Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Abhishek Agarwal from Indegene. Thank you, and over to you, Mr. Agarwal.
Thank you, Moderator. A very good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us today for Indegene 's earnings conference call for the second quarter and half-year ended financial year 2026. Today we have with us Mr. Manish Gupta, Indegene 's Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Suhas Prabhu, CFO, to share the highlights of the business and financials of the quarter. I hope you have gone through our results release and the quarterly investor presentation, which have been uploaded on our website, as well as the Stock Exchange website. The transcript of this call will be available in a week's time on the company's website. Please note that today's discussion will be forward-looking in nature and must be viewed in relation to risks pertaining to our business.
After the end of this call, in case you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to the investor relations team. I now hand over the call to Manish to make his opening remarks.
Thank you, Abhishek. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q2 earnings call. The past few months have been fairly action-packed, both externally, the external environment, and internally at Indegene as well. I hope to try and cover as many of these in much detail as is practical on this call today. Let's start with the external factors, especially the evolving U.S. policy matters that impact the life sciences sector and have been in the news quite a lot. The big headline for the industry has been the Most Favored Nation or MFN pricing. On September 30, President Trump and Pfizer announced the first deal on this matter. The agreement provides every state Medicaid program in the country access to MFN drug prices on Pfizer products and requires Pfizer to offer medicines at a deep discount off the list price when selling directly to American patients.
There is also a plan to offer many drugs at significant discounts through a new federally operated DTC platform called TrumpRxt.gov. Finally, this agreement also grants Pfizer a grace period of three years from any Section 232 pharma tariffs provided the company continues to invest in U.S. manufacturing. While this deal does have an adverse impact on drug pricing, the terms and scope of the agreement is seen as positive for Pfizer and for the pharma industry in general. Most companies have limited exposure to Medicaid, and prices are already significantly lower in this channel compared to the rest of the market. The federally operated DTC platform, TrumpRxt.gov, will also have minimal impact as most patients do not pay out of pocket. It is likely companies will sidestep MFN restrictions by delaying launches in other geographies while keeping prices high in the U.S.
It is also likely that the prices for drugs in non-U.S. markets are increased to minimize the impact of MFN-related price reductions in the U.S. Overall, this has been a big relief for the industry because it takes away the regulatory overhang and provides a template for moving forward in a way that is not significantly disruptive for the industry. As per analysts, top 30 life sciences companies regained approximately $440 billion in value during the last month. You can see how this development is considered as not disruptive to the industry. Companies have started announcing drug launches at significant discounts, which are applicable only for the limited DTC market. Also, overseas new drug launches are at some of them have been at higher prices in line with the U.S. prices.
The other big announcement in the recent past was the application of tariffs on pharmaceutical imports into the U.S., which were initially kept outside of the purview of tariffs. Beginning October 1, pharmaceutical manufacturers were to face 100% tariffs on all branded or patented drugs imported to the U.S. However, there were notable exemptions. Manufacturers could avoid these tariffs by building manufacturing facilities in the U.S., defining building as either breaking ground or under construction. Apart from this, existing trade agreements would also be honored, including recent EU and Japanese compacts that limit pharmaceutical tariffs to 15%. Most companies have announced significant investments towards R&D and manufacturing in the U.S., thus blunting the impact of any tariff threat.
It also seems that the administration may look at MFN tariffs as a combined tool rather than separate tools, so companies could use a mix of these two approaches as part of their negotiations. Taking a step back, one can see a sort of trend here. The U.S. administration seems to be creating regulations which were initially perceived as drastic and disruptive. However, the outcomes seem to indicate limited pressure in the immediate term while also providing a possibility to a way out without any significant negative impact on the industry even in the longer term. With the MFN tariff issue now having a potential resolution, there do not seem to be any of the imminent clouds on the horizon for the industry as of now. The other announcement of some relevance or somewhere connected to Indegene was the move against direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing.
To be clear, it's not a ban against DTC marketing, but action and tighter enforcement against deceptive or misleading DTC marketing. Essentially, the U.S. administration has tightened the regulations around DTC marketing, which may limit the activities on traditional DTC channels such as TV, print, and related media advertising, and drive more engagements through newer channels such as digital, social media, etc. This development has no impact on Indegene as we do not have any significant engagements using traditional media for the DTC segment. However, we likely benefit from the shift to digital channels or spend diverted to segments such as HCP or market access, etc. Now, with some of these. Having spoken about, let's come to the other action the U.S. administration announced. Now, this was not specific to the life sciences or pharma industry.
This was the fees on new H1B visa applications, and the evolving landscape there with exemptions and clarifications on limiting the applicability of the fees. This is a broader regulation that impacts all businesses, but more specifically outsourcing services businesses, which deputes a large number of employees from India to the U.S. every year. This has practically no impact on Indegene. Currently, Indegene employs around 550 people in the U.S., out of which 45 people, or approximately 8%, are on H1B visas. Every year, we deput only 5- 8 employees on H1B to the U.S., and this quantum can be easily managed through multiple routes, nearshoring, passing on the additional cost to our customers, especially in large engagements where there won't be material impact. The reason for the low quantum of U.S.
personnel on H1B is because Indegene is not a staffing business, not a labeled cost arbitrage, nor is the core of the business model at Indegene. As part of our business model, we hire talent who have deep local market expertise, be it regulatory expertise in each country, deep understanding of healthcare practices, channel preferences, pharma marketing, or medical practices, which vary country by country. This talent is, of course, available only locally. Our customer engagements need us to operate in multiple countries across the globe or large regions with a complex multi-location hybrid delivery system, which combines multi-country local operations working seamlessly with nearshoring and offshoring capabilities, with multi-skilled personnel having deep domain expertise working together in a global operating model. This is also very clearly visible in the higher revenue per employee metric at Indegene, which clearly is market-leading.
Before we move ahead, to summarize my commentary on the U.S. policy changes and administration action, the industry continues to face pressure on drug pricing and margins, whether it was through IRA in the past or MFN negotiations or tariff announcements now. This is something which we've been alluding to, speaking about from our, I would say, very early earnings call. However, the likely adverse impact on the industry is limited, and the positive news for the industry is that actions taken in this regard clear any uncertainty and policy overhang and show their decision-making moving forward. Calendar year 2025 Q3 performance for the industry is expected to be in line with the industry forecasts and market expectations, and there do not seem to be any major industry headwinds that we see as of now. Now, with this, let's come closer to home.
We continue to see clients now actively building on some of the earlier digital and centralization themes. This, we believe, is driven by some of the top-down pressures the industry faces and the fact that we see AI, they see AI as a way to get more efficient and effective. We believe this will be the next level of driver for digital adoption, centralization, and embedding of AI in key medical and sales marketing processes. Our offering, Tectonic, has been based on this theme, and we continue to make progress on that. While it's still early, we are highly encouraged to have clocked approximately $2 million in H1 revenue in Tectonic from four customers, which is up from two customers we had in Q1. We have initiated multiple conversations in this area, and the pipeline is shaping up well.
Given some of the things I saw and spoke about and the commentary we have been sharing with you for a long time, we continue to strengthen our GenAI-based capabilities. Centered around our proprietary Cortex platform, we are increasingly seeing evidence that supports our hypothesis that real value addition from GenAI will come from contextualizing the technology for the domain. With Cortex, our focus, therefore, has been on fortifying 26 years of our life sciences regulatory and business process-specific knowledge that we then use to train agents across the value chain. We continue to build business applications on top of this knowledge engineering-led agentic layer in Cortex. We are building applications across key areas like digital content with use cases for our agency business, Tectonic, as well as commercial content creation and adaptation.
All this has been on the commercial side of the business, as well as the marketing side of the business, if you would call it that. On the medical side, we have built applications for medical legal review, regulatory writing and submissions, and a few others. We are taking a platform approach versus a point solution approach to building these GenAI applications because otherwise we feel that the industry is very soon going to run into the problem of managing hundreds of business process agents and driving governance for them. Further, our end-to-end content engine called Content Super App is being built as a single platform for brand managers as well as global commercial operations. Multiple agents that drive different aspects of development, such as ideation, concepting, localization, personalization, and regulatory approval of content, however, all via a single platform.
Similarly, with our medical writing platform, we are automating authoring of all regulatory reports, right from protocol authoring to clinical study report to ongoing filings, post-approval on a single platform. We continue to add additional use cases on this platform based on our client's need as we see our client's needs getting crystallized and pipeline generation improving. Increased activity levels in customer organizations due to growth in revenue with new launches or cost efficiency and modernization GenAI initiatives with some of these customers, which is resulting in new opportunities, we have decided to strengthen our go-to-market engine in multiple ways. We have increased the strength of our business development teams on both fronts, increased customer coverage, and deeper penetration with existing customers. We have added capacity and capabilities in consulting, data and technology, including GenAI. This has been done in the U.S.
and Europe, and we'll continue to strengthen this as we make progress with customers and new engagements for enhancing the scope of current engagements. We have and continue to deepen our partnerships with some of the hyperscalers and other technology product companies that have and are getting traction in our industry. We have also acquired two businesses: BioPharm, which we had spoken about earlier in the call, a U.S.-based omnichannel marketing company focused on targeted HCP or healthcare professional engagement, and a very recent one, Warn , a U.K. based boutique consulting firm having people with significant experience in change management, transformation consulting, and digital and technology areas for pharma. Both these acquisitions were done in October. We'll have more commentary on these acquisitions a bit later. Now, we believe these investments will help us to capitalize on the market opportunity that we see in front of us.
These ahead-of-the-curve investments should accelerate our growth progressively over six to eight quarters, but with the bid-to-margins compression in the near term by about 1.5%. We had a good quarter on both execution front. Now I'm getting into our results. We had a good quarter on both execution front and new business generation front. Q2 revenue came in at INR 8,042 million, growing 17.1% year-on-year and 5.7% quarter-on-quarter. Among the significant wins during the quarter, there were two large deals of $3 million plus ACV, both in the enterprise commercial and medical segments. The first one with a big pharma to manage their global omnichannel or healthcare professional campaign operations for a few years, and the second engagement with a top-five customer of Indegene with increased scope in existing global commercial operations. Both of these are expected to start in Q3 and ramp up over the next three, four quarters.
Additionally, we had four deal wins in the $1 million- $3 million ACV range. One in enterprise commercial segment with an upcoming biotech company for various transformations and business tech implementation project. Revenues for this start again in Q3. The other three deals were in the enterprise medical segment. The first one with a medical device company for pharmacovigilance with a three-year tenure to start in Q4. The next with a top-ten pharma company with scope expansion in existing medical operations. The last with a mid-size small pharma for supporting medical writing and submissions for biological license application for a slightly shorter duration. Both of which will start in Q3. Finally, we also continue to have a healthy and growing pipeline with a higher proportion of potentially large deals greater than $3 million ACV.
Just a few weeks back, we also hosted Indegene Digital Summit, IDS 2025, which is our flagship event. This was done in September 2025 in Philadelphia in the U.S. We returned to an in-person format after five years. Since the start of COVID, we had gone digital. This in-person event was a huge success. It was attended by senior leaders from the industry, from our customers as well as regulators. While AI took center stage in all conversations, almost every one of them also stressed how important context is to make the most of AI. A re-validation of what Indegene has been saying. We gained valuable insights on why organizations across industries are struggling to derive meaningful ROI, turning pilots into full-scale production, and challenging re-engineering processes and upskilling talent for an AI-first world. This we believe is an opportunity for Indegene, and we continue to focus on this.
Finally, some details on the BioPharm acquisition that we announced early this month. The integration is underway at full speed, and support functions like finance, HR, IT, legal, etc., will be transitioned in two quarters, while business operations and go-to-market will likely take about six quarters to complete. We are excited about the potential of this business in its current form as aligned to brand activation, which is the brand-by-brand business, where we shall invest to increase the business development activity in the U.S., as well as the integrated omnichannel campaign offering, which is a part of the ECS segment, to scale up globally with some of the engagements cutting across brands. At this point, based on further context, many of you are aware, Tectonic is our effort to go upstream towards the creative processes within the marketing activities.
As an enterprise commercial engagement cutting across multiple or all brands and a customer, either globally or for a large region, then a brand-by-brand engagement at a country level. This offering is a combination of Indegene's content campaign and data capabilities, along with the creative capabilities acquired through Cult acquisition a couple of years back, and monetized through the enterprise-wide engagements rather than the brand-by-brand engagements, which also cuts across multiple countries or regions. We believe that BioPharm will provide a similar opportunity for us to expand our capabilities on the downstream omnichannel campaign execution capabilities and take these to our customers in an enterprise format rather than just a brand-by-brand format. That's a broad update. With this now, I'll pass it on to Suhas for further details on the financial performance as well as financial perspective of the acquisitions. Suhas.
Thank you, Manish.
Turning over to you.
Thank you, Manish. Once again, a very good morning to all, and we appreciate your participation on this call today. Let me begin by getting into the details of the financial performance for the quarter. Revenues for the quarter came in at INR 8,042 million, up 17.1% year-on-year and 5.7% sequentially. The growth in U.S. dollar terms is 12.4% year-on-year and 3.6% sequentially. The EBITDA margin for one-time non-recurring M&A costs for the quarter came in at 18.2%, down by 2% sequentially, almost entirely due to the annual wage hike, which was effective July of 2025. The EBITDA margin net of the M&A costs is 17.6%. The favorable impact of productivity and efficiency initiatives was offset by an increase in our marketing expense due to the IDS 2025 event, as also higher technology costs due to infrastructure and subscription for cloud and GenAI requirements.
With the rupee depreciating against the dollar, the impact of exchange gain was favorable, but this was also offset by the mark-to-market charge on the forwards that were outstanding at the end of the quarter. Finally, the interest income was down by about 22.5%, primarily due to the decrease in yields on investment in both the U.S. and India, with the progressively reducing Fed and repo rates. Thus, PBT came in at INR 1,331 million, a growth of 7.3% year-on-year, and PAT came in at INR 1,021 million, a growth of 11.4% year-on-year. The PAT margin for the quarter is 12.7%. A reduction of 2.6% sequentially is in line with the reduction in EBITDA. Thus, the ETR, the effective tax rate for Q2, was relatively stable at 23.3% versus 23.5% for the previous quarter.
Moving to the segmental results, our enterprise segments, enterprise commercial and enterprise medical solutions, which contribute to 88.5% of our revenue, grew by a healthy 8.1% quarter-on-quarter, partially offset by the degrowth in brand activation segment, which degrew by 15.8%. The geographical mix continues to be steady, with more than 96% of revenue coming from the U.S. and Europe region. North America revenue share is at 69.6% in Q2 versus 70.2% in Q1, and Europe revenue share is at 27% in Q2 versus 27.1% in Q1. Coming to the customers, our top five customers have grown 4.5% quarter-on-quarter, despite a degrowth in our largest customer, which was anticipated with the change in the onsite offshore mix during a past renewal, which we had highlighted during one of our past earnings.
The top 20 customer contribution remained steady at 75.2%, while the accounts beyond the top 20 grew at a faster pace, growing by 10.3% quarter-on-quarter, combined with our active customer base increasing to 76 active customers from 70 in the last quarter. Coming to the M&A. Side of the person, the acquisition of BioPharm was completed effective October 1st, 2025. The BioPharm financials will form part of our consolidated financials from October 1st, 2025 onwards, which is the next quarter onwards. Given the size of the acquisition, we'll be reporting both organic and inorganic growth and corresponding revenue in the coming couple of quarters. Please refer to the investor relations website for further details of the transaction, including the deal value and the deal structure.
The payment at closing to complete the transaction was approximately $65 million and was placed in an escrow account as of 30th September 2025, while the transfer to the sellers was done on October 1st. Hence, this reflects as restricted cash under other current assets as of September 30th, 2025. Including the restricted cash, our cash balances, cash equivalents, and investments were a healthy $210 million versus $200 million as of June 30th, 2025. The DSOs net of unearned and unbilled revenue remained a steady 71 days. Further, on October 16, 2025, we also completed the acquisition of Warn & Co, a boutique U.K. -based consulting business for upfront consideration of GBP 2 million plus future performance-linked payout. This is not likely to have any material impact on the financial results of the company on a consolidated basis.
However, Manish has already mentioned earlier how this fits into our investments focused on future growth, which includes the consulting capabilities that we have acquired through Warn & Co. With that, let me take a pause and move on to the questions that either Manish or I can address for you today. Back to you, Moderator.
Thank you. We will now begin the question- and- answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from the line of Ahmed Madha with Unifi Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, and thanks for the opportunity.
Trying to understand the P&L better, both for the Q2 and the comment you mentioned about 1.5% margin reduction. Right? In Q2, even adjusted for M&A expenses, the OpEx, other expenses, rates are quite higher compared to historical rate, and there has been an increase. It can give some granular sense what explains the increase in the expenses. That's first. Second, in terms of employee cost, you can give some sense of the hikes which we have taken post-June, which is reflecting in Q2. Coming to the comment you mentioned about 1.5% margin reduction, can you give some sense next two or three years, how do you see the margins range changing and what all initiatives you'll be taking which is reflecting in your margin guidance?
I'll let Suhas handle it, but let me just start with the last one.
The margin reduction in the very near term, let's call it next quarter, is primarily because of these investments we have made, and we believe in the next six to eight quarters, we should get it back to the levels which we've been operating at. With that, Suhas, I'll pass it on to you to break it down into some more details.
Sure, Manish. Thanks. Thanks, Ahmed, for your question. The other expenses that have increased have largely three components of increase. One, which I already mentioned earlier, was approximately $0.5 million of M&A expenses, which are largely diligence fees, legal fees, and the like, which were incurred in relation to work that was completed by 30 September for the two acquisitions that we concluded eventually in October. The other major component was the IDS or the marketing event that we had in Philadelphia in September in physical form.
Approximately $0.5 million of expense in the event, combined with a little around, say, $0.1 million of travel cost, was the other component. Finally, about $0.25 million of technology costs, which increased quarter-on-quarter given higher investments, especially in the GenAI subscriptions and the related cloud infrastructure, all of which that I mentioned is part of the other expenses. Now, coming to your next question, which is on the increments. At Indegene, our annual increment is effective July every year, and this year also so effective 1st July 2025. The increments in the past have resulted in a 2.1%, 2.2% dilution in margin rate on a sequential basis. Even in the current year, this is in the similar range, around 2.1% is the impact of the wage bill increase.
What we typically see is that progressively, the margins tend to increase year-on, but every year, again, in that July period, given that it's an annual increment cycle, would see a decline in the margins. This is. Nothing out of ordinary for Indegene, if you look back into our past as well. I hope that clarifies the questions that you had. Thanks.
Yeah. Yeah. I get the sense. Second question was to understand the business mix in terms of top clients, right? I mean, the commentary in the last quarter or so was that the pain in the largest client is behind us, but it seems there has been some degrowth again in Q2. You can give some sense how is the conversation with your top one or two clients, and how do you see those clients coming back with either new orders or the contract renewals?
I'm sure I can step in. Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah. Our top five customers, what we have seen in the past, our largest customer has been steady to growing in the last six quarters. A couple of earnings calls ago, we had mentioned that our largest customer, one of the contracts that was renewed, had a change in the mix from onsite to offshore for certain roles. Therefore, we would anticipate a reduction in the revenue, while it would actually be in the longer run positive from a margin perspective. That's the only major impact, and this is not related to any challenges that we have seen with a couple of other customers.
As you observe in the current quarter, the top five has actually grown by 4.6% sequentially, which is consistent with what we had mentioned, that we see that the pain that we had with a couple of customers is largely behind us, and things are back on track and growing.
I also want to emphasize that, as Suhas said, top five customers, we don't see any broad headwinds. The largest customer, this engagement was called out in our, I think, end of Q4, if I'm not wrong. However, in the largest customer, we have a pretty strong pipeline, and we are very bullish about growth in the, I would say, near to midterm itself.
Sure. Sure. That makes sense. Last question from my side. In terms of headcount addition, how do you see the trend in the near to medium term?
Considering we have made a lot of investment in terms of productivity and stuff, right? How does that sort of translate into headcount addition? We have been seeing last, I think, three or four quarters there have been incremental addition. After I think FY2024, there was headcount cut, and then in the first half of 2025 also, there wasn't much addition. Last three or four quarters, we have seen the trend of headcount addition. How do you see that. Number panning out in terms of increasing headcount?
Again, comment and then pass it on to Suhas. We believe our revenue per employee, which is, I would guess that it's highest in the industry. We believe, secularly it will inch higher, right? Which means that we will add employees, but obviously not at the same rate as our growth rate. Suhas, you want to get slightly more specific?
Right. Yes.
Continuing on what Manish mentioned, we would continue to see a growth in the number of employees, but the rate of growth of the number of employees would typically be lesser than the rate of growth of the revenue. We should see that reflecting in a higher realization at an employee level. One of the things that we are doing actively is also investing in talent ahead of the curve, given the kind of activity that we are seeing in the deal wins as well as the pipeline that is building out, and using this opportunity to onboard people and train them ahead of when we anticipate the revenues to come in.
Sure. Thank you so much, Manish, Suhas, and the team, and all the best.
Thank you, Ahmed.
Thank you. A reminder to all the participants that you may press star and one to ask a question.
Next question comes from the line of Divyansh Agarwal with Ionic Asset Managers. Please go ahead.
Hi. Am I audible?
Yes.
Hello.
Yes, you are.
Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Just wanted to get a note on the incremental growth that the company might get in the coming Q3, Q4, and say in FY2027, and how much growth are we anticipating from the two new acquisitions that we have made? This is my first question. Secondly, on the second question on the margin compression, we will be facing around 1%- 1.5% of margin compression. Are we taking any steps to ensure that maybe, say, in the couple of next quarters, the margin reduction that we'll have, we can make up a bit of that? That was from my end.
Let me start with the last one and go in reverse way.
The reason we are making these investments is that we see a market opportunity right now. We believe that while these investments are being made a bit ahead of the curve, by growth itself most of the margins will come back on track. Beyond that, we obviously continue to rationalize across the board, right? This is something we have done many times in the past, that when we see the market shifting, right, into positively, then we invest to capitalize on this opportunity. We believe margins will come back. As I said, in the six to eight quarters. Suhas, do you want to again double-click on anything?
Manish, you have already mentioned. As we have done in the past, while we invest, we also relook at areas that we can optimize while we continue our initiatives on productivity and efficiency.
Given our engagement model, which is a hybrid construct of time and material, but a larger construct of catalog pricing or output-based pricing, we believe that we have sufficient levers to be able to impact productivity, which results in better margins for us. That would be the other lever to get us back into the range that we have been operating in the past, which is around 20% and a little more of that.
Got it. Just last question, if I could ask, for the coming quarter and maybe for the next year, what kind of growth are you anticipating for the overall business?
We don't give guidance. That's something which we have stated on. All I can say to you is that we are seeing the market open up, right, at this point in time. Guidance is something which we don't do.
Again, Suhas, sorry, you want to comment on this?
You mentioned. Manish, Divyansh, again, we won't get specific as we don't give guidance. We certainly are looking forward to a growth rate which is higher than what we saw in the past year and even the start of this year.
Thank you. Mr. Agarwal, please rejoin the queue for more questions. A reminder to all the participants that you may press star and one to ask a question. Next question comes from the line of Sameer Dosani with ICICI Prudential AMC. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Just to clarify on this margin piece again, last year we did 19.5%, closer to 19.5% margin. One should think of a 1.5% decline, or there are offsets. Like this is the cross impact, and there will be offsetting cost measures that can help the margin.
That is my question number one. Also, yeah, so this is the first question. Thanks.
Yes. Thanks for your question. As I already responded to Divyansh, there are opportunities to offset, and we will be acting on those as well. Therefore, there will be potentially some offset, but that would also be progressively through the quarters. It's unlikely that the offset would be achieved within one or two quarters. I should take it from FY2025 base, not from Q2 numbers, right? So the current quarter piece would be likely. Impacting us on a go-forward basis rather than the cumulative basis.
Sorry. The FY2026 margin, ballpark guidance
for H2, for H2 and not on a full year basis.
H1, we have already done. If I add back the M&A 19.2, then one should take 1.5% impact on this 19.2, which is 17.7% for it, sir.
Second is, when you consolidate this BioPharm, right, would you be taking net revenues or gross revenues? Because, yeah. Thirdly, I couldn't understand this ECV remark. Four deals in $1 million- $3 million range, but $3 million, how many deals have you signed $3 million plus ECV?
The $3 million plus, it was two deals, and $1 million- $3 million were the four deals. Hopefully, that clarifies. What was your other question?
Whether you will take net revenues of BioPharm or gross revenues? Because net revenues are around lower, right?
Yeah. Yes. We would, as per accounting standards, have to report gross revenues. However, we would also be disclosing the net revenue.
Lastly, what we have seen in the past is on the growth side, H2 is usually stronger for us in terms of organic growth. Does that thing play out?
I think the deals that you disclosed and when I calculate this ACV is around $14 million at least, right? How does this compare with maybe last year? You have done $14 million each in Q1 and Q2. How does this compare versus the last year?
Versus the previous year, this year has been an increase in the deal closures. It is quite similar to the deals that we closed in Q1, maybe marginally higher,
and seems that H2 will be stronger in terms of growth versus H1. That is what we have seen normally and we've been commenting on. Should we see a similar phenomenon this year as well?
We don't see any reason. Sorry, go ahead, sir. Go ahead, Suhas.
Yes, Manish. Again, the business doesn't have any specific seasonality, which is material.
Having said that, unlike if we were to look at IT services, given our engagement model, we are not impacted adversely by furloughs or lesser number of working days in February and the like. Therefore, we believe that there's nothing, and also, given the deal pipeline and so on, we don't believe that there'll be anything outside of what we have seen in the past.
Thank you. Mr. Dosani, please rejoin the queue for more questions. Next question comes from the line of Deep Shah with B&K Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning and thanks for the opportunity. We've seen some growth resumption this quarter. If I hear Manish comments at the start of the call, it seems that some of the disruption or some of the uncertainties which were keeping clients on the fence are getting gradually resolved.
What I understand is whenever there is some disruption, it is that time when we gain the most. At least that's how history has been. It, of course, comes with some lag. I don't expect guidance, but if you could give a slightly qualitative answer about how historically has that conversion been, and do you foresee some of it to come by, say, 12 months or in 24 months, some qualitative understanding around this could be useful. Secondly, as a subtext to this question, the kind of disruption that we've seen in the past, these ones would be pretty small compared to them. Would that be a right assessment, or are these disruptions and these solutions also materially large enough to change the trajectory for us? Thank you.
If I can take a short answer in this.
First of all, typically, what happens is the reason we—and you should look at comments holistically. One is about the industry in general, the macro environment, which I spoke about, and the very specific things which we are seeing related to our space, right? The reason we gave this commentary is that there are so many announcements around the pharma industry, right? If there is massive disruption, in at least the short-term things come to a freeze, in many of these companies. This is what we wanted to call out. That doesn't seem to be the case. That's the settling down. Now, combine that with a comment I've been making for a very long period of time in our calls that we believe that drug prices are secularly going to be under pressure, right? We made this comment much before any of this thing had started.
What you are seeing is a validation of that, right? If drug prices are going to be secularly under pressure, companies will have to continue to become more efficient and effective. That plays squarely into our positioning, right? That's where we step in, where companies are saying that we'll have to decide that they have to run their medical and commercial operations in a much more efficient way. That's what we offer. Now, tied this to what I'm saying is that we see customers who are slightly, who are obviously, after the huge COVID wave, consolidating, they're coming back now to the table in terms of saying, "How can they move us upstream? How can they get downstream?" Right? In IDS, we heard themes like NoRep launches, right? All kinds of things.
We've seen customers now opening up and thinking about where do they take their various strategic digital initiatives in. Of course, AI is becoming another big driver for that because they believe that much more can be done using AI. I hope that answers your question.
Sure, sure. It gives some context, but I'll probably take it later. Thank you.
Sure.
Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Vinay Menon with Monarch Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Thank you for the opportunity. Just a few things. One is on Tectonic, you had mentioned Q1, we had closed a million-dollar pledge deal. Any progress on that, and have we been able to get more deals on that?
To add to your take? Yeah. Yes. Thanks, Vinay, for your question. Tectonic, even in the current quarter, has clocked close to $1 million in revenue.
Therefore, for the first half, we've clocked $2 million in revenue. The encouraging part with Tectonic has been that in the current quarter, two more customers have become paid customers, though at a very small level at this point in time. The encouraging part is that from unpaid pilots, we managed to convert two more customers into paid projects, but it's still very early with them. That's an encouraging sign. Having said that, the pipeline with the two customers that we were already having revenues in Tectonic starting last quarter, the pipeline is building up very fast. It's looking very promising. We are hopeful that in the current quarter, we would be able to close a lot of that pipeline, given that a lot of this planning, especially for longer-term engagements, tends to happen with the planning cycle of our customers.
In this case, also is the January to December planning cycle. We are hopeful of those conversions happening by the end of December, if not, maybe early January. For this renewal cycle, this should be the incremental scope of work that we signed.
Okay. Thanks for that. One more thing is, I just want to ask about the end-of-promotion part. Q1, you had mentioned that there was a project referral and a large project also closed. Any strategy to revive the segment or anything which you have seen?
Yes, Vinay. The impact of that was partial in the last quarter and continued the full quarter impact in the current quarter as well. Having said that, there's a significant effort on new engagements and so on. We have a good pipeline that has been built up. Unfortunately, it has taken more time to close than we anticipated.
There's a healthy pipeline, and we are hopeful to see those convert in the current quarter. One other thing that I would want to refer to is in the last quarter, we had also mentioned that there was a win for the brand activation segment, which has just taken off in the current quarter, but a significant ramp-up will be there in quarter three, which would partially fill in the degrowth that we are seeing from the project that ended in Q1.
Thank you, sir. That's all.
Thanks, Vinay.
Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Prakash Kapadia with Kapadia Financial Services. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I just had one question. If I look at the H1 operating cash flow, it has actually improved from $1.35 billion to $2 billion.
Receivables have come off in first half, and they've been declining as a trend over the last two, three years. What is leading to this decline, and can they further decline as we move towards the second half and beyond?
Thanks, Prakash, for your question. As far as cash flows and, more importantly, the AR levels are concerned, there's a bit of a seasonality in our business. Typically, in December, we have a peak in terms of invoices that we send out, and that results in a higher DSO, higher AR levels. In December, it comes down a little in March, given that a lot of that converts to cash flow with a 60- 90 day credit period. Ninety days sometimes moves into beyond March from a collection perspective and tends to be a little more elevated.
Levels of AR in March, while typically, June and September quarters are when these are not as elevated as the other two quarters. That's a bit of seasonality on the invoicing and related cash flow that we have experienced in the past.
You mentioned typically, like the IT companies, you don't see a seasonality as far as revenues go. Why does that seasonality happen in terms of the billing cycle?
Yes, to further clarify, while our revenue doesn't get impacted from an invoicing perspective, we see a bit of slowness in the. July, August period, which is summer vacations in Europe and the U.S. What we have as a practice at Indegene is to get customer consents before we send out the invoices. These holidays tend to be late, but at the same time, there's an acceleration in the invoicing in the quarter-ending December.
Many of our customers in December want us to send invoices ahead of their year-end rather than in normal course, which would have gone, say, the first week of the next month. That tends to elevate or increase the level of AR in December, whereas the reverse happens in the quarter-ending September, given that there are more holidays and unavailability of the customer tends to delay the invoicing cycle by a bit. That has no impact on the revenue. There's no impact on the revenue from a seasonality perspective, but there would be an impact on the invoicing and related due dates, which impacts the cash flow.
Thank you. Mr. Kapadia, please rejoin the queue for more questions. Next question comes from the line of Chirag Kachhadiya with Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited. Please go ahead. Hello. Mr. Kachhadiya, please go ahead. Yes, please go ahead.
Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity. I have just one question. Considering the challenging environment for the pharma sector in the U.S. and whatever we have witnessed in the past one year, can you share some qualitative insight, the type of conversations which are ongoing with the client and the type of solutions which they are asking and which they were asking a year back or two years back? Any change in the behavior in this time pattern, or if you share some qualitative insight, that would be useful. Thanks.
I can start off with that. Actually, the earlier part of my commentary was that there have been a lot of headlines, announcements, but over the last few months, right? In general, the uncertainty now on the pharma industry seems to have reduced very significantly. Companies continue to progress with their regular plans.
What has changed is pharma had a super active period for a couple of years during COVID, right, in terms of drug launches, various other things, obviously, digital acceleration. After that, they went into a phase of slow growth in 2023, if I'm not 2023, and a little bit of 2024. They were also doing consolidation of all the activities they had done. What we see is that phase seems to be over, and they are back in terms of. Figuring out, seeing, and expanding the scope of their centralization and digital initiatives they had taken at a central level, right? Tectonic, as a result of that, we see multiple other things happening similar to that level. We also see companies exploring the potential of AI-driven broader initiatives, right. Much more than what we were seeing, let's say, quarter 12 months back.
It's still early days, and this industry will be circumspect, but we're seeing many of those conversations. Overall, we see, from a demand perspective or quality of engagement perspective, the environment to be much stronger than it was 12- 18 months back.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraints, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you, Moderator. We thank all the participants for attending this call and spending your precious time with us. We also appreciate your continued interest in Indegene and such interactions with you. We hope to continue that in the future. With that, we'll close this call today. Thanks, and have a great day.
Thank you, Vinay.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of Indegene Limited, that concludes this conference.
Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.