Welcome. Welcome, everyone. This is exciting. So many of you here. It's very nice to see you all. On behalf of every Nagarrian, let me formally welcome you. Even those of you who are watching on the live stream, thanks for joining in. My name is Vaibhav. You know, I wanna start the session off by just telling you about what the day holds for us. This is our first capital markets day since we got listed. You know, we want to make it stand out. In true Nagarro fashion, there are about 20 of us here from all over the world. I think we have traveled from over 9 countries and hope to have a lot of conversations with you during the day.
It's our third year as a public company, and we feel we have a lot of stories to tell about ourselves and, you know, talk a little bit more, show a bit more about ourselves and say how fun a company we are to work with, how we are committed to our clients' success, how we are trying to rewrite the rules on how modern innovative companies should work while they scale, you know. That's the company that we want to be, so we'll talk about that a little bit today. Yeah, hopefully you'll find it enjoyable and informative today. You know, we would have gotten our work done. All right, here's what we have planned, right?
In the first half, we will talk about our org design, our culture, our core values, you know, our frameworks, processes, systems, how these all work together to create a differentiated experience for our clients, for our colleagues, even for companies that join us through acquisitions. We'll talk a little bit about that. After that, we have a coffee break, during which you'll again hear from us. There are so many of us here. Post the coffee break, we'll talk about the future of the company. We'll talk about some of our financial goals. We'll talk about what we're doing in the ASC space. We'll talk about how we look at partnership ecosystems to provide opportunities for growth. We will even talk about how we see AI as a potential opportunity for us. You'll, you'll hear all of that.
In the end, we have a Q&A session plan. The way we will conduct it is, we will request you to send your questions via email on ir@nagarro.com. The method for sending questions is the same for all of you who are present here and those who are on the live stream. Please do send your questions in as you have them. Please also mention specifically your name and your affiliation in the question, in the email. You know, it'll help us put together the questions later if you send them in early. We probably, as you can imagine, may not get to all the questions, so if we miss answering your question later, please, you know, understand that we maybe are running out of time.
You know, still can't get over how excited I'm as you can probably tell, right? I joined Nagarro, you know, when we were less than 100 people, and today I think we are 200 times that size. For me, it's been a very transformative journey, and throughout my time here, I've observed that we've always had an eye on the future. You know, we've always had some goal that we are looking at, which is different from what we have to do day-to-day, right? I mean, day-to-day work gets done, but you're always aligning yourself to something big. Until, you know, now, until recently, our goal has been to be a $1 billion in revenue company. As some of you may have read, we are projecting to surpass that goal this year.
you know, we will actually have achieved what we said out loud to ourselves in 2014 in our... When we were much smaller, I think about tenth the size. I'm sure the people with the figures would confirm that. These are actually slides from that meeting we had in 2014. You know, we said that we hope to be a billion-dollar company someday, but we also had eye to a smaller, more immediate target, which I think... I'm sure Vikram will talk about it later. I think we did meet that 2018 target as well. This was our hope back then. We are very close to achieving this goal, you know, this year as I said. What's our next big, hairy, audacious goal? We call it 10/20/30, right?
That is $10 billion in revenue at 20% adjusted EBITDA with a 30% year-on-year growth in revenue. This is what we would like to do. It's not a, it's not a plan. There's no plan for this. We don't have timelines for this. This is something that now all of us, all Nagarrians, you know, hold in our hearts, in our minds, and in our own way, we try to figure out ways on how we can contribute to this goal. You know, how do we design our work, our processes to be a 10x company, right? There'll be twists and turns along the way, but we move towards it all the time.
But I keep referring to Vikram because, you know, he likes to be more exact than I am, and he will talk later in the day more about the more immediate things that we can see and feel type of goals. Let's talk about 10/20/30 a bit more. How do we even envision moving towards this, something like this? It's quite big. It's far out there. What we do is we design. We are a company that's obsessed with doing things by designing. You know, we are all techies. We all like to do architectures and, you know, design diagrams and things like that. We take the approach of design, designing for scale, designing for culture. You know, designing for maybe the most important thing, differentiation.
You know, we are a company that is quite obsessed with standing out, with being fearless, being different from everybody else. You know, being a company like that while scaling, because scaling has been solved before. Scaling has been done. A lot of our competitors, other companies in the space are much bigger than us. We want to scale while maintaining our differentiation, while being the company that we are today. We design. We design for entrepreneurship, we design for agility. What that means is that all business units in Nagarro call their own shots. You know, they have the freedom to invest for their client strategy, invest for their growth, take decisions without, you know, being in collaboration necessarily with a central team or something like that.
On the other hand, our design also incentivizes all of the business units to work with each other. It becomes a collaboration model rather than a command and control model. We design for being global and non-hierarchical. What that results in is a very low importance for country or legal entities in the way we work. What that results in is not having a CFO, instead having a finance council, or not having a chief HR officer, instead having an HR council. For that matter, we don't even have a CIO, we have an IT council. This is how we work, right? We design. We design constantly. It's a never-ending thing. For example, I was talking about a differentiated experience for colleagues, for Nagarrians.
Every Monday, four members of the senior management meet and brainstorm ideas on how we can elevate the experience of our colleagues globally at scale. This is something that, I mean, I think three of them are present here. I think Manas is here, I'm here, Vera is here. This is something we do without fail. For creating a differentiated client experience, we started what we call as the Learn, Socialize, and Disrupt program, you'll hear about more later. Every week, several members of the senior management hold live sessions with the entire company, sharing experiences and learnings on how to create value for clients, how to elevate the experience for our clients. This is something that we do without fail. We've been doing it for years now.
Later in the presentations of my colleagues, you will see many examples of this thinking at work, you know, processes, frameworks, you know, global ways of working, all being put in place with an eye on 10x, again from the 10/20/30. We do all this, but, you know, one measure of success, aside from the actual growth and the numbers, is what our clients say about us, right? What do the clients think? We measure that also obsessively. We are a company which runs a client satisfaction survey every quarter instead of, let's say, every year. I think we did announce that last year we made some changes to how we do client satisfaction measurement. We made our questions much more actionable, much more sharp.
What we didn't say is last year, we also started measuring a more standard and acceptable measure called Net Promoter Score. We haven't published our Net Promoter Score till date. We will do so, but as a quick recap, Net Promoter Score is something where we just ask one question. We say, on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being very unlikely and 10 being very likely, how likely are you to recommend Nagarro, right? Folks who answer 0 to 6, we call them detractors. We should have 0 detractors, but everybody has them. These are folks who are maybe going to change partners, they may recommend others to not work with you. This is not a good thing, right? It's a pretty large scale.
Part of the scale is for detractors. Those who say 7 or 8 are passives. They like you, they're happy with your work, but they're not enthusiastic. Perhaps, you know, if somebody else comes in, offers a better experience, they are likely to switch. Those who answer 9 or 10 are your promoters. These are the people who will go out of their way to talk about Nagarro, to recommend Nagarro. They're very happy with your work, very enthusiastic, very loyal. The way you calculate NPS is you take the % of promoters, and you subtract from it the % of detractors, and then you get a score. Anything above 0 is considered good. Anything above 50 is considered excellent.
The leaders, companies like Lufthansa or Apple or BMW or Audi, they all have scores in the 40s, 50s, 60s, maybe even 70s for a few companies, right. What we understand is in our industry, the average is around 30. It's a good, well, industry that serves its clients well. Our Net Promoter Score for the beginning of this year, this quarter is 61. You know, some responses still coming in, but this is a pretty good representation of what the score is gonna end up to be. We will be publishing this regularly going forward so that it's a standard way of measuring client satisfaction for us. It's a good score, I'm sure we are always looking to push this forward. I mean, that just means that there are some passives and detractors still in our mix.
With this, let me hand it over to Annette, who's going to talk about one of the things that we design for, which is culture. Thanks for your time.
Hi everyone, welcome. My name is Annette Mainka, and by the way, I'm not a techie. Along with other topics, I'm responsible for risk and compliance. However, today I will talk to you about culture. Culture at Nagarro. Why me? Because from a compliance perspective, I help make sure that our values define us today and tomorrow. Now that my colleague, Vaibhav, talked about our goals, you might ask, why culture? Why shouldn't we start with strategy? Why do we care so much about culture and values? More importantly, why should you care? Well, we live in a world where everything is comparable. A product to a product, a service to a service, and the question is: what makes you unique? In our view, we believe that our values are a true differentiator.
By the way, we are not the only ones to believe that values are incredibly important. Probably you all know Peter Drucker's famous quote, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." While we agree that value-driven culture, of course, cannot be overstated, we still have a more nuanced view of it. In our case, culture virtually has entered into a love marriage with strategy. The two simply belong together. Also, our culture and our compliance framework are not contradictory. They support each other and make sure that we safeguard our company in a human, in a value-driven way. You all know our caring values, let's just take a short moment to establish them again. Caring is an acronym. What does it stand for? Let's start with a C for client-centric. Our number one goal is always to help our customers to become future-proof.
We help them face their greatest digital challenges and come out as market leaders. Agile. No matter how big we become as an organization, we will always be organized in small, powerful teams, persistently collaborating and purpose-inspired. Responsibility is, for us, not only about intrinsic motivation and a very high level of self-responsibility, it's also about empowerment to bring the best out of every Nagarrian. We feel responsible for our clients, for our colleagues, and for the world around us. Intelligence has many facets. Besides the classical intelligence, of course, which is important, we are also concerned about emotional intelligence. Meaning the ability to develop in such a fast-growing digital global organization. Non-hierarchical, this is, by the way, one of my favorite ones. What characterizes us? We are not driven by titles. We do not have org charts in the entire organization.
You just heard from Vaibhav Gadodia we do not have the traditional CxO positions. This is important, we all adhere to our compliance rules. G for global. Yes, we work in over 33 countries. Our definition of global is not being represented in so many countries around the world. We do not focus on cultural biases. We do not care about country borders. We have a very natural global way of working together that is based on respect and mutual understanding for each other. Actually, we see ourselves as globalists, and I think you will have the opportunity during the day to experience this. Of course, caring is in itself a value without which all the other values fade away.
To sum it up, caring is our superpower, and you will most likely hear about this superpower during the day in other presentations that have, you know, other focuses, but still this is the red line throughout the day. Let's move on to another very interesting couple. Culture and structure. Culture and structure form a winning team at Nagarro. We believe that culture without structure is not scalable, and structure without culture is a recipe for disaster. Maybe drastic words, right? We truly believe that our values are not only a differentiator, but also the fundament for freedom that we, meaning all Nagarians need to foster entrepreneurial spirit and flexibility to build and grow a company that makes an impact for our customers and for the world, today and in the future. Maybe you're asking yourself, "Okay, how can this work?
How can more than 18,000 Nagarrians around the world align with this special organizational structure? Well, there are two major points that I would like to mention here today. The first one is our playbook, or you can call it our code of conduct. The Nagarro Constitution, which along with our supplier code of conduct, builds the basis of how Nagarrians around the world work together in a compliant manner, be it with customers, with institutions, with suppliers, or with colleagues. Second, structure and processes start with global systems, like one single recruiting system, one single HR system, global interview panels, global onboarding processes, one single talent allocation planning system, one data lake in which all corporate data goes, one ERP on which all accounting gets done. Also one global compliance tool and processes that secure what we are doing.
These are just examples, while these systems and processes help us scale, they also ensure that from a compliance perspective, compliance targets are not randomly met, but can be monitored through systems and processes around the world. This is just an illustration to show what central and global structure at Nagarro means. Of course, we also have 18 companies that have joined the Nagarro family over the years. I think it's an open secret that most acquisitions fail due to the famous non-existing post-merger integration process. I do not want to get ahead of my colleague, Andrei, because he will talk about this in much more detail. Just one note at this point, the winning team also kicks into play here, culture and structure.
No matter whether we integrate new companies, whether we expand to new geographies, whether we implement global systems on a global scale, we do it with human persistency, persistent collaboration under compliance rules, and not to forget, with a lot of fun. Watching out for compliance, I may say that. I hope I could give you a small glimpse as an introduction of how our culture is unique, tangible, and real. With this, I hand over to my colleague, Andrei. Thank you.
Hello. Andrei. Surprise. A very warm welcome from all of us here. My subject today is mergers, acquisitions, and integrations viewed from the other side. Don't worry, I am from this side. Very much from this side. Why is that? Actually, my Nagarro journey started back in 2019, when four members of the Allgeier Group decided to merge, to unite, to form a larger and stronger Nagarro. At that time, I was part of one of the companies, quite a small company. I was part of the executive team, small executive team, and a minority shareholder. We were responsible for strategy, vision, mission, operations of that company. Today, I will share with you my personal experience of the journey to become Nagarrian, who I am today, proudly.
The experience is a fascinating one, because in 2020, when we started with the ambition to get listed later, we were 8,500 people. I was coming from a company of 700 people. As you know, today, we have just crossed 18,000 people. That's quite a journey. I'll share with you a couple of my insights. Before, a couple of words about myself. I am, I am a product of the Soviet Union. This is how I say, because my first spoken language was Ukrainian, and then because my father was a military engineer, my childhood was spent hopping from military base to another, from Ukraine all the way to Vladivostok. Today, I live in Romania, in a city called Cluj, also known as Klausenburg. It's known for its status as the capital of Transylvania, Siebenbürgen.
Don't worry, these days, we are not dangerous. Cluj is also famous because it's quite a unique place. It has 380,000 inhabitants and 100,000 students. It's also known for two of its large festivals. One is called Untold and another one is called Electric Castle. More, it's known as the largest location of Nagarro in Eastern Europe. My role in the organization now is leading one of our global business units, which is focused on life sciences and healthcare. I am also responsible of facilitating operations of Nagarro in Eastern Europe, which is Romania and Poland. Oh my God, these lights help me to understand what does it mean under the spotlight.
My experience, I have three very important points, and these points are very unique in my experience of being in this industry because I am with the company for 20 years. I am a techie. I started as a software engineer, but now I'm more responsible for the leadership side. When we started our journey, how I can describe it actually has 3 main components: preservation, then symbiosis, and then full integration. What does it mean? When we started our discussions, of course, we have a dedicated team, we have a structure, we have a framework in place how to integrate companies. Annette just mentioned integrating 18 companies, it's not very rookie, right? We have some experience with that. We have back-office, office integration. We have IT guys, finance, we have ERP, we have infrastructure, we have legal representation. All that works well.
What is different in Nagarro and what I felt different is that on top of this framework, which is very important and unique, we put emphasis on preserving what works well, because when we acquire a company, we look at something unique in that company. Each company comes with its own team, unique set of experience, skills. This is why we are looking at them. All the discussions we had from very, very beginning was business continuity. Back office works there to support us, but first make sure that what you do well, you continue doing well. You know, in our business, working with so many clients and having so much diversity, it's very important to give each entity freedom to customize its own approach so that we are delivering value for that specific case.
Preservation meant that when we joined the forces, I was leading life sciences business in my company. We also united the practice of bigger Nagarro from the life sciences point of view. On the way, we just united how we work and how Nagarro works, so that at the end of the day, we compound our experience and run for couple of months, even first year, just preserving the way we worked before and learning from each other how we can contaminate best things from one party to another. Then it went into a symbiosis, and today I can say that it became a full integration, but it was driven by the team inside out. We put our own deadlines. We have established our own objectives and how we merge the framework so that we work together.
I think that's fascinating because in my discussions I early had with Manas, and I was asking like, "Okay, what do you want me to do? I'm a senior leader. I decided to become part of Nagarro. Tell me." He was like, "You know, we have these KPIs. Clients must be successful. We have to provide numbers. You're a smart guy. Just come up with the best approach that you believe is there." What I feel, what I see, and even today, we do not put any frames or boxes around any integration. We treat people as intelligent people, and we ask them to do their best, and that works very well. Again, supported by the important things like compliance, which is invariable. Another part Annette already mentioned, non-hierarchical.
Non-hierarchical of course goes into the personal and people like me do not look at titles when it comes to communication and collaboration. What I felt is that non-hierarchical is also a way of working. When two companies sit together and discuss about merger, it doesn't matter if one company is 700 people and another company is 12,000 people, both have equal chance to be heard and to come up with the ideas. There is no hierarchy just because you are a company who are acquiring and the other company who is getting acquired. Everybody has the possibility to come forward and state its own ideas with the same weight. I'm not exaggerating. Even today, even when we discuss about different ideas, I think Nagarro, for me, it reminds me of Ratatouille.
You know the movie Ratatouille when there is this quote, "No, not everyone will become a great cook, but everyone has a possibility to become a great cook." I think in Nagarro it's same. Every single person has a possibility to become a leader if you have a good idea, if you can unite energy around you, nobody puts any structures or hierarchies around you to prevent you that. We do have structures, we do have roles. We have roles that have greater spans, so you have people who are responsible for other people, but every single person in Nagarro can be heard. It's up to you. You can become a leader at the company level if you have energy and you have ideas. That's something that also functions when we integrate companies, and it leads me to the next value is focus on people.
You all know that Nagarro mission, very mission is around people. We want to make distance and differences irrelevant between intelligent people. Again, coming back to my conversation with the leadership from Nagarro when we started discussions, I immediately felt that I am not treated as a resource or not even as a professional. You know, Nagarro internally, we refer to our culture as a family. To me, coming from Eastern Europe and, you know, with my background, it sounded a bit weird. I mean, I have work, I have family, I have... How does it work? I think through this approach of looking at each one of us as an individual, not only what I can do as Andrei as a professional, who I am, where I'm coming from, what's your...
There is a lot of focus on our personalities, and I remember many interactions around who we are as people. Last autumn, we had Conflux, which is one of our largest yearly gathering from the senior management team, and on that level, there was no problem and not at all strange or awkward for us to talk about personal experience. We were talking about job strategy, but also about personal experience on the stage, about our weird hobbies or things that we do with our families. It was absolutely okay and fine to do it, and this gives also an example to all the newcomers to start and integrate in and behaving that way, where it leads to a lot of trust.
About values and how we approach HR and how we tackle with people, because people, I was talking with somebody at the beginning and was saying, like, "People is the only raw material that we have." It's the gray material from here. So we put a lot of focus on people, and I will ask my colleague, Shruti, to tell you more about what do we do as HR to manage us as a community of Nagarrians, first of all. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Andrei, a very warm welcome to all of you. Let's begin with my introduction. I'm Shruti Tandon, I lead the People Enablement team for South Asia, and I'm a part of the Global HR Council. Today, I'm going to talk about our people practices, what we do for our colleagues at Nagarro. I think we have heard about caring as a superpower in a lot of slides prior to this presentation, we keep hearing about it in the other slides as well. Caring is primarily our superpower and our guiding principles in whatever we do. You know, the way we propagate our programs, design them, we actually live, breathe, and execute our core values. People Enablement at Nagarro is all about caring. It is actually...
Core values is the lens through which you would look at how feedbacks are given to individuals, how performances are discussed, how interactions are done. It is the base of everything that we plan and do. The way these core values could permeate through the organization is through a global framework that sends out signals of these core values. We have programs that propagate these signals and institutionalize the core values for our colleagues. Constant nudges are sent out through this framework, which would ensure that these programs are on track and that people are aligned to them. Ginger is the business operating model for us that helps us implement this framework. You know, Ginger enables us to run these programs at scale by reaching out to every Nagarrian and delivering the Nagarrian experience we want them to be delivered.
The journey into the Nagarrian experience, it starts right from the onboarding process. The moment an offer is released to a new Nagarrian, we start interacting and engaging with our future joiners and creating these touch points throughout their onboarding experience. There are programs that we have institutionalized, programs like Nagarro Overview, where leaders from within the organization talk to the future joiners. They answer their questions, and they talk about Nagarro. You're giving an opportunity to these people to give them a window into life at Nagarro. We have unplugged sessions, which are sessions which would give them a sneak peek into the tech landscape of Nagarro, and there are leaders who would represent these sessions. One of our key programs post-joining is TGIF. We call it Thank God It's Friday.
It's once-a-month session where the new joiners and leaders, they interact with each other. The purpose of this session is in form of storytelling, you know, talking about the core values of the organization and telling people who we are and giving them that experience. We also believe that common systems are important for common culture, and that's where Ginger, for us, plays a very significant role in orienting our new Nagarrians. The 30 days of Ginger series, which is bite-sized information sent to the new Nagarrians in the organization. It could be topics related to your core values, to your processes, to your policies, everything that they should know in their period of integration with the organization.
Not just that, Ginger also enables us to gather feedback and check on how the experience of these individuals has been throughout their onboarding journey. This brings us to a part where we talk about learning at Nagarro. Nagarro offers a variety of structured and unstructured learning growth plans for Nagarians. The way we are structured or our guidelines for learning has been is that we provide people with avenues and opportunities and learning material, but it is the choice and flexibility given to individuals and our colleagues to choose which skill they want to upgrade themselves in and how they want to chart their own growth path. They would have avenues available through Nagarro U, which is more so a traditional learning platform at Nagarro, which gives you loads of learning catalogs and learning material.
It allows you to level up through programs where what people can do is they can upgrade their skills in the areas of their choice, where they want to chart their own growth path. That's all about the way we run our traditional learning platform, but this helps us build the culture of learn agility within the organization. Learn agility is a learning mindset with, you know, the ability to try new things and with quick responsiveness. This helps us also create bridge-shaped personalities within colleagues. Bridge-shaped skill sets where people have deeper knowledge like vertical pillars of bridge, but layer of horizontal knowledge complementing these verticals of the pillar. The LSD series, we call it Learn, Socialize, Disrupt. Vaibhav spoke about this in his previous slides.
This is an umbrella initiative which composes of more than half dozen of different educational and virtual meetup sessions, and these are mostly led by leaders within the organization. People from all around the globe participate. These are beautiful avenues which are created for folks to learn, but at the same time, socialize, innovate, and connect together while the learning happens. There are hackathons, there are robots challenge, there are ideathons that happen, and there are master classes that senior leaders take for colleagues. There are whole loads of meetups that happen and synergies that get generated. This is our project ACE. This is our Global Performance Management System. It has three pillars to it. Anytime feedback, C for caring conversation, E for excellence review.
This is a tool that helps us build the culture of feedback at Nagarro. ACE adds to our famous Nagarro culture, the component of friendly, constructive and respectful feedback given to each other. The module A helps give feedback to anybody in the organization at runtime, anytime that you feel like. C is more so a structured twice a year program. Excellence reviews gives outputs to HR for important and key decision-making. All of this globally helps us create that common terminology and common culture of sharing feedback with each other. Now, there are programs also which are designed to recognize and reward exceptional performances at Nagarro. We do believe that, you know, there is a need of encouraging people, high performers, so that they're on track and they're motivated.
Some of the programs that we run under our applause segment, which is Shareboard, Old is Gold, Brightest Minds, these are more so avenues to recognize the exceptional performances of our people. Nagarro is culturally diverse, with offices in more than 33 countries and more than half a dozen of nationalities in senior management. We truly believe that inclusivity at workplace is totally embedded and aligned with the way Nagarro's culture is. We do not want to differentiate our colleagues basis where they belong to, basis their differences, but, you know, celebrating the dis-differences rather than focusing on them. There are a lot of programs and I won't talk about each one of them. A lot of them are already explained in our annual report. Programs like Glass Window.
All of these help us create this diverse culture and inclusive culture within Nagarro for our colleagues. Now, Yammer is truly a reflection of our core value, which is non-hierarchical. This helps us make distance and difference irrelevant between people across the globe. People could come, collaborate, learn together, form communities. This is one forum that helps build and connect all of us together. Our program called Connections is it's a once a week casual, open for all conversation meetup where people around the world could just come talk around any topic that they want to and interact. There are sessions where people jam with music or they sing or they just wanna get a beer and talk to each other about a topic of interest for that group.
This is once a weekly call that happens with colleagues around the world connecting together. Our aim is to be a great place to work, and for this, we need to build an organization which is also giving people a sense of purpose, getting them together, creating a fun environment of celebration, of camaraderie, of joy around. Globally, there are a lot of events that we run through Yammer, through other online platforms where we celebrate live concerts, where we do, you know, beer days, Halloween nights, family days. We do photography challenges, anything that would bind people together, you know, creating these experiences for each segment of people and connecting them in ways that we can.
Having said that, you know, the concept of hives, which is what we devised as a physical or a virtual place or a space, this allows us to retain the global component, the global flavor of the organization, but at the same time also bring in local flavors. There are things that keep happening in particular hives like India, in Austria, in US. There are always local flavors that run around the celebrations. Here are some of the events in Romania, summer parties across the hives. The largest regional event of South Asia, which we call Jalsa, was attended by 10,000 Nagarrians. It was an event that ran through 3 days, mornings and evenings. Mornings the entire office was converted into a carnival.
A lot of stuff happening and we had people all over South Asia come to this event, but not just that. We introduced another flavor to it for bringing our colleagues from globally across through a program that we call Global Ambassador Programs. These are folks who are highly engaged within the organization in terms of interacting with people, attending and doing a lot of meets, meetups. This event was attended then finally over three days by 10,000 Nagarrians and was a huge success. The best part of it is the people look at Nagarro not just a place where they come and code. It's a place where, you know, they belong to. It's a family. It's, it's...
The aim is primarily to make Nagarro a part of people's life and not just a company that they work for. Build this onto creating a differentiated work experience for every colleague and delivering that Nagarrian experience which is of paramount importance to us. With that, I would say thank you, and I would like to invite my colleagues Nidhee and Claudio onto the stage to talk about the robust global processes and systems. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. I'm Claudio. I live in Cluj-Napoca. I'm in the company since 2002. I have a software engineering background. I cover technical roles in the first part of my career, followed by coverage of project, account management, and various leadership responsibilities. Currently, I have talent allocation and planning responsibilities, co-leading this global function in Nagarro. Additional to my work, I'm passionate about sports and nature, especially mountains.
Hi, everyone. I'm Nidhee Pathak, from Gurgaon, India. I've been with Nagarro since 2004, so I complete 19 years next month. I started as a software developer and I've donned many hats, worked in different roles for Nagarro over the years, including technical leadership, account management, pre-sales, central project governance, automation of the talent allocation process, and very recently, since January 2021, I've been involved in scaling up of recruitment for Nagarro globally. Together with Claudio, we wanted to share about the framework of processes and systems that we have at Nagarro. Just to recap, you heard from our colleagues that Nagarro is an entrepreneurial, agile, global company which is driven by our system of core values denoted by the word caring.
To empower our values and culture, but also enable the growth that we envision, we need to have systems in place and processes in place. Let me start by sharing a little bit about why a different process and systems. We are entrepreneurial. We thrive in diversity. We love the uniqueness that each acquisition brings to us, each integration brings to us. With these diverse styles and different ways of working, what we need is a clear set of processes that we work under, clear ways of working that we have, and one Nagarro way of working. These processes and frameworks are not supposed to be or cannot be rigid, detailed, bureaucratic processes that cannot adapt. What we require are processes that are flexible, that provide adaptability, easy integration with minimal customization. We are also through and through global.
We don't operate under any boundaries of geographies or countries, which means that we need to operate under a single system of processes that is governed by rules, okay. We need these processes to have a framework that is an organized system that works with rules that work in the direction of the organization, allows the steering for the organization.
While Nagarro grows, staying agile is of key importance to us. The world around us evolves continuously, in the IT industry, the speed of change is very high. We wanted our processes and systems to allow us to quickly adapt to the industry shifts, to facilitate fast global steering and easy system replacement within the overall global system landscape whenever the case. Caring is our superpower. It required appropriate support from our processes and systems in terms of transparency, clear view of information, fairness, and overall contributing to a great Nagarrian experience. In order to achieve all these objectives, our process design took into account some key elements, loosely coupled but interconnected processes across different functions, enabling global collaboration between different specialized functions like talent allocation and planning, recruitment, people enablement, legal, finance, data protection, IT security, so that all aspects are properly covered, including compliance.
One global design and set of rules apply to all, ensuring fairness. We made our processes configurable so that it is easy to change and adapt and steer fast. We used abstraction for consistency and for handling complexity with a simple approach. For us, genus is an abstraction we use to express talent demands from projects. Genus, simply put, is a collection of skills. The drivers of existence of a genus are either the volume of demands for a certain combination of skills or a strategic direction. Colleagues across Nagarro, from the project teams to demand fulfillment, to recruitment, they use the concept consistently with no communication gaps and no redundancy on describing what exactly is needed for those positions.
Because the drivers of the existence of a genus are directly connected to the business need, it also allows us to very fast adapt to the industry shifts. We can create new genus, and we can deprecate existing genus accordingly.
Not only our processes are designed intelligently, we also support them through the systems that we have in place. We have an extensive library of workflows that are automated via algorithms. This ensures that our manual work is reduced and efficiency comes in, of course. Automation also means that the things work in a definitive and predictable way. There's no manual intervention, and that prevents any manipulation of data. Another interesting thing about automation of systems that are interconnected is that the upstream processes become more robust. One process is dependent on data coming in from the other process, and that has to be correct and complete. Process adherence becomes even stronger. At the center of our systems stands our data lake, along with data warehouse and a very special Ginger. Data lake has this vision. We have all data.
flowing into the data lake from different systems. On the data lake, you can actually get customized reports, dashboards, insights, nudges, whatever that you need. This data is transparently, readily available to everybody based on their context. Here's a view of the system. What you see here is the data lake is a big enabler for us. We envisioned this data lake in 2017, and since then, you know, we've brought in more systems, we've replaced systems, and all that has been going as we evolve, both in terms of sophistication and scale. We've brought in, you know, the ERP system, the HR system that have been evolved, the allocation system, the global recruitment system, and so on. The beauty of this design is actually that none of these systems are connected very closely.
They're not even coupled. They all communicate via the lake. That allows us to plug and play seamlessly, right? We can actually just move to a different system if that is what is required by our processes or if that is what is required by how we are evolving and bring in any state-of-the-art system without disrupting the rest of the things. This brings an immense power in terms of us being able to quickly evolve, stay agile as what we always want to be.
We are a global company, and we strongly believe in no borders between people and in the work from anywhere concept. In this context, communicating with our globally distributed colleagues is of paramount importance to us. The vast majority of the communication happens through Ginger, which is our internal intelligent conversational supporting system. Personalized nudges and insights, easy access to complex systems, fast and easy access to information and organization steering is all facilitated through Ginger. Just to give you a couple of examples, our colleagues can report their time through Ginger without even needing to log in into the one ERP system. Also, there are several nudges that go through Ginger so that we collect skill information or the input as part of the performance management system.
The role-based access to information is facilitated to Ginger KPIs and Power BI dashboard, all being leveraging the data layer. The talent allocation and planning is a global function, meaning it operates and it has the responsibility to respond to talent demands across all projects and in connection with colleagues from any country. The main objective is to provide for having the right person for the right job in a fair way, in a caring way, making distance irrelevant. Given the global exposure, given the very large number of projects we have and the different business domains, diverse opportunities are presented there for Nagarrians.
For us, the preferences of our colleagues, what excites them while working in a project is very important, so our colleagues can actually express those preferences using the, we call it, What Excites You module of the skill system, and then can express it based on criteria like business domains, technology, multinational teams, even colleagues they prefer to work with. While in between projects, there are trainings organized for the colleagues so that they are better prepared for future work.
The project, talent need fulfillment process at Nagarro is very strong. It processes through different functions, and it truly uses the global nature of our organization. If a project requires talent, they log in their request in the talent allocation portal. The allocation algorithm searches for a suitable and available profile in our system within Nagarro. The suitability actually is mapped using the skills management system, and the data from What Excites You, like Claudiu mentioned, trying to keep both the need of the project and also the Nagarrian experience and aspirations in consideration. If an internal availability is found, the allocation workflow is initiated. It just happens, right? A workflow starts. If an availability is not there, the external fulfillment workflow is initiated in which the recruitment is intimated of the need.
At Nagarro, we believe in consistency and quality of talent that we bring in, so there, the scorecards for assessment at hiring at Nagarro are standardized based on the genus that we have, which we call as our skill profile and the need, which is standardized across Nagarro. It does not matter where we are hiring. If we have a certain genus to be hired, the standard is consistent, irrespective of where and who is interviewing. That keeps the quality in check. Once a candidate is offered, they're onboarded through the HR system, and the allocation workflow picks up and then allocates. This is how it works.
This whole process harnesses the workflows that we have, which are run based on rules that are designed keeping in mind the strategic direction that we are taking, helps us to steer in the way we wanna go, helps us to steer in how we wanna go there.
We are there for our clients to enable their success. Their feedback is of high importance to us. Our global system framework enables that on a quarterly basis, we collect their feedback in a structured way. We use it to improve. While we have seen that, the global framework of processes and system helped us internally, it also contributes at the same time to what we call One Nagarro Way of Working. What this also helped us. Andrei mentioned before about the integration, it helped to make the integrations easier and successful on one hand. On the other hand, it allows that energy we have throughout the company, in all parts of the company, it is focused in one direction: to achieving our common goals.
While we have observed that, you know, this global framework of processes and systems supported us well, over the last years and supported Nagarro growth, we are aware we need to further and continuously evolve it so that it further supports Nagarro growth. We see excellence as an attitude of continuously striving to get better. It never stops. It comes with challenges, but challenges bring excitement and growth. Overall, it brings joys into our life in our ambition to reach higher heights.
All this we do is to provide delight to our customers, and I would like to invite Amit here, to help share a case study, with you all. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, good morning, everyone. Just to be sure, I'm a Nagarrian, not a customer yet. I'm a Nagarrian since 20 years, and boy, what a journey it has been. Today I am part of the travel and logistics vertical at Nagarro, where I'm kind of taking care of different activities within the unit. As part of the unit, we have been working with Lufthansa, which is one of our key customers in this unit, and we have been working with them since 2009, supporting them in different digital engineering initiatives across different areas. Today I would like to show you a video of which is recorded with the CEO of Lufthansa Systems, Dr.
Thomas Wittmann. He will talk about, you know, what it is and how it is to be working with Nagarro and what are his experiences, on that side.
Lufthansa Systems and Nagarro are working together for more than 15 years. Together, we are working on our products like NetLine/Ops ++ or Lido Flight, as well as application services for Lufthansa Group. For Lufthansa Systems, Nagarro stands for competence in technology, for open and transparent communication, and for the ambition to develop a long-term partnership. This created a lot of trust between the two companies in the meantime, and this is a basis for forming integrated teams to jointly solve technology challenges. This is one of the key success factor for any successful IT endeavor. As a global service provider, Nagarro contributes a lot of know-how in software development, in application management, and in IT and technology management in general. These capabilities complement our capabilities in having a deep understanding of the needs of the aviation business.
Together, we are forming a strong partnership to jointly address the challenges of applying IT to make airlines thrive. Nagarro is unique for Lufthansa Systems in having a very open and trustworthy management team, being very flexible and always able to adapt to our needs. They have a strong drive in always providing the right resources for the challenges we present to them, either through recruitment or through training. These three attributes form the foundation of our unique cooperation with Nagarro. We even sense a common passion. We see that Nagarro is very enthusiastic about the aviation industry, and we are happy that we have a partner here that shares our passion for aviation. In Nagarro, we value a lot that they provide us with technology-wise, very skilled people. That is not enough for a strong cooperation.
We also very much appreciate that they are able to integrate into our teams as allowing an cooperation on eye level, which I think is the foundation of successful projects. There are currently a lot of challenges for the aviation industry. Airlines and also Lufthansa Systems have to migrate their applications into the cloud. There's still a lot to do in order to complete system. Second, topic is airlines are currently investing a lot into digitalization, for instance, in digitalizing the customer experience. Third topic is we are working still hard on renewal of our product portfolio. We are already cooperating with Nagarro in all these three topics, and I think there is a lot of room to grow in the future in this partnership.
Next, I would like to invite Bernd Jurisch. Bernd is heading the flight and navigation solutions for Lufthansa Systems, and we have a very long-standing relationship with him. He will talk about the product and what we have been doing. Thank you, Bernd.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Amit. We heard a quote from Peter Drucker today in the morning, a famous one. I would like to start with a quote from Han Solo from The Force Awakens. He's asked by Rey, "The Jedi were real?" Han answers, "I used to wonder about that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil. The dark side and the light. Crazy thing is, it's true. The Force, the Jedi, all of it. It's all true." When I heard the presentation of today in the morning, I can tell you from my experience, it's kind of all true, what you heard here. It's really the case.
I don't want to repeat all of this, but would like to say some words about our joint history of Lufthansa Systems and Nagarro. want to tell you something about our business because this is important. Actually, I'm from Lufthansa Systems, I'm responsible for an area of the organization called Lido. Lido is an abbreviation for Lufthansa Integrated Dispatch Operation. We do products and services for airlines, I sometimes say what we do is the Google Maps for the pilots. Namely, if a pilot wants to fly from A to B, we tell him how to go and where to go, and how much fuel to take. There are two major goals in doing this. Namely, the first one is safety. Safety is utmost goal of aviation industry.
Everyone know this, whenever you enter a plane, you value this very much. The second one is cost efficiency. It's cost efficiency. It's fuel efficiency. If you know how much money airlines spend for kerosene, you know that this is. Even saving 1%, 2%, 3% of kerosene is a major number for all airlines around the world on the one hand. Of course, more and more important are environmental questions, and saving kerosene means saving CO2. That's it. We started the business doing Lido, flight planning, Google Maps for the pilot back in 1995, originally for Lufthansa. We did this not only for Lufthansa, we did this for airlines all around the world. In the course of the years, we got a market share of worldwide, roughly 25%, more than 50% in Europe.
I think 95% in the Gulf region. When you came in by aircraft, chance is pretty high that you came in with an aircraft, and the pilot used our solutions for route planning and for kerosene calculation. Pretty high chance. As I said before, we started in 1995. In the course of the years, I can say in the course of the decades, more and more customers joined our family. We heard the word family before today. Joined our family. We were growing. By the way, no customer ever joined our family, Lido ever went away again. We are very proud of this. In the course of the years, some things piled up. When you are a bit familiar with IT, you quite often hear about technical depth. I also like the word organizational or process depth.
Things of that pile up in the course of the years, we try to overcome it. We started projects. Actually, it's already 12 years ago, we tried to start and to run the first project of renewing our software, as I said before, run by airlines all around the world. We're starting to renew it with a good old waterfall project. After three years, I think we had good documentation, we stopped. It didn't work out. It was clear our product is important for all airlines around the world, especially for Lufthansa. We got the task from the Lufthansa board to renew, to really start a new project. It was clear from the very beginning, we couldn't do it ourselves.
It's not only because of the topic of manpower, it's a call because of the topic of know-how. We are excellent aeronautical engineers, very good in this stuff. We have to be it because of the topic of safety, because of the topic of cost efficiency. I would say, concerning IT knowledge, at this point in time, we weren't the best ones. We were looking for a partner and talked to other companies. We talked to colleagues from Lufthansa, and there were people saying, "Have you thought about working together with Nagarro? These are cool guys, this might work." This was the first time we got in contact with Nagarro and talked about, can we work together with running our new, our new project of replacing the old software, decades old, by a new one.
From the very beginning, it was clear we weren't able to say exactly what we want. This was not possible for us. We were really looking for somebody working together with us in a partnership, challenging us. Yeah. We weren't the ones who could say exactly, we have to do it this way. It was the other way around. We were looking for somebody who helps us to find out how we want to do things. This is how we started our specific relationship in, I think it's roughly 7 years, 8 years ago or so. Yeah. This was our Lido start, it grow. We work together throughout all the time. I would like to emphasize on 2 topics we have seen before. One is non-hierarchical, the other one was culture and structure. Non-hierarchical.
Once one colleague said to me, "The very specific thing about Nagarro is when you have a serious problem and you call Manas and tell him, 'Please, can you help us here?' Later, 3 years later, he will sit in your office and discuss with you, how can we help?" This happened once. We were in, not in a, in a situation where we had really problems how to develop our organization. This is when we called Manas and asked him, "Can you help us here?" He said, "Well, of course, I can." 3 days later, he was sitting in our office and we started to think about how can we be better there? The other thing is about structure and culture.
Another example, we asked or we wanted to invent a comprehensive metrics KPI system. I asked people from Nagarro, "What do you have there?" I got a very good answer. It was namely, "Well, we have some very good KPIs, which are important for every single project, and we want every single project to have a look at these KPIs." But we also ask projects to be self-responsible and to come up with their own metrics and their own KPIs to measure their success. What's important for these projects? This is for me, culture and structure and non-hierarchical at the same time. We have been working together and stepwise replacing our old product in the course of the years. We are still doing that.
With our first customers, our first cutovers with our launching customer, Lufthansa, in this case. They are really enthusiastic about what we have jointly developed there. Our collaboration, our partnership with Nagarro is going on, and if you ask me, I can't imagine that we ever stop it. Because what I feel when I think about our customers, namely being not really in a customer-provider relationship, but rather in a partnership relationship. We heard this eye level thing before. We heard working on joint goals before. This is what I experience in everyday cooperation with Nagarro. I can say I am very happy that we, with our product, with Lufthansa Systems, are a kind of, well, maybe I can say even a small part of Nagarro family.
I'm proud that Nagarro is also a part of the Lido family, what I've been taught before. What can I say? When I was invited to say some words here, I asked Amit and Manas, "What should I say here? What do you want me to say?" They said, "Say whatever you want." This is what I wanted to share with you. If you have any questions, I'm there for the coffee break and for the lunch. Happy to answer all your questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Bernd. Thank you for your nice words about Nagarro and for sharing your experiences, how it is to work with us. My name is Vera. I'm Vera Reiß-Meldeck. I've been a Nagarrian for more than a decade now, and today I'm co-leading the worldwide central marketing team. Thank you very much for being here. We now have a short coffee break. We invite all of you to join us on-site here, outside to the coffee break to have some more conversations. For all our guests who are joining in virtually, let me just tell you that we are not gone. We have 30 minutes break, and we will continue at 11:30 A.M. Frankfurt time with our second part. Thank you so much, see you soon again. Thanks.
Okay. Welcome, everyone. My name is Vikram Sehgal, I'm one of the co-founders of Nagarro. My entrepreneurial journey started about 30 years ago when I bought a couple of computers and put them in my living room, that was the start of my stream of Nagarro. In the morning session, you heard a lot of my colleagues talk about Nagarro's unique organization design, culture and processes, you know, how it makes Nagarro an agile, entrepreneurial, and a global company. All this leads to the numbers that we see on the screen. Between 2017 and 2023, we expect a CAGR of about 30%. During the same period, we are looking at a EBITDA CAGR of about 35%.
We have always set big goals for ourselves. Even when we were a $10 million company in the late 2000s, you know, we had set a goal for being a $1 billion company someday, and we expect to reach that number this year. Along the way, we have created huge value for a number of entrepreneurs, for Allgeier, and now for our investors. The management team has ownership in the company and is fully motivated to keep creating value and as a by-product, create wealth for themselves. Once we reach this $1 billion goal, what is our next goal? Vaibhav talked in the morning about the 10/20/30. You know, that is like $10 billion in revenue with 20% EBITDA margin and a 30% year-on-year growth rate.
You know, this is our updated long-term target. No timelines have been defined around this target. You know, but we are developing all the processes and systems so that someday we reach this number, and we believe we are setting Nagarro up for long-term success. Now I'll try to translate this 10/20/30 goal that Vaibhav was speaking about to a more short-term or near-term goal. You know, at the time of the last CMD in 2020 before we were spun off from Allgeier, we had talked or indicated a medium-term adjusted EBITDA target of roughly to 15%. Subsequently, we indicated that the adjusted EBITDA would be at least 15%.
you know, compared to our peers, we understand, you know, we run a bit lower on the margin side. Since the listing and as the Nagarro brand becomes stronger and is associated with speed and reliability, we expect we should be able to charge the customers a little bit more, which should help us inch the EBITDA margin higher. you know, our new medium-term target for 2026 and beyond is to achieve a sustainable adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 18%. Our 2023 guidance remains unchanged, although the demand environment is challenging for the entire industry. How do we drive this new target? You know, Nagarro is a very entrepreneurial organization, and we believe in empowering all our leaders. Our
Having said that, our team in finance is world-class, and our organization structure is available to drive these new targets. The members of the finance council in aggregate have about 200 years of experience in finance and controlling. The, you know, see, this is more like what we were discussing in the morning sessions, you know, the automation through Ginger. We believe, you know, we can help our leaders derive operating performance by providing unified systems, unified data platforms, trustworthy data, high-frequency insights, and actionable nudges. Our automation system and the operating system, Ginger, we are providing daily or weekly reports to all leaders, you know, at the company level, at the service region level, at the GBU, Global Business Unit level, you know, and at the sales and marketing unit level.
You know, Ginger also provides all our leaders with personalized insights and nudges. If you see any deviations, they are highlighted, or whenever required, they are escalated within the system. This systematic, rational, automation-driven, structured approach, which you see across the whole company, you know, is something which has helped us grow to $1 billion in sales and about more than 18,000 people. You'll see the same structured approach across all the departments in finance, including FP&A, treasury operations, hedging, transfer pricing, due diligence, deal sourcing, and group and country audits, and several other departments. Coming to capital allocation. You know, since we joined Allgeier in 2011, we have made 18 acquisitions. You know, our deal sourcing and due diligence team works like a machine.
We believe in operational integration. When a company is acquired, we merge it into the Nagarro brand, into the Nagarro systems and culture. M&A for us, it provides us access to great entrepreneurs and great leaders, it also provides us access to clients and to regions and to capabilities. Most of the acquisitions we do are not big. You know, they are smaller bolt-on acquisitions which provide us some strategic value. We have made 7 acquisitions since the spin-off, including 2 that we announced in quarter one. We also make share buyback. We see it as a legitimate use of our capital. You know, since September, October, we made a small EUR 10 million share buybacks.
In April 2023, we have announced a bigger share buyback of up to EUR 30 million, which, you know, will be executed starting next week. This brings me to the last topic I wanted to cover, which was transparency. You know, we are always listening carefully to what our investors have to say. We are happy to provide more transparency to investors and analysts where it does not have any operational downside for us. We are committed to presenting relevant information to shareholders in easy and accessible form. Since the listing, we have added new data which is being presented to investors and analysts.
We have started giving constant currency revenue growth, which we understand Nagarro operates in many currencies and, you know, it is, it gives more insights if we are able to provide you with a constant currency revenue growth. We are separating now organic versus inorganic growth, and we are giving revenue and expense by currency. We have also recently added days sales outstanding, DSOs. We are providing this more explicitly to give you nuanced insights into how our receivables are in relation to a fast-growing revenue. Going forward, we intend to provide data for our factoring program every quarter so that investors don't need to second-guess. If you have any other ideas, we'll be happy to hear them. That's all from my side, and thank you all for supporting us.
Next, I would like to hand over to Ashish with the presentation on ESG goals. Unfortunately, he couldn't make it here today, so we have a recorded message from him.
Good day, beautiful people. I am Ashish Agrawal. I am thrilled to be here today to talk about Nagarro's ESG efforts. Sorry, I would have loved to be there with you in person. COVID reached me before I could reach Frankfurt. Sustainability has always been a part of who we are at Nagarro. Let me take an example. In one of our largest offices in the world, you will not find single-use plastic anywhere, not in the pantry, not in the laptop boxes, not in the employee welcome kits that we send out whenever a new employee is joining us, and not even in the annual festival where more than 10,000 of us come together. We do not formally mandate sustainable procurement today.
How is it, you may wonder that our events team, our facilities team, our IT hardware team are all making the same choices? This is driven by the caring culture that you may have already heard about by the speakers who would have spoken before me. Caring extends not only to how we engage with each other, but also to all the decisions each of us makes as a Nagarrian every day. It's not just about plastic, it is about anything that we put our mind and attention to. Even if I take travel and commute, for example, if you don't need to come to office, you don't. If you want to brainstorm together with your global colleagues or clients, you use a Miro board. If you still must fly, you fly economy.
These are some of the choices Nagarrians are making every day. They are doing it using the caring value compass and by observing and emulating each other. We are on our own continuous learning journey. One of the things we are trying to understand today is how can we be greener with our technology? How can AI help us do social good? Through such tinkering, we have successfully created technology that can, for example, help unknown colleagues connect with each other over common interests or nudge colleagues to learn new skills relevant for their growth. We have made such technology work wonders within Nagarro and our culture and our employee well-being has been phenomenal. Now we are able to take it to our clients and engage the same technology with the world outside of Nagarro.
We have learned that if we keep humanity at the center of every decision we make, we will develop sustainable systems which will outlast us. While we applied our caring value consistently when making decisions, we did not measure and report quantitatively on the several environmental and social initiatives that we have been involved in. We may not exactly know how many kilograms of plastic waste we have reduced over the many years we have been operating, or how many air miles we may have saved by promoting virtual collaboration. Let me tell you that this is rapidly changing for us. Today, we are partially measuring our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, such as building energy consumption, as well as Scope 3 emissions, such as our travel miles. We have begun articulating how we can measure sustainability into our day-to-day operations.
We are now starting to align ourselves with international frameworks. Two major areas of immediate intervention that we have identified are communication gaps and data gaps. For example, I mentioned CDP over here. When it comes to CDP, just by closing communication gaps, we were able to move from a D minus to C in one reporting period between 2021 and 2022. We expect to improve further as we expand the reporting boundary in 2023 to provide data on our GHG emissions, which is our greenhouse gas emissions from not only India, but also China and Romania. If I take the Science Based Targets, that initiative defines and promotes best practice in emissions reductions and net zero targets in line with the climate science, many of you may already know about this.
We believe the SBTi is one of the most important initiatives of our time, and we will share our commitment within this calendar year and will use the SBTi guidelines to align our decarbonization efforts with the Paris Agreement. I want to take a moment here to talk about The Nagarro Constitution. This is not only a framework that helps all of us at Nagarro act in a legally compliant manner, but more importantly, it reflects the value compass that actually defines us. It speaks to all our policies today, and you may find topics such as data privacy and security, business ethics, human rights and working conditions, et cetera, all covered in there in a simple, easy to comprehend manner. In fact, you may read this document. It's also published on our website.
You will not find certain terms verbatim, but you will find them expressed differently. For example, our stand on freedom of association is covered under non-discriminatory approach towards union affiliation. Every page of the Nagarro Constitution is signed by every Nagarrian. We wonder if that is enough, as we always do. We take the help of our in-house digital workplace companion, Ginger, to deliver proactive nudges to all colleagues at regular intervals to help embed the Constitution and what is written therein in making our daily decisions. By the way, you may expect to find more information about our sustainable procurement policy, our health and safety policy, and environmental policy online later this year.
As part of our commitment to transparency and accountability, we have initiated a materiality assessment to identify the most important sustainability topics that are relevant to us and our stakeholders in line with the GRI standard. We have partially completed the engagement exercise with internal stakeholders. We have also conducted desk research to ascertain the materiality from our clients' perspective. In the coming months, we look forward to engaging with you all, our investors and our strategic clients to help us add more meaning to our materiality effort. Our non-financial statement for reporting period 2023 will be aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative standard. We remain committed to building a sustainable future for ourselves, our stakeholders, and the communities we serve.
Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen, for your time, and I hope you have a wonderful day today, and you engage, and you meet all the Nagarrians, that are there with you in person today. Thank you.
Hello. Hi. My name is Anurag Sahai, I'm here to talk to you about AI, a very exciting topic. Something that gets everybody very excited. It is one of the feelings that comes up amongst many other feelings, when we talk about AI. When you're talking about AI, the elephant in the room now is obviously ChatGPT. It's one of those things that has gotten everybody in this world onto a platform and an AI product so quickly. Let me describe briefly some of the backgrounds behind ChatGPT and the basis for this excitement. I, by the way, look after the data science and AI business unit at Nagarro, which has grown tremendously over the past few years, and all the work that we have been doing in this view.
In terms of how we look at a technology like ChatGPT, there are many ways to think about them, right? One of the perspectives around GPT is the work that has been done by several research companies when they were testing GPT. Apparently, GPT-4 technology was ready by August and September of last year, and then they spent about 6-7 months solving what is called the alignment problem, which is to look at a technology like GPT and try and understand whether it is aligning with human values. A lot of our understanding about GPT comes from that research work, which was published in a paper called "The Sparks of AGI." Now, in that paper, the researchers systematically went through five or six different qualities of intelligence.
This included things like reasoning, planning, thinking abstractly, solving complex problems, having a theory of mind, and many other things. What they found was pretty interesting and as eye-opening situation, right? There were clearly very remarkable outcomes that were seen in some of these tests. The outcomes that GPTs were creating were obviously shattering benchmarks, and these are benchmarks which are called around state of art, you know, the state of art, whatever the benchmark was at that point of time, the standard. This is really an exciting piece of technology that has suddenly become available to a lot of us at this point.
This goes on to, you know, bring out this idea that a lot of what is happening around LLMs and GPTs have to do with something called emergence. The idea that when you scale models drastically, you start seeing emergent qualities in these models come up. Nobody really knows what these emergent qualities are, but researchers are actively studying them and bringing them out. The other aspect of why AI is so exciting is the speed at which it is growing. It's not just language models, but you see this behavior in many different areas of AI, whether it's machine vision, whether it's speech processing, it's video generation, it's happening across the board. This is a model that was released by Meta about two weeks ago, literally two weeks ago.
You know, there's hardly a week that goes by when you don't see something new come in from the AI world. This is something called SAM or a Segment Anything Model, and what I'm showing you is a picture which I took from Google. It's a picture of a hair salon with a lot of different objects in that picture. There are shampoo bottles and creams and caps and many different things that are going on. I use the segmentation model to identify every object and, you know, to ask this question, can it even look at all these different perspectives and objects that are present in this, in this image, and can it identify all of them? It was a matter of less than even a fraction of a second it was able to do that.
You can look at the detail, right? I mean, it's able to even find the cap on the bottle, and every pixel is classified co-correctly. This quality of AI is really remarkable. There's genuine reason to be excited about a technology like this. Which brings me to the third element of excitement, right? Which is around what do we see as the impact of this technology on the economics of our world. This is a paper being published or published by MIT last month. It measures the impact on economics of AI. There are several numbers there, but the most important number or the most important idea in this paper in my mind was that we haven't seen a technology with this an impact before. That's remarkable at some level, right?
This is good quality research coming out with, you know, detailed datasets, good measurement frameworks to come up with ideas like this. All said and done, in the end, these are fairly powerful paradigms in tech that are being developed in AI. It's our feeling that, you know, there is hardly going to be any organization, any product or service or any individual who's not gonna be touched by a technology like this. There are genuine reasons to be excited. Excitement is one thing, but AI is also hard work. All of tech is really hard work. I mean, there's a lot of it that's going behind the scenes, right? Experience matters. It's the...
In our minds, one of the more important things that goes on when we are building tech is how much experience do you have with a technology like this. At Nagarro, we started very early on in working with AI, and in 2016 when we set this up, very quickly we started exposing ourselves to several projects, client situations, problems on topics around AI. We learned a lot in those experiences. As a result of all that, we have over the last few years, developed good specialization in many topics around AI. These are topics like analytics, big data science, IoT, conversational AI, and many others. Those last seven years have been a great learning experience for us in three important areas. One is, do we understand this idea called feasibility? Is a project feasible with AI?
That's a very important idea, like do we get that? The second important thing is it valuable? Is that something that will get you ROI in a project? The third important idea is it desirable? The idea of desirability is that, you know, when you have a AI project, is that something that is acceptable to people who are working in those areas? Like for example, if you go to a doctor and instead of a doctor diagnosing us, an AI diagnose us, that's not a desirable situation. Understanding these three ideas, right, are very critical in being able to succeed with AI projects. That's what we have developed over the last six to seven years of working on a topic like this.
We have excitement, we have experience, but the third important element is that we have to be responsible when it comes to being able to work with our customers. Technology is always exciting. I meet a lot of people who are very excited by AI, and I am so too as well, right? Working with customers is a different deal, right? You have to be responsible. You have to understand their journey, their roadmap, and whether as a company, we are sensitive to the way they would like to approach solving a problem. This is a very important idea in our minds.
To become a responsible partner, we have to understand a few important strategic things that goes on in an enterprise or in a customer. One important idea is the broad adoption of AI in that company or in that organization. There are several different departments that are working with several different aspects of value creation. We have to be able to work across all of that. Whether we have the capabilities in AI to be able to take some of these topics and work with many different functions in an organization. The second important element is strategic adoption. Not every company is trying to implement as many AI use cases. Some of them are looking at it very strategically. They are looking at two or three important areas where they can bring AI and make a difference to their value creation.
As a company, are we sensitive to these two elements of AI adoption? This is a task of being responsible in our minds, and not trying to fit everybody with the same template that we have. The second important idea is that while AI modeling is a very important idea and a lot of conversation and attention is taken over by AI, the engineering work around it is super significant, and it is way bigger than it takes to, you know, what it takes to implement an AI solution. It's pretty significant.
Again, as a engineering company, we have to be sensitive about the engineering ecosystem of our customers when we are building such a solution. The third important thing is whether the people who are working with these products, are they AI ready at some level? This is another important element. You have to have people with various roles and various responsibilities in an organization to be able to work with solutions like this. It's not a developer-only solution. It requires many different stakeholders to be considered as part of when you're rolling out a solution. Again, these are all important facets or aspects of implementing AI in an organization. The fourth element in all of this is the data that an enterprise really possesses or owns, as a part of their own value at some level.
One way to think about it is if you think about ChatGPT. ChatGPT was trained on what is called the open domain data. Open domain data is data which is freely and publicly available on the web that you can just get. It hasn't been trained on any of the enterprise data whatsoever, data which is living in what is called closed domains. This is like petrol or fuel, or, you know, value that an enterprise possesses, and it is fairly significant in quantity, significant in value. As an organization, we see that. We see that Our customers are sitting with really value-valuable data, and it is our role to really help them identify the critical information that they have, make it all relevant, make it all engineering-wise wide available, and then make it ready for value creation.
This is the fourth responsibility that we have when we are working with our customers. This is really important from an engineering mindset because we want to bring value across the board when we are working with a customer. Finally, the world of generative AI has unleashed a whole new marketplace of products. This is completely new, and this is now beginning to come out, and we are seeing more and more of this happen. These range from things like copilots, from conversational AI topics, from having virtual assistants, and many more. We are gonna see many more of this activity happen. It is our responsibility to bring this latest technology to our customers and make sure that they are succeeding with topics like that. All of these things together, at some level, is what we...
is how we see ourselves as a strategic partner to our customers who brings AI responsibly to their businesses and helps them create value. At some level, we are very hopeful about the future. We are looking at the future with great amounts of optimism and hope, and we are hoping that, you know, we are able to create a lot of value for our customers. Partnerships are super important. We obviously go into this journey not out by ourselves, but with a whole bunch of people to help support us in this ecosystem. To help us with that topic, here is Paul to take you further. Thank you.
It's exactly good afternoon. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure for me being here. My name is Paul Haberfellner. As you can probably hear, I'm from Austria, and I'm really sorry about my heavy accent, but I hope it's understandable. I have been with Nagarro more than a decade, worked in multiple roles, always with passion. I would describe myself as a global citizen. This was already my elevator pitch about myself because let us jump into the topic. Today, I want to talk about partnerships and alliances and why we decided to lift it up or lift it to the next level or take the next evolutional step in talking about strategic level. Does this implicit that we never had partners in the past? No, absolutely not. We always worked with partners.
We always had our partnerships and strategic alliances, but we changed it a little bit. Leading together with a hand-selected group of Nagarrians globally this initiative. I will tell you later on about the initiative, and I will go a little bit more in detail to give you our focus areas and what we are doing. Before I tell you about the initiative, which by the way, we started purely to add some growth. With growth, we do not mean only in an economical sense. As you already know, partner and client centricity is key. It's especially to add value to our clients and to our client engagements. That's exactly our driver, and it's the most important one. I want to start, and I want to tell you a small story. I'm pretty sure you all can remember the beginning of our corona pandemic.
Everybody was shocked. Nobody was aware what will show up next. It was hard to get a facial mask because no one had a facial mask at home. All the acronyms FFP2 was brand new to us and not available. You know, after the outbreak, you maybe can remember the second wave hit India tremendously hard. It was all day in newsrooms and all day reporting about it. It was crazy. The country was literally running out of oxygen, was running out of oxygen concentrators. No intensive care unit beds were available anymore. Even no hospital beds were available. This was exactly our call. Like a lot of other companies and governments and authorities, everyone globally tried to support India in the second wave and to ship whatever was available on the market.
Together with partners and clients, we collected globally hundreds of oxygen concentrators within a week and shipped them to India to relieve the pain of the society as well as from Nagarrians. You know this. It's a personal note here. It was my proudest moment because most of the people in the room from Nagarro and many, many more were involved to collect the concentrators and ship them to India. I told you, clients, airlines supported us. It was forwarding agents, wholesaler, retailer, name it, carriers, everything, customs experts, customs authorities. It was a pretty cool teamwork. I would like you to take two takeaways. Number one, this is like the green line here. Through all the presentations during the day, it's about caring and the core values, and we discussed it a lot today and presented it a lot.
I want to emphasize, caring is part of our DNA. We are all human beings, and we belong together, and we have to do good things. Number two, it's more in context with this talk. It's part partnerships, because we have done it with partners. Some of the partners were first-time partners. If you work towards a common goal, you will rock it. You can do it. This was exactly what happened, because we all had the common goal to relieve the pain in India, and we achieved it all together within a very short period during lockdowns and curfews and no airplanes in the up in the air. This was incredible. This is exactly how we describe partnerships, how we define and understand as Nagarro alliances and partnerships. Stronger together is a pretty old-fashioned and classical saying.
You can also say through thick and thin, or like my grandma would say, in good times and in bad times. This is how we define partnerships. Now jumping a little bit more into the story. If we talk, and I have to mention it, if you await now a slide with hundreds of logos of companies we are partnering with or where we have an alliance, I'm sorry, it won't show up. If I talk about strategic alliances and partners, we talk about companies like SAP, like Amazon, Atlassian, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and many more. Just, I don't know, Anurag, I take you as an example. My colleague, my previous colleague in the field of AI, we are talking about Databricks and Snowflake.
If I take Jörg as an example, upcoming speaker, this is a unique partnership with SAP, we always strive for global partnership. That's the reason why we had or we started with 3 focus areas, beside the mission of positioning and growth. I told you, growth is not only, please don't understand it only in an economical sense. With growth, we understand way more to add value for our clients, to create new offerings, co-create new offerings, add references, education. There are so many motivations at all. If we talk about growth, it's not only figures. It's important too. We don't discuss this, but it's not the primary motivation. The focus areas is visibility. It's all about contractual foundation, set up a contractual foundation and establishment. The obvious one is establishment.
I don't think I have to talk about establishing an initiative to make it public and tell everybody, "Hey, now we put it on a strategic level. We want to work with you even closer. Let us understand everything you have." It is all in visibility. Visibility means internally as well as externally. From an external perspective, to be visible with partners or at partners, you have to understand the partner programs. It's easy to believe, okay, I know one program of one partner in every detail, and we all know in the detail there is sometimes sitting the devil because they look similar, but usually they are different. They are different in bits and pieces, but you have to understand every single partner program. Mention the companies I told you before, SAP's and Amazon's and Microsoft's and so on.
It's always a little bit different, and you have to understand it. That was the reason why we invested a lot of time with this hand-selected group to go into details, to understand the existing partner programs and how we can position, the second mission, Nagarro in front of the partners and to take the generated value and bring it and deliver it to our clients. This is our overall mission, more or less. Contractual foundation, please believe me, it's sometimes really bureaucratic to go through all the contracts. For us, it was necessary to bring all the contracts to one global level. With partner A, it's sometimes easier because they have just one contract, which is immediately value, which is immediately available globally.
There are contracts where you have to roll out more or less country by country or region by region or continent by continent. This is what you have to tackle and what you have to know about because you have to be prepared. If you need for a project in a particular country, a contractual foundation, you should know exactly how to get it and how to drive it. This is it from a 30,000-feet view, and thank you for your attention. I hand over now to my dear colleague, Jörg.
Good afternoon, and thanks for being with us today. Let me introduce myself. I'm Jörg Dietmann. I'm responsible for the global business unit SAP, jointly with my colleague Michael. As you can see, there is a separate business unit for SAP, so we do some significant business with SAP, and we have a very strong partnership with SAP. You know, what can we do as a partner to support SAP? The way it works is that you all know that SAP is transforming into a cloud company, and they do it very well. What we can do is, with a strategy, which is actually a SAP Cloud First strategy, to support this growth of SAP and this transformation process. How do we prove this? I mean, we prove this in using the technology by ourselves.
We thought about a very complex implementation of ERP. We don't want to have a complex ERP implementation. We went for the SAP public cloud, which is a very simple and standardized solution. With this, we are our best reference ourself, so we can sell to the market that we are a cloud partner of SAP. Before I talk a lot about SAP, I ask actually SAP to talk about the partnership and what they expect from us and from the partner landscape. With this, let me introduce you to Thomas Bickel, who is Vice President of Digital Hub from SAP. Thomas, thanks very much for coming. I know you came from Munich, and I'm glad we don't have the day tomorrow because there is a train strike.
Yeah.
Thanks, Thomas.
Thank you. Yeah, my wife said, "Okay, Thomas, you need to come back today because tomorrow is the train strike." I will travel back to Munich, of course, today. Thank you, Jörg Dietmann, and also Michael in Freiburg, if you are seeing us on the screen for the kind invitation and, of course, to the entire Nagarro team for this Nagarro experience day. I see it more. I'm not an analyst. I see it more as an experience for also for me. Perhaps you would have expected, based on the announcements that there will be a guy from the SAP partner management, somebody responsible for the partners.
To be honest, I have been responsible for the partners, and I was also part of the first steps of Nagarro in the cloud, in the ERP cloud, but it's quite a while ago. I've been starting with SAP in 98, so I'm- An old SAPler, but I've been doing different jobs in SAP, also internationally. Currently, I'm managing the youngest team in SAP. Now, if you're looking on me, you cannot imagine, but perhaps a lot of those people could be my kids. It's true, I have the youngest team. The youngest team is exactly this team of the Digital Hub. We have been creating a cross-functional team per region. I'm representing the ME region, Middle and Eastern Europe. In this cross-functional team, we have been bringing all the digital natives, the digital talents together to create a unique e-customer experience, only digital for our customers. This has been creating even before the COVID, but of course, during COVID, this has been developed very fast and also boosted very, very fast.
In this team, we have people who are able to create unique experience which we never saw before, yeah. We have the talents for the social media. We have the talents exactly for the area where we're creating the early sales cycles, the demand management with the customers in a way which we have never seen also before in the traditional sales approach. We are inviting also partners to be part of this experience. This means that this is something SAP not doing for themselves. We are also doing it with our partners. I think this is one of our approach in SAP, that we are also starting initiatives which we are experimenting our own. Once we have reached the level of experience, we are immediately inviting our partners to be part of this movement, of this experience.
In this case, I've been inviting also Nagarro to be part of this experience because Nagarro gave me a relatively clear commitment about their cloud-first strategy, about their transformation abilities, and also about their interest and appetite to work with us in this early sales cycles and also to find new customers outside to also implement our public cloud solutions. As outlined from Jörg, Nagarro is a partner who has experienced this implementation of a public cloud globally in their own operations. This means that they are their own best reference to go out and say, "Look, we know exactly what we are talking about, and therefore, I think we would be also a potential good partner for you for this journey." Let's look a little bit outside in.
If you're going on the SAP homepage, if you look on our official materials, you see something about our most important customer imperatives. It's about business transformation, including digital transformation, of course, also becoming an intelligent, sustainable enterprise and also the entire cloud adoption. The supply chain resilience. A very important topic which we also saw today on the screen is the sustainability outcomes. We have, of course, a lot of partners. We have a lot of specialized partners. The interesting is, if we also find partners who are able to serve this on a broader basis, okay, are able to go to a customer and say, "Look, we can really work with you end-to-end.
We are not only specialized on one topic, we can drive the transformation really across the entire landscape you might need to drive your transformation sustainably for the future. I think from my perspective, Nagarro is a partner who is able to do this. We have more partners in this kind. I see in the movement and also in the strong vision and everything what I saw today in terms of the development so far of your company and also the visions, the possibility to take more and more responsibilities also of our line of business portfolio and bring it into offering, which is bringing this end-to-end responsibility across for also, for our joint customers. Let me summarize a little bit. SAP and partners are one team. This is also the mindset which we are driving in the partner organization, but also in the Digital Hub organization.
We are joining our forces as SAP with our partners. What is also important, for someone who is also so long-standing in SAP and also has created a lot of joint businesses with the partners, we have created a long-standing trust. We are also sharing joint values and visions with the partners. We are investing a lot as SAP to work on this trust building and also on this vision and value journey. An important topic is that we are driving innovations together with the partners in the cloud and also in digital. Yeah, this is my task. We have a huge opportunity together because SAP, together with the partners, is sitting in a pole position to drive the transformations within the companies, exactly to drive this kind of business transformation.
There is nobody better equipped like SAP and this kind, also our committed partners, to tackle this and to make this a big business. At the same time, we have through the Digital Hub and the volume capabilities, the possibility to acquire new customers for SAP together with our partners, which we never addressed before. We have this S/4HANA public cloud product now in our hand.
It's called, GROW with SAP. In order to show that we are inviting customers who have been just starting as startups or smaller companies to grow their entire business and scale them up into being very big enterprises based on a very quick and also small implementation, best practice implementation of S/4HANA Public Cloud, which in this case, Nagarro is able to do, and then I think grow with this, I think according the growth of their company. Partners are delivering integrated experience across customer journeys from offering to value delivery. This means that we are integrating our partners, and in this case also Nagarro, in the entire value chain, so that we are creating both growth for customers and also for the partners in the customer lifetime value.
This is something I would like to bring here on the table, not as a representative of a partner organization, but someone who knows SAP, I think, from different angles, and especially working now in an area which is strategic for SAP, acceleration of digital and the possibility to immediately invite our partners, in this case, this partner, to be part of a very strong journey to drive growth and also to drive an experience which we have never had before and then, celebrate together. Thank you very much, and thank you for listening.
Thank you, Thomas. Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to all of you, who've joined us virtually and who are here in person. I am Gagan Bakshi. I take care of investor relations. I've had the privilege of speaking with many of you in person and also in one-on-one calls over the last couple of years. We will now hold the Q&A session, the most interesting part. Many thanks for sending in the questions. They're streaming in. Where I would request you to please hand over the questions to Andreas. It gives me a lot of pleasure to welcome Andreas Wolf from Warburg Research, who will help moderate this Q&A session. Andreas. I would also like to invite Annette and Manas onto the stage. We'll set up a couple of chairs.
We'll get comfortable. Then we'll roll out the questions. Thank you. I'll go old school with the mic because the headset doesn't fit my turban. Sorry. Oops.
I can sit.
Okay, fair enough.
He has it.
Please.
You have a mic?
Um, so-
Take this. I'll get another one.
Okay. Please ask all the tough questions to Annette Mainka.
Basically, you can see that Nagarro organizes its event very lean. When I came in, Manas was standing at the reception, and I was asked to moderate this round. I'm not good at cooking, so I'm happy I got the questions. Let's start with the first question, which is for Manas. We kind of had already a reference to this, but what will be the impact of AI on your business in the short term and the medium term? Maybe you could elaborate on that, Manas.
Thanks, Andreas, and thanks for agreeing to read out these questions. Thank you everyone for being here. Before I just answer that question, I just wanna say that I hope you got a sense of the amazing people we have at Nagarro. You saw many of them today, but it's only a small fraction because we have many more senior leaders who could not come, or we did not really want to crowd this venue with them. It's just an amazing set of people. Amazing diversity in the topics that they are addressing, in the way they're addressing them, in the content, even in the slides. It all hangs together, and that's kind of, I think, what makes us special. Coming to your point, Andreas.
I think this is one of the biggest questions of this age of our time. I feel the urge to say, you know, I told you so, because I think that at the Capital Markets Day, the first Capital Markets Day and before that, in the run-up to the spin-off, when people were talking about competition and how things will evolve, we were always saying that AI is the big thing, right? People would ask, you know, AI and blockchain, and I said, "Blockchain is relatively... It's like AI is 100x of blockchain, right?" That's what it is now proving to be. We have been paranoid about this topic. Yeah.
Anurag said earlier that we started in 2016 with a COE around this topic, and we were able to rope Anurag in to help build it out. It is not just that. Our whole strategy, you know, of lean small teams. Because imagine that your job is to lift and shift a huge ton of software and from one language to another language. If that's the kind of work you do and AI comes in, it gets totally disrupted. Yeah. If your work is to create value in lean small teams and across hundreds of customers and thousands of teams, that is much more resilient to disruption. That has been our idea, right? Similarly, a lot of people ask us the question, "Why are you in different industries? Why are you in such a broad set of industries?
Why don't you specialize?" We believe that with AI, it's like everybody having superpowers, yeah? You can reinvent the world. A lot of the reinvention will happen at the intersection of different industries. The typical traditional boundaries will not be that important any longer. In a large number of small and big ways, including our change of our tagline from enterprise agile to thinking breakthroughs and pushing new innovation training through our organization, trying to have everyone more sensitized that, yeah, writing code is good. I mean, literally, there's a program that we run every week or every other week, which says. The introduction video says, you know, writing code is good, but maybe you won't have a job when AI comes.
Now this is like, you know, it seems like just a long time ago, but it's happening now. The productivity improvements are a massive change, right? I think with the three or four areas where we feel there is a lot of stuff that can be done. The first is that we are all going to do more with software, right? I mean, if you take this particular event, right, how much of this is different from what it would have been 10 years ago? Nothing. Yeah. Maybe the streaming or something. Well, minors. I mean, it could be done 20 years ago also, right? We will see completely different experiences, right? We will do a lot more with software. We will do better and better stuff with software because it makes us much stronger.
If we felt that we were not very good at consulting, for example, now we are good at consulting also, right? We are suddenly all super human, and we can do a lot of different things. We can bring a lot of ideas to our clients, and that's what we are trying to drive throughout our organizations, our client organizations. I think this friction that exists in human beings, right? I mean, the frictions of regulation, the frictions of departments, of, you know, companies or ecosystems, they're not going away anytime soon. To help overcome them, a lot of consulting is required, and I think that's the future for us.
It's a long answer, but, in brief, we have been watching this with a sense of preparedness and trying to be the best positioned technology services company to emerge out of it in terms of agility, culture, because culture is a very big part of creative teams. Trying to move away from, you know, we write code to, you know, we are open-minded thinkers, and that will be our big bet for the future.
Maybe, Manas, you could also share your thoughts on the developments in the economy. We see that Accenture is cutting jobs by 19,000. Other IT service names are reporting lower attrition, which appears to be an indicator of less demand, I would say. What does this say about your business, if there are overcapacity in the industry?
It's a very interesting time, right? You probably know more about it being in the finance side than I do. For the last year and a half now, a year and a quarter now, there's been this sense of dread of impending recession, right? The mood tends to go up and down every few months. I think in Q4, at the beginning of Q4, there was this huge stress about whether you would actually have any kind of growth the next year. Then by the time Q4 went by, then there was, again, some positive feeling. Now again, there's a bit of sense of dread. It's very difficult to say.
I think that we do see that in certain areas, like we mentioned in the last call, like horizontal tech and then a little bit with banking. You know, the kinds of things that were being projected are not coming through or there is a weakness. People still stay on track with their long-term programs. They stay on track with the long-term programs, but it is a challenging environment, right? It is also impacting us. As Vikram said, we are holding on to our guidance, but it is a difficult environment, and we don't know what next month brings. Yeah. I think that historically we have been caught off our guidance and had to keep revising it upwards, upwards. People sometimes think that we will keep doing it this year as well.
I think it's a little bit, it's a bit tricky. It's a tricky time. We wait and watch. We are holding on to our guidance for now, but we wait and watch.
Okay. Thank you, Manas. Next question is for Annette. Could you please comment on the whistleblower policy of Nagarro?
Sure. Thank you for the question. We have had a whistleblower channel in place already prior to the spin-off. This is an internal process. However, we are of course monitoring, you know, the European guidelines that are coming up and are prepared what is coming next. We will also work with an external law firm to, you know, optimize this process going forward.
Okay. Thank you. Have there already been issues that you had to follow?
Very minor issues, but I think not worth being reported.
Okay, great. Thank you. Next one is again for you, Manas. What is your view on... sorry.
Sorry. People are calling me.
Manas and Gagan, for you as well. Maybe you could comment on the M&A pipeline and whether you see any changes in the evaluation expectations of sellers. Obviously, the capital markets are applying lower multiples to listed stocks. Maybe in this context, on your momentum in M&A in general, as obviously you have very strong organic growth and against this backdrop also the rationale for acquisitions. That would be very helpful. Thank you.
I think that now finally the valuation expectations for M&A are starting to become more rational. I think it took there was a long lag between the capital markets starting to change their gearing versus that for these private deals. It's starting to happen now. I think that organic growth is definitely our core pillar of our, the growth of our company. Acquisitions bring a lot of different things. They bring access, as Vikram and everyone has talked about, access to new talent, access to new markets, access to new clients, capabilities. If you look also just at the diversity of the leadership team today, that also comes with M&A.
I remember when we stepped into Allgeier in 2011, I think it was, and when Allgeier began to say, "You should do some M&A," and we were very, very skeptical and very reluctant, I would say. We felt that it would spoil our culture, it would spoil our way of working, and we were so good and now I just realize that every single deal that we have done and every company we have merged with, every stream of Nagarro that has gotten together, it has enriched us with new power and new energy. That's one, at one level, the idea. You know, we do stay very careful about M&A. We don't do very big blowout, you know, headline, high, big headline acquisitions.
Every company we acquire has to be a successful company in its own right, and we have to also be able to see some interesting synergies that are at play. We need a leadership team that we feel that is like us, that can stand here and be one of us and be at the same level in terms of capability and in terms of ethics or the style. We don't... We have large earn-outs, yeah? We don't pay, you know, crazy multiples, right? We pay, you know, very careful multiples. The whole structure, you know, whether it's the sourcing, whether it's the decision to acquire, whether it's the due diligence, whether it's the post-merger integration, which is a separate team, it's all very, very structured.
Yeah, we keep looking for interesting targets, but we don't feel compelled at any time that we have to go and act and acquire a company every quarter or whatever, right? It's not the way we think.
You wanna add something?
I don't know. I guess you covered pretty much. A general belief that I've learned through corporate finance has been that multiples are what the market can bear, and what markets can bear is a function of buyer frenzy, of sellers' steadfastness in hanging on to their multiples and the macro environment. I think we look at all of that and we see that, you know, we've been making sure that we pay the right price and that is a win-win for both the teams. It's important for us because we fully integrate the teams. It should de-risk both sides and hence a lot of thought process goes in thinking what we offer now and what we offer through an earn-out.
It should benefit both the so-called seller, if we may use the term, and the buyer, which is Nagarro.
Great. Thank you. Maybe on the 10, 20, 30 ambition that you've just published, there needs to be a link, I would assume, between the long-term ambition and project profitability and higher margins in the future. How do you make sure, Manas, that the long-term ambition actually flows through the project, then finally into the P&L?
I think our mechanism is through the business units. You have here a couple of global business unit heads, but there are lots of business units and very, very strong people who run them, right? I know the people who are here are strong, but the others are equally strong and very, very sophisticated on how to run a company within a company. I mean, it's of course with the common frameworks and hiring processes, allocation processes, but they can set their own strategy. They have to, there's a lot of peer pressure, if I may, to try to hit growth, try to hit the margins that the company as a whole is aiming for.
It's not that we are sitting with people and say, "We need to set individual targets." I mean, that's not the way this company works. It's more like this is what the shared vision that we are all driving towards. With that, we want to make sure that the projects themselves, which are typically led by engineers and typically by young engineers, are not feeling this pressure for margin, yeah. They are more incentivized on customer satisfaction. They are out to get customer satisfaction. At the account level, right. Where the delivery, engagement managers are active, that is where the discussion happens that, okay, this account, we may be looking at this kind of margin, this account, that kind of margin. There's that setting.
At the end of the day, I think it's the business unit leaders who play a critical role in translating what the company wants to achieve down to what the accounts are trying to achieve, yeah. That's the connection.
Thank you. Then there is one question on revenue growth. How do you generate growth besides increasing just the number of employees? How can you increase revenue per employee as well? This is obviously about efficiency.
There are lots of different things. I mean, one simple way is to add employees in a region that has higher rates and so on. That's just... I'm kind of joking, but since that had come up earlier in some conversation about revenue per employee, right? That is dependent very much on the location that employee is working from. In general, right, there is a lot of investment that we are making, which doesn't show out explicitly because it is above the gross margin line.
In all these topics that we are working on, whether it's AI and big data, whether it's in life sciences, whether it's in aviation, whether it's in automotive, whether it's in whichever the topic is, these are basically practices that are being generated, created to build forward a specialized subject. Right? Automotive is not one subject. Automotive is 100 subjects, and we may be going after 10 of them, right? But for those 10, maybe it's, you know, shared mobility, right? We have to build out capabilities, concepts, frameworks, POCs, so we can engage with the client meaningfully on shared mobility, right? I think that these investments also have are a source of leverage.
You know, as you get larger, you're able to, you know, spread them out across a large number of projects. A lot of our, I mean, we think, again, with a long-term horizon, so we are not out to maximize this quarter's profit or this year's profit even, but trying to make sure that it's a sustainable growth that we are setting ourselves up for.
Okay. Thank you, Manas. I think investors will also be looking at your free cash flow generation and how do you see the free cash flow going forward, and how do you want to improve it? That was also a major question from investors, I assume.
Free cash flow has been a conversation topic. I would really recommend that someone just model it a little bit, because if you model it, you will see that it's really related to growth, right? It's totally related to growth. If you are growing at 40% versus 30% versus 15%, it changes massively because, you know, a a hack for thinking about how much the changes in net working capital are if you take a period, let's say you take a year, if you want to estimate how much is the change in net working capital, you should just take the Q4 revenue of this year and Q4 of that year, and the delta is roughly the net working capital change that you should account for.
The amount of cash that is sucked up by this growth is a massive thing. As growth starts to moderate, we will start to see that flow out, right? It's relatively simple in terms of its mechanics and it'll flow through soon. Yeah.
Yeah. Vikram has mentioned factoring as one of the points for the future. Will you also be using factoring to the same extent in the current interest rate environment, as obviously interest rates are growing?
That's definitely a question. I think we are discussing it again. We also realize that some investors are not very happy with factoring. It's an alternative that we are considering. I'm not saying that we'll do it, but to see whether we want to enlarge this factoring, keep it the way it is, reduce it. But all of this is in play. At the very least, as Vikram said, we want to be very transparent on factoring because I think a lot of the conversation was how much of this is factoring and how much is actual reduction in days of sale and so on. I think that although it's no recourse factoring, and we have mentioned it again and again, it's with top customers and it's, you know.
Still, just to make it very clear, quarter by quarter, we will keep reporting it. I think we do plan to keep evaluating it in light of investor sentiment. Let me put it this way.
Okay. Thank you. The next questions are for Annette, I guess. Nagarro has obviously inherited its auditor from Allgeier. You're obviously also in the process of changing it. So there was 1 investor question, if you could provide details on auditors in different countries right now. Related to that, I'll have another question.
Yeah. As we communicated, we are in the process. There is, as you know, an official selection process, this is about to be set up. During this year we are organizing our local audit firms accordingly to be prepared for this, you know, group auditor change coming up. Yeah. Here we are in the process, I think we are on track.
Thank you. Apart from the auditor, are there other services that you are still sharing with Allgeier?
Interesting question, which by the way, came up during the break as well. We had a service agreement at the time of the spin-off in order to secure a smooth transition when getting listed and towards the way of being an independent company. This is terminated, so there are no other shared services. We do not, I can say, have any connection. We are fully independent, being in shared services or being also physically in terms of location.
Thank you. I think we've covered quite many questions, at least the major topics. There's one question asking whether you could provide your five to 10 top customers and the names. Is this possible?
Probably.
I can understand this. I know many other service names which are behaving the same, obviously. There is another also relating to customers and customer satisfaction. Obviously it decreased slightly in 22 versus 21. I have not realized it myself, but obviously there is a number indicating this. Is there any reason related to this?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think there's a change in the methodology. We used to have a long customer survey form with 12 questions. We narrowed it down to 5 or 6 questions, I don't remember precisely. And we added a Net Promoter Score kind of question, which has not been made public yet, except from now onwards we will publish it. But we don't see any meaningful change if you consider which questions we retained and how we tweaked them, there's no meaningful change.
Okay, thank you. This question came up several times, obviously, I had the same, so I won't read mine, but the one that was asked from someone else, obviously. How do you manage high focus on customer satisfaction on the one hand, and margin improvement on the other hand? Asked it slightly differently. How do the GBU leaders basically make sure that the project CEOs and the COD, CEO level that you have, don't overstaff for the projects, right?
Yeah, it's exactly that, right? I think that, you know, there is, there are, like in every decision, right, there are local decisions, and then there are larger decisions. The larger decisions could be in terms of scope, it could be in terms of time, longer horizon decisions. You need maturity to be able to trade off, inconvenient or, you know, sacrifice a bit in the local scope, in the shorter time frame for the larger scope and the larger time frame. I don't mean to be ageist, but I think younger people still need some more experience before they're able to make these trade-offs in most cases. We prefer that more seasoned people are making these trade-offs at the BU level, et cetera. The younger folks are just going for customer satisfaction, right?
Actually all of us are going for customer satisfaction. That's our shared responsibility. We prioritize that. Then behind that, we say, "Okay, but we also need to make money." That's what we try to do with the older people.
Thank you.
More senior people, I should say, not older.
I still have some questions left here for Gagan. We referred to takeovers before. You've already alluded to some of the thoughts in the M&A process. Obviously people are also curious what you are typically paying or what kind of multiples for the targets. Maybe you could also, in this context, explain how Nagarro lowers takeover related risk. Is it mainly due to due diligence, the obvious normal, in inverted commas, process? Or do you also go into business relationships with these targets just to test them before acquiring them? If you could shed some light on that would be helpful.
Okay. I'll maybe take the second part first. The way the entire M&A process works is that we have a very large funnel and a pipeline. There's a team dedicated to just filtering out the right candidates. There's no frenzy from our side to just do a deal. You know, we're very patient buyers. Once that filtering comes through, then we obviously have a team which is focused on due diligence. We've got a couple of people with really strong diligence experience, big four experience in their past careers. They will look through the opportunity set that we have. Then we move on to the next step of assessing fit with the company from the culture perspective.
That's a process that goes through the entire, you know, the M&A process to make sure that we're comfortable with the culture and the fit. Once that is done, then we get the structuring team, which then structures the deal based on how much upfront, how much total multiples, how much would be the earn-out and spread over whatever time, so that it's, like I said, win-win for both sides. Once the deal is closed, then the post-merger integration team takes over. Depending on the target, the time period can vary as to over the as to when the integration is done. But it's flexibility and agility in making sure we do that.
I think all of these steps will help de-risk a particular transaction, not one particular thing. I mean, you may do good diligence, but then something else is not a fit. This is the way we think, we've been able to do good, with M&A.
Okay, thank you. I think we've covered pretty much all of the questions. One last, I guess that's from Anas. Could you provide guidance on hiring rates in 23?
No. I think, we have our first quarter numbers coming out soon. You will have a sense from that of where we are in Q1. We're not actually guiding for hiring rates. We don't do that in general. Yeah. Sorry.
Obviously it will be in line with revenues, more or less.
Yeah. No, not necessarily, because, you know, we hire both lateral and fresher or youngsters from colleges, and that has a several months lag, right? As was said earlier, we have this except for the youngsters, which is a little bit episodic and disconnected, but the lateral hiring is more or less set up through the system and algorithms, and so on. Yeah, but you won't see necessarily a direct correlation. Yeah.
Okay. Great. You're guiding for nearly a 20% growth. We are looking forward to see this going forward. Thank you for being available for the questions and answers.
Fingers crossed. Thank you very much for having this and hosting this Q&A. Thank you all. I have the one last role, which is to invite the next speaker on stage. Maybe we disband this
Yeah.
get these chairs off, and then we will just have the next speaker. The next speaker is, you know, I would have liked my, the BU leader who leads BFSI, Surya, to be here to invite the next speaker, but I will do this in his place. Can you just click to the next slide? Our next speaker is Dietmar Beutmann, and he has led for several years the entire digital transformation initiatives of Erste Bank. He's not with Erste Bank any longer, but he took a bet on us in 2010 or 2011 when Erste Bank was. Or maybe I let him tell you the story. He's one of the most interesting and intelligent young men, if I can say that I have met.
It's always a pleasure to spend some time with him. Once every few years we get a chance to talk, and it was very nice to catch up with him yesterday. Yeah, over to you, Dietmar.
Thank you, Manas, for your very kind words. Good afternoon, everybody. Before I start, I have to do a very small legal disclaimer. I was working for Erste Group many, many years, and I really enjoyed it, but in November, I decided to move on. I'm still on the payroll of Erste as this is my cooling down phase, but I'm not speaking on behalf of them. With 1st of June, I will start a new role. I will be a board member of an Austrian bank. I'm now today here as a private person. I had great years with Erste. Nagarro was definitely part of this great journey. This is a very international round. Maybe not everybody of you knows Erste Group.
Erste Group is one of the leading banks in Central and Eastern Europe with approximately 45,000 employees. I was the head of Erste Digital, which is the captive IT company with roughly 2,000 IT engineers working for Erste Group. These days, I'm enjoying my gardening leave. Trust me, my gardening looks great. My garden looks great. The flip side of the coin, I'm not used anymore to be on a stage, so I'm a little bit excited, and I hope that I won't lose my thread during the next minutes. I met Manas and the Nagarro team for the first time back in 2011. Back then, I was not a managing director. I was a division head responsible for the development team.
My experience with Nagarro is, comes from being responsible for as delivery, but also as a senior management overseeing the strategy, sourcing strategy, IT roadmap. Basically, this is my experience and where we can talk about also later over lunch. Back in 2011, the IT of Erste was really a closed shop. Basically, everything was done by their own. I already had back then the feeling that we need to open. You know, globally, there are millions of IT engineers, and to provide relevant services to banking customers, it was clear for me that we need to open up, that we need to change our DNA and be capable of integrating every services which make somehow sense for a financial institution. I did it, I think, somehow the hard way.
I opened up by introducing an Indian offshore partner, which was somehow a shock. A shock to the senior banking management, which raised questions like, "Why we are not investing in our region where we are doing banking business? Why we go to India?" Of course, many, many questions also from the employees and staff, who of course believed that they are the greatest HEDs by themselves. I had a lot of headwinds, and I do remember some very tricky meetings, where people were really shouting at me, why we are doing this kind of transformation. There was one meeting when I was shocked because I was asking to do so or to do this transformation, we need a pilot project.
Uh, and there was just one team who volunteered, and then I was a little bit afraid, uh, because it was our internet banking team. Uh, so this is somehow maybe not the most complex solution in a bank, but the most prominent. So... And I was pretty sure if we screw this up, uh, my journey with Erste will be at the end. Uh, so I was a little bit nervous. Uh, but of course, I was also happy that we found a team who were willing to pilot, uh, this new engagement. And we ran an RFP. We invited ten different Indian suppliers, uh, and to prove their worth, we said we want to have this pilot together.And surprise, surprise, that's why I'm here. Nagarro won two thousand eleven, the RFP.
Luckily for me, they delivered the new internet banking solution, the refactoring of the old solution very, very well. Since that, our engagement grew drastically. I think the peak time of people we had from Nagarro was roughly 200 or more than 200. It was a big scale from a very small project. We really grew together, and it helped us a lot to learn how sourcing in a complex environment helps. Today, Erste Digital has somehow the image to be really innovative. We are doing a lot... Not me anymore, but the company is doing a lot on cloud, on quantum computing, things like that. We really managed the transformation from a closed shop to an open part, to an open company.
From my point of view, remember the legal disclaimer, this is really because also the relationship we had with Nagarro. Of course, not everything was great. It is still IT, and IT makes also a lot of headache and troubles. We had our discussions, but we always managed to come up stronger, to come out of the issues stronger than we were before. We also had, like Lufthansa in the beginning, horrible waterfall projects. We changed our collaboration model basically to 100% agile. The DNA today of Erste Digital is that we are organized in platform teams and product teams. The platform teams are supporting the product teams. The Nagarro team is embedded into the Erste Digital teams.
of course, we have a lot of compliance requirements, and the offices are completely compliant in India. if you walk into this office, you will think you are part of Erste. You have a lot of advertised material. The Nagarrians think in the first line, they are Nagarrians, but those of them who are working for us think in the second line they are working for Erste. I think this is something extraordinary, and we invested a lot to come so far. I remember we hosted many people from Nagarro in Austria. Our teams went skiing together with the Indian colleagues. They went ice skating. When our people were in India, they were hosted very friendly from Nagarro side. Personally, I enjoyed the most the disco bowling with the Nagarrian colleagues.
We really invested a lot in building one team, and of course, this also costs money. The other side is you get really high productivity, and you also get somehow friendships. If people trust each other, you get out a low fluctuation, which is key in days of this, but also a very high productivity. I personally think it was really important, this partnership, between Erste Digital and Nagarro. Let me just conclude with one personal remark. Of course, before I came here, I read about some analyst opinion in the newspaper. As a banker, I can even understand one or two facets out of it. Maybe I don't agree with the conclusion, but I can see the point. There's at least one or more I cannot understand at all.
This is about everything about org structure and structure. I tell you this as a customer now. I tell you the story. As a customer, I can tell you, I don't care about the org structure. Back in 2011, when we agreed that Nagarro will take over this engagement, Manas handed over his mobile phone number to you, same like you experienced, and said, "I can call him anytime, and he will take care." Now, 12 years later, 100,000 of delivered person days later, I can tell you, I never called Manas. He said we met. That's right. We agreed over email, and we had a nice dinner and discussed about family and future of IT and things like that. I never flagged an issue to Manas. It was not necessary.
I personally think this shows a lot on the commitment, the motivation, engagement, and customer focus of Nagarro. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Dietmar. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us, and also thank you for flying from Vienna to Frankfurt. This is it. We are at the end. I thank you all very much for participating in our Capital Markets Day. Thanks especially for all the folks who joined virtually and for everybody here on site. We have prepared a little lunch outside, and we can continue our conversations over there. Thank you. Bye-bye.
I have a bit of a strange and weird request, and it's perfectly okay if you say no. At Nagarro, we always end an event with a huge selfie where everybody gets behind, and we take a nice photo. We invite you if you can. I mean, I will be there at the entrance. Please join us for a picture before lunch. If you don't want to, that's perfectly fine, but we're going to take a selfie now. Yes, we don't let you go out.