Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Hexaware Technologies Ltd Q4 CY24 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Neeraj Khemka from Hexaware Technologies. Thank you, and over to you, Mr. Khemka.
Everyone, this is Hexaware's first earnings conference, a release date on 19th February, and we are delighted to connect with you. In the call today, we have Mr. R. Srikrishna, CEO, Mr. Vikas Jain, CFO, and Mr. Vinod Chandran, COO. In the course of this call, we may make certain statements which are forward-looking and may involve a number of risks and uncertainties. All forward-looking statements made herein are based on the information presently available to the management, and the company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements.
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We have, I think, the last window, a few days to announce the Q4 results, so here we are. A little bit housekeeping, I think many of you know this, that we are on calendar year. Calendar year is our fiscal year, so this is our quarter four for the fiscal year 2024, which is also calendar year 2024. Just to kind of keep reminding everyone of that, we have put our terminology as CY24, which is also the same as FY for us. We had a really good fourth quarter, a little bit of momentum of continuing acceleration in YoY growth continued. Our bit of lag in the slides, but it'll come up to what I'm talking. So our fourth quarter 2024, we finished at a modest 0.2% sequential growth, but more importantly, close to 19% YoY growth for the year.
This is, of course, accelerating. It has been accelerating through 2024. It also means that on a full-year basis, we closed at about 13.5% Y-Y growth, and all of you, of course, follow all of our peers. Really kind of only one company clearly above, and another company in the same range. Nobody else is in double digits. On profitability, we have been improving our reported EBITDA numbers. In our DRHP and RHP, we reported some adjusted numbers. During the roadshow, we said we will not present adjusted numbers once we list, so you'll not see any adjusted numbers from us in this. You also heard us say that the adjustments are truly one-off, and they will recede, and I think you're seeing evidence of that through a sharp increase in reported EBITDA in a pretty soft quarter, cyclical quarter for us.
In effect, the reported EBITDA is up 50% YoY and more in absolute terms, right? Our actual EPS is up 65% YoY in absolute terms. So with all this combined with a very strong closing cash position of just under INR 2,000 crores or about $230 million. We added 4,000 people in 2024, which is among the highest in the industry for IT growth. So we've been close to the net headcount of just over 32,000 people. Attrition has been trending down, and it is now, we think, the lowest or among the lowest in the industry at 10.8%. This is great on a number of fronts. It means people like working for Hexaware. I think it also means that profitability attrition is a big negative for profitability.
The cost difference between cost of hires versus cost of trade drives profitability down, and we've got that to a best in the industry level. Our utilization for Q4 is at 81.6%, which is seasonally impacted due to furloughs, so we are actually okay with where it is. It does mean we have headroom to grow from here, but some of it is due to furloughs. We're very proud that for the first time, we have a customer whose revenue is in excess of $100 million. We added four customers in the 20 million category, so up from 11 to 14 in just one year of customers that give us about 20 million. That's a lot of solidity in the middle of a pyramid, which gives us confidence for the future, and our top 10 clients' revenue concentration is about 36%.
We are proud that we got recognized in Brand Finance, top 25 most IT brands globally. In our RHP and DRHP, we presented our NPS data. There's an additional data point that did not get presented in that is that Europe-specific study by Whitelane Research, and in this, we were again ranked first in general satisfaction across a number of different countries that we operate in, in Europe and the UK. Growth for us has been broad-based. Let me kind of talk to both ends of growth here on the vertical side. You see that growth is led by high-tech and professional services and financial services in that sequence, 22%, 19% YoY growths. This was full year 2024. This is kind of consistent with what's been consistent with our commentary that financial services did a sharp turnaround for us, and we expect that to sustain going forward.
We said on the other end, manufacturing and consumer is a challenged sector. Frankly, we've had at least two clients that have gone through Chapter 11, which among other secular headwinds, there are two additional kind of specific to our portfolio headwinds that have caused this. We don't see this to recover substantially, but we will see perhaps somewhat better in 2025 than in 2024. I think our negative outlier in 2024 from a performance perspective is banking. We see at 7.6% growth. Actually, there's a couple of one-offs that contributed to that. We actually see that coming back pretty sharply in about six months. But nevertheless, all of this aggregated to mid-13s.
Ladies and gentlemen, the line for the management has been disconnected. Please stay connected while we reconnect them. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for patiently holding. The line for the management has been reconnected. Over to you, sir.
Apology, I didn't know when we got disconnected. So I'm actually going to just talk through verticals and geographies once again. So our growth kind of came broad-based as in every vertical grew. However, there's quite a wide variance in the growth. Headlining growth was high-tech professional services and financial services in that sequence. And it's consistent with what we've spoken about, that financial services saw a smart recovery for that, and actually, we think these will sustain. The other end is manufacturing and consumer. Apart from secular headwinds across the industry, I think we had at least two clients that went through Chapter 11, which added to headwinds for us, and this softness will persist somewhat. Banking, 7.6 low performance actually is a few one-offs. We actually think this will recover very smartly in a couple of quarters.
But in aggregate, all of this still meant mid-13% growth, which is solid in a difficult economy. From a geographic perspective, I'll start with APAC. At 6.5% growth, that's much lower than company average. However, it represents a sharp increase from what our historical performance in Asia has been, and we expect this will actually accelerate. Europe has come down after a number of years of challenged performance, and actually, it will make an improvement to company average, is the broad expectation. And the U.S. will continue to do very well like it did in 2024. We spoke a little bit about client pyramid and client concentration. Again, we are very proud that we have our first $100 million client. We expect to expand that list pretty quickly, and that's fed by strength in every level of the pyramid below.
Like I said, 30%-40% increase in the 20 million customer base is the most important feeder for customers becoming larger. We've done all this while moderating customer concentration risk over a medium-term period, so. Some examples of deals we've won during this quarter. This is a mixture of existing clients and new clients. The right two are new clients, and the other four are existing clients. I'll give some color on this. The top right hand, the global supply chain management, provides logistics, in-store marketing support for some of the largest food and beverage quick service restaurants in the world. Our initial work with them starts with AI-based outsourcing of tech operations. We started work with a global leader in e-discovery, and this is an area that substantially will be altered by AI.
Our solution, what we are executing for this customer, reflects that philosophy, that substantial amount of AI in how we're building platforms and products for this customer. The last four are existing clients. The one that I will highlight here is entirely based on RapidX, and GenAI is a major airline in the U.S., legacy modernization using RapidX. Extremely old code written like over 50 years ago. Uncovering both the code and the business logic behind that code using RapidX is that example. With this, actually, sorry, a little more commentary on profitability and EBITDA. We said three things when we met people during the roadshows. One, we will not report an adjusted EBITDA. We're not. Two, we said our adjustments are truly one-off, and they will receive. You're seeing evidence of that here.
Third, what we said is that our reported EBITDA for 2025 will be close to the adjusted EBITDA for 2024. The adjusted EBITDA for 2024 was 17.3. You don't see that here, and we fully expect to get to that pretty quickly. Right now, the only one-off cost left is ERP, which will continue through Q1 and Q2, but it'll go to zero after that. So you should see the numbers that we spoke about playing out. With that, I'm going to hand over to Vikas for a few minutes.
Thanks, Keech. Hello, everyone. So as Keech already described, we have improved our margins both from a quarter-on-quarter perspective and from a year-on-year perspective on a reported basis. And that's primarily driven by three aspects. One is with respect to better pricing. The second is in terms of our operational improvement, and the third is unit average. Some of the metrics that you can see here from an operational improvement perspective is our attrition rates have come down significantly, and we know that attrition is the single most important factor in terms of driving the cost of delivery. So our attrition rates are down to 11%. It is primarily driven by the fact that we are growing, so that's the reason people love to work for us. Our class two ratings are one of the highest. The quality of the work they do is top-notch.
Added to the fact that we are expanding into two locations is actually helping us bring down our cost of delivery and attrition. Utilization rates, we have put in a lot of initiatives which basically have helped us in terms of improving our utilization to close to 82.5% and going up to 83%. We think there is a bit of a headroom available for us to improve it further. What you see in Q4, as Keech described, is primarily an impact of the lull in seasonality from a Q4 perspective, but this will come back into, again, the 82% plus range from a Q1 perspective. Moving on, we have a very strong balance sheet. Our closing cash balance was $233 million, primarily driven by our DSOs, which has been one of the lowest from an industry perspective.
We closed Q4 at 65 days, both billed and unbilled put together, clearly the best in the industry. Just want to add that our comparable range in terms of where our DSOs are going to be is around the 70 mark, so that's what you should consider when you're modeling, and the fact that our working capital management helped us in terms of reducing our DSOs so significantly, our OCF to EBITDA was at a very healthy 75% on an adjusted EBITDA basis, but on a reported basis, it was at close to 81%. Again, the range for us, as we had communicated, is close to 70% on a go-forward basis. Our ETR continues to be one of the lowest in the industry, and the full year ETR was close to 25%.
From an EPS perspective, Keech already spoke about the fact that we have added and done a good job in terms of our margins. So our Q4 EPS was a year-on-year growth of 65%. Even from a full year perspective, it was 18%, much faster than the revenue growth. Lastly, we continue to return cash back to our shareholders. From a dividend perspective, we paid out close to 45% of our profit for the full year in the form of dividend, which in absolute terms turned out to be INR 8.75 per share. I'll hand it over back to Keech.
Thank you, Vikas. I want to spend a few minutes providing a view on 2025 and future. I think the first thing I would say is we've decided not to do guidance. Now, we spent a little bit of time thinking about this and debating this. I think we would like to start off because we're coming back to market after a while, start off giving you guidance, and there's certainly confidence to do that. However, we're thinking about several years, 10 years, and we think it's best that we don't provide guidance. Before I go into 2025, I want to talk about a couple of things that will be true in most years, some patterns that will be true in most years. One is that our calendar quarter one, calendar quarter four are seasonally low quarters.
A variety of factors: furloughs, budgets, calendar budgets, year-end, people cut to meet certain budgets. Year beginning, people haven't released budgets fully yet, or there may be unexpected change to programs. So in most years, we see kind of some discontinuities, and as a consequence, we are seasonally low quarters. Q2 and Q3 have the best sequential performance. We think the best way to take into account these is to look at Y and Y performance and the full year performance. So those two, Y and Y kind of accounts for the seasonality, and full year, we think, is a good absolute measure. It is also always true for us that Q3 will be a weak-like quarter. Calendar Q3 will be a weak-like quarter. Actually, July 1st will be a weak-like month for us. Now I'm getting to specifics on 2025.
The first thing that I want to highlight is that our Y and Y rates through second half of 2024, which is the numbers we just spoke about, the 98% and the 16.0% in Q3, are somewhat elevated due to a weak denominator in 2023, corresponding period in 2023. That is true not just for us. It's true for pretty much everyone in the industry that we saw a significant slowdown in H2 of 2023. Our Q4 exit is pretty strong at greater than 4%. Actually, if you adjust for furloughs, it is about 5%, is the exit. I think what is true is that even since the time we listed in the last two weeks, macros have trended marginally negative. All of you follow the same news that I do, so it's good to acknowledge that macros have trended marginally negative.
However, we actually expect that our 2025 performance to be resilient to modest macro changes. When I say modest, if the roof falls on our head, that's different, and that'll be different for everyone. But modest changes, such as the one that I would describe as what is happening now, our performance will be resilient to that. Some quick evidence on the basis of why I'm saying this: two of our top three customers are going through material consolidation efforts, which we've already won, and we expect some ramp on this in Q2 and a material ramp from Q3. In fact, the larger of these two, that customer's fiscal year is from July, so a lot of this execution will actually start in their new fiscal year, which is our Q3. There are two more significant deals. These are with very large customers who are not large for us.
They are large brands. And should we win even one of them, both these will have ramp in H2 or Q4, but if we win even one of them, it'll put us in a pretty good spot for 2025 and, more importantly, for 2026. Yeah. To summarize, I think macros are going to pick up, but we don't think it impacts the current shift impacts how we think about our business and performance. And I spoke already about EBITDA. We had said we will get to adjusted margins what we presented in 2024, which was at 17.3%. We will get to that on a reported basis or roughly that in a reported basis in 2025, and I think that outlook remains primarily driven by ramp-off and one-off adjustments. With that, I will pause and take questions.
Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask questions may press star and one on the touch-tone phone. If you wish to withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. First question is from the line of Ankur Rudra from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hey, thank you, and congratulations on the first quarter. So just a quick question, clarifying, what's the organic growth for Q2? Because I understand there was an impact of an acquisition, if you can clarify that to start with. Secondly, if you can talk a bit more about the broader demand environment you're seeing, especially with regards to the budgeting cycle in your top 30-40 clients. Any color on discretionary spending that's coming through?
So Ankur, good to speak to you. I think there's a 2-odd% of acquisition impact on a year-on-year growth for Q4. Okay. So the 18-odd will come down to 16-odd. So that's from the first question. I think on budgets, there's clearly some uncertainty. And I'll say, let's just remove the current uncertainty cycle for a second. Okay. I think prior to this, there was certainly some modest positivity. And I would, at that point, prior to this two- to three-week period, my expectation was that positive will kind of directionally continue. I would still say the positivity is largely true in multiple sectors. Okay. Financial services, especially banking financial services, I think continue to be in that direction. There's a lot more uncertainty in industries that are first-order impacted by tariffs.
Of course, eventually, second-order impacts will also become into play, but first-order impact of tariff industries, there's more uncertainty, which is for us, manufacturing and consumer.
If you could elaborate a bit more, Keech, in terms of the impact, is the customer reaction to this uncertainty any kind of freezing of programs which previously were decided? I mean, just talk us through in terms of how you see this play out right now and how it may play out going forward.
I don't think we are yet the sufficient time that has passed for us to know or understand the full impact. Everybody's kind of watching a whipsaw effect on a daily basis. I'll also say one more thing to what I said, right? That there are customers who at the beginning of the year kind of said, "Hey, I know that I'm going to reduce spend. However, I actually want to do more with a lesser number of partners." And that's the reason I'm going to undertake a consolidation exercise. And like I said, two have been completed, and two are in works. The two which are in works are where we have virtually no presence. So for that, in that scenario, there are challenges all upside. In the two that we won, there were both downsides and upsides for us. We were fortunate to end up on the upside.
But the part of the thing is, yes, there are clients who said, "Hey, I'm going to reduce spend, but increase with a smaller number of vendors.
Understood. Just one last question in terms of your capital allocation plan. How are you thinking about M&A with the cash on the balance sheet? And what kind of sizes of acquisitions are you likely to be looking at? There's been some news about a very large acquisition. If you can comment on that one at all.
Yeah. I won't comment on the news, but I think it's fair to say that we have an active corporate development program, M&A program that has a pretty solid and active pipeline. And at any given point of time, we're looking at deals, and we have some widgets.
Thank you, Ambassador.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Umar Manzoor from Arihant Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation. I just want to ask two questions. One is away from the business uncertainty itself, do you see any risks in the US from just the US policies, basically, in terms of not just visas, but just general made-in-America stuff? That's one question. The other is on the if you could comment at all on the plans for the bond as a shareholder. I'm not sure if that's within your scope to comment, but that's my second question.
So I'm not sure I fully heard the second question. Would you repeat that?
Concerning the bond as a shareholder?
okay.
About the plan for that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yes, I'll kind of not address that in this call. We do have it's a public bond, so we do have calls on that. So if you join that call, you could kind of hear more of that. On the first one, I don't think that legal immigration is a question of discussion. There's a topic of discussion currently. In fact, I think the administration has clearly thrown its support for the most part behind H-1B. It's not often that President Trump actually shows his cards, but in this case, he did, and he threw his support behind H-1B. Having said that, I think as a consequence of Trump 1.0, our dependence on H-1B from an incremental growth perspective is modest. So I'm going to say, yeah, maybe 80 people with H-1B that went to the U.S.
Even should that go to zero, it's not going to create any material impact on business.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. From the line of Rishi Jhunjhunwala from IIFL Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Just a couple of questions. Keech, the two customers that you have talked about, just wanted to understand, given how the environment in BFS today is and the increasing uncertainty around that also, apart from the fact that you will benefit from the vendor consolidation, otherwise, in terms of spending, the underlying spending in those customers, can you give some color? And also, the consolidation benefit is coming at the expense of what kind of vendors or what kind of work?
Yeah. So one of the two is financial services. The other is in professional services. One of them, and I won't mention which one, one of them, I think said at the beginning of the year that their goal is that they want to moderate spending in the future. And yet, they want to be meaningful because tech is so important, the platforms that are critical for the business. So they want to build deeper relationships with a lesser number of partners. So the type of work is to build technology and platforms for their business. In that example, kind of the spend will come down for the customer in aggregate, or it will be modest growth, flattish modest growth. It won't grow as much as it has in the past, but some vendors will grow quite a bit. The other one, actually, their spend is growing modestly.
On top of that, there is a consolidation, which is benefiting us.
Just a second question on margins, right? You talked about looking at doing reported margins similar to adjusted for last year. I'm assuming the commentary around margins are on a constant currency basis.
Think of it as constant currency as of now, right? As of now, yes.
Okay. All right. Thank you so much.
Which has a headwind actually already on revenue to some extent and some headwind on revenue. Sorry, on margins. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. Keech, in the past and even in your initial years of your tenure, you've had challenges around consolidation or customer-specific actions. And through the course of recent years, you have been transforming the client portfolio. How do you think about this aspect on a go-forward basis? Because in the past, we've had instances where this has impacted our overall revenue growth for certain periods. It would be great to get your perspective on the same.
Yeah. Yeah, Manik. Good to speak to you. I think kind of it's a fine balance of growing all customers and yet moderating your dependence on the top few. And I think we've been doing that balance, right? So if you look at our top five, top 10, our dependence on them has come down. Come down even in a three-year basis, but on a zoom-out period that you refer to, it has come down very materially, right? And right now, actually, even in a three-year basis, the composition of top five is different from what it was. What is today is different from what it was three years ago. So it's got a different, more robust set of clientele right now. At least two of them are different.
Sure, but do you think we are in a better situation now from a client mix standpoint, and thereby some of the challenges that we've faced with some of the customer-specific issues, they may not arise on a go-forward basis?
I feel much better about where we are. Okay. I mean, if a top three top-5 client has a growth challenge, it will impact our performance, but the extent of impact will be materially lower than what it was before.
Sure. Thank you. All the best for the future.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Abhishek Kumar from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning and congratulations on your first quarter. First question, Keech, is on your initial remarks where we have said that some of the ramp-ups that we are seeing will happen in Q3 and H2. So does it mean that the growth in CY25 will be slightly back-ended with second half, again, like we saw in CY24 on a YY basis better than first half? That's my first question.
Yes. It will be. But that growth is not contingent upon new things happening. We're not saying, "Hey, we expect the economy to improve and hence it will," or, "We expect demand patterns will change." These are kind of on the basis of what we've done already. In addition, there are more things that can happen that can further improve it, but the base outlook is based on things that have already happened.
Okay. Maybe a quick follow-up. You said you expect your growth to be resilient. Could you define resilience? Does it mean growth similar to CY24? Does it mean double-digit growth? Any color on what do you mean by resilience?
So I first want to kind of say what resilience is in the context of changing macros, right? So I said modestly changing macros, our growth is resilient. It's not going to get impacted by that, okay? So that is the context of the resilience. I certainly think our performance, I mean, double-digit, I think, is like a solid baseline you can assume almost forever for us. It's still early. We're only like two-odd months of the year. But the expectation we will do, our ambition is always to do better than what we've done in the past.
Okay. One last question on margin, specifically on ESOP expense. When we say that the only non-recurring expense left now is ERP implementation, are we implying that the ESOP expense also will be nil in CY25 because we just launched ESOP 2024 plan? And it seems like that will have some impact on the ESOP expense.
Yeah. We never kind of thought of that as an adjustment, and we won't. Okay. So it will continue, but it is in our reported numbers now. It will be in our reported numbers going forward, and the reported numbers, like I said, our goal is to get to that 17-odd %, 17.3%, 17.4%, what we got to last year on an adjusted basis. So ESOP will continue, but it will be on an adjusted.
Okay. Understood. 17.3 includes ESOP.
ESOP. Correct.
Yeah. Okay. Great. That's all from my side. Thank you and good luck.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from the line of Girish Pai from BOB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. This 200 basis points inorganic element, is this for 4Q 2024, or is it for the full year? I mean, what would be the number for the full year?
The full year would be like one-odd%, okay, because the acquisition only made in May. So that was for 4Q.
Okay. And on the 4Q basis, I think you had an EBITDA margin expansion of about 330 basis points YOY. How much of that has been because of pricing? Because you mentioned pricing is one of your key levers which drove margins up.
The way to think about it is it's a combination of pricing plus the operational improvement, which has driven more than one-third of the overall 32.5% improvement. The 32.5% is currently one-third, one-third, one-third due to forex leverage from an SG&A perspective because we are growing in scale. The investment in SG&A, we continue to invest, but at a slower pace than the revenue growth. The balance one-third, which is coming from pricing plus operational improvements. It's the combination of both.
You mentioned a 4% exit rate. What exactly were you referring to? Because QOQ growth was, I think, 0.2% sequentially in CC terms. What is the 4% exit rate you're talking about?
The little over 4% is the Q4 annualized divided by the full year revenue.
Yeah.
Okay.
Adjusted for furloughs, actually, that's about 5%. Yeah.
Okay. Lastly, you mentioned about consolidation in two of your top three clients. What do you think are the factors which drove that consolidation in your favor vis-à-vis the other players who were there in the vendor base of these particular clients? That's my last question.
So both these are existing customers as opposed to the other two, which are in works, which are non-existing customers. So certainly not long-term. They're new clients. In existing customers where we've worked for a long time, I think the single most important factor that works in our favor is our excellence in execution. Our fair-to-do ratio with these customers is very high.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Dipesh Mehta from Emkay Global. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Couple of questions. First, about travel and transportation. Keech, can you provide some sense about the travel and transportation, how you expect growth to play out? Second question is about the top 20 clients. We have benefited in some of the vendor consolidation exercise. You said two and two are in progress. But any challenges you witnessed, let's say, in overall top 20 clients where we might be on the losing end kind of thing and which can provide challenges in coming quarters? If you can give some sense on top 20, any challenges, if any. And last question is about banking. Whether the recent few weeks' phenomena are likely to lead to some kind of challenges even in banking growth? Thanks.
Yeah. So on top 20, I'll say there are nothing that we are aware of that we're seeing currently that could be challenges from consolidation. Okay. I think there are potentially known issues of directional GCC efforts in some organizations because of which two or three top 20 clients have seen slower growth over the last number of years. And I think that directionally will continue. But we don't see a downside risk in consolidation in any other client. That's on your top 20 specific to consolidation. The second one's on banking. I actually think banking, in some ways, the 7.6 full-year growth in 2024 is not actually reflective of the strength in our business. There's some one-offs that kind of made that number enough to be what it is. And that'll continue for a quarter, perhaps two quarters more.
Actually, after that, you'll see some smart change in direction. Sorry. Your first question was on travel. I think travel will grow a little bit above company average. And that's the expectation right now for 2025. It's not going to be neither end. It's not going to be a major driver or a drag on growth.
Thanks.
Thank you. We'll take the next question from the line of Manik Taneja from Axis Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the follow-up opportunity. This question is for Vikas. You've mentioned that ERP transformation costs should be coming off by second half, January 2025. Could you talk about the quantum that we should be expecting on this front given this program has been on through the course of the last couple of years?
So from a full-year perspective, the impact of this is going to be close to $0.40.
Thank you. No worries. In the future.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Girish Pai from BOB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity again. What would have been the QOQ growth for the last four quarters just to get an understanding of how the cadence has been?
So like I said, this feature, the typical pattern for us across a number of years is that the sequential growth is high in quarter two, quarter three, right, and seasonally kind of slow in quarter one and quarter four. This is generally true over a number of years. There are years which are off in either direction. Can be particularly low or some quarters can be high because the excess budget is spent at the end of the year. But those are off-pattern ones.
No, no. I got that. I was just trying to understand what were the specific numbers for the four quarters of 2024, if that can be put in the public domain?
Yeah. From a quarterly perspective, Q1 was close to 5% sequential. Q2 and Q3 were close to 6% sequential. And Q4, obviously, you saw was marginal decline at 50 basis points. But one thing what I would call out from a Q1 of 2024 perspective where there was a 5% sequential growth, it was coming on the back of a Q4 of 2023 where the sequential decline was very steep.
These are all U.S. dollar numbers, right?
They're all U.S. dollar numbers to make a like-to-like comparison.
Yeah. So I think just the FY 2023, not just Q4, but Q3 was also a bad quarter, not just for us, for everyone. So it's coming off back of two pretty bad quarters.
Okay. A couple of other data points, Vikas, if you can give that. What were the subcontractor costs in 2024? And also, were there any pass-through elements in 2024, if you can give these two numbers?
I mean, we continue to have some pass-through element as part of our revenue numbers, which is pretty consistent. I mean, it's not very material. And there is no material increase what we have from our pass-through revenue numbers either in any of these quarters. So that's sub-$10 million from an overall quarter perspective if you think about it. In terms of the contractor cost, our contractor mix has remained pretty consistent in terms of the overall mix. The cost is in the range of 17% of revenues, give or take. By quarter, it varies a bit depending upon the number of working days because they are primarily on-site. And contractors get paid only on the basis of the working days because they are almost utilized 100%. So it keeps on varying on a quarterly basis, but at the highest level, it's close to 17% of revenue.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll take that as the last question for today. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Over to you, sir.
Thank you. Thank you all for being here. I look forward to these ongoing interactions. Obviously, this is a bit compressed. We've been speaking a fair bit. We'll actually be back again for Q4 pretty quickly. Sorry, for Q1 pretty quickly. So look forward to that conversation.
Thank you, members of the management. On behalf of Hexaware Technologies Ltd, that concludes this conference. We thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.