Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to Nagarro SE's webcast for analysts and investors presenting the 2021 annual results and Q1 2022 quarterly results. Please send us your questions via the chat tool you can see on the left-hand side of your screen. We will have a Q&A session after the presentation. If you have any technical difficulties during the session, please use the chat box as well. Now, I'd like to hand over to Christian Bacherl. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Beatrice. Good morning to those of you tuned in from North America. Good afternoon to those connected from Europe and Asia. On behalf of Nagarro SE, allow me to extend a warm welcome to you. You should have received a copy of the earnings release for Nagarro's first quarter 2022 results. If you have not received the press release, a copy of the release as well as of this presentation is available on Nagarro.com in the investor relations section. With me on today's call are Manas Fuloria, co-founder and custodian of entrepreneurship, and Vikram Sehgal, co-founder and custodian of operational excellence. Before I pass you over to Manas, I would like to remind those listening that some of the comments made on today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release.
Additionally, please also refer to the earnings release for the notice on reported results that are non-GAAP measures. With that, it is my pleasure to hand you over to Manas.
Thanks, Christian, and welcome everyone. This call is going to cover both the FY 2021 results that were released on April 29 and the results of Q1 2022 that were released just some hours ago. Let's start with the FY 2021 results. You have probably gone through the annual report by now, so let me use this time to add some additional narrative to it, add some additional color to it. 2021 was, for us, a year of two parts. Quarter one was relatively slow. Demand had, of course, increased around the turn of the year, but we did not have the hiring pipeline to service it. We had been too absorbed and busy with the spin-off and listing in December 2020 to make the necessary changes in time to take our foot off the brake, as it were, and put it on the accelerator.
Anyhow, after the slow start in Q1, we recovered rather smartly, and Q2, Q3, and Q4 were three successive quarters of strong sequential revenue growth. 10% sequential growth in quarter two, 11% in quarter three, and 15% in quarter four. We had to keep revising our guidance for 2021 upwards again and again, which was a little awkward, but frankly, a good problem to have. Just to be clear, this breakneck growth came with a lot of pressures on us, particularly in talent acquisition and profitability management because of the high wage inflation scenario. As the year progressed, we sort of got used to the relentless pace, and it kind of became the new normal for us.
As usual with Nagarro, we kept tweaking, we kept improving, we kept making organizational design changes and infrastructural changes to our systems and our processes to support this growth momentum. Because of this acceleration in the last three quarters of the year, Nagarro's revenues for the year 2021 grew 26.9% over 2020, which in constant currency translates to a revenue growth rate of 28.6%. Gross margin was 28.3%. adjusted EBITDA for the year was 14.6%, which to our minds was a satisfactory outcome given the high wage inflation. As we have mentioned several times before, our focus in these years is not to maximize profitability, but to maximize Nagarro's revenue growth and maintain an acceptable level of profitability. Talking of growth, we added over 5,000 net new Nagarrians in 2021.
We also had the acquisition of ATCS with its significant presence in the U.S., in Germany, and in India. I'm happy to report that the ATCS integration is proceeding very well. 2021 also saw us enter the SDAX and the TecDAX indices. We are particularly proud to be a TecDAX company, and we think this will also be very good for our business, in the long run, especially in Europe. Moving from the FY 2021 to the Q1 2022 results, we have carried our growth momentum from Q4 into Q1. Nagarro's revenues grew 60.3% year-on-year in Q1, which is 55.2% in constant currency.
The sequential quarter-on-quarter growth remained high at 14.5%, which makes this the fourth consecutive quarter of 10+% sequential quarter-on-quarter revenue growth. The gross margin came in at 27.1% and the adjusted EBITDA was 15.6% of revenue. We added nearly 2,300 Nagarrians in quarter one. Not all of these additions are immediately productive, I must warn you, since this number includes many young trainees. Also, some of these new Nagarrians came to us via the acquisitions of Techmill Global and Right Concepts with slightly different profiles of skills and billing rates. Overall, our pace of growth and hiring has been reasonably good. Nagarro's employer brand is the strongest it's ever been, and it has been helped by our generous and quite bold Work From Anywhere policies.
Meanwhile, we expect the job market to cool somewhat in the coming months, especially as the flow of cheap funds to startups begins to dry up. That's in the future. We haven't seen any of that happen yet. In quarter one, we continued to battle wage inflation. As we have said before, we believe the demand for our services is ultimately quite price inelastic. Since the digital products and the digital services we are building for our many clients are, in most cases, critical to their business and critical to their competitiveness and critical to their strategy. However, these billing rate increases that we can extract will typically lag our wage increases. Hence, there can be margin pressure in the interim. This is just a general statement.
In this quarter one, we were joined also, as you know, by new colleagues from Techmill Global, with a presence in Singapore, India and Australia, and our new colleagues in Right Concepts, with a presence in the U.S. and the Philippines. We also opened legal entities in Colombia and Ecuador. These last two are still very small at the moment, but may be seen as a sign of intent from us. We continued to innovate in quarter one around Work From Anywhere. I would not like to speak too much about the details of what we are doing since it is a major competitive differentiator. I can say that we have built in many markets, in many job markets, a special positioning around this that is very helpful to attract talented engineers and to give them a nice working context.
In fact, Nagarro's entry to the United Nations GCNI's Global HR Best Innovative and Sustainable Practices Championship placed first runner-up. It was titled Work From Anywhere You Decide, and this made us quite happy. Moving on and getting a little more into the details for the quarter. We have touched some of these numbers already in terms of growth. We ended the quarter with EUR 186 million in revenue and EUR 29 million in adjusted EBITDA. Our fastest growing industry year-over-year was automotive, manufacturing and industrial, which grew 88%, aided by also by the acquisition of ATCS, whose largest client is a European car company. Our slowest growing industry was telecom, media and entertainment, but even that wasn't too bad at 20%. Among the segments, the rest of the world has been growing very rapidly for Nagarro.
It continued to grow very rapidly, and this quarter it was joined by North America. Europe was relatively weaker, but this is also a function of where we decided to deploy scarce and expensive engineers as the U.S. dollar strengthened. Our guidance for 2022, as you see on the bottom right, updated on April twentieth, is a revenue of EUR 770 million, gross margin of 28% and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%. We routinely monitor our industry exposure and our client concentration, and I'm happy to say both of these were still comfortable. We remain quite diversified by industries and our top 10 clients made up only a little over a quarter of our revenues in this, in these three months. Here's some more detail on our segments, which are the client regions for us.
North America and the rest of the world have been taking share away from Europe. I can safely say that there is a lot of pent-up demand in every region that we just don't have the engineers to service. We ended the quarter with nearly 16,000 professionals, of which roughly 14,800 were professionals in engineering. Here is another view on the segment performance. We have covered most of this already, but you can see that North America and the rest of the world have grown very rapidly, whereas the growth of Europe has been relatively subdued. Coming to our balance sheet and cash flows. On the left here you can see our net liabilities and the net leverage, which is defined as a multiple of the trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA.
Our net liabilities have gone up in this quarter from EUR 166.0 million to EUR 191.1 million. Net leverage remains at 2.1x, which we think is quite comfortable. On the right you see our cash flows for the quarter compared year-over-year with Q1 2021. There's really nothing dramatic here except the increased cash flow in investing activities related to the acquisitions that we have made. Now we are nearing the end of the presentation. As a tradition, we have this reminder on the investment highlights for Nagarro. This content is largely unchanged since the Capital Markets Day in 2020, before the spin-off, but it's just nice to revisit this slide every quarter.
It gives me some satisfaction to see that we continue to prove these claims, to validate these claims of positioning, of great clients, of a great organization and culture, of great financials and strong growth, just to keep validating them line by line. I'll just give you a couple of seconds to go over it. The important thing here is the last line, which is growth. Growth is key for us, and we have had a quarter of good growth. I would like to tell a little story here.
Even eight years ago, in 2014, when Nagarro was less than EUR 100 million in revenue, we had this, our first global management meet, as a significant company, and we set our sights at that time on becoming a billion-dollar company, a billion-dollar revenue company, which was a growth goal for us of 10x. Now, the 10x goal, the billion-dollar revenue goal, is close to being achieved if the current trajectory holds. We have started thinking on how we will get the next 10x of growth in the next 10 years. For this 10x growth in 10 years, we have been working hard, as always. At Nagarro, we always are working for the future. We are working hard to build out the infrastructure of the company to be hyper scalable.
This Work From Anywhere environment that we have, sort of come into because of the pandemic, it incidentally helps a lot with this whole hyper scalability while it adds some other challenges. This design, with this promising opportunities from Work From Anywhere as well as the challenges, this design for the future is tricky and fun and exciting and actually quite promising, right? This is what we are working on at the moment. We are also thinking about what Nagarro should be known for. Besides the business success, what Nagarro should be known for ten years from now. We believe it'll have something to do with our mission statement, which although more than a decade old, seems more and more important today in today's troubled world.
We will speak of this some other day on some other forum perhaps, but this aspect of what we want to achieve, as a company is very important for us, and you will see us act in the coming months and years in this direction, and take our core value of caring to the next level, along the lines of this mission statement. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity, with a strong quarter to reemphasize that at Nagarro we don't see this as a quarter by quarter play. We don't think of the company that way. We don't think of our numbers, in the quarter by quarter way. We are rather out to build a company that will last decades and will grow for decades.
That takes some hard work and it takes some investment in the future. From time to time, you have to have some good luck, and sometimes, you know, you have some bad luck. Through all of this, you know, we are very thankful to you all for your participation in our growth story, and hope you'll be committed to the company equally through good times like this time and through tough times. In short, thank you all very much for your participation and support, in this journey. We will now take questions, and for this, I will hand the call back to the operator.
Thank you, Manas. I think I'll take over. As a reminder to all participants, please enter your questions via the chat. We will pick those up one by one, read them out, and then Manas and Vikram will take care of the answers. First question was submitted by Martin Jones. What percentage of engineers are employed versus freelance consultants?
The vast majority of our engineers are employed. We don't disclose the numbers, but it's really the absolute vast majority. We do have some freelance consultants, but it's like a small rounding error.
Second question, again by Martin. You've managed to protect margins well. Do you expect to be able to pass through all wage cost inflation over the longer term?
Yes. I've been saying this even for the last 15 years. We have seen wages increase in many of our service regions. We have seen how clients are able to adjust to these wage increases. We do expect that in the longer term, we will be able to pass all wage increases to our clients.
Again, Martin Jones. Do you plan on large M&A or more bolt-on to add capabilities?
We, I guess you never say never, but our primary focus is on bolt-on acquisitions, mainly for client access. Because by now we have this huge asset of case studies and testimonials in many regions and industries and types of solutions, and we wanna leverage it as much as possible. Client access is typically what we will do M&A for, but once in a while, there is some niche capability that a nice acquisition can bring us, and that we will obviously stay open to that. Transformative M&A is not a key priority at the moment.
Two more questions from Martin. Given the opportunity in the share price and strong cash generation, would you consider a buyback of shares?
These are always considerations, and we discuss these all the time, but I don't have any plans. We don't have any plans at the moment.
Last question before we jump to other questions. Martin Jones. Will you hold a Capital Markets Day this year?
We don't have one on the calendar yet, but we will. We don't have a firm idea yet.
Next question is from Adrian Pehl. Are there any remaining acquisition-related expenses, cash outs, resulting from your recent acquisitions to be booked in Q2?
I do not think so. I think all the, I mean, of course, there's. I could get back to you with a firm answer, but I do not think so. Vikram, do you want to add to that?
I agree with you, Manas. I don't think there are any expenses that are not booked at this time, but we'll send a confirmation.
Second question by Adrian Pehl: Why have you decided to keep the outlook unchanged after 60% growth in Q1, which is way above the 40% run rate you see for full year 2022? What are the risks you see here?
Yeah, we call it as we see it, and we are very careful with revising guidance, and there is always a certain quantum of change that we need to have before we revise guidance, as per, you know, the rules of the road. We'll keep an eye on this, and when we feel that we are at the point where we can and should revise guidance like we did last year, we will do so. At the moment, you know, we have challenges in hiring, we have challenges expected in the economy, so we are just being cautious.
There is still a lot of questions, so, I'll take the next two from Adrian and then switch to another listener. Operating cash conversion has been weak, 10% of EBITDA in Q1 due to working capital. How will working capital play out in the rest of the year? Which conversion do you target?
You know, Vikram, do you wanna take that?
Yes. We did have a lower conversion. This was mainly due to increase in the receivables in the working capital, but also because of some of the revenue was unbilled for a new customer that was onboarded. We hope to get improvement in this figure.
We don't actually state any particular target for this cash conversion, but yeah, we keep an eye on it, yeah.
All right. Adrian's fourth question related to M&A, that was already answered. Next set of questions come from Nicolas David . Could you share the like for like growth in Q1, 2022? Also specifically the like for like growth in NAM and in North America and rest of the world. What was the organic net staff hiring in Q1?
Could you repeat the question? The like for like in North America?
Like for like in Q1 overall, and then more specifically for North America and Rest of the World.
The like for like, I assume that to mean over Q1, 2021. Is that correct?
The organic, I guess.
Oh, the organic. Well, we're not splitting out the organic growth in our numbers, so we couldn't share that. Yeah, so we couldn't do that either at the segment level or the overall level.
All right. There is a question on organic net staff hiring. Do you wanna answer that, Manas?
Yeah. We just wanna be consistent about what data we share. We are not typically calling out what the hiring is by, for example, acquisitions or direct hiring. Yeah, I mean, the majority of the growth is coming from hiring, but yeah, we don't call out the exact numbers.
Right. Also from Nicolas: Is the pressure on Central Europe's gross margin only linked to inflation or also linked to another item, for example, project execution issues?
No, it's not linked to project execution issues. Yeah, it's nothing of concern, in that sense.
All right. With that, we'll switch to a set of questions by Andreas Wolf. First of all, he says congratulations on the strong start to the year. Thanks, Andreas. First part of the question, I think refers to Q1 organic growth. Andreas, you heard Manas' answer, so I switch to part B of the question. Bigger players such as IBM and Accenture are experiencing strong growth. Do you observe even stronger competition for IT talent offsetting the relief related to less hiring from startups?
No, I think the general consensus in the industry seems to be that there is a slowdown in the job market expected. Now, to what extent that actually manifests is always up for discussion. It's very difficult to predict the future. I think that there's the talent that we are typically tapping into, we have startups as a big competitor for us. If that relaxes somewhat, it'll give us some more breathing room.
At part C of the question. At what level do employee attrition and utilization currently stand?
Yeah, these are both numbers that we don't disclose, Andreas, as you know. As we say, you know, we have always said that we have an approximate 12%-15% attrition. We are now a few percentage points over that, but nothing to be, you know, really crazy concerned about. That's as specific as I can be. Utilization, we don't report, and we don't even take very seriously internally yet. Because we are spending a lot of time in trying to develop accounts and practices. We're just concerned more about how it all nets out rather than pure utilization.
All right. Part D of Andreas Wolf's question. Do you observe a change in the type of projects that clients are currently carrying out compared to pre-pandemic times?
Yes. I mean, I won't say that there's a wholesale change, but there are definitely many cases of a client just deciding to make some dramatic investment in some adjacent area and roll something out in a few months in conjunction with a consulting company. So there's a lot of fast-moving activity. There's a lot of you know, CXO-level involvement. I think that, as we all know, the digital products and services are now seen as more the frontline mainstay of many of these clients and their businesses. This has happened during the pandemic. I think that big transition has happened during the pandemic.
All right. Next question comes from Jonathan Ard. What billable resources do you have in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia? What is the step-up in costs in Q1 due to the start of the year for employee taxes, et cetera, that will now get absorbed into the P&L?
We have minimal exposure to Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Just again, a rounding error. On the employee taxes, could you repeat the employee taxes question again, Christian, please?
Yeah. What was the step-up in costs in the first quarter due to the start of the year for employee taxes, et cetera, that will now get absorbed into the P&L?
For employee taxes? I'm sorry, I didn't get the question. Ard, if you can-
Jonathan, we'll
Send the question, we will, we'll send a reply back to you.
Yeah. Absolutely. Another part of Jonathan's question: What were the revenues and employees of the last two acquisitions?
Yeah. As I said, we don't state these numbers separately. You can try to figure some of these out from the annual report. As a policy, we don't separately state these out.
All right. Next question is from Paolo Ciccioli . In terms of cash flow generation conversion of EBITDA into operating cash flow, full year 2022 will be on the same line of full year 2021, or shall we expect an improvement?
Vikram, do you wanna take this question? I mean, we typically guide only up to the adjusted EBITDA, but if you wanna give a directional answer, Vikram.
Thanks, Manas. Our endeavor is always to increase the conversion from EBITDA to the cash. You know, but looking at the circumstances and the fact that, you know, we have had some increases in the, you know, working capital requirements, we would say we would try to maintain the levels for 2021 and going into 2022.
Thanks, Vikram.
All right. The next question is a follow-on question from Andreas Wolf. Could you please describe some of the projects that are driving growth in first automotive and second financial services?
All right. You know, I can't talk about all the projects, but if you would take automotive, for example, we did get permission from BMW to share three of our case studies that are on the website. You will see, for example, for BMW Motorrad, there's a platform for subscribing and renting motorcycles. There's a connected car case study and another one. There's a bunch of these case studies that could be taken as examples. If you look at financial services, I don't know which stories I can talk about, but there are digital transformations at various banks. At the Dubai Expo, we did the digital card that was used there.
We are working in banks around the world, in fact, with their digital transformations, working a lot with consulting companies for these. These are some of the examples. I mean, there's of course a whole variety of different solutions. The BFSI colleagues must be sort of listening to me and finding my examples very shallow. Yeah, there's a lot that's going on. It's one of our fastest growing units, and it's on track to achieve a, you know, a very, very three-digit run rate. Really cool.
Thanks a lot, Manas and Vikram. I think it's already past two, and we are basically running out of questions, so I suggest we conclude the call at this point, and if anyone has follow-up questions, you know, the team will be available to answer those.
Well, I'd like to thank everyone again for being here for this call and again for your support. We are very excited with the platform this last year and this quarter have given us. It's still been just barely 15 months or 16 months, maybe 17, since we spun off from Allgeier. The kind of traction we are getting is very exciting. Thanks for your support, and I'll see you next time.