thank you. Look, I don't remember the percentage off hand. You know, I would put it slightly differently, right? If you look at you know, the year-on-year growth that we have had in the retail, right? The quarter-on-quarter sequential has been a different narrative. If you actually look at year-on-year, you know, kind of growth on the retail segment. I think at an aggregate level, we should still be able to you know, deliver good value for that sector. I don't think I have it handy in terms of exact percentage of customers who have China dependency or Russian dependency. I gave you an example in terms of types of retailers who have the dependency. I can't give you an exact percentage on that. Great. Thank you for taking my question, and best wishes for the year. That was the final question for today. On behalf of the management, thank you all for joining this call and for your continuous support. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.