Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for being here for our presentation of our 2023 annual results. But before to start the formal presentation, I would like to address the elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is, is AI and new Gen AI an enhancer for the human employees who do a job, or is it the beginning of the great replacement? And what I can tell you over the business that we are doing, is that it's mostly an enhancer. More accuracy, more productivity, and it gives us the ability to manage end-to-end, more complex solutions. So that's why we embrace it. In few cases, but it's a minority of the cases, it replace the human employee, and this is typically for more simple, transactional, factual interaction.
Let's not forget that we are hired to help companies to reduce the friction that they have with their customer, and to maintain the loyalty to the brand. When a customer contact us, in most of the case, it's because there is a friction, there is a frustration. Of course, we need to give the accurate answer, and of course, the AI and the Gen AI are of a great help, and even adding more possibilities to address more complex situation. But at the end of the day, there is a need for contextualization, common sense, and decision. Gen AI has a lot of qualities, and by the way, I use it absolutely every day, and I think it's fantastic! But when it comes to common sense, decision, and empathy, this is the realm of the human being people.
By the way, for you, if suddenly a GenAI try to show you empathy, the natural attitude of the people is just to get here. Empathy is human, and uniquely human. Having said that, Teleperformance over the decades, has always surfed the different technology waves. We have been a transformer. A transformer of the customer experience, and Teleperformance transformed itself. And this is what we are doing right now. We are going to give you as many example, tangible example, as we can. And, now, except if I forget something... Oh, now I just would like to tell you also, without breaching any confidentiality agreement, that out of our top 10 clients and long-term clients in the world, eight of them are large digital companies, either from Silicon Valley or from China.
So, which mean that it doesn't seem that this company, who are big leaders in AI promotion, think that AI is going to replace us. Finally, I hope that you are going to have a different perception at the end of this presentation, of what does Teleperformance, what is the future, and yes, I know that the stock price of Teleperformance has been very much impacted. For us, we work on the long term. We build, we have built, and we continue to build a company that leads the market. It's a strong company, generating a strong cash flow, and there is some kind of mismatch between the current situation in the stock exchange and the reality of the company. Now, please let me start with a more formal presentation. I think that now I still need to be manual.
So, yes, 2021, 2022, were great years of tailwinds. There was the COVID. People were confined, and they had nothing to do but to be with their computer and to play with their screen, either on the social media or with the e-commerce, and it was a timing of great optimism, even in Silicon Valley.... 2023, end of the confinement period, what did you all do? I go out. We go to the restaurant, we take the plane, and so on. What does it mean? You reduce the time of interaction with the brands, because you are not bored and you have something else to do, another priority.
Clearly, there has been, for many of our clients who have not lost share of volumes or shares of market, market shares, there has been less interaction in 2023 than in 2022, 2021. There has been a peak there. Then, this new situation created a slowdown in the growth of the digital commerce. You will remember a very famous boss of Silicon Valley that said that 2023 was the year of efficiency, which has been somehow a scale back in the launch of new product, new service, new investment, and also a strict disciplined management of budgets. So basically, it has been a year of maximum efficiency, where our clients were looking for the best possible labor arbitrage, combined with the best possible automation. And I will come back to that later.
Of course, there has been the GenAI release that has created a hype in the media. It has a clear importance, and by the way, we have many products, TP proprietary products, that integrate GenAI, and you will see that with Bhupender later. But it has not significantly impacted our growth dynamic. What has significantly our growth dynamic has been much more the shortcut from servicing a market from a domestic delivery place to servicing a market to offshore. Usually, you would go through domestic, then nearshore, then eventually offshore, when you need to really, really squeeze your cost. Here, our business in India in 2023 grew by +17%. And of course, when our business in India grow by +17%, it mean that in other more expensive geographies, our business doesn't grow the same way.
So on the top line, it has a kind of deflation effect to the growth, because the price per unit is not the same. But on the bottom line, there is more room for margin, and by the way, we maintained or even improved our operating margin. Then, clearly, the rest is obvious, except that we all live also right now with huge investment and a huge focus on data security, because the fraud is growing exponentially. All the government of the world would say that, whether it's our U.S. government or the EU government. And, by the way, this create opportunities, additional opportunities for Teleperformance services. The numbers, you all saw the PR, I'm not going to be long on that.
I know it was disappointing versus our first expectation when we had the tailwinds, but at the end of the day, like for like, we had a growth of 5 + 1% in revenue, except the COVID one-time business, I mean, 2021, 2022. We increased our operating margin by 40 basis points. We increased our free cash flow to EUR 812 million. So this company is in great shape. We increased our cash conversion from 40% to 46%. I don't think that we should be ashamed of these numbers. Then, in 2023, we made the acquisition of Majorel. That was not always very well understood, because we always said we want to make acquisition in specialized niche business, high value, and we always want to do that. We do not find them every morning, the good one.
Why did we buy Majorel? For really two simple reason.... During difficult time, the large client are consolidating their numbers of vendors. And to have the number one position on the global market is a clear competitive advantage. Number two, it's always a topic of the shoemaker who always has the worst shoes. Teleperformance was weak in the French market. Sorry. And Teleperformance was a small actor on the German market. In both market, Majorel was a leader. So suddenly, the market number three in the world for outsourcing, and the market number four in the world in outsourcing, we did not have any more gap. This strengthened our position. And I will give a little bit more explanation later. But what is our starting point for 2024?
We are now more than EUR 10 billion pro forma euro company, more than EUR 2 billion EBITDA, more than EUR 1.5 billion EBITA. Yes, Majorel standalone had EBITA margin lower than the one of Teleperformance, but the result of the process of the synergy in two years is going to give back the gap, to fill the gap. That was the rationale for the Majorel acquisition. I'm not going to spend too much time. Yes, there was also some very good complement. We tend to be very present in the banking and the fintech in the U.S. and in LATAM, not in Europe. They were present there. It's a great booster for us. Insurance.
Majorel has a well-oiled, end-to-end claim management process, and I can tell you, a claim management process, whether it's in auto or in habitation, is not exactly something that is solved by GenAI. GenAI can come in the process to optimize, but you have multiple interlocutors, you have timing to solve, you have multiple point of contacts. We love it, and they serve some of the largest insurance companies of the world, and of course, we are going to expand that in the other geographies. And I could continue... Now, this is what I was telling you about the, the synergies. If you look at 2024, it seems to be a wash. We are going to get EUR 50 million in making our synergy work, but it's going to cost us EUR 50 million.
It's not a wash-up, because it cost us EUR 50 million one year, but the green EUR 50 million are here for multi years. Then in 2025, it should cost us EUR 50 million or so, and the full synergy should be at EUR 150 million, and here again, this come, repeatedly, so for the next 10 years, it should make EUR 1.5 billion. Now, I want to, to tell you why I'm so confident in Teleperformance future. First, we have our strategy that we started in the mid-2010, of developing niche, high-value services that grow double-digit, top line and bottom line. And in 2023, it was also the case, and in 2024, it will also be the case. What are these specialized services? Oh, I love to speak about this one. LanguageLine Solutions.
When we acquired it in 2016, many people told us, "What is the sense to buy an online interpretation company when there is..." Excuse me to mention a brand, "... when there is Google Translate?" It's totally different. And why is it totally different? In the U.S., where LanguageLine Solutions is mostly present, there is a regulation, and this regulation wants every critical service, whether it's finance, healthcare, police, justice, to be able to speak to the individual in its native language. And I can tell you that LanguageLine Solutions continue to grow beautifully well, while integrating, of course, the support of the AI! There is TLScontact, oh, that got a big drop during COVID. That was the only company that got a drop in the group during the COVID.
But now, who took advantage of that time to refine its process, and it's now growing double digit and very profitable. Health Advocate, who help the employees of the large U.S. companies to have a additional benefit, which is a help to navigate, to navigate and to advocate on their behalf within the very complex healthcare system in the U.S. You have to be American to understand what I mean. PSG, AllianceOne, I will let Scott Klein, who is the President of the Specialized Services and the very talented President of the Specialized Services, to present in details this line of business. But Scott Klein, if you could show yourself that you exist. Thank you, Scott. Oh, that's just an example. What does it mean?
Yes, it's a growth curve of LanguageLine Solutions that had no future in 2016, from 2016 to 2024, +13% CAGR. Now, the other strong basis for Teleperformance future, and believe me, we love AI, we embrace AI, and it's the AI augmented human. And again, I know that there is a permanent debate between will AI enhance the humanity, or are we going to the theory of the great replacement? We know the strike on Hollywood, we know so many things. How do we address that? First, we decided to have a general architect to manage our effort. It's João Cardoso, who is part of Teleperformance for 23 years. He's an engineer in computer science and with a specialization in formal language and in AI.
And he is taking the leadership of all what we do in AI over the world. By the way, this individual has contributed a lot to the value of Teleperformance in the past, because he was the architect behind Teleperformance Cloud Campus, who helped us to convert Teleperformance from brick and mortar to work from home, and virtually hiring, virtually training, virtually coaching, virtually... and so and so. At the time of the COVID in 2020, when from end of March to early July, April, May, sorry, two months, we made the conversion of more than 220,000 people. We have 600 solution architect, who are analysts and developer in our center of excellence for AI.
Of course, in India, where you have a lot of talented resources, and Bhupender Singh, who is my co-CEO, will explain that. He knows pretty well India. He was graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management, and he knows few things about deep learning. In Europe, we had a team already in Netherlands that had developed many solutions integrating AI. And by the way, there is a product that was present in the press few days ago that created a kind of drama in the stock exchange, to our big surprise, because it's a product that we use for years. But I'm going to show you that later. We have a little bit more than 7,000 IT people for the network management, the helpdesk, and many support.
That would make already a nice IT company. We have 60 AI proprietary solution for the core service. We have 600 clients out of the 1,500 who today that we serve who today have at least one element of TP AI solution, and I'm going to show you what. And guess what? For the replacement, for the simple transactional interaction, of course, we deploy the bots, and we have 25,000 bots that more or less are an equivalent of 150,000 people. That's a replacement. Simple, factual, transactional. No need for empathy. What is the level of my account? How much do I owe you? But I paid two weeks ago, and you continue to relaunch me or whatever. Just factual.
For us, of course, AI is, in the vast majority of our business, human augmentation. Human augmentation in accuracy. We have instantaneous access to multiple source of data and a synthesis of that, which is very, very efficient. So we gain in productivity. With the online analytics, we have some kind of predictability, predictability, which help us to make better proposal, and so to enhance our results. AI can help in some kind of personalization by indicating moods and giving some clues to the human. And of course, in a world that becomes more virtual every day, and where the fraud becomes a daily issue, not only for the companies, but for the government and for everything, we use a lot AI in data security to reduce the fraud, and which is something super important for our clients.
I think that the real future of the business process outsourcing is the level of data security we are able to provide. That's a real topic. Here, because a lot of people speak about AI and do not give any details, I don't want to make marketings with all the name of the AI we have. We put some of them. We say exactly what they do, and you have exactly the details in this slide, which is the slide number 15. Thank you very much. I need to change my glasses. You will see there a product that is called TP Protect in data security.
It's a patented solution, and it gives us signals on what's happening in the flow, each time it, on the process that it runs, and each time there is some kind of outliers, it gives warning, and then it helps us to anticipate and manage. This product, the base of this product, was from Israel, by the way. We started it more than 10 years ago. Of course, we are at the iteration XXX, with integrating more and more of the possibilities. Bhupender is going to explain that much more. Now, another strong basis for our future is we decided to start to commercialize our group's unique expertise, because nobody has the expertise we have in customer experience management, to the in-house market. That remains the, a large, large part of the business.
By creating TP Infinity, where we have right now, it's we start modestly with 650 consultants. I hope in few years from now, there will be a few thousand with consultants in strategy, technology, creative design, analytics, and selling our best practice as a service, like a cloud as a service and best practice, whether it is workforce management, whether it's a QA, it means quality assurance, and so on. Another strong basis for Teleperformance future is India. We do more or less 50% of our business in the beautiful English language. In difficult times, let's not forget that the next 2-3 years are going to be difficult at the macroeconomic level.
If you look at the forecast of the World Bank or the IMF, you see that 2024 should be even more difficult than 2023, and 2025 is not going to be so great. If I'm not mistaken, we, of course, we have delivery service all over the world, but the main markets that we serve are the rich market, the U.S. and Europe. And when U.S. should continue to grow by something like 1.5% in GDP, Europe is probably going to grow by 0.8.... and if I add U.K., it can even lower a little bit this number. So in that difficult times, people go directly for the max efficiency versus, the, bell and whistles. And so to be strong in India is important. Today, we have 90,000 people in India.
We plan in a few years from now to pass to 150,000, and here is where we were in India. We were at 374 in 2020. We are at close to 600 in 2023, and we hope to be above EUR 1 billion by 2027, continuing our CAGR of +17%. Of course, we make all the investment for that. We are present in I don't know how many cities. Bhupender knows the details much better than I know. Finally, finally, because even if personally, I would prefer to live 800 years, and there is an AI guru, Ray Kurzweil, who explained to us that we are going to live way beyond 100 by 2040.
But age is age, and so it's important to prepare, first, the succession planning, and second, to answer to some demand of our shareholder and of the market. We are going to, when we will be ready, to split the function of chairman and CEO. You... We want to do that smoothly, methodically, and in such a way that it's going to be totally flawless. So Bhupender and I are working together. We speak exactly, even if he lives in London and if I live, somewhere else, I never know where I live. We speak exactly every day. We review everything that happened within the company, what is important, how we consider it, what decision we should take. And you see here the ExCom, and the ExCom, we added João, that I mentioned, and the chief marketing officer.
So the ExCom today has 30% women in representation, which is a little bit better than before. That's it for me. Thank you very much.
Good morning to all. I'm going to present you the figure for 2023. I'm not going to come back on what Daniel said about the macroeconomic context that we lived in 2023. I just wanted to point out one thing, which was the exceptional FX volatility that happened this year, last year, sorry. If I may say, we are used to living in a exceptional unexpected volatility of FX, but the pattern has been dramatically different on what we lived in the past. Meaning that not only the dollar was going down and up, but we had also some currency in which we are significantly present, country significantly present.
I'm thinking to Colombia, I'm thinking to Mexico, where the currency climbs up, and where in other country where we are also significantly present, meaning Turkey, Egypt or Tunisia, or Argentina, where the money slipped dramatically. I will come back to that in a minute. What was the answer of TP to continue to grow and to create value? Of course, stability, diversification, and credibility are, were key to secure growth. We'll see that in a minute. But what we decided very, very early in the year was to tighten the belt. So we have tightened the belt on the cost. We made some streamlining on people and some site optimization very early in the year, even if it has an impact which is deferred in the year.
It drive us towards the best EBITDA margin that the group ever achieve. Secondly, we start to be very, very careful on cash, because we believe that cash is absolutely key, whether it's CapEx, DSO or other tax issue. So at the end of the day, we are happy to report the best free cash flow that we ever reported. So let's move now to the figure precisely. Here you have the figures that are presented. You have the full year 2023, which include, as you can remember, two months of Majorel. And of course, we put on the side to compare 2022 figures, which was published last year.
I thought it was interesting to isolate TP by itself, without the Majorel figure, for the full year of 2023. So you have on the right side of the slide, TP standalone, with no impact of Majorel in his book. So you see that finally, two things, the 5.1% growth that I just mentioned by Daniel, and on which I will come back in a minute. The margin that we were able to deliver, which is 15.5% for the published reported figure, including two months of Majorel.
But if you take TP standalone, it's 15.8, and even 15.9, if you take into account the EUR 13 million that we spent to streamline the organization all along the year with BPO, to prepare the future. So to a certain extent, we have been able to improve dramatically our margin in 2023 versus 2022, at a pace that was never achieved at TP group level. I just wanted to remind you that the growth of Majorel, because you are going to ask me the question, has been for 2023, 5.5%, so close to TP. And the margin was, we'll see that, has been different.
As you've seen, we have presented to you through Daniel presentation, the full year of Majorel, where the margin is significantly below the, the, the margin of of TP. Let's move now to the evolution of the sales. Probably, it's, it's one of the years that has been the most difficult that we've ever lived. Daniel touched upon about, I would say, headwind. You, you see the headwind there. In sales, we had EUR 600 million of headwinds, of which, 346-350 to currency effect, EUR 32 million of inflation, and of course, 223 from COVID contract. I'll come back on the, on the inflation in a minute. So we had EUR 600 million. We start the year by losing EUR 600 million in sales versus last year.
Of course, it's this currency effect came from the dollar, from the Argentine pesos, Indian rupee, the Egyptian lira, and the Turkish lira. But the hyperinflation has an impact, which was huge in Q4, as we started to feel it sufficiently in advance. Just to give you an idea, the inflation in Argentina was 211%, 211% all along the year, while the FX decline was 388%. So this difference lead us to a EUR 32 million impact on our sales that has been posted in Q4. This disconnection between inflation and FX shows that the monetary devaluation do not compensated the the inflation the the FX decrease.
So beyond that, you have a growth of EUR 388 million, which is 5.1% growth, which is... And again, I don't know whether it's appropriate to make it clear again in this global environment as of today, but it's probably the best performance that the market and the big competitor achieve all along, all along the year in 2023. And of course, you have the scope perimeter effect, which is EUR 400 million, mostly Majorel, EUR 343 million, but also PSG, that what was bought last year in November. I'm sure you remember that. Where we lead to EUR 8.3 billion that are the published figure of today. Let's have a look to the source of growth. Not surprisingly, the growth is distributed differently across the sector.
In fact, if you take the U.S. market, which is made of North American impact and to a large extent LATAM, you have a U.S. market which is flat, which is not surprising. I'm not even speaking about the deflation that was mentioned by Daniel, about the fact that people are going to India. But the whole market was flat. While in Europe, we have been able to drive a growth of EUR 200 million, and of course, the growth from specialized service of EUR 180 million. Probably, I just wanted to stay a minute there, because what makes the difference from TP from the competition is that it's given of distribution in terms of countries.
In vertical, we are able to capture the growth that is still happening. Of course, people who are totally focused on U.S., totally focused on a contract, totally focused on a client, have hard time to get growth. While TP, okay, is not immune to the macroeconomic environment, but is able to swallow much more the potential slowdown of the growth in every country or in every market. This is true, of course, by vertical. And you see that the distribution of our sales by vertical, but also by region. We know that probably APAC is going to push also much more the growth in the future. And specialized services will do also in the future, so we'll come back to that later.
And being largely, I would say, split across the world and across the sector, help us to swallow the ups and down. Let's move the EBITDA by activity. Again, figures are complex to read. Starting by the total excluding Majorel, you'll find the 15.8% that I just mentioned, 15.9%, if you take out the cost of streamlining that we have done all along the year, versus the 15.5% of last year. Just a point I wanted to make is global figures are the same, EUR 1,126.1 million versus EUR 1,262 million. It's because of the FX impact. You have a FX impact in 2022, in 2023 versus 2023, that is massive.
50 million of the profit would have disappeared in 2022 with the 2023 rates, because we have some business in Egypt, in India, and in Turkey. But we have been able to improve the margin in terms of percentage versus last year. We put aside Majorel, the two months of Majorel, which are not different reporting lines. This is just for two months. And next year, it will be of course spread around all the region. But these two months were not really fantastic, as you can see, 8.5%.
This is due to some decisions that have been taken, some costs that have been taken out from the business, especially for some restructuring part and for some, I would say, cost of the deal. Clearly, what is said is also that you will see that we have been able to maintain at least the margin in all the region, while specialized services are significantly improved, notably in the second part of the year. You remember that the first part of the year was hit by some specific impact, and now we are back to normal. Quick word about the other stuff. Few things to tell. Just to tell that the amortization of intangible assets and performance share plan are non-cash, I would say, accounting charges are going to.
that are going to to impact us. And the other are mainly of the cost linked to the deal of Majorel, which is EUR 24 million, that is going to vanish next year. Just a point on the earning performance. With no surprise, the financial result is less good than last year. Not surprised too. Most of it is coming from the net financial charge between EUR 50 million and EUR 60 million, which is made of two thing. One is, of course, the level of the debt that has increased, specifically with the EUR 2 billion that came on our balance sheet starting early November, and of course, an impact on the rate, which hit a variable part of debt all along the year, despite what has been decided to cover it.
Just wanted to, sorry, to highlight the income tax. Not only it went down in terms of value, but also in terms of rate. It's not by chance. It's a mix of work that has been done all along the year and to reduce the income tax for the group. I do believe this is the most important stuff of what we have done this year. We have been able to dramatically improve the cash flow. All along the year, we knew that we had to work on that. We have been able to improve our working cap dramatically by putting a strict attention to client cycle, whether it's DSO or unbilled, and we will continue to do so all along the year. We did the same for the CapEx.
We have been very, very picky in the CapEx decision, and we will continue to do that because we do believe this is absolutely key for us to continue on that road. Daniel mentioned the 46 cash conversion rate. I just wanted to finish on this figure. For a company that is absolutely in disarray, we have been able to show the improvement of the CapEx over the last year, of the cash flow of the last year. Of course, there are ups and down, but there are much more ups than down, as you can see. We do believe that we are going to continue this trend for the next year. But that's at least it gives a trend of what is making this company special versus the others.
Where we are in terms of debt, EUR 4.3 billion, including EUR 832 million of lease. Of course, debt has increased of EUR 2.016 billion by the acquisition of Majorel, Majorel and its minority interest that we bought back from Majorel subsidiary in 2023. And we send back to the shareholder close to EUR 600 million made of dividend and share buyback. I'll come back in a minute to that. What we are absolutely convinced of is to continue to control our debt. We have a net debt to EBITDA ratio, which is 2.18 on a pro forma basis, and we are absolutely convinced that this is going to be the name of the game in the coming year.
Not going to be very long on the balance sheet, but where we are in terms of debt, because I know that there are plenty of people that are interested in the debt and how we manage the debt. Our financial debt, excluding the lease, is EUR 3.7 billion. The cost of this debt is below 3.5%, and the average maturity is 3.75 years. We are mostly fixed. What is more important for us to—for you to understand is that this debt is absolutely secure. We have EUR 880 million cash at the end of the year on balance sheet. Just wanted to mention it again. What is clear, and there are some banker in the room, but we have access to liquidity.
We have a dramatic access to liquidity and no, no issue, whether it's a bond, whether it's a commercial paper, or whether it's a bank. We have EUR 1.5 billion undrawn credit line that are, that are available at any time to, to, to cover the, the business. Lastly, dividend and share buyback. Okay, we maintain the, the dividend. We propose to maintain the dividend, but what we did, is we send back to the shareholder close to EUR 600 million versus cash flow EUR 812 million, just to give you some meaning of, of figures that we are speaking of. So not a, not a bad figure at all... I just wanted to finish my, my presentation with, with the capital allocation strategies that we are going to follow in the next years. The first thing is to finance development.
We are going to continue to be picky on CapEx, probably below 3% on the range of what we have done this year. M&A, still on the possibility, but still clearly not the first one. We are going, as mentioned by Daniel, for our specialized service in priority, mid-sized company, if it happened, probably in the second part of the year, and if it happened, with very, very clear pricing discipline. There is one simple message, which is simple: we want to maintain our investment grade rating. And I'm sorry to use this word, but we will do whatever it takes to make it happen. So we will be below 2x in 2024. This is clear, and we will continue to have this rating.
No doubt on that. When that done, we'll return shareholder to shareholder. We believe that we should. It will be through dividend and also share buyback, and we believe that the return to shareholder should be up to 2/3 of the net free cash flow of 2024. That is the message I wanted to do, and I leave the floor to Bhupender.
Thank you, Olivier. I'll start with the topic of AI, because possibly that's the only topic that everyone wants to hear about today. At Teleperformance, for the past few years, we've had a fairly holistic approach to AI, and we've been embedding AI in our products, in our processes that we use in our daily life, and these are across three categories. One, we've been using AI to improve the operational outcomes for our clients, so to reduce costs, 15%-30% efficiencies, and to improve outcomes. The outcomes could be quality improvement, accuracy improvement, improvement in the sales conversions, and, wherever we have deployed it, we've seen 10%-25% improvement. The second category where we have been deploying AI is to improve our operational support functions, so things like operational supervision, workforce management, QAs.
And again, we've seen improvement of 10%-25% in quality and 15%-30% reduction in costs. And finally, for reducing the costs and improving the outcomes of our internal support functions, be it HR, IT, finance. So, as we mentioned before, also, we've been investing dozens of millions EUR for the past few years in our transformative TAP capabilities. And today, we've got over 600 experts working on AI projects.
Six hundred.
Yeah, this is a typo here. It should be 600 experts working on AI projects. And within those projects, about 250 are in Gen AI, and another 150 are in the pipeline. And the kind of companies that we do these Gen AI projects for are, some of those are mentioned in the right side. So one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, it is U.S.-headquartered, but it is a global company, for a large U.S. e-commerce platform company, a big hospitality company from Scandinavia, one of the biggest, card companies in America, Western European national airline, another airline which is subsidiary of one of the largest aviation groups in Europe, a large tobacco company, and one of the largest telecom company, again, headquartered in the U.S.
Just wanted to give a sense that, these GenAI projects are not only for some small companies, but it is for some of the largest companies that we are supporting in. Apart from that, what we are doing is we are also embedding AI in some of our core processes. So we've got two process standards which are industry-leading: TOPS, which stand for Teleperformance Operational Performance Standards, and BEST, which stands for Baseline Enterprise Standards of Teleperformance. So we're incorporating AI in those. We're also embedding AI and now upgrading those to GenAI in some of our products. Daniel touched upon a few of those, and I'll come to the top five later on.
Then, apart from building our own products, we are getting into partnerships with leading companies like Microsoft, ServiceNow, Genesys, and there are a few more in the works, where we are using their products both for our own purposes and also as integrator for our clients. Coming to some of our core products, we've got more than 60 AI-enabled products. The top five are mentioned here. So we've got TP Client, which is our proprietary CRM platform, which is deployed in currently 228 clients. TP Protect, which is our compliance and security product, which detects and then send triggers for any abnormal behaviors, that's deployed in 669 clients. We've got StoryfAI, which is a real-time interpretation, which can handle up to 100 languages, which is deployed in 78 clients. TP Recommender is a GenAI-enabled prescriptive analytics product.
which is largely used in sales and collections setup, and that's deployed in 59 clients. And TP Interact is another GenAI-enabled analytics product, which is used for three different things. One, for automation of quality interactions. Historically, in our industry, typically, quality was monitored manually for about sample size of 2%-5% of interactions. With TP Interact, we can monitor 100% of the interactions. Second, it is used for giving near real-time coaching and feedback to our agents. Immediately after interaction ends, it summarizes what the agent did well and what he or she could have done better. And with GenAI enablement, it also now can track customer sentiment, and it gives cues to our agents as to how to modify their tone, their verbiage, their offer, to be able to service the customer better.
Apart from our own products, we are also, again, partnering with other platforms. So I've just mentioned two here, but there are others that we have already, and there are some more that are in the works. So Twilio is a CX automation platform, which can look at an interaction and can divert it into a self-serve or a auto-fulfillment channel, depending upon the complexity of that interaction. That's deployed in 144 clients today, and Centrical is a productivity enhancement and gamification platform that's deployed in 60 clients today. Moving on to the topic of financials, and like any industry, there are multiple factors that impact the profitability and the top-line growth dynamics of an industry. I've listed down four interdependent factors that have been impacting the profitability and growth dynamics in our industry over the past 15 years or so.
So I'll first explain this conceptually, and then I'll put some numbers behind these. So the first and foremost is the macroeconomic environment. In more stable periods where there is high GDP growth rate, where the cost of capital is low and inflation is moderate, obviously our clients are looking for growth, and they're expanding in new products, new markets, new geographies, and that creates high volume of activities for the industry, which also in turn means there is less pricing competition. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. In tougher times, what happens is companies start scaling back to conserve cash, which means lower volume of activities and hence, more pricing pressure. If you look at the second factor around...
On that point also, I do want to highlight that while, TP is somewhat more resilient because of its, diversification across lines of business, across geographies, across verticals, across clients, but we live in the same world, and so we are not totally immune from it. The second factor, and it is interrelated to the, macroeconomic environment, is, offshoring and nearshoring. And it is interrelated because during tougher times, clients are looking for more expense takeout, and hence, they prefer offshore and nearshore than to onshore. Thirdly, technology, automation, AI, that also has similar effect as offshoring in the near term, because technology typically drives productivity, and because in our industry, most of the commercials are still input based, in the near term, it is deflationary on the top line.
But it does drive up profitability for the companies that are able to enable their products with the right technology, and also in the medium term, it creates more business opportunities. The new services could be at two levels. It could be at an industry level. So the classic example is trust and safety. The industry did not exist till about a decade back, and today it's in the $7 billion-$8 billion range. Or it could be at a company level where those services existed, but a company—a particular company may not have had enough share in that line of business, and I'll mention a couple of examples of that later on for Teleperformance. Now, let's look at some numbers around that.
So this chart shows the growth rate and profitability for Teleperformance over the last 15 years, and it's divided in three periods. The first period is 2008 to 2012, which is, as you would remember, the global financial crisis and then the gradual recovery, and our numbers somewhat tracked that trend. It is important to point out here that during this period, TP was not as large and as resilient that it is today. It was much smaller and more concentrated on the CX business. Then, from 2012 till about 2018, the world saw a fairly steady 2.5%-3% GDP growth rate in the developed market. The cost of capital was low. The inflation, again, was moderate in the developing countries.
During that period, if you look at it, we grew by 7%-9% like-for-like. This is also the period where we had the RPA hype, starting in about 2013 and then reaching its peak around 2015, 2016. Despite that, we grew by 7%-9%. Now, the 7%-9% actually is a combination of two numbers.... Our actual gross growth rate during this period, gross growth rate meaning new business coming from either totally new clients or coming from existing clients in new lines of businesses or new markets. So the gross growth rate was around 14%-15%, but then we had a churn of 5%-7% on account of increased offshoring and automation, and hence you get the 7%-9%. 2018 onwards, a few things happened.
One, we had an explosion in the number of interactions, mainly driven by the digital commerce companies because they were expanding rapidly and they were driving interactions. And then obviously with COVID, there was a further boost to that. And we also had increased AI adoption. There was a company-level thing also during this period, that TP aggressively got into additional lines of business, whether it was trust and safety, more specialized services, more sales activities. So because of combination of all those factors, during this period, our gross growth rate moved up from the earlier 14-15 to more like 16-17%. And during this period, the churn, again, driven by automation and offshoring, was in the range of about 7-8%. And hence you see the like-for-like growth rate in the range of 9%-12% during this period.
During this entire period, if you look at it since 2012, our EBITDA margins have been going up. And again, what is important to point out here is the margins have been going up despite our average unit price not tracking the inflation rate. So our margins went up, but the average price that we were charging to our clients did not grow by the inflation rate. In fact, they grew at almost about 60% of the inflation rate. So that's the value that we have been adding to our clients. We have been helping them to manage their cost structure below the inflation rate, and that's why this industry has been growing fundamentally over the last decades. Come to 2023, what happened?
Now, obviously, both Olivier and Daniel have touched upon it significantly, so I won't kind of go through all the factors once more. But even in 2023, the gross new business that we had was 13%, just over 13%. We did add EUR 1 billion of new business in our business last year. But then we also had the churn, the same churn that we've been talking about, around 8% or so from offshoring and automation. And before the question is asked, and I know it is counterintuitive, it actually was more driven by offshoring than automation. We did not— Yes, there was automation, but did not see a significant uptake in automation rate versus what we had seen in the previous 5 years.
But yes, we did see a significant uptake in offshoring during last year, and hence that 13% gross, 8% churn, net of about 5% growth rate. That was past. What about future? If you look at the forecast for the next few years, the forecast in the developing economies is not as strong as what it was in the previous five years. We 2024 is expected to be only 1.4% in the advanced economies, so further drop from what had happened in last year. Then it does pick up afterwards, 2025 onwards, as per the forecast, but it is still not going back to the 2022 and 2021 levels. So what we are doing is we are adjusting our strategies and the financial forecast accordingly.
So in terms of the priorities, for us, we continue to build out our new Teleperformance organization, taking the best of talent from erstwhile Majorel, erstwhile TP, and then adding, especially in digital capabilities, vertical capabilities, and new lines of business, from outside. Second, we will continue to accelerate our AI, AI deployment. We actually see this as an offensive move rather than a defensive move because it does create new business opportunities for us, and also it creates a ground for us to capture higher share. We'll continue to focus on the alternate lines of business, so specialized services, sales, back office. And I won't touch upon all, but I will touch upon sales, because for some reason, people misinterpret this as telemarketing.
Yes, there is a bit of that, but what we are referring to, sales here is actually B2B account and relationship management. So for example, ad sales relates to helping small and medium businesses, restaurants, independent hotels, or let's say neighborhood salons and other things, to onboard digital and media platforms, all the big media, social media platforms, or digital commerce companies, onboard them, and then spend money on them, tracking the ROI. So that's what we do for, for many of the, the almost the biggest platforms in the world, we do that for them. The consumer goods supply chain management also is, again, virtual relationship management. Historically, the consumer goods companies have been managing their vast hundreds and thousands of retailers through either wholesalers or through armies of their own sales officers. The pandemic taught us that these could also be managed, remotely.
So what we are now doing is actually working with a number of consumer goods companies to manage their and retailers. Some of the bigger retailers like the, let's say, supermarkets, the Tescos, the Sainsbury's, the Waitrose, et cetera, client companies can manage directly. But when we are talking about thousands of retailers, the small grocery stores, et cetera, they require management. Typically, historically, it was either wholesaler, where you ended up sharing 10%-12% of your gross, of your margin pool, or you had your own army, which was a fixed cost. By doing it with us, it's both more efficient and also you have consistency in service with the recording of every interaction that gets done with them. TP Infinity, we touched upon it earlier.
Historically, this was more as a capability for us to help us deliver and sell our core business. Now we are carving it out as a separate business line, and we'll continue to optimize expenses, leveraging shared services and technologies to make sure that we maintain a high margins and also create headroom for further investments. And finally, the guidance for 2024. So in this environment, we've taken a conservative approach, and we are giving a like-for-like revenue growth on a pro forma basis, which means assuming full 12 months of Majorel in 2023, 2%-4%. And here I would like to peel one more layer. Standalone TP, which is excluding Majorel, even in 2024, the growth rate is north of 5%. Very similar to the like-for-like growth rate that we saw in 2023.
This is because while there is a overall slowdown in business services kind of sector, you've seen the guidance from almost every company, whether they are direct competitors or indirect competitors, there is a slowdown. But TP, because of its diversified geographies, lines of businesses, verticals and clients, is much more resilient and hence is able to still grow by that rate. Unlike TP, many mid and smaller sized companies in our sector who are exposed to either some particular vertical or client or geography, are not able to actually deliver that kind of growth. And hence, you would have seen from the guidance of many of the companies that have come out in the last couple of weeks, it's a much slower growth rate or actually deceleration kind of in the year.
Majorel, like many of these smaller and medium-sized companies relative to TP, also had a greater concentration of global internet accounts. As we know, this is a sector where we have seen the biggest budget cuts, and hence, they have seen a significant deceleration in their growth rate in the second half of last year, and that is continuing in this year, too. Having said that, it is still a good acquisition for TP for the long term because it reinforces the leadership position of Teleperformance in a consolidating market. It establishes fairly strong and profitable position in Germany and France markets, which are number three and number four outsourcing markets. It doubles the footprint in Asia-Pac , which is the fastest growing outsourcing market. It does add some niche capabilities in claims management, in document management, in luxury goods marketing.
From a long-term perspective, it does work well. There's other factor that is also there in Majorel. Their account management and operational management team is excellent, and but it did not have that established new business engine. It will take us somewhere around 12-18 months to expand our new business engine so that the combined growth rate can go back to 5%+ levels. Talking about profitability, we'll continue to improve that. This year also, we are targeting 10-20 basis point improvement on a pro forma basis, and this is excluding the cost of integration and synergies. With the improved profitability, we will see an increase in net cash free flow, net free cash flow.
And with a more controlled and disciplined capital allocation, this free cash flow will also result in a stronger balance sheet, whereby the year-end, we should have debt levels below two EBITDA. And with that, thank you.
I think it's time now for the Q&A session, so please feel free.
Yes. Good morning. Antonin Baudry at HSBC. My first question is about top-line growth, short term and midterm. First, short term, will it possible to have more color about the top-line growth that you expect in Q1 2024, on the exit rate that you expect at the end of the year, and to have more granularity on your 2%-4% that you expect for 2024? The second question is about the midterm guidance of revenue growth. You did not give us details or quantified targets in the midterm. Should we expect at some point the company to come back with a quantification of midterm guidance in the occasion of a capital market day, for example, later in the year?
Or does it mean that you, you do not know finally what will be your, revenue growth in the midterm? Thank you.
... Just on the first off, as you saw, the end of the year, specifically December, has not been as strong as what we wanted. We know that, and that leads to the figures that we have reported. Anyway, we knew that for Q1, and to a less extent, Q2, we have I would say base of comparisons that are still high. If I remember properly, 8.3% or 8.6% in Q1 last year, and 5.3, 5.7 in the second part of the year. So of course, we are going to have a second part of the year, how we build the budget.
We have a first part of the year that will be, I would say, not so, not so much growing, growing marginally, and the second part of the year growing dramatically. Despite the fact that specialized service that is here through through Scott is going to deliver a significant growth and accelerating its growth all along the year. So we have been careful in fixing the guidance for 2024. I'm sure we can probably have plenty of doubt, but what we learned from 2023 is just to be careful. Just to be careful on the guidance and just to be careful on the margin, and I'll come back on the margin later on, but this is what we want to do. But we know for a fact, and from what...
That the first half will be, I would say, much more flat than the second part of the year. Exactly like what you heard from competition, from extended competition, and this is exactly what we are going to deliver. The second part? Mm.
Yeah. The second part, we have a certitude, which is to grow faster than our market. And the growth of the market is defined very well by companies, I mean, research companies. Everest is a good benchmark, and we are sure that we are going to continue to grow faster than the market. Now, what is going to be the growth of the market, or what is going to be the future in six months, in nine months, if there is no specific disaster, we are able to say it. What it will be in three years from now, we are not able to say it, and again, it's not AI that prevent us to say it.
It's the socio-political environment that is extraordinarily volatile, and I think that the governments of the world would like to be able to say it, but if I remember well, the minister of the economy of a government that I know pretty well, because I'm born there, in France, had just to review downwards its forecast for 2024. So right now, you will understand that we are careful on the long term. When the sky will be a little bit less foggy, we will give you numbers. Right now, our certitude is to make better than the others.
Go.
Hi, good morning. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. A couple from me, please. I think in conversations with investors, one of the questions that always comes up, it's probably for Bhupender, is about the implementation of third generation AI in your software stack and with customers. Of the pilots that you have done with your customers, have any converted, and have you implemented it? And in relation to that, can you help us understand? If let's say, you had 100 interactions that you were servicing a customer, for example, and the mix was maybe 50 voice and 50, you know, chatbots, plus, you know, chats with human beings, how does that mix basically change after you implement third generation AI?
If you had, let's say, some level of deflation, do you then go back to the customer and say: "Okay, now we are able to give you the cost savings, maybe can we take a bit more from you in terms of incremental outsourcing? Or maybe take a bit of share from other players in the end market." Is that how your conversations go, and therefore, your pie doesn't shrink, or maybe it grows? That's first question.
That's right. Thank you for the question because it was the answer.
Yeah.
But Bhupender, please.
Yeah. Yeah, I was about to say thank you, Suhasini. You can, you can be in our business. You can be our salesperson. But many parts to your question. First, the GenAI projects, have any been implemented? Yes, tens and not in hundreds as yet, but yes, in tens they have been implemented. They are live today. Second part, in terms of, I think what you're saying is, what's the percentage automation? Ultimately, that's what you're gonna feel, yeah, you're asking. Remember, this is at least TP, I'm not talking about the entire industry here, but at least TP, we have been on this journey for the past few years, and we have been working systematically with our clients to automate the lower-end, simpler transactions.
So the number that I gave to you, 5%-7% deflation on account of offshoring and automation, we have been doing that consistently for at least I'm aware, since twenty-
Before twenty.
Yeah, 2013, 2014, just using RPA, et cetera. But even before that, there were other kind of things, the call deflections and other things that were happening, earlier also. So we have been doing that for quite some time. So what is getting left behind incrementally is difficult to automate, and hence the impact of AI and automation associated with it is also less pronounced on TP than maybe some other company who may not have had those kind of things. You talked about chat. Chat is actually only about 5% of our overall business, because elements like chat probably are more prone to automation, you know, this thing. And so, but coming back, I gave you the numbers. At the moment, replacement is not that substantial.
What we are seeing is significant productivity improvement, which could go up to 20%-25%. But replacement, it's truly very low end of activities, which for us was already automated to some extent.
I, I would like to add something because I would like to add some color to this answer. Let's take in the financial industry, the KYC or the fraud prevention, that are typical line of services that we provide to our large clients. Of course, the vast majority is already treated by the AI. What comes to us is a minority, but this minority is growing every year, and it's exactly the same with the content moderation. The content moderation, I mean, if we speak about... Okay, everybody knows who are the big social platform. They are all our clients, by the way. So they have done such a good job with the AI, that right now they are able to prevent offensive material to come online in 98% of the case.
We manage only 2% of the case, but already today, this is more than EUR 700 million at Teleperformance and our main competitor there, and it's strange because nobody asked them question, is Accenture.
Hello? Hello.
Go ahead.
Yeah, perfect. The second one is on the 2024 guidance, please. Appreciate you gave the color that in terms of what may be changed in 2023 for you versus your previous expectations, and there the churn was driven more by offshoring. So if you think about, let's say, your views on 2024, do you still see the bigger risk coming from incremental offshoring? Has that stabilized, or are you still worried that there's more to come? Thank you.
I think that is continuing. We are still in a tougher economic environment period, so, the year of efficiency of most of the big, tech companies continues, and hence they're looking for budget cuts, expense management, and hence, offshoring continues. See, the maths for us is not that complicated. If I use the same numbers that I gave to you earlier, instead of growing by 13%, we'll probably only grow by 11% top line with a 7%-8% of churn because of combination of offshoring and automation. And why are we growing by 11% and not by 13% that we grew last year? That's because we've not been able to expand. You can't expand your business development engine kind of overnight.
It does take 12-18 months to actually, to get that cranking. And our base has—the base has increased by about 25%. So that's, that's what has happened. So we—Once we build our business development engine to cater to the expanded base, we'll go back to that. We expect to go back to 13%-14% top line growth rate, and there will be churn, which we have been seeing for more than 10 years now.
By the way, the fact that it's going to continue, we see that also as positive. You know, the world is not so binary, because right now we grow. We grew last year by + 17% in India, and we are going to continue to grow a lot there. And of course, top line is deflationary, but bottom line, it's, it increased the ratios. And, for sure, there is something very important that Bhupender started to mention, is the fact... And that you mentioned, by the way, yourself, is the fact that by providing the best possible labor arbitrage, plus the best possible AI, we become the best partners of our clients' expectation, and this is the way we secure the partnership, and we grow our share of wallet. There was a question.
Yeah. Thank you very much. It's Karl Green from RBC. I've got three questions. I'll probably take them in turn. The first question is really around what's happening at Majorel. I think in the fourth quarter, you indicated in the statement that the margins came out at about 8.5%, which was a long way below what they averaged for the year, and I think also there was the comment that H2 growth had slowed as well because of customer mix. So can you indicate what the fourth quarter pro forma organic growth was for Majorel, please? And then just thinking about the comment for 2024, I think you said that Teleperformance standalone can probably still grow at around 5%, which therefore implies a lot lower growth for Majorel.
So just to understand how much of a drag Majorel is gonna be, and that question also then flows onto the margin as well. You know, if it was 8.5% margin in the fourth quarter, what kind of margin ex synergies should we be thinking about for Majorel? 'Cause that seems to be the real weak spot in terms of the down step in guidance. Sorry, that's sort of lots of questions in one there, but that'd be really helpful. Thank you.
Just a question about the 8.5% of the two months of Majorel, which are exceptional because you have roughly EUR 10 million of costs that have been embedded in these two months that are exceptional. Meaning some reorganization in some specific countries that were decided before, some people that decided to leave, plus some cost of the deal that was embedded in their margin that we were unable to highlight differently. So we are probably much more. In fact, we are not probably, we are. If you take the Q4 of Majorel, they are not so different of what they have, what they are for the full year that has been displayed in the presentation.
It's clear that the growth of Majorel in Q4 has been reduced significantly versus the trend, and I, and I was telling you that the final growth of Majorel for the full year was 5.5% like-for-like, well, estimated. We know that December has been difficult in Majorel, slightly negative. That is what I can tell you. In 2024, again, I'm going to be to be clear on that, we are not going to follow Majorel and TP. We call it TP B lue and TP Pink so far. We are going to mix them together, and this is. And why? Because what we want to do is to do it quick, fast and good. What does it mean? It means that you are launching a lot of of different we'd say topic in the meantime.
Tomorrow, Majorel will be totally part of a group. What is clear is that the growth embedded with the from the budget from TP was higher than Majorel. It's going to be mixed all along, and we are going to not be able to follow specifically Majorel by itself in 2024, as a separate company. That's what I can tell you. You saw that the margin of Majorel is dilutive to TP, and this is where we are. We have decided to accelerate as much as we can the synergies. That means that the EUR 50 million that Daniel mentioned earlier on is a run rate figure. That means that the decisions that have been made so far should lead to a run rate of EUR 50 million of margin for the full year. We probably... But the cost is there.
The cost you are going to incur, the EUR 50 million cost, of course, we are going to isolate this cost, but the run rate of the synergy will be EUR 50 million, hopefully better, but the cost will have an impact on the full year, of course, and will be probably lower in terms of positive impact of the synergy in 2024. That's what I can tell you, probably, half of it.
I can add four points. First-
My dear.
If you want five.
No, no, come on.
First, Majorel is a company that was known for excellent delivery and had tailwinds, thanks to a strong presence in social media and an excellent rebadging deal that they made with Booking.com. It has been public, so it's not something new. By the way, the clients of Majorel love Majorel, and we shared some of our clients, and sometimes it's Majorel people who take the lead of these clients, just to show that there is a clear interpenetration. But Majorel did not have an engine that Teleperformance specifically has, which is our spearhead, you know, our arrow, which is our strong business development team in all the regions. So we, and of course, as now, we have Majorel, and there is tailwind, we need to boost this structure that we have. It's a question, but it takes time.
You know, it's a question to hire the right person, to make sure that they are well onboarded, and okay, it's a question of months, maybe 12 months, maybe 18 months, but it's not a structural issue. Then when you merge two companies in the same business, you always have, at the margin, some kind of erosion, because suddenly a client that loves you, say, "Hey, come on, now you represent 60% of my share of wallet. I cannot. I need to, to balance a little bit the risk. So I love you, but you are going to have only 50%." And so there is a little bit of this leakage, marginal-
Mm-hmm
... in the first year. Four, the point number four is: with the synergy-... we compensate the gap in margin, and so the deal with Majorel is not going to be dilutive to Teleperformance margin after 2025.
Okay. Thank you very much. So just going back, Olivier, so the synergy numbers, they're run rates for the exit of each year, so we won't see, in theory, the full EUR 150 million until fiscal 2026. Is that-
Exactly.
Okay, thank you. Then my second and third question is much simpler. Bhupi, just on the churn definition, is that completely synonymous therefore with deflation, or do you include a degree of customer loss within that churn number? I sense it's synonymous.
There is some degree of customer loss, but that's minimal. It's not kind of huge. It's mainly driven by revenue deflation from automation, offshoring.
And then the final question, I suppose to all three of you, is, I'd just really like to understand the logic as to why you don't report an underlying earnings definition, and how that would be in your shareholders' interest to actually report that.
Sorry, can you repeat?
Most companies of your size report an underlying earnings definition and an underlying net income definition, which adjusts for, you know, lumpy, one-off finance charges and associated tax and other lumps and bumps. Given that creates volatility at the bottom line, do you think it would be in your shareholders' interest to move to that basis?
Yeah, of course.
Ask our Chief Financial Officer.
No, we might do that, so, I didn't thought it was absolutely key for you to get the stuff, but, okay.
I think, I don't think it matters for the sell side. I think investors would find it very useful.
Really? Okay.
Thank you for the suggestion.
Hi, three questions from me as well, Ben from Deutsche Bank. Firstly, just thinking about scale in the industry, and as the generative AI solutions that you've talked about today become commoditized and more widely available from third-party providers, is there a risk that some of the smaller players in the industry are more agile in being able to divert capacity towards niche growth verticals? And more broadly, why is scale important? Why is being the market leader important in this industry, in that context? The second question, if I could just take them all at once. In terms of offshoring, obviously a huge dynamic in 2023. Can you explain, historically, you've achieved very significant gross margin premium on offshored volumes.
Can you explain how you can justify those premium margins with your clients, especially in the current environment, where there's a huge focus on cost and potentially going forward when clients will be looking to automate some of their volumes? And then the third question, I think one of your peers was talking in the last few days at a conference about potentially 30%-40% of volumes in the industry being at risk of automation, going forward. Can you, can you commit—When you think about market growth over the midterm, can you commit to market growth being positive?
We are going to try to answer together. First, the small players, honestly, and more agile, it always happen. You know, you always have a new a startup that can be super agile and so on. But this is not the time for that. I mean, we serve very large client who need and want to consolidate with less partners. When we ask directly the question to our clients, even before to make our 2024 budget, to say: "Okay, how do you see 2024? How is it going to be?" And we get answers that are not extraordinarily enthusiastic about the business, but typically we get the answer: "In any case, you are going to have the same level of business, because we want to consolidate with global partners.
We want to be sure that we have the consistency. We have to be sure that we don't need to speak to 50 different people with 30 different managers who manage the vendors. So we are much more in the era of consolidation, and our largest clients, you know, they are client for right now, the average is 14 years seniority. But it's 14 years seniority only because we onboard new clients every year. We have many, among our top 10 clients, we have many clients that are with us for more than 20 years. So I mean, it's not because suddenly you have an agile guy that is going to come and to say, "Hey, me, me, me!" that is going to change something. On top of that, we are not exactly blind.
We have something that we call TP Lighthouse, which is a special unit based in India that scans the market every single day, and we know what's happening all around the world every single day.
It's not necessarily that large players cannot be agile.
Then, what the client likes is that we have the largest footprint in the industry, and so not every size fit everybody. Some clients are going to prefer to deal with us in Colombia because they are in the U.S. They, it will be three hours from Houston or from Atlanta or. They will feel more comfortable, more proximity. There will not be 12 hours jet lag. I can tell you, I go very often to the Philippines, and I live in Miami. It's 26 hours trip. Our clients like the fact that Philippines, India, Latin America, Egypt, wherever in the world, we have a solution that we can customize for them. Then, are we at risk of de-growth? We don't think so.
We don't think so, but, you know, when you read, there is a book that is very famous right now, which is The Beginning of the End, written by a smart economist and sociologist in the U.S., which shows that, maybe, the world of the fifty glorious, or the sixty glorious, in which the Western world has been, maybe is challenged today. From us, from our point of view, we continue to see ourself in a growth situation. Now, I don't know if tomorrow there is not going to have a political threat that is going to cut the world trade. I don't know if tomorrow there is going to be the Houthis who are going to cut the submarine internet cable that make the world communicating.
For that, we have a lot of protection because everything is double at TP. So if it's not one route, one route, it's another one, and then we have the cloud. But, you know, I'm sorry, but all of us, we have entered in a very difficult-to-predict world long term. I think that we are solid. I think that we are going to do the best in our class, and what I call our class is not just customer experience contact center, it's BPO. It's, it's...
There is something strange, by the way, in the perception that I see from the market, which is it seems that a class of actors are deeply impacted by a kind of distrust in the future, when another class of actor who do exactly the same job, or at least for 50% of their business, are not at all impacted. But this is probably the common sense of the algorithm.
If I could just follow up on the first question. Given your comments about vendor consolidation, it sounds like there's likely to be an ongoing M&A thematic in the industry among your peers. If there is another mega deal in the sector, would you be forced to consider to go out and do another deal yourself to remain the largest player?
We don't believe in doing defensive deals.
No. Majorel deal was an offensive one. A lot of people did not understand that it was an offensive one, because it helped to fill a gap in France and Germany that were the market number three and number four.
We have to stop because we will be late if not speaking.
I think that we have a break now, and then there is a second part where you are going to listen about Bhupender Singh, Miranda Collard, who is our Chief Global Chief Client Officer, who is here with us today, and Scott Klein, about the business deep inside.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.