Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the TDCX Q1 2023 results announcement. My name is Neil. I will be coordinating your call today. If you would like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Jason Lim, Head of Investor Relations from TDCX, to begin. Jason, please go ahead. Hello everyone, and welcome to TDCX 1st quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Jason Lim, the Head of Investor Relations. Allow me to introduce management on the call. We have our Executive Chairman, Founder, and CEO, Mr. Laurent Junique; our CFO, Mr. Chin Tze Neng; and our EVP of Corporate Development, Mr. Edward Goh. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future. You should not place any reliance on any forward-looking statements. Also, this call includes the discussion of certain non-IFRS financial measures, such as Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income, and constant currency revenue growth. For a reconciliation of the non-IFRS measures to the closest IFRS measures, please refer to the Form 6-K, which is available on our website. We have prepared a convenient translation for the translation of Singapore dollars to the US dollar. This was done at a rate of $1 to SGD 1.327. It should not be construed as representation that any Singapore dollar amount can be converted to USD at this or any other rate. Let me hand over the call to Laurent. Laurent, please. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for TDCX 1st quarter 2023 results briefing. Our team delivered a resilient set of Q1 results through continued focus on operational excellence and efficiency despite challenging market conditions. We'd like to thank the entire TDCX team, spanning across 16 geographies, for their efforts in keeping our forward momentum going. In particular, a warm welcome to our new TDCX colleagues at our newest locations of Brazil, Vietnam, and Turkey, who have done an amazing job for our clients since we started. I also want to thank our clients, many with whom we've had long-standing relationships, for their continued trust in us. Let me begin with some highlights of our performance. As a result of a great team effort, we delivered at the top end of our revenue guidance this quarter with $124 million, representing an 8.2% year-on-year growth. The Singapore dollar has strengthened considerably against all our foreign subsidiaries' local currencies, notably across our Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Japan businesses. On a constant currency basis, revenue would have grown 13.1% against the same period last year. This was driven by increased revenues across our sales and digital marketing and omnichannel CX service lines. Earnings performance was robust as EBITDA grew 7% to $32 million, while profit for the period was up 22.5% to $21 million. This set of results included a net reversal equity-settled share-based payment expenses of $3.9 million. To recap, the targets for our performance share program were set in November 2021, when the business and capital market environments were very different. The vesting criteria for the PSP program includes, among others, total shareholder return and earnings criteria. In this current market environment, some of the key performance conditions of our performance share plan not expected to be obtained, therefore, we had to reverse some previously accrued costs. Excluding the reversals, our Adjusted EBITDA declined 16.2% to $30 million, and adjusted margins declined to 24.2% from 31.2% last year. Our CFO will provide detailed reasons for this later. To a large extent, much of the margin compression is due to planned costs, such as our geographic expansion, choosing to recruit in good time ahead of projected growth in the peak summer travel season, and in keeping strong support and shared service staff ratios. We also continue to invest in initiatives such as the Digital CX Center of Excellence and TDCX AI, our in-house consulting arm. We run our business for the long term and believe these investments are necessary. Besides these are productivity measures and cost levers that we can pull to bring margins back nearer to our guidance levels over the course of the year, and our CFO will share more on this later. We continue to execute well from a business perspective. Operationally, I'm very proud that we remain at the top end of performance tables for our clients, demonstrating that TDCX continues to execute at the very highest levels. Our client count rose by a strong 55% to 85 as of March 2023. Our growth was broad-based, and we are excited that revenue from clients outside of top five rose 45% year-on-year. This included clients that we added from our Hong Kong subsidiary. As a result, we improved our revenue diversification, as our top five clients contributed 76% of this quarter's revenue, down from 83% in the same period last year. Lastly, we want to highlight our strong returns, which reflects the underlying strength of our business. A return on equity of 19% places us ahead of many of our peers. Over the last two years, we've embarked on a strategic geographic expansion, and this has really started to contribute meaningfully. For example, Korea, Colombia, Romania, all recorded revenue in Q1 2023, more than four times what they contributed in Q1 2022. Last year, we've added new geographies like Turkey, Vietnam and Hong Kong, which were not part of our footprint just a year ago. All in, revenue from new geographies was 10 times in Q1 2023 compared to what it was in Q1 2022. Most recently, we announced the launch of our newest campus in São Paulo, Brazil, in support of a key gaining client. We also opened our office in Jakarta in 2023, which further bolsters TDCX of Southeast Asia network. Indonesia is the largest Southeast Asian market, with a population of 270 million, with over 70% internet penetration and a large ecosystem of international and regional tech companies. With a growing headcount of over 18,400 employees globally, we are excited by our new, wider geographic reach. This empowers us to serve more clients across the world. Moving into client highlights, as mentioned earlier, we continue to grow our client count steadily. While our client count stands at 85 as of March 2023, another six clients have been signed up but not yet launched. We look forward to kickstarting this campaign soon. As shared earlier, our higher client count and broad-based growth have contributed to the improved revenue diversification metrics. In terms of contribution from verticals, digital advertising and media remains our largest vertical at 51% of revenue in this quarter. The revenue contracted slightly year-on-year, with a decrease in volumes from some of our clients, partly offset by good growth from several other clients in this space. Our second-largest vertical was travel and hospitality at 24% of revenue. This vertical saw a strong growth of 34% year-on-year, driven by the strong rebound in cross-border travel, with room for further recovery. We have started ramping up our hiring to meet the demand for the summer peak period, as well as increased outbound Chinese travel in the second half. We have always shared that TDCX differentiator is our focus on more complex work. Now, given the speed of developments in tech and AI, the need for moving up the complexity ladder is all the more a key strategic priority for us. We intend to deliver this by attracting top talents, providing good training, and optimizing our tools and processes. Allow me to illustrate how we do this across our three lines of business. Sales and digital marketing, which represents 27% of our Q1 revenue mix, involves digital marketing experts focused on optimizing average revenue per account for SMB advertisers, campaign and lifecycle management, agency management and onboarding, deep analytics, creative consulting, and marketing operations on behalf of our digital advertising clients. Our talents in this LOB are recruited from a diverse range of linguistic backgrounds with obvious higher qualifications and capabilities. On the content, trust, and safety, which represents 13% of our revenue mix, it involves complex content moderation interventions that require human interpretation and nuanced knowledge of cultural and political norms. We also perform a wide range of complex trust and safety functions to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of listings for rental or sales, KYC procedures for some of our fintech clients, as well as data annotation and labeling work. Lastly, our biggest service line remains omnichannel CX, which is 59% of our Q1 revenue mix. The vast majority of these are primarily complex B2B interactions or complex B2C discussions. For example, many of our clients have multiple tiers of complexity or escalation. We typically deal with the highest tiers and serve the most demanding or highest-paying customers who require a white glove approach. Others, such as escalations, are time-sensitive and require us to employ empathy and mediation skills to intervene. Our long-standing focus on new economy clients has provided us with deep domain expertise and understanding of innovative verticals and client needs. We have doubled down on our consulting strategy to add even greater value to our clients. This January, we launched our Digital CX Center of Excellence to pilot and validate new CX models to support emerging technology architecture, as well as to develop practical, real-world use cases. By leveling up our consulting capabilities, we're able to showcase our domain expertise, obtain a seat at the strategic table, and can therefore deepen our relationship with clients. I'm also happy to announce that we recently launched TDCX AI, a specialized consulting division which leverages AI and CX applications and helps clients on their AI journey. The team is composed of 50 specialists with expertise in AI algorithms, data science, and business analytics. We think these insights and tools. will help clients deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences, which will allow clients to create tailored CX journeys or targeted marketing strategies, which will in turn drive customer loyalty and revenue growth. We are also investing in generative AI tools to enhance internal productivity, which will free up our employees to focus on higher value, more rewarding, and fulfilling work. There are lots of fresh and exciting opportunities presented by this generative AI wave, and we are agile and nimble enough to pivot quickly to meet new demands. We will share more about developments in TDCX AI in due time. To sum up, with a solid presence in Asia, a globally expanding footprint, a culture aligned with new economy clients, and continuous technological innovation, I believe TDCX has the right fundamentals, and we are well-positioned to excel in this constantly evolving BPO market. Before I pass my time to Mr. Chin, who will bring you through our results and guidance in greater detail, I'd like to briefly touch upon outlook. Broadly speaking, the near-term macroeconomic outlook remains uncertain. Sales cycles have lengthened, and generally speaking, clients remain hesitant to commit into more business in the near term. On the other hand, a number of our largest clients have recently reported slightly more optimistic Q1 earnings. We are cautiously optimistic that business will improve into FY 2024. With that, let me hand over to Mr. Chin. Thank you, Laurent. For Q1 2023, revenue rose 8.2% on a reported basis. Had the Singapore dollar remained constant against our operating subsidiaries' currencies from Q1 2022, revenue would have risen by 13.1%. Notably, the exchange rates used for the translation of some of the local functional currencies of the Malaysian ringgit, Philippine peso, Thai baht, Japanese yen, and renminbi depreciated between 4%-16% against the group's presentation currency of Singapore dollar for the three months ended 31st March 2023, compared to the three months ended 31st March 2022. This quarter's earnings included a net reversal of the share-based payment expense of around $4 million, as Laurent had alluded to earlier on. This was because certain performance share plan awards are not expected to vest, reflecting the current macro and business environment. Largely as a result of this, EBITDA increased 7% to $32 million, and net profit for the period grew 22.5% to $21 million. With effect from January 1st, 2023, the group has decided to include adjustments for net foreign exchange gains or losses and acquisition-related professional fees in the Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income, and Adjusted EPS, in addition to the adjustment for equity-settled share-based payment expense or reversal that was included in prior periods. Over the course of the previous year, we have identified such additional items as not indicative of our ongoing operating performance, and that adjusting for such items renders a more meaningful understanding of the underlying performance of the business to the readers. For like-for-like comparability, similar adjustments have been made on the Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted Net Income for Q1 2022. While we believe that such non-IFRS financial measures provide useful information to readers, these have limitations as analytical tools, and you should not consider them in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of the financial results as reported under IFRS. Back to the results. Adjusted EBITDA declined 16.2% to $30 million in Q1 2023, as margins contracted from 31.2% to 24.2%, with largely higher costs incurred during the quarter. I will discuss this in further detail in a later slide. Consequently, from the lower Adjusted EBITDA, our Adjusted Net Income declined 19.1% to $18 million. Earnings per share in Q1 2023 landed at $0.14, while Adjusted EPS was $0.13. Let me next provide some insights of our revenue by service verticals. Our revenue growth was led by a growth in our sales and digital marketing line of business, followed by omnichannel CX services, partly offset by a decline in content, trust, and safety. Revenue from sales and digital marketing services increased by 23% to $33 million, primarily due to the expansion of existing campaigns by our key digital advertising and media clients, and volume contributions from new clients onboarded in the second half of 2022. Omnichannel CX revenue rose 9% to $74 million, primarily due to increased business volumes from the expansion of existing campaigns by travel and hospitality clients, as well as in the gaming, FMCG, and technology verticals. Content, trust, and safety revenue declined 17% year-on-year to $16 million due to lower volume requirements by decline in the digital advertising and media vertical. The mix from the different service lines has been shared by Laurent in an earlier slide. Let me provide some details on the Adjusted EBITDA margin movement from 31.2% in Q1 2022 to 24.2% in Q1 2023. There are three broad categories. In Q1 2022, we had the COVID-19 related government aid grants, largely from Singapore, that did not recur in Q1 2023 of 0.7 percentage point. Secondly, there was a 1.9 percentage point impact due to the higher non-employee overheads attributable to infrastructure costs of expanded and new CX capacities, coupled with more business and operational traveling and recruitment costs. Thirdly, there was a 4.5 percentage point compression relating to higher employee benefit expenses, excluding the equity-settled share-based payment expense reversal. This included higher group corporate costs to cope with compliance and listing requirements obligations since becoming public listed. Higher proportion of deployed resources versus billable resources, which also drove up higher campaign support and shared service resource costs. To elaborate, we have some excess agent headcount on our payroll to cater for higher volumes in four months planned by some of our key clients, namely in the travel and hospitality, gaming, digital advertising, and fintech sectors. We also opted to retain trained and experienced program support resources, such as quality assurance and team leaders for future business recoveries or ramp-ups. As we roll forward this year, we are targeting two areas to recover some of the margin compression. We are focusing on the impact of over-resourcing gap to be optimized by closer engagement with our clients for better projection, visibility of existing and new business volumes over the rest of the year. Part of the impact from higher overheads and non-employee costs will be progressively reduced as we generate better economies of scale from our new geographies. These have been considered in our outlook for the year, which I will share in the next slide. Let me provide an update on our full year 2023 outlook. We are reiterating our revenue growth guidance on constant currency terms at 3%-8% for the full year 2023. We also maintain our Adjusted EBITDA margin outlook of approximately 25%-29%. This does not include investments such as our Digital CX Center of Excellence and our recently launched TDCX AI arm. With that, let me hand over back to Laurent. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chin. guys, we're ready for questions. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two to withdraw your question. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. Thank you. We now have our first questions from Varun Ahuja from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Thank you, management, for the presentation. I've got quick three, four questions. First, I understand, Laurent, you gave a brief comment on the discussion that you're having with clients, it will be helpful for investors if you can provide more color. How is the visibility compared to, say, suppose a quarter ago, when you gave the original guidance? Is the outlook over the last three months or four months has improved since you're obviously you're at the peak early in the year? How do you see as we move for far ahead in 2023? I understand AI you started to have initial movements over there, how do you see overall impact on AI on the business per se? Which segments, verticals you think will be impacted most, and how does these initiatives by you, kind of, help you mitigate some of those headwinds that we have perceived? So that's number one on overall commentary on visibility and AI. Secondly, on margin side, Mr. Chin Tze Neng, I understand you gave a more color on it, but it will be helpful if you can provide going ahead, how should we think on the outlook, given you're expecting an improvement? The revenue guidance implies still headwinds in second half. Economies of scale, how do you want to achieve given the revenue may, based on guidance, may not be growing at the same rate as first quarter? Secondly, if you can provide some colors on country-wise. I don't want a specific country, how should over the countries which have been launched two, three years ago, where they are in terms of your base case, margin expectation? How far are they from what we should expect on a steady state margin level? Those are the two. Third, on the tax rate, if you can provide some color. This quarter was down. Is this the normal tax rate which should be assumed? Thank you. All right. Thank you, Varun. I'll take some of your questions. I'll defer some to Mr. Chin. Just touching lightly on the margin compression, and I think Mr. Chin will be giving you more details. I think a lot of the impact that you see is by design, if I may say, as we had to make decisions to adapt to the times, but with the future in mind. I think Mr. Chin will be a bit clearer here on the strategic decisions we make to keep our clients happy, but also take into account the operational opportunities as well as the limitations to be the best partner to our clients, but also to our employees and to our investors. Going back to... Mr. Chin will talk on this as well as the countries and the tax rate. You asked me about AI and the impact of AI on TDCX. I think maybe it's not easy for me to reiterate how differentiated TDCX are and how we have anticipated this. If you look back to our IPO paper, now a few years back, we were already discussing this topic. We are doing much more complex work than a number of our peers. 51% of our business is in digital advertising. Close to 70% is in business to business. Not that we're immune to AI and the automation journey, but this is not something new to us. Obviously, we've been going through that process for a number of years, and we've discussed it before, but what the impact that this has on our work is that our work is becoming increasingly complex, and that's forcing us to hire more competent personnel, provide better training for them, and retention are important topics. The way clients look at it is exactly the same way, and the pressure, usually, right now, we feel is on speed to proficiency. Clients are asking us to help them to get their specialists to a higher level of competency at a higher pace and work on retention. Hence the launch of TDCX AI, where we are intending to respond to the increasing interest of clients in advisory services to guide them in their strategy. We've been very successful with this recently, and we'll be continuing to press hard on TDCX AI to address the opportunity. We think, beyond the possible impact that is difficult to estimate, the opportunities are gonna come with the fact that clients are all wanting to do something, but the resources are hard to come by, and that's exactly the way outsourcing works. When it's hard to find resources, outsourcing has an opportunity to shine. We intend to capitalize on this, and we've already made steps, obviously, towards that goal. Your question on the clients' discussions. Visibility has not improved dramatically. It's still a volatile environment, both on the macroeconomic side of things. You know, everybody's waiting to see what the Fed is gonna do, whether there's gonna be an impact on the economy. We've heard a lot of layoffs, especially recently. We hope that's the end of those layoffs and that clients are in a better position to make decisions. Especially coming towards the mid-year, we anticipate clients will need to make decisions to make the year. We hope those decisions will come a bit at an accelerated pace, but I cannot guarantee this. The discussions with clients are ongoing. They're fruitful and meaningful, but I cannot say that our visibility has increased so far. Sorry for a long-winded response. I'll hand over to Mr. Chin to maybe get a bit clearer on the margin compression, as well as the other details that you've asked. Yes. Hi, Varun. Hello? Yes, we can hear you, Mr. Chin. Maybe. Okay. A bit on the. Yeah. On the software. Okay. On the compression of the margin, as I must mention in a while ago, the cost that goes a bit more than what we had when we were newly listed in Q1. Around throughout the course of 2022, to sort of cope with the compliance and the listing, since becoming listed ourselves in late 2021. That, that kind of like came to a bit of a high level throughout 2022. That, that culminated into Q1 2020, and there was some advisory work that also started in the first quarter. The second point about the margin compression came from the deployment of resources against the available headcounts. That definitely, and really the campaign support and chat service resources. There were some additional process agent headcount on our payroll to cater for certain volumes that were planned in the fourth month by some of our key clients in gaming and especially advertising sectors. In that sense, in some of the new fields that we set launch some the new programs in a few new site in Europe, in Latin America, as well as in Vietnam from the Korea as well, we have some expansion there. In advance of the available phase of this headcounts, that there was this margin evolution arising from this situation that we had. Also in essence, we also opted to retain as much of our trained and experienced support resources, like QAs and PLs, you know, in anticipation of future business coming volume recovery, and also as possible new business, which we are aiming for on the new logos that we are quite, I would say, confident, cautious confident to capture. On that front, going forward, I would say the, as what you're saying, that the headwinds in the second half year will impact on our margins going forward. I think generally, we will, we actually started to focus on the closing or narrowing the gap to optimize with the visibility of the volume. We are having really close hand-in-hand engagement with our clients, and, you know, working with them for better projection visibility for the existing and new business volume for the rest of the year. We probably, we are actually will try to shift off some of the programs volume, I mean, the headcount, by seeing what their numbers are like, and, you know, maybe taking a bit of risk in addressing spikes in volumes if those happen. Also, the overheads and non-employee costs we will progressively optimize as much as we can when the scale of the new business and new specs started to increase over the remaining period of the year. Yeah, that pretty much connect back to what we talked about the margin effect. As for the tax part, if I probably jump into that question first. There was this tax in one of the business units in Europe from the tax calculation that we made arising from some projection of the profitability of that business unit, as well as to a certain extent, the absence of the prosperity tax that happened in Malaysia in 2022, that did not happen in 2023. Going forward, we will probably be landing at about 20-ish% TR for subsequent quarters, subject to any whether tax rules and that is law that is being implemented by any jurisdiction that we operate in. Did I cover all your questions, Varun? I missed out any other? Yeah. No, thank you. I think there is some problem with the audio, but most of it, I got it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much. We now have our next question from Pang Vitt, from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you very much for the opportunities, and good morning, management here as well. A couple of questions from me. Maybe number one, going back to the revenue, again, I understand that there's some headwind that we supposed to expect, but the constant currency basic revenue actually came in above 13% on a year-on-year versus your guidance of 5%-8%. Particularly, can you actually highlight which quarters or in the what time frame that we might actually see headwind coming in and in what sector as well? Just wondering, like, why do you keep, like, very conservative stance here as well, despite seeing some of the improvement. Number two, somewhat related to that as well. I think previously you mentioned that part of the weakness of the SC is because some of your digital advertisement clients see less willingness to spend overall. Given that some of these clients and the sector itself is actually seeing their results and basically numbers coming in better than expected in first quarter, are you potentially seeing better demand indication from, let's say, the OCX sector, SDM sector from them? That's question number two. Last question, just wanted to ask about the new location that you just launched, Brazil and Indonesia. Can we have more color if you already have client locked in for these new locations? And if so, which segment should we see uplift and when? Super, Pang. Thank you very much for all the questions. On the headwinds part where, yeah, we grew in constant currency at 13% in first quarter, which looks pretty decent. The question is: Why do we, are we not upping our, our guidance? I think it comes back to the visibility issue and really us taking as usual and as you know, as a conservative stance, as we don't want to over exaggerate the opportunities that are in front of us. The market remains... they remain jittery, uncertainty on the macroeconomic front, and that's not to be underestimated. Coming back to your question on digital advertising, clients who have reported better quarters, it's great, nonetheless, you can see that they're still looking for efficiencies. Sometimes, you know, clients look at every single aspect of efficiencies, whether they are anticipating a slowdown, or are they looking at improving their profitability as a trade-off to some investments they're making? We're not sure, and at least we can see at this point, a huge turnaround of confidence, saying that the second half is gonna be trading much, much stronger. Until then, we don't think we should change our guidance. The new locations that we've launched, the most recent one, Vietnam, is very busy, at full capacity, right now. Indonesia is a new site that we. you know, we have those greenfield sites where we start with a client and some sites where we make an investment and wait to get clients as a strategic move. Indonesia is such a an investment that we've made, as opposed to last year. We spent quite a bit of last year setting up sites that were really a greenfield operation, purpose-built for our clients, and they started going straight away with business. we try to make that trade-off between a strategic location expansion versus really greenfield sites for clients to further our growth. quite happy to see how the strategy of growing our new offices has paid off for us or continues to pay off by driving some growth that is starting to be quite noticeable at this point. Thank you, Pang. Did it, Let me, a question that I think I omitted to answer to Varun's, one of the three questions. On the new logos, revenue as well as the margin performance of those new sites that were set up last two, three years. Basically, they are still operating at below the mature units, as that were set up in much longer ago. They are I mean, on tracking quite nicely in a sense that they are coming not so much as yet to a full state, but they are still finding their foot on running the programs because they are still young. A lot of handholding by the mature units in Malaysia, Singapore, in running those programs, the tracking on a positive track direction, but yet to arrive at the margins of the mature units. Pang, I continue as well on the new geos. If you look at Colombia, Korea, Romania, our revenue was up four times compared to Q1 2022. It's quite significant in terms of growth. Overall, the new geos, compared to last year, same quarter, actually grew 6.5x when we exclude the Hong Kong operation. It's a lot more even if we add the Hong Kong operation. It's starting to really contribute and more to come in that front for sure. Operator, can we have the next caller, please? Sure. Thank you very much. We now have our next question from Ranjan Sharma from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, thank you for the presentation. Just a couple of questions from my side. Firstly, coming back to the revenue guidance, if you're guiding for a 3%-8% growth on a constant currency basis, while the first quarter is a 13% growth, should we think that the revenues are, might decline in the coming quarters, despite the expansion in logos and then despite the expansion in geography? The second is like, how are your hiring decisions evolving with GenAI? Are you looking to hire more to build capabilities? I know you talked about efficiencies, but also would like to understand if you're looking to provide some solutions based on LLMs as well, and how that's affecting your hiring decisions. Thank you. Thank you. On the revenue, we don't provide a per quarter guidance, unfortunately. As we mentioned, we're really sticking to our guidance in constant currency basis. And yeah, so that's really how far I can go at this point. On the GenAI, and I want to call it AI in general, if I may say. Beyond that, the consulting part of things, absolutely, we want to invest in that sector. It's still early days, yet, TDCX has been in this business for years now. Our Digital Innovation Lab has been building AI models for the past eight years, leveraging machine learning. Some of our revenue comes from data annotation as well. It's, we're absolutely in the business, but we want to take it to the next level and invest in resources and capabilities. We have, I have to say right now, we're quite overwhelmed in terms of the number of use cases we're working on, and we are really looking for talent in that space to take it to the next level. As we build that capability and continue to really do it at a very strategic level with our clients, there are two objectives. One, continue to nurture our relationship and buy that seat at the strategic table with our clients. The second one is to look at how this can spice up our revenue and possibly our margins moving forward. Nothing to announce at this point. As we said, we just launched a TDCX AI, and we'll be tracking it pretty closely in the coming months. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. We now have our next question from Han Tan, from HSBC. Please go ahead. Thank you. Could I ask what your employee utilization was this quarter as massive? You, of course, been hiring much faster than top-line growth, so curious how this has affected sort of staff utilization? I don't, I don't think we report really on employee utilization at this point. The... I think if you mentioned that our employee count has grown faster than our revenue growth, there's a reason that I think Mr. Chin has explained around the margin compression and the fact that there's a misalignment between how quickly we scale down our headcounts to reflect the new revenue forecast or the new revenue that is given to us by clients, and the decisions that we make to hold on to some buffers to wait for the business to rebound. You'll see that discrepancy possibly, especially in Q1. That's typical playbook, operational playbook, that we use to mitigate between operational risk, and client satisfaction, and financial performance. We try to find the right balance between those three and get to the right flavor of the moment where you are in a situation where your growth has slowed. We have capacity chasing growth across the output base, right? That's probably one of the main reasons that. I think Mr. Chin has already quite covered this topic already. Thank you. Could you also comment on sort of levels or wage inflation in the key markets? How much did that impact employee costs in first quarter? Mr. Chin, maybe can comment on this. You can hear me enough. The wage inflation for current quarters has not been quite evident. We are making our wage decision internally to contain costs, so we are ahead on that front. So far, I think we are managing it quite reasonably well. There are still movement. Market is still a bit high on that front. So far, I think the level is still under decent control by the management. I would say the wage adjustment is not a main factor in the current period. Thank you. Final question from me. I noticed you incurred some due diligence fee on a discontinued acquisition. I wonder whether you could give us any color on why you decided not to pursue this opportunity? Yeah, Han, Ed here. I think you're aware we said that we are actively pursuing and evaluating different opportunities out there, and they're all at different stages. At some point where we see the right opportunities that warrant a closer look, we would appoint professional advisors to help us conduct due diligence, and we did. It's just in this case, for reasons that I can't disclose and, you know, which is quite typical in M&A discussions, we decided not to pursue. The talks was basically discontinued. I think we continue to take a very disciplined approach going forward and scan the entire landscape to look for the right fit and the right target. Okay, that's all for me. Thank you. Thank you very much. We now have our last question from KC Ong, from CGS-CIMB. Please go ahead. Hi, morning. Thanks for taking my question. Quickly on the revenue side of things, I noticed on a Q-on-Q basis, revenue contribution from SDM actually came off, while OCX was more flatbed. Any reason for this? Because I imagine that SDM would typically be more resilient in times of, for example, a digital advertising slowdown, because clients are trying to more proactively reach out to drive revenue growth. How should we read into this? No, good question, KC. Look, I mean, the sales and digital marketing is still more... If you look at it from Q to Q, it looks like it's more acute in reduction, but if we look at it from Q2 last year, we've grown quite significantly on the sales and digital marketing. I think it's around 25%. Yeah Up on the sales and digital marketing. It's probably more of a quarter issue. I don't want to underestimate as well, the impact of macro on sales and digital marketing. As much as it's a bit more resilient, it is not immune to macro pressure, and the digital advertising is obviously impacted, we have to take that into account. We're confident with that sector this year as one of the key drivers of our growth as well. KC, to follow up to that. Yep. Go ahead. To expand on Laurent's question, Laurent's answer just now, is that Q1 this year was a shorter working period as opposed to, you know, on a life practice, barring any other or else equal. Q4 last year was a slightly longer work month, work quarter, in that October and November was a longer period of work months, and whereas December was a bit more slowed down, as opposed to Q1 this year, where Jan and Feb, and Feb was probably had quite a bit of break and a short month, typically. January was a kind of a, you know, start of the year where things are a bit... The engines takes a bit of time to reboot before March. That's where the number of work-based deviation in the two quarters had a little bit of effect to the new trend trending that you just mentioned. Got it. I guess just circling back to your full year guidance for revenue. Just wanted to confirm if, you know, the mix expectation internally is still the same compared to three months ago? I think back then, guided that SDM segment growth should be stronger compared to OCX. Is that expectation still the same? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Okay, got it. This is probably a bit more of a seasonality type thing. Yeah. No, yeah, we still expect sales and digital marketing to grow faster than the rest, but for the exact mix of the business lines, we don't provide forward guidance on the mix. Got it. Secondly, I guess just again, on M&A versus share buyback. Noticed that this quarter, of course, we haven't managed to secure an M&A target. But on the share buyback front, still also seems to be a bit lacking. I think the share buyback was only about $30,000, compared to last year. At current share price levels, I think the management was more proactive in share buybacks. So just wondering, how should we read into this? Any more colors would be helpful. Yeah. Sure, KC. I think there are multiple factors there, in guiding us, whether we activate the share buyback. I think, obviously, one is the current valuation versus peers. Number two is sort of always sensitive to sort of the float and the impact. When we dip into the market. I think third is also the fact that there are regulatory sort of considerations, including when we are in possession of price-sensitive information, which creates sort of restrictions on when we can go into the market. We, we consider all the three just mentioned before going to the market. I recognize that in the first Q, I come across as just relatively small in terms of the quantum. Going forward, I think we adopt the same sort of principle when looking at whether we can go into the market. Got it. Thank you so much. Thanks, KC. We've completed the calls via the phone line. We have some questions online. Let me just read them out. This is from Jason Chiu from UOB Kay Hian. Elaboration on professional fees for the acquisition. I think we've answered that. Second one, what is management's view on the macro environment affecting TDCX? Are new economy clients cutting back on the SDM spending? Yeah, I think, we, I think, addressed this as well, but not specifically to new economy clients. They're, again, not immune to the macro environment, and they are reacting, with swift action, I would say, in terms of adapting to the scenarios that are in front of them. No, I think, new economy, or not new economy, everybody's in the same boat, looking at efficiencies and making some rationalization decisions, or being impacted by the slowdown and having to adapt accordingly. As a result of that, we're also not immune to the macro environment, and it's reflected in our guidance and the difference in our growth this year versus last year, for sure. Thanks, Johan. Next question: Employee expense for Q1 is 64% of revenue, with a historical average of around 60%. Will it taper down again, and is there any expected timeline for this? Maybe Mr. Chin. Yeah, Mr. Chin can take out this piece. We were aiming for that to land back at that ratio, but I would say it's quite a fast-moving part happening. That's something that we will, yeah, we are looking at as a target. Probably in the near term, we will not land at those rates yet. Again, the revenue, get productivity, and the head count optimization are still in progress of we will work on. That's something we will try to attain. Thanks, Mr. Chin. I think that's all the questions we have now, both online and on the webcast, as well as the phone line. Thank you for dialing in. Oh, I'm sorry. I think there's one last question from Jonathan, and we probably have time to take a last question. Operator, can we have Jonathan, please? Sure. Thank you. We now have Jonathan Woo from Phillip Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, management. Morning. Thanks for taking this last question. Just actually only have one. Could you give us some I guess based on your revenue growth for this quarter, how much of it came from new geographies from the last several years? Maybe just in terms of revenue growth. Thanks. Revenue growth from new geographies? Yes, correct. Around $8 million of revenue in Q1 was from new geographies. Around just over $7 million of revenue growth is from new geographies. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, I think that's it. We have answered all the questions. Please feel free to reach out to the IR team if you need anything else. Thank you for the time, and have a good day ahead. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.