Good day, ladies and gentlemen. We wish you all a very happy new year. Welcome to the Wipro Limited Q3 FY 2022 quarterly earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing Star-Ten-Zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Aparna Iyer, Vice President and Corporate Treasurer. Thank you, and over to you.
Thank you, Stanford. Wish you all a terrific 2022 and a very warm welcome to our Q3 earnings call. We will begin the call with business highlights and overview by Thierry Delaporte, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, followed by financial overview by our Chief Financial Officer , Jatin Dalal. Afterwards, the operator will open the bridge for Q&A with our management team. Before Thierry starts, let me draw your attention to the fact that during the call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are associated with uncertainties and risks, which may cause the actual results to differ materially from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are explained in our detailed filings with SEC.
Wipro does not undertake any obligation to update the forward-looking statements to reflect events and circumstances after the date of filing. The conference call will be archived, and a transcript will be made available on our website. Over to you, Thierry.
Aparna, thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. First, I'd like to really wish you all a happy new year. At Wipro, we are starting this year with hope and a lot of momentum and purpose. We would like to wish health and success to every one of our friends, Indian analyst and investor community. Across the globe, the new variants of the COVID-19 virus are spreading rapidly. This wasn't unexpected, but it's a damper now, nonetheless. I say to all our colleagues at Wipro, mask up, take your vaccines, and let's help stop the spread of this virus. Now, despite the pandemic, we have delivered a fifth consecutive quarter of excellent performance, strong growth in revenues, acceleration in bookings, sustained operating margins, and solid operating cash flow.
I want to thank every one of our employees who helped us achieve this. These results reflect their passion, their dedication, and inventiveness. I must say I was really glad to see that our colleagues have taken the time to attend to their health and well-being while continuing to serve our clients with integrity and zeal. Looking at our financials, our revenue growth during the quarter was at 3% in constant currency terms and 27.5% year-on-year. In the first nine months of this year, we have grown at 28% year-on-year. This is nearly six times faster than the average growth rate we've had in the last 10 years. We've been consistently growing at or over 3% for five quarters now.
Frankly, this is because of our improved execution abilities and followed through on our business strategy that was established in November 2020. Our growth continues to be broad-based across all our key markets, service offerings, and most of our sectors. We have added about 34,000 new employees on a net basis in the past nine months. To give you a sense of proportion and pace, we actually have added in three quarters what took us 11 quarters in the past. Now, looking forward, the demand environment continues to be robust. Our growth rates, our pipeline, and our order bookings all reflect that. Our pipeline, in fact, shows a healthy mix of medium and large deals across all our business lines.
We also continue to see rapid expansion in small and mid-sized deals, which really represents growth in our existing accounts as well as expansion of our market portfolios. Order books, which is frankly the best measure of the demand environment, has grown 27% on a year-to-date basis in terms of annual contract value. In fact, our bookings have been the highest ever. In Q3, we saw a 50% year-on-year increase in the total contract value order booking for deals in the $10 million-$30 million range. What I feel stands out is that our win rate in the market has improved dramatically. For this year, our win rate has expanded 300 basis points. This is clearly a reflection of our strategy, the cultural shift we've been pursuing, as well as the services we are now being recognized for.
I think it's also a reflection of our impact on our clients' business. As expected, we are seeing the benefit of Capco's consulting edge in our large new pipeline. We are now winning in cloud transformation, in engineering services, data, digital transformation, and security. Our clients are continuing to place their trust in us to help them turn into digital businesses. On the M&A front, we have continued to pursue aggressively on our strategy fit. We announced the completion of two acquisitions in Q3. The first one is Edgile, a transformational cybersecurity consulting provider that focuses on risks and compliance, on information and cloud security, and digital identity.
Edgile is definitely recognized by security and risk leaders for its very unique business-aligned cybersecurity capability, for their deep understanding of the changing regulatory environment and enabling cloud transformation that help secure the modern enterprise. The second acquisition that we completed was LeanSwift Solutions, a U.S.-headquartered system integrator of Infor products, whose service capabilities include ERP, e-commerce, digital transformation, supply chain, warehouse management system, business intelligence, and of course, integrations. This acquisition will expand the capabilities of Wipro's FullStride Cloud Services. We're very excited about these acquisitions, and we welcome so many new colleagues from Edgile and LeanSwift into Wipro recently. On operating margins, at 17.6% in Q3, we are ahead of our stated range of 17%-17.5%.
These margins were delivered after an incremental two-month impact of salary increases in September that covered 80% of our colleagues globally and an equity grant for our senior colleagues. We continue, frankly, to invest heavily in our business across sales transformation, capabilities, and talent. I will now provide some finer details on market, on service offerings and sectors, right, as always. Americas and Europe, our top two markets, grew at 28% and 38% respectively for the quarter in year-on-year terms. In Americas 1, we grew 23% year-on-year and 5.2% sequentially, with all sectors showing strong growth. Communication, media, information services grew 30%. Consumer good and life science grew 25%. Healthcare and medical device grew 16% year-on-year. Now, looking at Americas 2, we grew 33% year-on-year with a strong growth across BFSI and manufacturing.
The order book in terms of annual contract value grew over 47% year-over-year. Frankly, this was led by good overall bookings in the bucket of $10 million-$30 million. Our European business has delivered an outstanding year-over-year growth of 38%. Germany, the largest market in Europe, has almost doubled. Benelux grew 24%, and our U.K. business grew 40% year-over-year. The momentum on deal wins have accelerated this quarter, and our pipeline has several large deals above the $100 million range. We are frankly confident about how they are shaping up as well. I'm sure you know where we were with our European business a year ago, so it's a great turnaround story here. Finally, our APJMEAM market grew at 13% year-over-year. All our major markets are growing sequentially.
Overall, the order booking in TCV terms is looking healthy with 37% year-on-year growth, excluding acquisitions of course. In my mind, this should definitely support the growth agenda in this market in the coming quarters. One of our key pillars of our strategy is to grow our existing large accounts and deepen the relationship. Let's look at that. Our top five customers grew 36% year-on-year. Our top ten customers grew 37% year-on-year. In the last 12 months, we've added seven customers in the more than $100 million bracket and nine new customers in the more than $50 million bracket. This is, I believe, a significant shift, one that we believe will continue. From a service offering standpoint, we have two big global business line. Our IDS global business line grew 37% year-on-year. Most of the sub-practices showed a healthy growth.
Our engineering business grew over 26% year-on-year in Q3 and grew at a compounded quarterly growth rate of over 6% in the last four quarters. Our iCORE global business line grew by 17% year-on-year. Again, most sub-practices grew in double digits on a year-on-year basis too. Digital operations and platform led the growth with 18%. We also continue to invest in and strengthen our partnership with hyperscalers and industry-leading platform players. We, in fact, expanded our go-to-market approach with cloud and with application partners now, resulting in us driving leading-edge solutions in the market. Wipro is, therefore, more visible in the market because of this. We are driving proactive solution development and campaigns with our partners on both horizontal and vertical solutions, all of this resulting in an increasing number of multi-partner wins.
Our order bookings that were a result of going to market together with our partners grew 40% year-on-year. This is the highest ever. Our cloud ecosystem revenues also grew, and grew at an accelerated pace of 30% on the year-to-date basis. Now, let me give you a sense of the kind of deals we're winning. One, we won a strategic ServiceNow implementation engagement from a large Brazil-based oil and gas company to transform their IT processes, increase agility, and quality of services to business areas. Leveraging Wipro FullStride Cloud Services, this is a significant ServiceNow implementation in the Latin American market. Second, a U.S. headquartered financial services institution that has awarded us a contract to transform the core banking functionality of their retail portfolio.
Wipro here will leverage its domain and technology transformation capabilities to bring in design thinking methodologies, improve agility, and obviously increase business value for the client. There are more examples worth sharing, but I'd like to now focus on our biggest success factor, talent. Our focus on building world-class talents remains more than ever. We've worked very hard to ensure that scale is never a constraint for growth. We are, of course, on course to onboard over 70% more fresh talent from the campus in FY 2022 versus the previous year. I would not surprise you if I said that attrition is a reality across almost all industries. It's been no different for us. I had shared with you last quarter that we expect attrition to slow down only after a few more quarters.
However, we now feel more confident of having stabilized our attrition rate in Q3 and expect it to moderate next quarter. When we embarked on our transformation in 2020, we had committed to creating a vibrant, diverse, and a more local leadership team. We've made progress on every count. Our leadership has moved closer to clients. The presence of senior leadership in locations outside India has improved by 13 percentage points. It's also relevant to note that nearly 50% of our leadership hires have been in the growth office and in the customer-facing global account executive roles, which are strengthening our front line and sales. Over the last 18 months, we have improved ethnic diversity in our senior leadership by 20 percentage points, and gender diversity in the leadership has nearly doubled.
Without a doubt, we have more work to do here, but I'm pretty proud of the change we are seeing in Wipro thus far. Now, we are committed to being a company that respects diversity, walks the talk on inclusion, and is a beacon for change within our industry. It's very clear. On an even more current and urgent topic, I'd like to reaffirm that the health and safety of all our employees remain our topmost priority. With the rapidly spreading Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, we remain very vigilant. As a proactive measure, we have decided to close our offices globally for the next four weeks. It's of some relief to us that 90% of our employees globally are now vaccinated with one dose of the vaccine, and over 65% are fully vaccinated with the recommended two doses.
Our plans to return to office, even in a hybrid model for our fully vaccinated employees, will be calibrated in the context of the evolving situation, keeping both our employee safety and client preferences in mind. That said. Of course, we are continuing to service our clients with dedication and agility as always. Staying with topics of great urgency, our sustainability efforts have continued with great momentum. You may know Wipro has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index again for the 12th time in a row, a testament to our consistent ongoing efforts in this area. Climate change and our ecological and carbon footprint is something we take very, very seriously. Finally, onto our outlook for the next quarter. We have guided for revenue growth of 2%-4%, which will translate into a full year growth of 27%-28%.
To summarize, the demand environment continues to be robust, and our growth path over the last few quarters reflects this. We'll stay on course with the strategic priorities I had shared with you in November, and I'm confident of sustaining the growth momentum we have so far displayed. Right. On that note, let me welcome Jatin for his comments on the financials. Jatin, over to you.
Thank you very much, Thierry, and thank you all for joining our earnings call. I will quickly summarize the financial details. As you know, we have grown 28.5% on a year-on-year basis in rupee terms. Our margins have remained constant or stable between quarter two and quarter three in a narrow range. Our effective tax rate, or ETR, has actually improved from 22% to 21.3% in quarter three. Overall, our earnings per share has grown at 4.2% on a year-on-year basis. We have had a strong performance in cash collection as well as a strong performance in billing, and as a result, both our unbilled revenue as percentage of revenues have improved, and our DSO days have also improved. Our operating cash flows were 101% of our net income.
At the end of quarter three, we had $4.6 billion of gross cash and $2.8 billion of net cash. We had $3.4 billion of Forex hedges as of thirty-first December, and we realized an exchange rate of INR 76.12 for quarter three. The board of directors has recommended an interim dividend of 1 rupee per share, as you would have read in the press, in our press release. Our guidance for quarter four is 2%-4% in the constant currency at the exchange rates which are mentioned, in the press release. We'll be very happy to take your questions here. Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may please press star then one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star then two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Anyone who wishes to ask questions, please press star then one. We take our first question from the line of Moshe Katri from Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead. Moshe Katri, your line is unmuted. Please unmute the line from your side and proceed. Moshe Katri from Wedbush Securities, your line is unmuted. Please unmute from your side and proceed with your question. As there's no response, we move to the next question from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirus Securities. Please go ahead.
Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Just a question in terms of last two quarters, we have actually exceeded the upper end of the guidance, and I do agree, that's a high base while this quarter we are at midpoint of the guidance as a whole. Is it fair to say it is a high growth? Is it some deceleration in a small tenure, faster conversion deal rates? Deal wins are a bit decelerating as a whole, which is impacting the growth. Even if I look at the current quarter guidance, on organic basis, it looks like 1.3%-3.3% as a whole.
No, Sandeep, this is Thierry. Hi. You know, I really do not see any deceleration of our growth. I think, you know, what we've done for the last few quarters is we've guided between 2%-4%, and we've been consistent in guiding that. Sometimes you go a little up, you go a little down, but there's no real trend, you know, that would go down by any means. We haven't lost clients. We haven't, you know, terminated, you know, abruptly any deal or so on. We continue to grow. We've done fabulously in bookings, frankly, with the best performance ever. You know, that gives us the confidence that we can continue to, you know, guide on 2%-4% for the next quarter.
Keep in mind also, because, you know, obviously we are tracking performance on a quarterly basis. This is 28% growth over last year. Imagine the company, the transformation of the company in four quarters. You know, if you go back five quarters, we actually have added a third of the Wipro revenue of that time to the overall base. The company has increased by a third in five quarters. I think, you know, it is, you know, the kind of growth that we've had, and we continue to see the same trend going forward, frankly.
Yeah. This is helpful. We also acknowledge that the growth journey of Wipro has really turned around. Just a question further to that. In this era when Wipro has successfully turned around the organic growth, why are we depending on too much of inorganic growth as a whole? Because in one of your media interviews, Thierry, you also mentioned that, we may be open for another large size acquisitions. And in terms of smaller acquisition, we are keep doing as a whole. Why not focus in terms of improving the margins, improving the return ratios when the time has come where organic growth is easy to come rather than too difficult, with efforts which already being taken by you in terms of turning around the organic growth? That's-
Sandeep. Yeah, Sandeep, it's two different things. We are not mixing our organic growth strategy with the inorganic strategy. Those are two different tracks. You know, M&A will never be seen as a way to compensate for organic growth. The focus on the market, on the business is to drive organic growth. Every of our business units are driving growth and focusing on that. The M&A strategy is to help us accelerate and, you know, gain and accelerate in speed to make jump in some strategic areas. When we do an acquisition like Edgile, okay? Edgile brings, you know, expertise, consulting expertise in cybersecurity area. We have a strong cybersecurity practice.
We have, you know, a good business that is growing very well, led by, you know, a very strong leader, Tony Buffomante. We feel that, you know, by adding this consulting, you know, business, it will allow us to have, you know, and be able to have a bigger impact in this market. That's really how we are seeing M&A. It's strategic. It's to reinforce and bring, you know, expertise we don't have and compress time. But it is not to compensate for organic growth.
Yeah. Thanks. Just the last question to Jatin in terms of margins. I think even in this quarter, if we look at EBITA margin, the decline has been 45-50 basis points versus last quarter being close to 70 basis points. The question is in terms of the margin outlook, are we continuing the band of 17%-17.5%, which may continue over the next four, six quarters, which we call out as a medium term? Or we believe now there could be tailwinds because of growth as well as fresh additions which we may be doing to the band has an upside potential rather than a downside potential.
Sandeep, Jatin here. You know, we have maintained that we will, you know, there could be quarterly variation, but this is the range that we think margins are sustainable for our business. There is no change to it. You know, this year is going to be like the previous two years, a year of its own pattern and pressure points and excitements. We should remain pragmatic and dynamic with the changing scenarios on the ground. You know, there is no change. Fundamentally, we have always said that the first priority for us is growth. Alongside very clearly is talent.
As we work through these two, we also try and maintain the margin in the band that we have spoken about. We have done a decent job around it in current quarter despite two months impact of wages. That we have invested little bit in additional flexibility in utilization. As you can see it's about 2.5% change from previous quarter, which gives us some additional headroom for growth in quarter four and beyond. Despite these two sort of investments on cost side, we have been able to remain in a narrow range on operating margins. I would say it's going to be a dynamic year. We'll need to manage every quarter as it comes, but our midterm sort of range remains.
Okay. Thanks and all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Vibhor Singhal from PhillipCapital. Please go ahead.
Hi, Jatin sir, thanks for taking my question. So, Thierry, my question was on the deal flow and the overall demand environment that we are seeing. We are hearing a lot of news, and I think the anecdotal evidence also suggests that the large deals that we have seen in the last calendar year in CY 2020, in fact, there's been few and far between those kind of deals in the last six to nine months. What we're hearing is that clients are breaking those deals into smaller size deals with smaller size and tenure as well. Are we also seeing similar kind of a pattern in the deal flow? How does that impact our ability? I mean, is there more competition, more difficult to win those deals?
How does that basically impact our overall strategy to grow over the next couple of years? After that, I have a follow-up for Justin. Thanks.
I'll take that one on the overall structure of the large deals. You know, one is obviously, you know, the clients, you know, are in every industry, clients at the moment are driving very active execution of large transformation program. They're not in the design phase, they're not building roadmaps, they are getting it done. They are progressing, and they want to see results. It's not uncommon indeed that, you know, clients feel that rather than going for lengthy legal negotiation or, you know, building a three year roadmap or five year roadmap, let's go ahead with six months, 12 months and see how things are going, and we'll adjust along the line.
Oftentimes we see clients indeed having a large transformation program in mind, but willing to contractualize through chunks as opposed to having a big one. It doesn't mean it's not gonna happen. We are observing that at times they like to be pragmatic and go with, you know, a phase one, phased approach as opposed to a big bang. That's all fine for us. It doesn't really change as long as we are able to, you know, structure the way we are developing and driving our, you know, our solution, you know, the same way. But it's okay. Frankly, at the end of the day, if you sign five times $100 million deal with a client or a $500 million deal with this client, it's about the same.
Got it. In terms of effort as well, do you not believe that maybe chasing smaller but more number of deals would be, let's say, a higher, let's say, a pressure on our sales and marketing cost, and it could be probably more difficult to compete with the smaller companies which probably aren't present there in large deals, anyhow?
No, I don't think so, frankly. I believe that, you know, when we are going for a deal of, say five or seven years, it just gives you a little bit more perspective and a little bit of time to really define the way you're gonna, you know, project your investments. Frankly speaking, our clients are very mature, and they know that well as well. When we are building and structuring the phase l or phase ll of a larger transformation program, we are able to structure it in a way that it's in the context of a bigger and larger plan. At the end of the day, I think it's not dramatically changing the way we work. From a sales standpoint, I think, you know, it has its ups and downs.
It has its upside and downside. If you sign one deal for five years, then, you know, you maybe do not have to come back to the negotiation table, you know, a year later. When you do it regularly, you are able to adjust to the needs that are possibly changing over time a little bit or so. It drives in more flexibility that can play for the client, like for the partner. I think, you know, I'm not, I'm not too concerned at all about that. I tend to look at those deals, whether they are sold at once or in chunks as big deals and I'm expecting our teams to work on it with the same mindset.
Got it. Thanks for answering that question in detail. Jatin, just one quick question. You mentioned we have around $4.6 billion of cash on our balance sheet. Any basically outlook on basically enhancing shareholder returns either by buyback or increasing dividend in future per se?
Sure. You know, we have articulated that over a block of years, you know, we will continue to for sure return 50% of our net income to the shareholders. You know that over last few years, we have returned even higher amount. For the current quarter, the board of directors have gone ahead with a recommendation of dividend, INR 1 per share, as I spoke about it. You know, our approach to any other action or decision on cash distribution is really based on two aspects. The quantum of cash on the balance sheet, and second is around the need that we see over next few quarters from a strategic use and investment standpoint.
Whenever we feel that we don't need an additional cash beyond 50% of the net income, you know, we have come to you all with a proposal for buyback. Right now there is no such proposal under active consideration, otherwise you would have heard about that. Right now we have announced the dividend, interim dividend of INR 1 per share.
Great. Got it. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and I wish you all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is from the line of Moshe Katri from Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. Happy New Year, and to you, Thierry,[Non-English content] .
Yeah. Thank you, Moshe.
A couple things. First, you mentioned a 27% increase in TCV. Is there a way to slice it by new logos versus renewals? That's number one, and obviously this is important because, you know, we wanted the renewal piece to be higher because it will drive growth. Then the other part of my question is focusing more on Capco. Maybe you can talk a bit about where are we in terms of integrating Capco, focusing on the cross-selling initiative that's gonna be a big deal. What happens to growth when it normalizes, i.e., fiscal 2023, you're analyzing, you're annualizing the contributions from Capco. Is mid-teens kind of a good number to kind of focus on from a big picture perspective? Obviously, we're not talking about guidance, but maybe from a long-term perspective.
Thanks for the color.
Sure. Okay. All right. Moshe, I'll ask Stephanie to go on question one around, you know, the type of deals we've closed. I'll take question two on Capco and question three on margin projection. Okay?
Thanks, Thierry.
Stephanie, you want to go with number one?
Yeah, sure. Thank you. We're really seeing a mix of renewals, but also new logos and also new areas within existing clients. I'm energized by the mix of growth that we're seeing. We see a lot of new clients placing their trust in Wipro on major transformation initiatives. As Thierry described, some of that is in, you know, initial smaller chunks, and in some cases it's large transformation deals. I think it's a healthy mix of adding new clients as well as renewing existing business. Clients continue to place their trust in us to continue to transform. They're bringing us into new parts of the organization. That's what's driving a lot of our growth in our existing accounts, but also, you know, adding new logos.
Thank you, Stephanie.
Thank you, Thierry.
Moshe, on the Capco question, what I can say is that, you know, now it's been what, eight months since the acquisition of Capco. Frankly, it's actually been a wonderful first year. The teams are working well. We have aligned, we have built common governance on the large accounts. We have worked on opportunities, Capco and Wipro BFSI together. We have really won some very nice deals. We had a nice series of deals shaping up in the previous quarter. Beginning of this quarter, we really won a very significant transformation deal that typically we would have never won without the other. I'm pleased with really the attention of the Capco team to the market.
I'm very pleased with the performance of Capco team. I am pleased with the way the leaders are, you know, engaging with the, you know, the larger Wipro organization. Same thing, there's a great, I would say, there's a warm feeling for the Capco team on the Wipro team. To me, it is a success, and not one single day I've been doubting about the decision we made, and I think it will continue to deliver results. I would say obviously it's difficult to reflect after eight months, you know. You will want to have more perspective, but frankly, it is very promising. Again, solid performance from Capco every month.
Your third point on margins, if I understood well, because at some point in time, your—at least for me, your voice broke up. You know, it's a question about, you know, you want to know where we're going in terms of margins. You mentioned yourself the fact that we are not guiding yet for fiscal year 2023. What I would say is that, you know, if you look at our margins, we have been pretty consistent over the last six quarters, guiding about, you know, we guided around 19%, and then came Capco. We announced Capco's impact on margin was between 1.6%-2%. We've guided ever since, you know, on a, you know, narrow band between 17%-17.5%.
We maintain our, you know, focus and our, you know, attention to this level of margin. You know, from that standpoint, Moshe, I would not be expecting changing from where we are now.
in that respect, in fiscal 2023, the annual revenue contributions from Capco annualize
Growth rate will normalize, and the question here is whether we should use mid-teens growth rate for fiscal 2023 and beyond as the right kind of range.
Growth rate.
Because of the fact that it annualizes. Exactly.
Growth rate. Look, again, we've been communicating, guiding on 2%-4% growth quarter-after-quarter for the last quarters. Obviously, Capco has already normalized. It's not impacting those numbers anymore. I can tell you that we are maintaining this guidance for Q4. As you know, we have made as a practice to communicate on a quarter-after-quarter, so you'll have to be a little patient, but again.
Yeah.
We are saying we are going for 2%-4% quarter this quarter, and we are not seeing major change in the market.
Understood.
We are performing ourselves.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Thank you. Good luck.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Diviya Nagarajan from UBS. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions, and wish you all a Happy New Year. Thierry, I think you've kind of answered this question in different parts, but let me try and come at it from a different angle. If you look at the last three quarters that you just reported, I think some of your peers have seen pretty strong surprises or this is a seasonally weak quarter. I appreciate we don't really see those kind of surprises. I was just wondering, from Wipro's perspective, why didn't those surprises come through? Was it a mix issue, or is it that we had some ramp ups that are already behind us? How should we think about this?
Because we have seen, at least so far in the earnings season, fairly broad-based revenue beats from many of your peers so far.
Yeah, you know, Divya, in some ways, I feel that, you know, because, you know, when you're guiding on a certain level, you're giving a bracket, right? It's between 2% and 4%, and we've been guiding between 2% and 4% for 3-4 quarters. If you know, you're hitting the top end of the guidance, then, you know, the next time the market is expecting that you'll do the same. The reality is that when we are managing our business, we are looking at our portfolio, and we are looking at, you know, the trend, and we are trying to guide, really reflecting what we are seeing at the beginning of a quarter.
You know, at the end of the day, I cannot be unsatisfied with the fact that when I guide 2%-4% and I do 3%, I cannot be more accurate.
I think I was coming more from the point of view as I think with some of the others, the surprise seems to have come from demand during the quarter.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think you anticipated the surprise.
Demand hasn't changed.
I was wondering if there was anything in the portfolio that kind of inhibited Wipro from taking advantage of such a demand surprise.
Divya, one thing is clear is that typically when you sign a mega deal, it's not uncommon that one quarter or another, you have suddenly a massive bump in your revenue. If you do not have this mega deal, you do not necessarily have this one-shot big bump that, you know, maybe some others have, but that we've had in some quarters. You know, if you look at the difference. Let's say we've done a strong performance in sales. The difference with, for example, the performance we did exactly a year ago in Q3 of last year, it was a little lower than what we've done this year, but it had a $1 billion deal inside with METRO.
Actually it was coming to more or less the same number, a little lower, but you know, a comparable number, on the TCV standpoint, but coming from a large deal, and therefore the performance outside of this large deal was very different. I think we've turned the engine into a way that we have more recurring type of deals every quarter so that, you know, the mega deal comes on top, right? And what's comforting is that if you look at, you know, the performance itself, even without mega deal with, you know, $2.85 billion of ACV, we've done 55% more than what we used to do on a given quarter a year ago.
Fair enough. Fair enough. Just a question on attrition. I think you have discussed it again, but do you feel like from here on, you're at a point where you find that attrition will be more manageable, and eventually start to, you know, come off these highs?
First of all, on this topic, Divya, I, you know, I tend to be cautious because, you know, the decision lies with our employees and with the other employees of the market. What I believe we are seeing is that, you know, definitely, the level of attrition will moderate in Q4, which is rather good news. Again, I don't want to claim, you know, victory on it, and I think we'll continue to stay very focused on it and keep really an eye or two on the situation of our employees in the organization and continue to connect as much as we can with them.
You know, when a quarter ago, I was saying, you know, I don't think it's here to last. I feel that it might actually stabilize, if not slightly improve. I'm a little more optimistic than I was a quarter ago on that.
Got it. Thank you, and wish you all the best for the year.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandip Agarwal from Edelweiss. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. I would like to start with wishing everyone a happy new year and good health. Thierry, I have a very, very simple question. When you see the current environment, when you engage with your clients, where do you see, you know, the transformation journey towards digital for the clients have reached? Means, when we do our channel checks, when we speak to global technology consultants and all, what we understand is that, you know, everyone is very excited to, you know, for the transformation journey. They want to, you know, link more and more of their revenues to technology, generate more revenues through technology and platform. That journey has just started. What is your sense in that? How do you see that?
Do you think that the journey has already been 30% behind or 50% behind? Number one. Number two, if the journey has just begun, or even if it is at 30%, what is your sense that how long before this matures? It will be three years, four years, five years Or you think that, you know, going forward, the technology trends will keep on continuing. What is your sense on that front? I'm asking more of a five, 10-year strategic thought process on how do you see the technology trend for clients will be.
Sandip, you know, the feeling I have is that technology is pervasive and is critical to the transformation of every industry at the moment. There are multiple topics that, you know, that have Chief Executive Officer attention today. The cloud journey is the best example because, you know, I remember even three, four years ago, Sandip, cloud discussions were happening with the Chief Information Officer . The Chief Executive Officer would not focus much on it because it was considered to be an infrastructure discussion and that was a back office perceived as a back office issue. Today, cloud is a way for organizations to be agile, to drive, you know, to be able to generate more opportunities, to be inventive, to develop solutions, connect with new clients, and it is across organizations.
You know, I don't think I've seen yet a company that can say that it has reached 50% of the cloud transformation. I think it's obviously I'm not gonna be able to give a percentage, but my feeling is that we are still in the early stage of the cloud transformation across industries. It is a massive wave ahead of us. To a point that today, you know, when I look at the big hyperscalers who play a big role in cloud, you know, the Microsoft, the Google, AWS, ServiceNow, SAP, they are coming at us because they need us to help them develop vertical solutions on their platforms or on the cloud. I think it is very clear that the more we do, the more opportunities there are beyond.
That's for the cloud. The growth in the cloud will be massive over the next five years at least, okay? We have, you know, the whole world of data. We know that, you know, we are producing billions of data and we're leveraging very little the power of this data, turning them into insight to drive faster decisions. Companies have started to work on it, but it's, you know, very complex because it requires alignments of processes and systems and policies in these companies. You know, there's still a lot of levels of complexity. The way we are helping companies to develop to become data-driven organizations is, you know, a huge topic for us.
The last one is, and not saying the last one, but just say, taking a third one, because I realize the clock is ticking, but is engineering. I mean, the need for organization to invest more in R&D for them to transform their, you know, processes and product developments by leveraging technology is immense. You know, looking forward, I think we have a market that will, you know, be driven by talent and will, you know, be very, very hot in the next years.
Thanks. Thanks, for that detailed answer and best of luck for the current quarter. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Sandip.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sumeet Jain from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and Happy New Year to everyone. First of all, can you split your guidance of 2%-4% into organic and inorganic, given the recent acquisitions what you have already closed?
No, we don't do that because it's very difficult to do that because at the end of the day, you know, these business when they join organization, they are part of the organization and they're driving, you know, and we are driving synergies as from day one. We are not reporting. Unless those are very large acquisitions, we are not reporting separately. I think, Jatin, you want to add something?
Yeah, Thierry. Sumit, we did share the details about the acquisition when we announced them, so I'm sure it gives you a good indication. From our perspective, both internally and from the way we manage the success in the market, we stay with one number. Hence the guidance we will not break down into the two components, but I'm sure you would be able to have some indication around.
Right. No, that's helpful. Secondly, I joined the call a bit late, so have you disclosed your deal win TCV number for this quarter?
No, Sumit, we haven't disclosed that. The number we did speak about the ACV growth number, which is 27% for the first nine months, and we did share the quantitative details around it, which was about $2.8 billion on an aggregate basis for quarter three, and that we did in the press conference.
Basically no disclosure for this quarter as such in terms of TCV or ACV?
Yeah. The number that I just shared was for quarter three. The growth number that we had shared was for the first nine months of the year.
Got it. Lastly, if I look at your EBIT margins, your D&A expense as a percentage of sales has been coming down for the last 2 quarters pretty sharply. Any reasons why, and what kind of D&A expense as a percentage of sales one should expect going forward?
The way, Sumeet, you would appreciate is that when some of the amortization lines are coming to an end of their tenure over which we take those amortization, then it leads to the reduction, which is step down reduction in the number of amortization. It's not uniform, as you can say. That has happened over last two quarters for some of our prior capitalizations. My suggestion is that you should look at Q4 as a base because we have two more acquisitions which are getting integrated from first of January.
You would see that number stepping up a bit because they will come with their intangibles schedules over as we do the acquisition accounting for that. Q4 should be a good base for you to build your model for future.
Got it. Thanks a lot, Jatin and Thierry, and all the best for the future.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I now hand the conference over to Miss Aparna Iyer for closing comments.
Thank you, Stanford. We understand that it must have been very hectic for many of you as you've had to simultaneously attend multiple results that have been announced today. Thank you all for joining the call. If you have further questions, do not hesitate to reach out to the investor relations team. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Wipro Limited, that concludes this conference. We thank you all for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.