Thank you, Ram Mohan. I hope my voice is audible.
Yes, sir.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today for the Q2 FY 2026 earnings call at Happiest Minds Technologies Ltd. On behalf of Anand Rathi Institutional Equities, I would like to thank the management of Happiest Minds for giving us the opportunity to host this earnings call. Today, we have with us Mr. Ashok Soota, Chairman and Chief Mentor, Mr. Joseph Anantharaju, Co-Chairman and CEO, Mr. Venkatraman Narayanan, Managing Director, Mr. Rajiv Shah, Executive Director, Mr. Ram Mohan, CEO, Infrastructure Management and Security Services, Mr. Sridhar Mantha, CEO, Generative AI Business Services, and Ms. Priyanka Sharma, Head of Investor Relations. I will hand it over to Priyanka for today's public statement and to take the proceedings forward. Thank you and over to you, Priyanka.
Thank you, Shashovan. Good morning to all participants on the call. Welcome to this conference call to discuss the financial results for H1 and second quarter ending September 30, 2025. I'm Priyanka Sharma, Head of Investor Relations. We hope you had an opportunity to review the earnings release we issued yesterday evening. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Ashok will begin by sharing his perspective on the business environment and our results. Joseph and Venkatraman will then discuss our financial performance and operational highlights. Following that, we will open the floor for questions. Before we begin, let me read the safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements reflect the environment we see as of today and involve risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We do not undertake to update these statements periodically.
With that, let me now hand it over to Mr. Ashok Soota.
Thank you, Priyanka. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are really happy to share that our strong H1 FY 2026 results, with revenue growth of 11.8% in constant currency and EBITDA margin of 20.8%, reflect the continued success of our 10 strategic transformations. These transformations were announced in the last quarter of FY 2025 and are now visibly yielding these excellent results. Amongst them, the most defining organizational change was that Joseph Anantharaju became the Co-Chairman and CEO. I'm happy to advise that Joseph has really settled into his enhanced responsibilities remarkably well, and the impact of his leadership and the structural changes he has driven are clearly visible in our performance this half-year. Two of our strategic initiatives, in particular, have been pivotal in accelerating growth: the creation of our Generative AI Business Services unit and our sharper focus on expanding net new accounts.
The Generative AI Business Services unit has been a standout performer since its launch in October 2024. It has scaled rapidly and become one of our key growth engines. GBS delivered 77.8% year-on-year growth in constant currency for Q2 and 79% for H1, along with 15.3% sequential growth this quarter. This is amazing numbers and a clear reflection of how our customers have responded to our AI and GenAI-led solutions. What is even more heartening is that many of our solutions are highly replicable, and as we take these to other customers, it will lead to further accelerated growth. Equally encouraging is the momentum from our net new sales initiative. The independent sales unit has strengthened our go-to-market discipline, accelerated client acquisition, and expanded our opportunity pipeline, creating a solid base for future growth.
The success of these two initiatives, GBS and NN, underscores the effectiveness of our strategic direction and validates the investments made. Both are deeply linked to the structural and cultural shifts Joseph has championed, including agility, accountability, and an AI-first mindset across the organization. Our consistent performance in a muted demand environment reaffirms the resilience of our AI-led offshore model. Each of our 10 transformations is now delivering measurable outcomes, from faster decision-making and sharper vertical accountability to enhanced productivity and operating leverage. Together, these are structurally strengthening Happiest Minds Technologies for the long term. I would say it's the combined impact of Joseph's leadership, the rapid scaling of GBS, and the momentum from our NN sales engine that gives us the confidence. This is important. We are reiterating our earlier commitment, which was for three consecutive years of double-digit growth.
We are now raising this to four continuous years of double-digit growth. This reflects our confidence in our pipelines. It reflects our confidence in getting accelerated growth through these businesses that we've talked about and the many other areas which will now start contributing more heavily. It also shows the predictability of our business model as we proceed ahead with our AI-driven transformation portfolio. With that, I would like to thank all our customers, our partners, shareholders, and mindful innovators for their continued trust and commitment. I now invite Joseph to take you through the business highlights and customer success stories for the quarter and the half-year.
Thank you, Ashok, and good morning, everyone. We have delivered a robust H1 FY 2026 performance with revenues of $129.5 million, growing 11.8% in constant currency and delivering EBITDA margins of 20.8%, well within our target range. This reflects the continued success of our 10 strategic transformations and reinforces our ability to deliver consistent, profitable growth, even in a challenging demand environment. In an industry context where most peers reported flat to mid-single-digit growth, our performance stands out, which was powered by a strong offshore model, domain focus, and early bets on generative and agentic AI. Now, let me begin with the demand environment. Across industries, clients are reprioritizing spend towards cost efficiency, AI-driven productivity, and digital modernization. While discretionary budgets remain tight, we are seeing a clear rise in investment intensity across data, cybersecurity, and generative AI, areas where Happiest Minds is uniquely positioned to lead.
Our Generative AI Business Services unit continues to be a major growth driver. The success of this unit is evident from 22 transformative AI use cases that have now scaled into replicable projects, unlocking GBS-led sales potential of nearly $15 million over the next few years. These projects are shaping how enterprises adopt AI-first architecture. They are building increments to platforms and processes to deliver measurable business outcomes. As part of these initiatives, we are also discovering major challenges with the customer's data in terms of silos, quality, and governance, leading to significant opportunities. At the same time, customers are also realizing the architecture is not optimized for AI, leading to modernization projects. Our investment in an independent NN sales unit has also begun to deliver strong results.
During H1, we added 30 new clients, generating approximately $9 million in revenue and representing a potential of $50 million- $60 million over the next three years. This NN engine combines domain-led hunting with AI-powered account intelligence, allowing us to enter large, high-quality logos and scale them rapidly. What's even more encouraging is that over 1/2 of these 30 new clients have already expanded into multiple initiatives within months of onboarding, a clear reflection of their confidence in us and the early cross-sell traction we are seeing. Let me share a few wins from Q2 that clearly demonstrate this traction. For a Fortune 100 insurance company, we're executing a large-scale database modernization and migration program, positioning ourselves as a strategic partner in their core technology transformation. For a global health tech leader in Europe, they're strengthening their cybersecurity posture through advanced threat analytics and zero-trust architecture.
For a global information services company, they're embedding generative AI into their quality and engineering processes, reducing cycle times and enhancing accuracy in test case generation. For a U.S.-based cloud provider, we run a multi-year network managed services engagement, leveraging our cloud ops and platform engineering capabilities. From a business unit perspective, growth in H1 was well distributed, with GBS leading the momentum, growing more than 79% in constant currency. PBS grew 9.6% during the modernization and industry transformations programs, while IMSS delivered 15.6% growth backed by sustained demand in cybersecurity and cloud services. From a vertical perspective, retail, CPG, healthcare, and high-tech industry groups demonstrated strong growth during the quarter and the half, and we expect this to continue into the second half based on the pipeline that we currently have. Our industry group verticalization is deepening engagement across focus sectors.
BFSI continues to be our largest vertical, powered by proprietary platforms such as ATA and Insurance in a Box, enabling digital payments, AI-based credit scoring, and agentic AI-driven claims automation. In health tech, we are driving recovery through digital campus enablement, personalized learning paths, and AI-powered assessments, allowing us to target institutes and universities where we have a small presence and can lead to replicable sales. In health tech and life sciences, large database migrations and AI-driven compliance programs are fueling next-gen healthcare developments. Retail and manufacturing are benefiting from connected commerce and Industry 4.0 initiatives, while high-tech and media are seeing renewed demand for GenAI-based campaign management and ad tech optimization. Geographically, the U.S. remains our largest contributor, with India and Europe showing steady improvement and the Middle East/Africa emerging as high-potential AI markets. Operationally, utilization improved 18.7%, the best in over three years.
The scale achieved by GBS and the strong offshore mix contributed meaningfully to operating leverage and delivery excellence. Looking ahead, our priorities for H2 are clear. To deepen AI integration within existing accounts, continue looking for replicable use cases in GenAI and AI to get long-term revenues, scale net new logos into multi-million dollar relationships, continue focusing on a high-growth strategy to grow more million-dollar customers and move them up the ladder, and sustain profitability through disciplined execution and high utilization. Backed by momentum in generative and agentic AI and the strong visibility from both GBS and NN pipelines, we are, as Ashok Soota mentioned, raising our growth commitment from three to four consecutive years of digital double-digit revenue growth through FY 2028. With that, let me hand it over to Venkatraman Narayanan for the financial review and outlook.
Thank you, Joseph. Good morning and happy Diwali to all on the call. For the next few minutes, I'll take you through the financials and operational highlights for the first half and the second quarter of 2026. We have delivered another encouraging set of results at the end of the second quarter. When I look at the performance across the industry, I feel even more positive about how we have executed and maintained consistency despite a difficult environment. For the first half of FY 2026, we produced $129.5 million, reflecting a growth of 11.8% in constant currency, well aligned with our double-digit growth guidance for the year. The transformational changes we initiated last year are clearly translating into results. In rupee terms, our revenues were INR 1,123 crores, up 14% year-over- year, demonstrating healthy momentum across all our business units. Our total income for H1 stood at INR 1,175 crores.
On profitability, EBITDA was INR 244 crores at 20.8% of revenue, comfortably within our guided range of 20% to 22% for the year. Our operating profit at INR 194 crores, or 17.3% of revenues, is broadly in line with last year. Moving to the quarter gone by, operating revenues of Q2 stood at $65.2 million, growing 2.3% sequentially in constant currency. In rupees, this translates to INR 503 crores, up 4.3% sequentially, 10% year-over- year, aided by a favorable exchange rate environment. Operating profit for the quarter was INR 97 crores, representing a margin of 17% compared to 17.6% in the previous quarter. This quarter's margin reflects the impact of the annual pay increase with offsets coming from forex benefit, volume growth, efficiencies through higher utilization, and lower attrition.
Just as a point, gross margins improved to 37.2% compared to 36.7% in the last quarter and 36% a year ago. Most of this gain has been reinvested into scaling our Generative AI Business Services unit and the NN sales engine, two of which are now showing tangible business traction. Speaking of these investments, our business, previous business, broke even last quarter and continues to deliver strong growth, improved margin, and higher utilization this quarter. The team has built an impressive portfolio of 22 use cases and replicable solutions, representing a revenue potential of over $15 million in the next three to four years. Our net new sales unit is now operating at an annualized run rate of about $20 million.
We have signed over 30 new clients in H1, half-year one, with a collective revenue potential of almost $50 million- $60 million over the next couple of years. These early outcomes validate the strength of our new business model. Our EBITDA margin for Q2 stood at 20.2%, within the guided range of 20%- 22%. With continued efficiency initiatives and cost optimization, we expect gradual improvement in both operating margin and EBITDA as we move into the second half. Now, turning to some operational metrics, company-wide utilization improved to 81.7%, the highest in the last three years, and compared to 78.9% in Q1. Within that, GBS utilization has improved sharply from 40.8% to almost 62%, reflecting scale back and operational leverage. We ended the quarter with 6,500 Happiest Minds, a net addition of 31 over the previous quarter, and gross hiring numbers of 264.
Our DSO has improved from 91 days in the previous quarter to about 88 days, and we continue to work towards further improving this. Our capital return ratios have consistently remained strong, with ROC and ROE steady at 23% and 14%, reflecting our efficient capital management practices. Attrition continues to moderate. It has come down to 17.4% from 18.2% in Q1. This is on a trailing 12-month basis, and it's a trend that we hope to sustain. Let me address a topic that has been widely discussed, which is the recent H1B visa policy developments. I would like to emphasize that our exposure here is zero, rather, let's say even negligible. In the past 12 months, we have only had two professionals traveling to the U.S. on H1B visas. Our strong offshore delivery model and diversified geography mix have insulated us well from such external changes.
Given cash flows and strong balance sheet, the board has spent INR 2.75 per share, and the report is 4th November 2025. Looking ahead, our focus remains on accelerating growth in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and data-driven transformation across our key verticals while maintaining financial discipline and margin resilience. Our aspirations for FY 2026 remain unchanged. It is to deliver double-digit revenue growth in constant currency and maintain our EBITDA in the 20%- 22% range.
Sorry to interrupt, sir.
AI isn't using your audio in between, sir.
Sorry to interrupt, sir. May I request you to please reread the last sentence? We lost that audio in between, sir.
Our aspiration for FY 2026 remains unchanged, and it is to deliver double-digit revenue growth in constant currency, sustain EBITDA margins in the 20 %- 22% range. With continued investments in talent, AI, and operational excellence, we are confident of delivering sustainable and profitable revenue in the quarters ahead. Thank you for your time and continued trust. I will now hand it over to the moderator to open it up for Q&A.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and- answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to please use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on what has led to the decline in this quarter in our Infrastructure Management and Security Services and financial services vertical.
Ram, you want to take that round?
On the Infrastructure Management and Security Services side, we had one of the large customers who is actually going through a new proposal, and some of the things which you were supposed to continue with, some of the deals have stopped because of the new proposal. That is one reason. The second reason is there was one of the deals which actually was supposed to happen in quarter two that has been pushed to quarter three. These are the two reasons why we had a little less growth in the infrastructure and security business. On the other hand, we have seen some good progress, and our pipeline is looking good for quarter three, and we believe that we will be able to improvise in quarter three going forward.
Sure. If I can just add Ram out here, we should also note that Q1 had increased by 7.23%. In a way, it's kind of still very much in the plus if you look at these variations. With these changes which Ram has talked about, we should be very much into getting back onto a good growth path.
Okay. Aditi, addressing your question on the BFS side, overall, we still continue to be quite bullish, and we see good traction in the BFS space. The slight drop that you see on a quarter-on-quarter basis, which is a little bit of an anomaly because we've been growing otherwise over the last few quarters, is for two reasons. One is our ATA banking platform, some of the deals that we had that we expected to close during the quarter, we couldn't sign the contract and, you know, therefore recognize the revenues in Q2, and that shifted into Q3. We should be able to recognize those revenues in Q3. You'll also notice that APAC had a little bit of a drop during the quarter, and that's come in the BFS I space.
One of our large customers out there had a temporary ramp-up, and they're going to start this back in the new year when they get their initial budget. Therefore, you will see that the overall performance of BFSI will get back to a positive trend in the second half of the year.
Okay. Got it. My third question is on, can you give more color on how our win rate and pipeline has improved post our focus on the winning net new large deals and also how the size of deals has improved?
I'll first address the pipeline at a broader level. If I'm not mistaken, you asked how our generative AI pipeline has improved, right?
Net new.
Net new.
Okay. Net new. Overall, our pipeline, if you look at it at the end of the quarter, was around 20%- 25% higher than what it was at the beginning of the quarter. This represents, I would say, progress on multiple fronts. NN, and I'll come to how the NN is looking. Generative AI, which we touched upon in our commentary where we had these 22 replicable AI use cases, and we're looking at $50 million of revenue over the next three to four years. Very positive about that. Ram touched on the IMSS opportunities, some of the large RFPs that we are addressing. Overall, our FICO strategy, that's also giving dividends and adding to the pipeline. When we look at our NN initiative, the team has just come together finally during the quarter. We had quite a few, we had a couple of people that joined during the quarter.
I think it's credible that in spite of the team not being fully formed, we were able to close 30 new logos during the first half of the year. Many of these logos are Fortune 500, Fortune Global 1000 customers. We are very positive that we will be able to convert these into million-dollar customers, which is why we are projecting out that the $9 million that we've done in the first half of the year from these customers will translate into $50 million- $60 million over the next three to four years. This is reflective of the pipeline. Now, having said the $9 million, we expect that the trend to continue into the second half. The team has got quite a few new opportunities, some of them really large, in multimillion dollars.
We expect this to be one of our growth drivers both in the second half and for the next three to four years.
Okay, thank you for answering. I will join back in the queue.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Dhanshree Jadhav from Choice Institutional Equities. Please go ahead. Dhanshree Jadhav, your line has been unmuted. You may proceed with your question.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone, and congrats on great set of numbers. My question was, we are talking about a double-digit growth. The first half has already been done with. Should we see, as you see, some of the deals have been pushed over in third, from Q2 to Q3? Should we see Q3 and Q4 in top line should be better or better than what we have seen in the last two quarters? When we are talking about the $50 million of, you know, gradual improvisation in the $9 million size of the client revenue, what would be a timeline for that, if I can give?
Venkatraman, you want to take that?
Yeah. We should be able to do a decent quarter in Q3. One is obviously the trend of the pipeline is good. In IMSS, we had a slippage from Q2 to Q3, which is again a security deal, which is almost in place right now. We are reasonably confident that we'll have that done in Q3. That's one on IMSS. The second point is the aspect of ATA banking deals, which did not happen in Q2. Those are also most likely. We are very confident that they'll also happen because ATA banking is seasonally strong in Q3 and Q4. That will happen in Q3 and Q4. We are confident that that will also happen. Yes. Dhanashree, to a certain extent, the trend of an improvement in volume growth will be aided by these two deals, which move into the next quarter.
Venkatraman, I could just add that GenAI will clearly, all the use cases which we've signed up, many of them will be starting billing in Q3 and Q4.
That's right.
Okay. Yeah, thanks. That's it from my side.
[Dhanshree], your question?
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sushovan Nayak from Anand Rathi Institutional Equities. Please go ahead.
Hi, I hope my voice is audible.
Sir, you are audible. You may proceed.
Yes. If I remove the impact of the other income, what we observe is that your margins have actually improved recently in the last quarter. If you could just possibly help us quantify what would be the impact of currency, wage hike, if any, that would just be helpful.
Yeah. Sushovan, we have given, we have started reporting operating margin, taking off any sort of noise from the other income. At an operating margin level, we are at about 17% compared to 17.6% and 17.3% vis-à-vis last quarter, 17.9% and 17.6% in the last quarter in the last year. We did have exchange rate benefit. Net exchange rate benefit was in the region of about INR 10 crore because we had forex losses also. On our forwards, we follow a structured approach, a ladder approach. We had losses. Our pay increases were in the region of about INR 11 crore-INR 12 crore. If you set off that, the rest of it has come from the benefits that we talked about, utilization and the improvement in attrition and GBS doing better. To give you a color of all of this, that's why I alluded to the gross margin.
If you look at our investor presentation, that's there in our entire P&L data sheet. We have given the gross margins. We did see a perk up of gross margin to 37.2%.
Thank you, sir.
Sure. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the follow-up opportunity. This quarter, we had cross-currency headwinds of around 111 bps. Can you help us understand what has led to this headwind? This is higher than what we have seen for other peers in the industry.
You mean headwinds? I just quantified the gain.
On the revenue side, sir.
We didn't have a headwind. We had a benefit, right? The benefit was about, if I remember my numbers right, INR 15 or 16 crore. Net of, you know, the forex loss that we take on realized forwards, that would be about INR 7 crore. Net of about INR 9 crore-INR 10 crore is the gain that we got into the margin. Under the top line, in rupee terms, it is about INR 16 crore if my number is right.
Okay. I was referring to USD growth of 1.2% versus constant currency growth of 2.3% in QoQ terms, the difference between these two numbers.
That is because if you look at it, our growth has substantially come from geographies outside of the U.S., while the U.S. has remained steady. In the geo split, we are at about 60% compared to the 59.3% or something last quarter. We have touched 60% this quarter. The growth that has come is largely from the geographies of India, Middle East/Africa, and APAC. When you and vis-à-vis the dollar, we have been able to do those currencies have done better. On a constant currency basis, that has helped us show the growth.
Okay. My next question was on the outlook on our SG&A costs. For the last two years, our SG&A costs have been growing higher on year-on-year terms versus revenue. Would this intensity continue, and what would be the key spend areas in SG&A going forward?
Our SG&A has been primarily in putting the new sales engine in place, Aditi. That's something that started early last year, and the team is almost now fully in place. The second thing is we also got into verticalization last year, and when you get into verticalization, you have certain SG&A costs that's required because now the sales structure is one of the new new sales opportunities are opened by the new new sales team, and they are followed in by the verticals. Then you get in the pre-sales. You've got a couple of layers that are added to the business and business support layer, which is added to this cost. Like I called out in my speaking notes, we are looking to bring in efficiencies now that things are stabilizing, looking at how to manage these costs.
I don't want to use the word control, but manage these costs to get more efficiencies from them. That's on the SG&A. We are looking at it very carefully, and hopefully, it will not be a linear trend. It's not expected to be a linear trend also.
Some of these, Aditi, we should look at as investments. Venkatraman alluded to the industry groups. He said once you verticalize and bring in an industry group, under each industry group, there are typically sub-industry or sub-domains, right? Like if you look at BFSI, you'll have banking, you'll have capital markets, you'll have insurance. If you look at healthcare, it'll be life sciences, pharma providers. Each of these sub-domains have their own specific needs and requirements. You need to get sub-domain heads who can talk that language to customers and take a consultative approach. Those revenues from these investments are increasing, and over a period of time, they will outweigh the cost, and we'll get returns on them. That's one. The second is realizing the state of the market.
We've pushed our domain technology leaders and our salespeople to travel more and be at the customer location and have more in-person meetings. I think this is leading to much stronger relationships and identifying opportunities as reflected in our growth. The third point I want to touch on from an SG&A perspective is that we are also investing heavily in marketing and events. We've got an event sales team, as Venkatraman pointed out, which is a fair bit of the SG&A cost that has increased over the last year. Having made that investment, I think we need to enable them with the tools, getting them to events where they can meet with prospective customers. All of this I look at as investments that will start paying off.
As you see, the 30 logos that we've closed, we are projecting that over three years, it'll yield us $50 million revenues or so. I look at it a little differently. Having said that, as Venkatraman pointed out, we will look at where we can manage our costs as well.
Okay. Got it. My next question was on GenAI BU. Can you give more color about how the nature of work has evolved over the past one year in terms of size of deals, complexity of the deals, and nature of contracts, whether they are TNM or outcome-based?
Sure. Thanks for the question. There's three there. I'll address each one. For example, the nature of the team from the TNM and fixed bid point of view. One year back, when we initially started, one and a half years back, when we initially started working, we actually had approximately 80% of the projects going as fixed bids because most of the projects, the initial stages were POCs, somewhat reasonably well defined, and customers also not willing to put a lot of money. From that stage, at this point in time, we started moving more and more into external engineering teams, one-year port structure, which typically is like a five to six people kind of port structure, one-year commitment from the customer. We started moving into that direction. However, compared to the rest of the company, we still are approximately 50% fixed bids compared to the external engineering team.
Typically, the rest of the organization of Happiest Minds is around 9%- 10% of fixed bids. We also want to work on longer engagements because the customers are also getting clarity. It is no longer a two, three-month prototype, let us see, and wait. They're committing for the one-year roadmaps, etc. In terms of that's the last question that you asked. In terms of the scope of the work and the nature of the work, right? Two things are happening. One is, of course, the [agent kit] came like a storm on layering on the top of the LLM technologies, etc. We are also working on complex use cases along with the platform development. We started seeing integrated deals, which are larger ticket price for Happiest Minds with generative AI plus AI use cases, that part alone reaching closer to $1 million in a couple of deals.
That started making us believe that we slowly started crossing the inflection point of the technology adoption. That's where Ashok, Joseph, and Venkatraman alluded that we have a much higher confidence about the replicable sales of having a larger ticket deal. The last point I want to add is about the replicable sales, right? Now, with this technology, we started seeing the same use case being asked by multiple customers. I'll take something very simple like a virtual tutor, something all of us can understand, right? Now, every edutech company requires a virtual tutor kind of use cases. Similarly, across multiple domains, we identified multiple use cases where we already have customers such as and taking them to the market.
Okay. That color is helpful. I had a next question on the edutech vertical. The revenue in that vertical has been ramping down since the last few quarters. When should we expect the revenue run rate to stabilize?
Yeah. I think the observation is right. As I have shared in the previous earnings call, that's a segment that has had a little bit of challenges over the last couple of years. Having said that, some of the headwinds that we were facing, I think by Q3, we should see bottoming up. As I pointed out in my commentary, we are seeing opportunities based on GenAI in a new segment, in the institution and university segment, where the hope to manage the student lifecycle and their experience and improve their engagement and graduation rate offers us a huge scope for replicable sales across many institutions and universities. Just this quarter, we managed to get a multi-million dollar, close to $3 million SOW with one of the leading management institutes in Asia for implementing an end-to-end solution and a platform for them. This experience we can take to other universities.
This is based on a consulting exercise that we have done in the previous quarter. On similar lines, with much limited scope, we've assigned one of the universities in the U.S. to do a consulting exercise, which we expect will lead to implementation over a multiple-year cycle, starting next quarter. The end goal is to see if we can take over their entire infrastructure and applications and run it for them while they focus on educating their students. We're also in discussion with a couple of universities in Canada on similar lines. We believe that once we have some experience, we could even look at building some of these solutions or modules that we could take to universities. This should allow us to see a recovery in the edutech segment going forward. It's a pivotal strategy that we are doing, and we're already seeing results on this, Aditi.
Okay, thank you for patiently answering my questions.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sushovan Nayak from Anand Rathi Institutional Equities. Please go ahead.
Hi. I just have a quick question. Sir, are you seeing any productivity-related benefits passed through on account of GenAI, which may potentially impact the pricing or the margins for that matter? That's one. If you could also give us some flavor about how the PR as well as the audio technicians are now faring. I would like to understand.
Sure. If you look at, you know, if you break up our whole GenAI strategy into two, one is demand, the other is supply. On the supply, it is how do we bring in some of these productivity tools to increase the productivity of our engineers. In our fixed-price projects, we are making sure that we include GenAI at the core, at the proposal stage, and base our estimation of the productivity enhancements that we get from using these tools.
I'll come back to an offering that we have, which is also interesting. What we're doing out here is we're sharing the productivity enhancement and the benefits that we get with the customer. We keep part of it because there's a cost of training, a cost of tools, etc., and we pass on part of the benefits to the customer, right? From a pricing perspective, for GenAI-based projects, what we're seeing is that we're getting 20%- 25% premium over a standard rate card. This is just the demand, supply, and the outcome that these initiatives and our team is able to drive, right? That was the first question. Can you just repeat the second question, please? How do you see?
Yeah.
Okay. I think both of them are progressing really well. As we can see in our BFSI performance over the last few quarters, it's been growing quarter on quarter. Both of them are heavily leveraging some of the capabilities that they did not have within their own units, things like security, data and analytics, AI, and especially GenAI. We've been able to do a fair bit of cross-selling of these skills and capabilities to some of PureSoftware and Aureus customers. We're looking at how to take some of our domain capabilities because being smaller, we have not really verticalized. As you know, we verticalized two years back, and we've built a fair bit of domain capabilities.
We're able to take these capabilities and take a more consultative approach, go up the stream in terms of discussions and drive value and become a much more value-adding partner to some of these customers. At the same time, we are working closely with both of these companies on two of these solutions. With PureSoftware, we've been working on the ATA banking platform, making investments into the platform to take it first into India. As we speak, we're working with a couple of cooperative banks out here to implement this ATA banking platform for these two cooperative banks. We also have an Insurance in a Box platform that we've worked jointly with Aureus. We should be signing a few customers by the end of this month in Africa. These will be five-year deals that will give us an ARR of at least $500,000 just for these three customers.
There are multiple other customers out there. I think overall, there's quite a bit of synergies, and there's value being driven both ways from the Happiest Minds organization to PureSoftware and Aureus. We're taking some of their capabilities and taking it to our customers.
If I may just ask a couple of other questions.
Sushovan, you need to be louder.
If I may ask a couple of other questions, is my voice audible now?
Yeah, yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah. Is there any reason for the other income having significantly reduced this quarter? The other bit is on the segments, retail and manufacturing segment. While most of the other larger peers have maintained a comparatively weaker commentary on these two segments, we observed that both these segments have done really well. Any particular reason for that? If you could just give us some color on that. Other income is an easy answer.
Yeah.
Yeah. The other income is an easy answer. It's essentially, we have got 80% or 70% of our investments into mutual funds, which has been doing very well. Thanks to the trade and the tariff that was happening last quarter, we had a little bit of buffeting of returns. Now we're just back to 8% +. We touched 6% in thereabouts last quarter. That's the only reason.
Sure. Thank you.
Take retail and manufacturing, both separately. Give you a little bit of view. As you rightly pointed out, retail has grown really well. If you look at from Q1 to Q2, the growth is almost 10%. There are two, three reasons that have driven this growth. You'll also notice that Europe has grown quarter on quarter, right? There's a correlation between the two, actually, because some of the deals that we closed in Europe during the quarter were in the retail CPG space. One of them is one of the largest players in natural food. The other one is one of the largest bottlers for a leading beverage manufacturer in Europe, right? Both of these engagements started. The bottler is a GenAI use case that we are implementing for them. If you want some details, we could provide that.
Whereas the other company that I talked about, we are doing multiple projects for them on data, on GenAI, and on business intelligence. We're also seeing traction in Australia with retail customers. We have quite a few of the leading retail companies in Australia that are customers, and we added a couple more during the quarter. A couple of others that we had, they've also ramped up. That's why you're seeing an increase in the revenues for the retail and CPG segment. For manufacturing, one of our large customers in India, we saw an uptick in revenues. I think it was a little cyclical, probably. They had dropped during Q1. We saw that the inflow of projects that we were able to execute. Now, having said that, the revenue from manufacturing standalone—we typically look at manufacturing and industrial together—is around $2 million, and it's gone up to around $2.1 million.
It's around $130,000, not that much. The reason is this India automotive company where we were able to get additional projects, and that has resulted in the growth.
Sure, thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vinay Rajani from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead. Vinay, your line has been unmuted. You may proceed with your question.
Hello. Am I audible?
Yes, you are audible, sir. You may proceed.
Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity and giving a strong operational performance during this quarter. My question, I have a few questions. One was related to the geography. The US geography during this quarter had shown a sequential improvement after the three quarters of decline. The question was, is there any spending pattern change, or still the deals are related to the cost optimization deal, or GenAI-focused deals are coming in?
Sure. If you look at the U.S., as we rightly pointed out, we had around 3% increase quarter on quarter in revenues. I would attribute this to three reasons, right? The first, as we rightly pointed out, is GenAI. We see it in the GenAI numbers. Quite a bit of our, majority of our GenAI revenues come from the U.S., and that has contributed. GenAI has contributed to the growth in the U.S. geo. We also talked about NN, right? The NN team that we've created, separate team, we've started with the U.S. and India because between the two, they account for 80% of our revenues. If you see, both India and the U.S. have grown quite well. If you go back to the statement that we made that the 30 logos that we've signed, they yielded $9 million revenues in the first half.
A majority of that has come from the U.S., and that, again, has contributed to the growth that you see. That's the reason we've been feeling bullish and projecting $50 million over three years, three to four years from these logos that we've closed. We're also seeing initial positive signs from our FICO strategy, where we've had a couple of customers that have grown based on a focused mining effort. In terms of spend, we've seen more of at least the deals that we've closed, the revenues we've got, they're based more on AI and GenAI-based initiatives. We've had a couple of consolidation deals, the ones that I talked about, where we were able to grow significantly through account mining. That was a consolidation that we were able to engineer with the customer with cost savings that we're able to drive back to the customer through productivity enhancement.
More of our wins and requirements, we are seeing in the AI and GenAI and data space.
Okay. Got it, sir. Another one was regarding the furloughs. How do we expect the furloughs in the next quarter? Do we have a seasonality impact of normal furloughs, or do we expect that it to be higher? Another one was on the utilization. As you pointed out, our utilization has improved to 80%, which is highest in the past three years. Do we expect that to improve further, which would be adding our margins going ahead? What would be the comfortable range of utilization going ahead? Thanks.
Sure. If you look at furloughs, we typically get minimal impact on it. It's too early to talk about it because customers come back to you only towards the end of the second half of November or first week of December. As I see the customers that we have and the nature of engagement, my belief is that we should not be impacted by furloughs because a lot of the work that we are doing is quite critical, and customers need to get these initiatives and these projects out and into production to customers and to the employees. I don't believe we'll have much of an impact from furloughs. We have taken a goal of getting utilization to about 80%, and I'm very gratified to know that it's at 80.7%.
We expect to keep it at this level and, if possible, to move it slightly up as well, right, because there are still pockets, and we're approaching this in a segmented manner, looking at specific skill sets and development centers and seeing how we can push up utilization. There could be scope for a percent or so. From a margin perspective, I think we'll maintain the 20% - 22% EBITDA that we've consistently committed to and which we will deliver on.
Thank you, sir. That's all from my side. Best wishes for Q3.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ruchi Mukhija from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a year, more than a year, since we acquired Arttha from PureSoftware. Could you summarize the integration and the synergy benefits from these two advisable acquisitions?
Sure. I kind of touched on this a little earlier, but I'll kind of recap what I talked about. See, both Arttha and PureSoftware, Arttha was stronger in the insurance space, and PureSoftware was stronger in the banking area, right? They had their own strengths more in platform engineering. This is an overlap with Happiest Minds and one of the reasons we acquired both of these companies, apart from the fact that they really augmented and enhanced our BFSI capabilities and presence in the market. There were also areas that both of these companies did not have capabilities, and hence, we're leaving opportunities on the table. For instance, security infrastructure, GenAI, analytics, these are areas where we've been able to identify opportunities and do more of cross-selling.
At the same time, some of the domain skills that both Arttha and PureSoftware have, whether it's in insurance or in banking, is something we've been able to take to some of our existing customers. More importantly, to some of the new prospects that the LLM team is working with, we are able to take some of the experts from both of these companies and have them join the same team and represent the domain capabilities out there, enhancing and increasing our probability of winning these deals. We've done a few of these deals in both insurance and banking space. Again, on the platform, as you know, PureSoftware has the ATA banking platform, and we've been working closely with the architect of that platform, the business owner, to make investments in the platform to take it to market, starting in India because they don't have any presence in India.
Currently, the customers are in Southeast Asia and Africa. As we speak, we have a couple of COCs, or I would say semi-implementations going on for a couple of cooperative banks. This should open up the India market for ATA, which is something that we are helping drive along with the PureSoftware leaders. On Arttha, we've put together an Insurance in a Box. Some of the ideas and thoughts came from Happiest Minds. Some of it came from Arttha. We're taking this as a platform to, you know, MGAs, starting with South Africa, where we already have pre-committed customers. The business model is ARR-based with five-year deals, right? There are multiple other such MGAs that we can cross-sell into. We look at, you know, how do we get into other countries and other geos or continents.
That's the other area where we are extracting synergies out of, you know, these two acquisitions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Dhanshree Jadhav from Choice Institutional Equities. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my question. My question was on pricing. We said that in GenAI, we have been able to get a 25% increase in pricing. I just wanted to know, other than GenAI, how is the pricing conversation as of now with the clients? Some data points, if you can share there. My second question is on hiring plans for the current year.
Can you repeat the question?
The first question.
It wasn't very clear. Can you please repeat it?
Yeah. On pricing, we said that in GenAI, we are getting a premium of 25% as of now. I just wanted to understand how this has been blended, or other than GenAI, how is the pricing and the conversation with the clients as of now and our hiring plans?
Sure. This is a blended or an average rate, right? The rate range could vary anywhere from 32 - 45 or 60. It varies between the customers who we see have huge potential and therefore sometimes make semi-investments, which kind of pulls the rate down. What we get out of that is an entry into these customers. At the same time, it also helps build some of the replicable AI use cases that we talked about, right? Once we are able to implement it, we understand what it takes, what are the customer requirements. That's how we arrived at that 20 %- 25% premium on the standard rates or the average rates that we get for the rest of the business. In terms of hiring plans, I think it's going to track the pipeline and the revenue growth. We did a headcount increase of 31 in Q2.
As I mentioned earlier, we still see a little scope for increasing our utilization. We'll have to factor that in and then reflect it on our growth to project out our hiring plan. My expectation is that we will continue adding headcount both in Q3 and Q4 because we have a good pipeline. As Venkatraman Narayanan pointed out earlier, we are optimistic on our revenues and performance for Q3.
Thanks. When should we start reporting the TCV numbers, like the order bookings?
Hello. We have not been reporting TCV because that's been, it's not a consistent, you know, number that we have. There have been reasons that we have clearly given out in our previous calls. There is no uniform formula into how these things are communicated. It's just numbers which are, you know, cited at a point in time. Rather, we give out numbers of our repeat business. We give you our new new business numbers. We give out our pipeline as a percentage of where we stand. TCV number, you know, it doesn't make too much of a, you know, at least from our side, we thought it doesn't make too much of a sense. That's why we've not been doing it.
Sure.
Just to add to what Venkatraman Narayanan said, many of our opportunities or revenues come from more of, you know, land that expands. Let's say, you know, the couple of examples I gave where we did discovery or consulting exercise, typically we'll do it at maybe $100,000, $150,000, $200,000. The implementation would be a few million. Would you have TCV at $200,000 or $2.2 million or $3.2 million? You don't know the premium until you do your consulting exercise and go to the customer. That's the reason why, you know, we don't want to, you know, paint a muddy or confused picture. We want to be consistent.
Okay. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as a last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ms. Priyanka Sharma for closing comments. Over to you, ma'am.
Thank you all for joining us today. We sincerely thank Joseph Anantharaju for hosting this call on our behalf. We look forward to continued engagement with all our investors and analysts. For any follow-up queries, please feel free to reach out to the Investor Relations team. This is Priyanka Sharma signing off, and you can reach out to us on ir@happiestminds.com. Thank you once again, and have a great day, guys.
Okay. Bye.
Thank you. On behalf of Anand Rathi Institutional Equities, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.