Hearty good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Infosys, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to all of you to the 2022 analyst meet. I am Kavya R. Chavali, and I must admit that it's just wonderful to see all the smiles that are not behind the masks anymore, or for that matter, faces that are not behind the screens anymore. It's just wonderful to see all of us back here in a physical format after a gap of three years. First up, huge amount of thanks to all of you for taking your time off and being here in person, present with us to be a part of the event.
At the same time, I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to all those who probably are not here in person joining us right now, but they are definitely watching this event and accessing the event via the live audio webcast from our investor relations website. I'd like to also inform you all that this event is being recorded and the audio file for this event, along with various presentations and the transcript, will be put up on the investor relations website. Now, before we get started, I just thought I'll share a couple of announcements for the benefit of the audience. First up, as you can all notice on the seats, or on the table rather, there's the agenda that's placed that contains the entire schedule for the event.
Please do take a look at that and do ensure that we can all adhere to the timings to be in time and on time. That being said, the room is also Wi-Fi enabled. In fact, at the back of your attendee card, you'll also have all the details in order to connect to the Wi-Fi. Towards the sides of the hall, that is towards the edges, in fact, on the tables, we also have power points. In case you do wish to charge your devices, your mobile phones, you may please choose your seats accordingly. That being said, we also have our volunteers here who are spread across the hall, and they are the ones who are wearing the Infosys iCards, and they'll be more than happy to help you in case you need anything at all.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, as we've taken a good look at the agenda, what we do know for sure is that we have five crisp sessions in store for all of you. Considering that the sessions are short, we may not be able to take the questions during the session, but we do have a dedicated Q&A round, a Q&A session scheduled for all of you. So please keep your questions ready for then. That being said, can we also have an energetic round of applause considering we are all catching up together in a physical avatar, in person. Can we have a round of cheer for all of you and for all of us, everyone gathered here this evening? Let's give this a vibrant start, a buoyant start.
To give a head start to the program, ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome on stage none other than the Infosys CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Salil Parekh.
Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see all of you here and great to have you here with us. Thank you for coming for this session. We have, as you will see in the agenda, quite a packed lineup today. We wanna talk to you a little bit about our overall strategy, give you a sense of what's going on with our digital and cloud work, talk a little bit about our go-to-market, and really what's happening in financial services. Then, give you a sense of how we are engaging more and more with all of our employees, and then, have a sense of what we are driving in terms of our numbers, and our sustainability work, and then leave it open for Q&A. A fairly packed agenda.
I'm gonna start it off with the overview on strategy. Some of this, I think, you've seen before in the strategic discussion, but I wanna share with you what happened in the time since we started. Of course, every session will have the safe harbor slide as well. As you know, we put in place a strategy a few years ago, which was focused essentially on what we are driving in digital, what we wanna do with energizing the core, what we wanna do in terms of reskilling all of our people, and then how we wanna drive what we then call localization. Underpinning all of that was a much more focus on client relevance, and really a relentless focus on execution.
Now four years later, we've had some good success with that. As you've seen, we are really considered a digital leader in the market today. Today we have 52 different categories where we are considered one of the leaders. When we started a few years ago, this was more in the range of 24. Beyond that, we've seen our digital revenue has gone from about 25% to close to 60% if you look at our Q4 numbers of last year. The growth, which was 5.8% the year before we launched this strategy, is up to 19.7% last year and looking very strong. A lot of market share gain in that growth that we saw.
Accounts over $100 million, we were at about 20 then, today at about 38. That we see as a very good sign of the trust that the clients have in what we are driving. Employees from about 200,000 to 300,000. A big change in the scale and the size of the company itself. Significant market share gain, as I mentioned earlier. If you look at our total shareholder return, it's the leading one amongst our peers, in that timeframe. We put together a strategy, we executed it well, and we had some very good outcomes. But that was, as they say, all in the past. What are we doing in the future?
What we see today is digital and cloud is still very dominant in its growth. If you look at the overall tech services market, people estimate, this is from third-party analysts, in the range of 5%-6% growth over the next five years. If you then take the digital and cloud part of it, that's around $400 billion ±, which people estimate will go to about $800 billion ±, growing in that sort of 14%-16% type of a range over the next several years. This is where we focused in the past, and we are gonna continue to focus. We will fine-tune some of that focus, which I'll share with you.
We have a huge opportunity to continue to gain market share in this, in part because we made some very good capability building in these areas, and in part because we are in this cycle also going to build out some more new capabilities. We of course understand that the macro environment, there are lots of changes that are going on. Interest rates are going up. Inflation worries are there. The supply chain concerns in many parts of the world. What we see today is a very strong demand outlook, and we continue to see the overall trend, which is driven by digital and cloud to be sustainable over this course of this time. Even through all of these macro environment points, we see companies are focused on large digital transformation programs, and that will continue.
Now, what are the elements as we look ahead? We've tried to keep it along these five lines for the next few years. First, really go big with cloud, and cloud is the big opportunity. I'll come back a little bit on where we are differentiated in the cloud. Second, continue with all the intensity that we've had in digital. We have some tremendous capability, even outside of cloud, and continue with that. Third, we are taking this time to start to seed some things which are in the next generation, which may not have a result this next quarter or the next financial year, but will have some impact in the three- to five-year horizon. Then we've always been very strong in automation, and we want to continue to be the leaders in automation and modernization.
Especially as we see the macro developing, we will be even more relevant in what automation can give us in that market. Finally, more critically, redouble what we're doing with people care, with engagement with all of our employees, and how we wanna make that the cornerstone of everything we do in the future. All this continues to be underpinned with a continued focus on, client relevance and continued focus on execution, which has always been the critical differentiator, even as we put the strategic elements for the last four years. Now, on the cloud business, one of the things that we've seen and noticed, in the past couple of years is the launch we've had of Infosys Cobalt. Many of you have seen that launch. We've really built it out on some market-leading capabilities.
For example, we have infra-as-a-service relationships and partnerships with all the major public cloud players. We have our own private cloud capability when we look at infra as a service. We have strong partnerships in software as a service. You look at any of the big SaaS players, we are the number 1, number 2 or number 3 partner worldwide. We are also now building out very strong partnerships and our own toolkit on platform as a service. Everything new that's being built today is cloud native, is cloud first, and the platform as a service becomes even more critical for that. Big moves on data and cybersecurity on the cloud. These are becoming absolutely critical as we go ahead. Of course, there's a lot of work on advisory, on design and migration, but that's not the only elements of the cloud.
All of the other elements are more and more relevant. We've now started much more industry solutions within the cloud, and which are all available within Cobalt, and this is what's helping us fuel our growth. You might have seen last quarter we had 40% growth in digital. We had in cloud a growth that was even faster than that, and we can see us gaining tremendous market share in the cloud space. On digital, we will continue with the intensity. There was a pentagon that we had built. It has worked really well for us.
We are continuing with what that tells us in terms of building capability for clients, whether it's on data and analytics, on engineering, digital engineering services, on IoT, on cybersecurity, even on enterprise technology, for example, new work going on SAP S/4HANA and Hybris and so on. On experience, which is where we built all of our digital studios. We have now a global network of these studios across the world that is helping us as we work with our clients in all the new things that they're doing. The next generation seeding. Here we've taken a few ideas and started to build them out with great depth within the business. For example, there's a set of companies which are called digital natives or technology-native companies. These are growing very fast.
We have a very good business with them today, and we are expanding the footprint to work with them to benefit from the growth that these companies are seeing. We've also been very strong in Europe, but we want to now look even more deeply in what is going on in expanding in Europe. Good traction in the Nordics, good traction in Germany, even more scaling up in the UK, good traction in Switzerland. There's lots of opportunities in Europe, which we'll go faster into. The new technology areas. You may have seen, a few weeks ago, we announced our Metaverse Foundry launch.
We have other launches like this and internal capabilities, whether it's on Web 3.0, of course, on blockchain. We've been in there for a number of years now, and on technologies which relate more and more to what's going on in the quantum area. Finally, in the new seeding domain, the company has focused on sustainability over the years where we've ourselves driven to carbon net zero in 2020. We have taken all of those tools and, of course, more of what's going on in the market and build a practice for sustainability, which we are seeing good traction with clients. It's still early days, but these are some of the new areas that we are starting to be focused on.
Here on advanced automation, this is where we have all of our core services. We have very good strength in BPM, which we are building upon. ADM, where we're putting in much more of the automation and no-code, low-code building of new tools. The modernization area, and then AI and machine learning, both our own tools and tools that we have from the market, which we combine to drive automation. We've seen over the past several years, automation allowing our clients to benefit 10%, 15%, 20% each year to improve their efficiency. We've seen that internally into our own capabilities as well. We know this is something that is of huge interest for our clients.
As we drive growth with digital, there's always the play on automation, which is helping them reduce their footprint and improve their efficiencies. On people care and development, we'll have, of course, a full session which you'll hear about a lot of the work which we're doing. It's very much focused on how do we enhance engagement with our employees? How do we attract and retain and develop our people? Much more faster, predictable career progression. Making sure that our employees see that it's predictable for them and that it's happening at a faster pace. Extensive reskilling for all of our people. We very much have the view that we wanna make sure we reskill our employees as we go into the future and bring them with us in the new domains that we're gonna see.
One of the areas that I'm always very keen to share is that as we look at all of these growth dimensions, we also have. Again, we'll have a more detailed update with you later on in the afternoon. We have several levers that can help us drive to a much higher margin. There are levers which relate to how we manage the role ratios and the pyramid within the organization. There are levers that relate to how we manage the mix between on-site and offshore. We've also got a very high level of subcontractor usage in the past few quarters and couple of years, and we know that that's a huge lever as we unwind that subcontractor usage percentage to give us more margin benefit.
We know that automation itself will give us internally some benefit, and we will capture some of the value from it. We realize the scale has changed as we've gone from 200,000 to 300,000 employees. We know there's some operating leverage within the business, which we will bring into the margin benefit as well. Then, of course, we have a method of looking at how do we communicate more and more the value of what we are driving with clients, both from a digital perspective, from a wage increase perspective, and what do we do to make sure we capture some of that value back into our business and help us on the margin.
We have a set of margin levers which we are working on actively to make sure that as we drive the growth, we continue to drive a higher margin business. With that, to conclude from my perspective, first, we've had, in the last four years, demonstrated that we've had a good strategy, but even more important, a very disciplined execution on that strategy, which has brought us to where we are today. Going ahead, we still see enormous opportunities, especially in digital and cloud, but in many areas across our business portfolio. We've built the portfolio, which can hopefully benefit more and more from these opportunities.
Our people engagement is already very robust, and we are now putting in more work into it to make it stronger still, to make sure that connect with the employees is very high. We have several levers which can drive us to a high margin as we go through the next few years, and those are good things to have as we embark on this cycle. We remain well-poised to continue to gain market share, drive growth, and continue to create value for all of our stakeholders, but especially for all of our shareholders, who are represented here. With that, thank you, and I pass it back for the next session. We have a couple of sessions now which will relate to what we're doing in digital and cloud, and more on the market. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Parekh, for sharing a strategic overview and also for sharing the levers towards the growth drivers. That being said, ladies and gentlemen, it's also time to gather insights around what's next in digital. In fact, our next speaker, we have with us Mr. Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, who's actually joining us digitally or, if I may say, virtually, as he's joining us all the way from New York. We'll have this session taking place in a virtual avatar, but we'll be having Mr. Ravi Kumar S joining in to share his insights on what's happening next in digital.
Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm guessing you can hear me now. I'm so sorry that I couldn't make it. I was so looking forward to joining you in Mumbai. I ended up contracting COVID on my way back from Davos. I was just about to board a flight to Mumbai. Hope the technology and my voice holds up for the next 25 minutes. In the next 25 minutes or so, I'm gonna present a view about next in digital, what's coming up in digital, cloud and AI automation. I think Salil kind of summarized it pretty nicely, so I'm gonna little bit double-click on it.
I think I can give you enough to excite you, but not give away a lot so that we kind of lose our competitive advantage by pushing this information into the public domain. If you can jump into slide two, which is the safe harbor, and then slide three, which talks about the market dynamics which are reshaping the future. Salil spoke about it. Everyone is talking about the potential slowdown, the Ukraine war, the supply chain disruptions, high inflation in developed nations. The digital opportunity is a real one. It's a very different one this time. It really contributes to the must-have transformation rather than the historic past where it contributed to the nice-to-have transformation of enterprises. In fact, digital technologies today can be the deflationary force for inflation.
It can actually kind of reduce supply chain disruptions. It can even diffuse the heated labor market. Salil spoke about analyst predictions. I think the analyst predictions continue to remain intact. Almost $1.3 trillion of IT services spent by 2023, and a significant chunk of it between $500 billion all the way till $800 billion, where Salil was speaking about on digital services. The four shifts I kind of put up on this slide are the market dynamics reshaping the future. It's a golden era for technology. We're gonna see accelerated digitization, needless to say.
Just to give you an example in retail, it took a decade to go from 10% to 15.5% in e-commerce till 2020, and then it kind of hit 20% in literally 12 months at the onset of COVID. Every industry is going through this significant digital embrace. Digital plus digitization plus dispersion, as I call it. I wrote a very nice article in Forbes three or four days ago. Dispersion of work, you know, heavy investments on digital infrastructure for employees, dispersion of healthcare, dispersion of education, dispersion of telecom utilities in hybrid models as some of it is actually permeating into our homes. That is gonna lead to more digitization as we go forward. Software is the new alchemy of businesses.
We've gone from using digital technologies for extended reach, disintermediated reach to consumers to deeply embedding software in automating businesses to deeply embedding software into products and services. In fact, if you split the industries into bits and atoms, the bits industries are bits-related industries. Primarily, services industries are becoming more bits, and atoms are getting immersed into bits. Who would have imagined, as an example, the car industry going from internal combustion to being a software business? Who would have imagined the car industry to not have any dealers? Tesla actually hands over cars on your driveway. And you just open the car on your app and take the keys out. What a disruption we are all going through in industries where the core product is changing.
Industry transitions, that's my fourth shift. You know, Amazon did it very smartly for many, many years. You know, every time they wanted to transition an industry, they did it seamlessly. Now, there is the smarter G2K companies. A large number of them are clients. Having a renewed confidence on the digital platforms because of COVID. Of course, they had a strong physical network, which is kind of important in the times we are in, and a trusted consumer brand and a consumer base. They are keen to straddle between industries, transition between industries. Big box retailers in the U.S. getting into healthcare.
Oil companies want to be in automated retail because they can change the gas stations into EV charging stations and then as more time is spent on EV charging stations, you can do autonomous. A lot of our clients are doing conversations with us on the industry transitions using digital technologies and these, which I think make the digital opportunity now very different to the past. Therefore, even if there is an impending slowdown, I don't see a big change in the outlook. Slide four. We have been speaking about the pentagon of services, pentagon of digital services. More than 59% of our business is digital now, and it is growing at 40+% , as Salil mentioned about it.
A portion of that business, a chunky portion of the business is cloud related, and it is significantly growing faster than digital, which of course is significantly growing faster than our core services. Our investments in Cobalt, the first cloud services brand much ahead of our peers, has helped us to enable growth. We have 60+ digital services. 25 of them have a run rate of more than $100 million. Annual run rate of more than $100 million. Our endeavor is to create that similar runway for all the 60 digital services. What has helped us get there? A focused go-to-market, a strong partner ecosystem. You know, a lot of awards and recognition. A services plus platform approach. Co-creation with a network of living labs and design studios.
Early investments on reskilling infrastructure. Distributed talent pools as we localize them across the world, which is really kind of needed for digital capabilities, has helped us to stay ahead of the curve. The next slide is about really the next in digital. In some ways it's a summary slide, which I will double-click here on. You know, digital technologies, as I said, was always focused on the growth agendas of enterprises because you created extended reach to consumers and created more efficient way to reach consumers. Digital services have now evolved across the efficiency stack, the growth agenda, and of course, creating smart connected products and services. As I had mentioned earlier, the atom-related industries that are getting immersed into bits.
All digital has underpinnings of the cloud, more nuanced offerings on the cloud emerge, hybrid multi-cloud offerings. The resource and the infrastructure layer is getting repurposed. SaaS is almost $200 billion of market size, both horizontal and modular industry apps. A reimagination of data on the cloud. We're gonna double-click on it. Product engineering, embedding software into products, leveraging the 5G revolution. Human experience is no longer about consumers, it's also about employees. Better intuitive UI, UX design for employees as well as more businesses go hybrid. Cybersecurity. I think the biggest opportunity for us is to industrialize cybersecurity-as-a-service. Emerging technologies which can future-proof us. Of course, a new era of consulting and advisory at the intersection of technology and strategy.
You know, especially in industries where there is a paranoia to leverage technology at the core, like the car industry we spoke about. Slide six. Cobalt is a key differentiator. Why is it so? You know, we all have this notion that, the cloud is a lift and shift of on-prem infrastructure to, virtualized infrastructure. The reality is, it's not a lift and shift only. Lift and shift is a vehicle to do, significant transformation of those workloads. To create that transformation, I'm on slide six, we need a orchestration layer. Just to give you, illustrate this a little further. Between the top three hyperscalers, almost $100 billion is spent on capital expenditure, over the next two years.
Why do they do so? They do so to build infrastructure-as-a-service and lend it to enterprises across the world. That's not the real value is. That's not where the real value is. The reason why they do so is you land that enterprise workload, and then you straddle them over the value layers. These are the three value layers I've kind of illustrated on my slide. You could potentially take that workload which you land on, move it to IT and business operations, and move it to business services. In fact, between the three hyperscalers, they have economies of scale because they have internal consumption. Like Google has 20+% of the consumer internet traffic in the United States going through Alphabet assets. 40% of e-commerce of the US is through Amazon.
145 odd million users go through Microsoft because of Teams. All of this allows them to create the insights and the algorithms and the business services and the ability to create IT and automated business operations, which you can flip around and give utilities to your clients. That orchestration layer. Somebody has to straddle our clients through that value. We early on adopted this mechanism to make Infosys the orchestration layer for our clients who are going through this transformation, not just a lift and shift. The ability to straddle those layers will help us to generate the value and transformation needed, and the spend on the cloud then becomes worthwhile.
Between the top three hyperscalers, almost $150 billion of revenue per year is generated. For cloud. You could potentially, you know, for every dollar spent there, you could create $2-3 of cloud services. $600 billion is actually spent on public cloud, or rather it will be spent on public cloud by 2023. This is an exciting opportunity. On Cobalt, through a ground-up exercise, we created 35,000 assets, 35,000 cloud assets, 300+ industry templates. We've created a rhythm around building those assets, contributing into a repository, and deploying them for projects, deploying them for programs.
Equally, the cloud is gonna become multi, you know, the enterprise landscapes are gonna become multi-cloud. We created a Polycloud layer. Again, a part of our orchestration. It creates interoperability, portability of data, apps, and services. You could straddle between the clouds. This is very uniquely ahead of the curve because we did that way ahead of others. That gives us the opportunity to stay differentiated in the market. Lots of exciting partnerships at the bottom of the slide. All of them, we are in the top one, two, or three, as Salil had mentioned. I'm switching over to slide seven. You know, this is a big shift in the way we see our business.
Historically, system integrators saw business as the tech spend of enterprises as the universe. With the advent of the cloud, you could really pivot to business operations, automated business operations orchestrated on the cloud. You could take large in-flight transformations and accelerate as-a-service. For years, system integrators spoke about as-a-service, consumption-based models, outcome-based models. We have now reached an inflection point because of the cloud, because you could literally give as-a-service model to your clients.
I think one of the differentiating value propositions of Infosys is our ability to create a viable economics around taking an existing estate of applications, data centers, people, taking the current mode of operations, as I call it, giving it service in the current mode, underwriting the advances, and then taking future mode of operations and transitioning all that to the cloud. Doing this in a big bang way, seamless, I think is what our differentiation is, and that's why we are able to cut large deals with our clients from current mode of operations to future mode of operations. The next slide, I'm gonna.
The next section is gonna be a video from Ausgrid, the largest electricity distributor on the Australian east coast, which owns, maintains, and operates electric networks. We have created 120 curated services, leverages a Polycloud platform with a digital command center, AI operations, advanced observability for business operations which are automated through those 120-plus cloud services. Can I have the video for Ausgrid, please?
Ausgrid's cloud transformation was underpinned by three key planks, total cost of ownership, an improvement in our cybersecurity position, and speed to internal market. The Polycloud platform helped us in all three of these areas. In total cost of ownership reduction, it allowed us to automate a range of lifecycle actions, such as start and stop VMs.
Automated alerting, etcetera. These significantly reduced the operational overheads we had in maintaining infrastructure in Azure. Secondly, in the cybersecurity posture, we were able to implement automated patching on a monthly basis, which was a significant shift from for Ausgrid. It had primarily been quarterly, sometimes even half yearly or yearly. Now we're able to patch all the operating systems within the Azure environment, as I said, on a monthly basis, which is a significant improvement from a cybersecurity perspective. Finally, from speed to market. Previously, we had only been able to raise systems even within Azure, in sometimes weeks, sometimes months, due to the excessive workflows.
Once we'd integrated Polycloud with our internal workflow systems, we've been able to cut that down to a matter of days for some of the simpler systems, and up to a fortnight for even fairly comprehensive systems as well.
Thank you. The next slide is about transforming digital experience. Again, I'm kind of drawing from the summary slide I put up earlier. You know, we had this very unique value proposition. Salil early on kind of created a strategy of the string of pearls for digital experience. So we bought a bunch of companies to create the beachhead capacity. We didn't go the traditional way of buying creative talent, but we went on specialized services, and we built that beachhead capacity. Then we went to schools in the United States and actually got non-STEM talent and design talent, and then we built a platform which is uniquely different to the agency talent everybody else built experience on.
As the onset of COVID happened, we realized that that experience will be doubled down on digital assets with our employees. We bought a bunch of assets all the way from WongDoody, Blue Acorn, Brilliant Basics. We did a acqui-hire called Carter, and then recently we bought oddity, which actually has an exposure in Germany, but more importantly, it also has AR/VR capabilities to create immersive experience, which is needed, especially in some of the industries where you have the physical and digital interface. Over the last few years, we created a network of 16 digital studios, and we orchestrated all of this underneath the leadership of WongDoody.
WongDoody really ran the whole process because they knew this business, and they actually ran it for us, and then they were very tightly integrated with the Infosys engine. Our belief is that programmatic digital experience services or creative services, as we call it, will be insourced over a period of time because of privacy data considerations. Iterative nature now because you know, when you're doing digital campaigns and digital branding, new-age creative is much more iterative with digital feedback loops. You will need a service where you could give dedicated studios to your clients. We've already done three of them. In fact, we call it Studio Next. We are now helping our clients to build their own studios, you know. In some ways, using Infosys to insource their own creative.
It's a very, very unique value proposition, and it is a blockbuster offering of Infosys. I'm gonna now show you a video from Rite Aid, an American drugstore chain having 2,400 retail pharmacy locations in 18+ states. It delivers healthcare services, retail products, and every day 1.6 million Americans you know buy from Rite Aid. How do we evolve pharmacy systems from dispensing prescriptions to focusing on personalized holistic wellness? That was the problem statement and WongDoody Infosys came together for building something which can give holistic wellness to the customers of Rite Aid. Can I have the video of Rite Aid, please?
How does a drugstore giant become the pharmacy of the future when sluggish technology is holding them back? By looking at their business like they should look at customers, from a holistic point of view. To help our client, Rite Aid, do just that, we applied WongDoody's wellness prescription for human experience-led digital transformation. Called Conversation to Creation or C2C, our approach brings design, business, and technology thinking together from the start, enabling us to solve problems from multiple angles at the same time. First, we collaborated with Rite Aid to perform an in-depth health check. We conducted interviews, co-creation workshops, and store visits to better understand how their pharmacists interact with technology. We got to know people like Chad, a Rite Aid pharmacist, and Alexandria, a customer, as we looked for a key human insight to help transform Rite Aid's business.
Spoiler alert, we found it. Pharmacists got into the business to help humans, not just dispense prescriptions. Combining this insight with intuitive design and innovative technology, we created a robust new digital wellness system centered around holistic care. RiteCare solves Rite Aid's business problem by empowering pharmacists to build relationships that go beyond prescription pickup. Now Chad can easily see Alexandria's information, preferences, and personalized wellness recos all in one place. Our RiteCare platform has completely transformed the way pharmacists and patients interact. Chad's happy, Alexandria is happy, and Rite Aid is thrilled. The pharmacy of the future doesn't happen overnight. Stay tuned for the next phase of Rite Aid's multi-year digital transformation project. Like any great health partner, WongDoody will be there every step of the way.
Thank you again. I'm on slide 11, next generation data and analytics services. I know we're running out of time, so I'm gonna kind of rush up the rest of the session. Data services has been talked for a while, and so I don't wanna go into details. Our approach has been very simple. We wanna unlock data from legacy estates, create a flexible mesh of foundational services, build a data supply chain, create digital feedback loops, use data for AI models. The opportunity we tapped into way ahead of everybody else is the data on the cloud and data exchanges. We built some very strategic partnerships with Snowflake, Databricks, on data exchanges and data on the cloud. Let me give you one example of why this is such a powerful opportunity.
You know, I call it the network effect of data, and I call it the network effect of data on the cloud. You know, big box retailers, as an example, get higher revenues these times because they're straddling between physical and digital channels. In fact, they gained digitally much more during COVID because they had a physical network to support the digital channels. They have lower margins. The reason why they have lower margins is because higher digital channels spend means lower trade promotion. Consumer goods companies know that consumers are just buying online, so they give you much lower trade promotion spend, and of course, higher shipping costs, higher returns. Digital channels uniquely, however, have the opportunity to monetize the data.
While you have lower margins because of lower trade promotion and high shipping and all, you have a digital estate. Either you could say it doesn't exist because there is no real physical estate, or you could actually say it's unlimited. The smarter ones are taking the data, putting it on the cloud on a data exchange, and then bringing the data elements across the value chain, consumers, retailers, supply chain coming together. Those insights are monetized using either the data exchanges of the hyperscalers themselves or specialized ones like Snowflake and Databricks. We have an early strategic partnership with these companies, and we are seeing significant traction with the clients who actually want to not just monetize, but generate significant value by bringing all these data elements on the cloud across the value chain.
I'm on slide 12, which is about security. Security is like the first cousin of technology. If you spend more on technology, you have to spend more on security. If every company across the world is gonna be a tech company, and the core of the products and services are gonna be embedded with technology, you're gonna have more dispersed businesses, you're gonna see geopolitical risk attached to cybersecurity, you're gonna see more orchestrated hacking communities, you will need an orchestrated approach to security. We have a secure by design, pervasive, overarching approach, which has given us an opportunity to build everything with a secure design mindset. We also have a zero-trust architecture.
You know, in the past, most security was built on a castle and moat, where the castle was the corporate network, and you created that security around it. The users have left the corporate network onto the Internet. The apps have left the corporate network. The data left the corporate network. You need a zero-trust architecture. We are significantly investing on SASE-based or Secure Access Service Edge-based security, where we assume that you need zero trust architecture for building the future of security. We've invested in seven cyber defense centers. In fact, I think security will move from a fragmented software-led insourced model to an integrated automated software plus services platform model, and it will be a managed service in the future.
These seven data and cyber defense centers together, we can create 24/7 security operations and secure enterprise landscapes in a hybrid world where it is more important than ever before. It's a $100 billion-plus market opportunity, as McKinsey says in by 2025. There's an acute shortage of talent. We were very early on to sign up partnerships. In fact, we signed up with Purdue to get 1,000 professionals on cybersecurity. It's Purdue University in the US. We now have a solution for the supply constraints as well as we've created a industrialized scaled security offering for our clients to embrace upon. The next slide is about applied AI. You know, we launched an offering in 2021.
In the last five years or so, there was a huge embrace of AI in consumer value chains. We now see enterprises embracing it. There's an inflection point now, I would say, what enterprise software did in the late 1990s to re-engineer enterprises, we are now gonna see AI software evolving to, I would say, the next wave of re-engineering of an enterprise. We did a formal launch in 2021, Cobalt, enabled by putting the guardrails required. We have significant traction, again, we have an AI store with 25+ AI services you can draw from 1,000+ use cases. Slide 14 is, I think Salil kind of alluded to it. We are accelerating automation for efficiency and productivity for ourselves. We have 24,000 bots.
We have something called a bot factory. The idea is to constantly re-baseline our productivity so that we stay ahead of the curve in winning large deals, staying competitive. Mohit will speak about how we have made that process so robust. The idea is to keep the productivity cutting edge so that we win these deals. We not only win these deals with the productivity commitments we make and therefore stay competitive, but also get additional value, transition additional value on top of it so that we could release people from our projects and save more for us. We have done that very effectively over the last three years, and we continue to stay ahead on that runway. The next slide is about IoT. Slide 15.
You know, IoT had a slow start, I would say, as it took off as a concept. It had a lot of promise. IoT is now starting to gain a new life because it is no longer about Internet of Things, it is Internet of Everything. Internet of data, processes, you know, things, people, everything else. Equally, it comes at the intersection of decentralized 5G, edge and devices, smarter devices. You know, when the cloud centralized compute and storage and network, that's what the cloud did, it just centralized it. You know, with the advent of 5G and with smart devices, you could decentralize compute and storage.
As you decentralize compute and storage, you can build a mesh of the Internet of Things and create a significant number of use cases. We distinctively see three categories, industrial IoT, product IoT, and of course, smart spaces and sustainability services, which kind of are the new wave in smart spaces which are evolving in this space. Lot of excellent partnerships. We also have some significant industry solutions. The next one is embedding software into core products. We spoke about it before. Historically, Infosys had a lot of capability on turbo engineering, mechanical and electrical product development.
Now we are embedding digital CAD-based modeling, embedding software into end-to-end product life cycles, digital twins, and then we are embedding software into media services. We recently bought a company called Kaleidoscope Innovation. The idea is to expand our capabilities on product design, development and prototyping. They have prototyping infrastructure so that you could embed software into medical devices, consumer electronics, industrial products. You know, as these things come to your living spaces, from, say, you know, medical devices, more medical devices come to your living spaces, you need to embed software in it and interact with that ecosystem virtually. This is an interesting company we bought which helps us to prototype and generate more value. I'm coming to the end of my deck.
The next one is about emerging technology. Well, we see significant value in the future. Therefore there is a lot of curiosity and traction now, and we know that we can future-proof our business as we invest into these spaces. Again, I'm gonna just touch upon it. The Metaverse Foundry, which we launched, one of the first few system integrators in the world, which actually created a foundry for the metaverse. I do believe that a three-dimensional internet is gonna evolve a virtual world in parallel. Why do people want to go to the new three-dimensional internet? Because either they find inequalities and disparities in the physical world, and therefore they want to spend time in the virtual world.
They want to experiment in the virtual world and bring it to the physical world, or they want to bring the virtual world to amplify the physical world. Whatever be the reason, I think we're going to see a Metaverse. The Metaverse will also have underpinnings of the reset of the Web 3.0 because the current internet is having an imbalance between creators and participants. So the ability to use crypto, blockchain, all of that, will come into picture. We invested heavily on AR/VR. The recent acquisition of oddity will help us as well. The Metaverse Foundry is for enterprises to experiment and find out what their presence on the Metaverse should be. Lot of traction we are having. Gaming is a great opportunity.
Three plus billion people in the world are in gaming. You know, I'm astonished to know that number is so high because I'm not one of those gamers. $200+ billion of revenue from gaming industries. I think there is a $40-$50 billion of IT services also on core product development. A lot of it is done in Eastern Europe today. Hyperscalers have a very big play, and we think we can have a footprint out there. Low-code, no-code. In fact, we have globally only 25 million developers while the world has three plus billion corporate users.
The need of low-code software is very critical because if everybody wants to, if software is gonna be the alchemy for every business, you need power users and citizen developers who can code as well, but it has to be low-code. We see a $100 billion opportunity. We have some early partnerships, as you can see on this slide, with Unqork and Appian, OutSystems, Pega. A lot of these companies have low-code software, and we believe this is gonna be a $100 billion opportunity. The last one is co-creating innovation cycles. In fact, historically, we, you know, system integrators had a follow-through innovation cycle. We think we have now got to that point where we need to co-create.
We have a bunch of things all through, and we want to be the bridge between startups and large enterprises. Startups accessing large enterprises who are our clients and our clients accessing startup ecosystems. We have 120 startups in an Infosys innovation network, and we've created this bridge so that innovation capital can flow on both sides. We're also leveraging the innovation fund of Infosys. We have living labs in all our innovation hubs in the US, Europe and Australia, of course, now in India as well. We also have something called listening post as a service.
The idea is if clients want to access startup ecosystems, we create a listening post as a service, which is creating a listening post for our clients and allowing them to access those startup ecosystems. This is again an exciting opportunity to future-proof our business. The lines between the startups and the large enterprises are blurring, so we become the bridge for it. Thank you again for listening to me. I know I went a little overboard on my time, but I'm very glad that my internet connection and my voice held up for the last 30 minutes. Thank you again.
Well, I guess we truly managed to harness the power of technology and the internet, God, especially to ensure that this conversation continues. We managed to also extract insights around the market dynamics that are literally reshaping the future. That being said, let's quickly move on to understanding the market approach and financial services depth, and for which I'd like to invite on stage Mr. Mohit Joshi, President, Infosys. Please put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, to also welcome Mr. Mohit Joshi on the stage.
Thank you so much, and it's great to be back here. I was just thinking that it's almost four years ago since we were here, and we were talking at that time about the sales transformation within the broader transformation that we wanted to drive within Infosys. Four years later, the results are in, and you will see that we've actually done very well. At that time, about four years ago, we had outlined our strategy, and there were two key components that we were very focused on. The first was large deals, and the second was our focus on account mining, our focus on account expansion. Now, the large deals space, as you've seen, has been central to our focus over four years.
In terms of the numbers, we won over $40 billion in TCV over this period. You know, we have tripled the size of deals that we have over the three years, both in terms of the number of deals and in terms of the total TCV that we've done. Our pipeline has increased very significantly. Our pipeline today is 2.5x the size it used to be, back in 2018. As Salil alluded in his presentation, this increase in deal wins, this increase in TCV has come up as a result of the competitive market share that we have been gaining. Again, it has been a central pillar of our strategy and one that has been immensely successful.
Obviously, you know, this is talking about the past, but even in the future, our large deal focus will stay very central.
To our vision of sales transformation. The other pillar, apart from the large deals piece, has been our focus on account expansion. As you will see also, you know, when I talk about our financial services practice, we've always been blessed with, you know, with a really marquee set of clients. We have focused on digging deeper within these clients, on looking at the unaddressed segments of the market within the client that we can address. We've also had great success with our account expansion and account mining program that internally we have called the Titan initiative. If you look at it, I think one of the most visible signs of the success that we've had in the account expansion program has been the increase in the number of 100 million plus account.
We have doubled this over a four-year period. If you think of it, right, it took us roughly 35 odd years as a company to get 20 $100 million accounts, but only a four-year period in which to double them. Again, like the large deals program, the Titan program will be very central to our sales transformation initiatives. Apart from the large deals and the Titan program, we have also done a number of other areas, right? There have been a number of other areas in terms of transformation of the sales force itself. We have significantly expanded the size of our sales team. We have invested heavily in the training of the sales teams.
The composition of the sales teams to include a lot more Gen Z and a lot more millennials has again allowed us to deliver on these two key initiatives. The new account opening program again has been very successful. The revenue that we get from new accounts has also doubled over this four-year period. As a result of this, we are today, you know, among the fastest growing IT brands in the world. Very importantly, from my perspective, the connectivity that we have with key decision makers within our clients, right? You know, whether you use, LinkedIn as a proxy for this or you have other analysts do their study, consistently Infosys comes across as the company with the best connectivity within our client organizations. I feel that this is something that will really serve us very well for the future.
That in a nutshell is something that we have done over the past four years. If you look at it slightly more in detail, you know, Salil spoke about the work that we've done with clients the world over to drive digital transformation, right? These are some case studies. Over here you will see six case studies of digital transformation done through large deals, right? You know, digital transformation is a difficult thing to describe. The best definition that I have for it, you know, working with my colleagues is digital transformation is if as a company, you can provide an Apple-like experience, if you can provide Google-like data and targeting capacity, if you can fulfill like an Amazon, and potentially train like an Infosys.
This is what our digital transformation initiative looks like, and these are, you know, six great examples of it. If I take the first one, this is the work that we've done with a large bank. We've done it with their European operations, and essentially driving optimization and transformation within their portfolio for Europe. 20-plus countries across the retail bank, and the commercial and the corporate bank across the various stacks of technology, right? A transformation from an apps perspective, an infra consolidation, a move to the public cloud, and a transformation from an end user perspective. A comprehensive transformation of the client's estate, resulting in a significant improvement in productivity, in a consolidation in the number of applications that they have, and a significant investment in employees as well. There's a talent transformation piece to this as well.
This is one example from the banking industry of a large deal and a transformation that we've driven over the past year. The second example is for the telecoms business, and this is about the digital supply chain that we're helping this client build in their industry. Again, it has two parts to it, right? The first part is allowing the client's teams themselves, right? And this goes to the no-code or the low-code piece of it. Allowing the client's teams themselves to configure the complex applications without relying on the IT team. That's a huge value add for the client team. And the second is really building out a significant data lake that allows them to track, you know, from a device perspective in terms of fulfillment in terms of client satisfaction across various segments.
Providing that detailed targeting capacity to the client is the transformation that we've driven for this telecom major. There's an example from the healthcare space. In the healthcare space, we've worked with this client using an Infosys platform called Infosys Helix that I'll talk a little bit about later. This is to completely transform the onboarding, the billing, the provider management for 3.6 million clients using Infosys' system integration capability, Infosys BPM capability, but also an Infosys platform. Across these three offerings from Infosys, we are transforming the entire experience for 3.6 million, you know, members. We are driving significant productivity, a 60% increase in productivity, a 95% reduction in their dropout rate.
Again, giving this client this platform has meant that the client is so much more competitive that they are now entering new markets in the US. Again, a holistic example of transformation using platform and people capabilities. Finally, I'll talk a little bit about, you know, the retail example that you have over here. This is with a large, you know, consumer goods retailer, soft goods retailer. Across 100 million clients that they have, we have entered into an initiative to build a significant data capacity for them for their direct-to-consumer business. I'll just leave one metric with you, right, about the impact that we've had. Before this data lake and this significant targeting capacity was built, the client had about 8% repeat sales to customers. With this new platform, we are now driving a 37% repeat sales capacity.
Again, a sea change in the direct-to-consumer business for this very large retailer with 100 million-plus clients. Hopefully this gives you a sense, you know, when we talk about digital transformation, what do we truly mean? Why is these deals so large? Why are they so significant to our clients? Hopefully this gives you a flavor of the kind of work that we have been doing over the past couple of years. This work also has been powered by many of the platforms that we have built. You know, I'll be talking about Finacle specifically, which is the oldest platform that we have. Ravi spoke and Salil spoke about Cobalt and the Cobalt capabilities that we have created, both from a horizontal perspective, but also the vertical industry capabilities that we're creating in Cobalt.
I spoke about Helix briefly, which is, you know, a healthcare platform that we're building. We are building out the payer capabilities of that platform. I think this is very significant. This is a cloud-native, API-first platform. You really don't have cloud-native platforms in this space, and so the work that we've done, we think will give a significant boost not just to us, but also to the industry. We built Equinox, which is, you know, a digital marketing and e-commerce fulfillment platform. Just within the two years that we've launched this platform, we've had close to $50 billion of gross merchandise value flow through the platform.
We had a very significant win recently with Nu Skin, that we had announced, and you had a quote from the CEO of Nu Skin talking about how this was transformational, you know, to their business, the whole beauty industry. We've spoken previously about Wingspan, which is our digital learning platform that has, you know, over one million, you know, learners now on the platform. Again, a very significant capability that we have built not just for our own enterprise, but also for our clients, and for, you know, for, you know, for the world at large, right? In the UK, for instance, it is also being used by the Brent Council, so it is being used as a social enabler and a social growth platform as well.
Again, just to give you a sense of the multiple platforms that we've created and how these are not isolated now, right? These are central to the deals that, you know, that we've been doing. We are seeing a paradigm shift in the marketplace, right? This is something that we talk about quite often. When I think of Infosys, I think of Infosys as being like a really capable jet with two engines, right? You have the one engine which is focused on productivity, on automation, you know, on cost. When things are tough, this is the engine that clients rely on. You have a second engine, which is actually larger now, right? Which is 60% of our revenue, which is all around growth. It's around experience, it's around data, it's around cybersecurity, it's around the cloud.
Typically, you have one of these two engines going on at full steam. This has been a remarkable period over the past two years when you find both the engines being equally in demand and being, you know, in great, sort of, use across our client base. Because clients are not looking only for transformation and growth, they're also looking for efficiency. They're also not just looking for, you know, for a technology impact, they're looking for a holistic business impact. We feel that at this time we are uniquely positioned. We are uniquely positioned to deal with this duality, where clients are looking for significant global capacities that we have, but they're also looking for significant local approach.
If you look at it across the US and Europe, 70% of our delivery capacity in these markets is now local. If you look at the talent infrastructure that we have built, it is among the best in the world. We have added more headcount in the past 12 months that we have than we have ever in the history of the company. Equally, we are also a great magnet for talents that our clients' organizations have, right? We've also done more rebadging of client talent than we've ever done in our history. Again, it is this duality which is making Infosys especially interesting to our clients because we bring this combination of, you know, agility and scale of global presence, but also significant localization of a historically a technology focus, but also a holistic business understanding.
We're looking to address this duality, you know, from our sales perspective as well. If I look at it from a large deals perspective, we are very focused on the turnkey deals that we can do, where we are bringing tech capacity, we're bringing ecosystem partnerships, you know, through the cloud. We're bringing automation, but we're also bringing a deep knowledge of the industry. So for instance, we can promise clients that we will be able to process their mortgage book for a certain basis points of the book, right? So for 7 basis points, we will service your mortgage book instead of the 20 that you pay just now. We are focusing, again, like both Salil and Ravi mentioned, on the cloud. That's a significant opportunity for us and on digital.
We are also focused on the tech natives. This is a significant opportunity for us because digital natives historically used to, you know, they used to make their own coding, right? They would, you know, they would only work with their own tech teams. But again, because of the need to expand quickly and because of the focus from a productivity perspective, they're increasingly looking at partners like us to provide that scale capacity. With digital native companies across the world, we are seeing significant large deal opportunities. Europe is a significant focus area for us.
I do believe based on the discussions we've had with several analysts, and several of you actually, that over the next four-five years, the incremental spend, not the overall spend, but the incremental spend on technology, in Europe will probably be the same as the U.S., which is quite remarkable because there's a lot of catch-up to do. We feel that this is a huge opportunity for us. We've been working with private equity partners. Private equity is a very significant component of our sales playbook now. We've been working with them as they try and build this, you know, as they try and realize value from their portfolio companies. You know, either for a single company or for the entire range of companies.
It's a team that we have created that now works with private equity companies, and we have started to win our first set of deals in this market. Finally, ESG, right? ESG has been a great driver for us, and it is now almost the third leg of every deal that we do. Historically, when we used to do deals, we used to talk to clients about A, the productivity that we can drive. For this portfolio, we will simplify it by reducing the total number of your applications by 20%, by automating 30% of the processes, by, you know, reducing FTE count by, let's say, X% . We'd also talk about the work that we do from a digital perspective, right? We will improve your NPS by, you know, 5% year-on-year.
We will improve your total addressable market and your market share, you know, by maybe 7% year-on-year. Now we're also able to commit to specific ESG goals which are so important for, you know, for all Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 companies across the world. We're able to tell clients that you have a stated ambition to be carbon neutral by, let's say, by 2035. Based on our analysis of your portfolio, we feel you can be carbon neutral by 2033 if you work with Infosys. It's a very important lever as part of our overall strategy in working with clients across the world. Our account expansion program has been incredibly successful. As you've seen, we've gone from, you know, $200 million-dollar clients to 40.
We are now focused also on building the next set of Titan accounts, right? How do we get the accounts between $10 million and $50 million? How do we increase that base of accounts that we have so that we have a healthy pipeline for the future as well? At the same time, we are very focused on making sure that we're able to upscale, to hire, to retrain, and to build better social connectivity for our sales team. There's an immense amount of work going on to make sure that we can educate the sales teams, right? If you think of it, you know, we are launching dozens of service lines every year. We're launching dozens of propositions for our client every year.
We have to make sure that our sales teams are able to understand and articulate this and take this to the market. A set of platforms has been created that allows our sales teams to very quickly understand the offerings, understand the applicability to the industry, and then take it to the market. This is the focus from a sales perspective. Again, everything is focused on the work that we do for our clients, right? Which is, how do we build vertical solutions that are based on cloud infrastructure that incorporate the latest thinking and the latest opportunities that technology offers, whether it's the metaverse or whether it's blockchain or whether it's quantum. All of these are built on very real business use cases, right?
We have very strong horizontal capabilities, but our go-to-market is built on very strong industry use cases about the change that we can drive, you know, for our customers. One final slide from a Europe perspective. Again, just to highlight the importance of this market to us. It already is a very significant market for us. We already have a very large footprint there from a market capacity, but also from a delivery capacity. We're very focused on growing in that market. Therefore, the seeding that we've done in terms of digital studio capability, in terms of digital innovation centers, in terms of cyber defense capability, it has been obviously buttressed with the new acquisitions that we've done. Whether it's Fluido or it's Kaleidoscope, or it's, you know, Brilliant Basics or it's more recently oddity.
I feel very confident about our presence in this market. We will be doubling down, and we will be making sure that we can grow incrementally in a market which I think is poised for for an increase from a spend perspective. So that's the overall you know sales vision. We have been incredibly successful with the strategies that we put in place four years ago. We're very focused on doubling down on these, and I believe that we have the momentum. We have the momentum in the marketplace. Infosys is uniquely positioned because of our you know because of our heritage as a very efficient, very productive, highly automated player, to which we have added the capabilities of you know design, of data, of cybersecurity. So we feel very optimistic about the opportunities from a market perspective.
The customer demand is not slowing down. The customer demand remains very strong across sectors and across geographies. Now, talking specifically about financial services, and again, this is an industry that'll need very little introduction for all of you. I'm sure all of you know it much better than I do. But you know that this is an industry that is being transformed dramatically, right? Over the past few years and really across the various sectors, whether it's banking and. Some of the metrics in this industry are mind-blowing, right? If you look at banking, for instance, just about 10 years ago, 50% of transactions globally would happen in the branch. Now it's 5%. 95% of transactions now happen digitally. But banks still sell mostly their own services.
80% of all financial services sold are products that are owned by the bank. This will change. No more than 30% of the products being sold will be the bank's own products, right? Again, a transformational time in the banking business. Again, a new customer demographic as well. A very significant change in the insurance industry. The insurance industry is tech-driven like it never was before. The focus has moved squarely from an actuarial focus to a technology focus, whether it's parametric insurance or embedded insurance or, you know, IoT-driven insurance, or whether it's the transformation that we're seeing of claims, for instance, or the focus of, you know, of aggregation of this business. It is an industry being dramatically reshaped by technology.
The capital markets business is being reshaped by this intergenerational wealth transfer, which will be the largest fee opportunity the industry has seen in over 50 years, right? There is the whole digital asset classes that have been created, whether it's currencies or it's NFTs and the need to settle and to be the custodian for this is a huge opportunity. Payments. Possibly no sector of the industry has seen a more dramatic change in the payments business, you know, from an automation perspective, from a tokenization perspective. Again, a significant amount of spend and focus on this. The industry is changing very dramatically, and we are growing. I think we've had industry-leading growth in this segment, you know, for many years now.
If you look at the, you know, at our revenue, both our overall revenue and our digital revenue, you will note the trajectory. You will also see that at a time when the market was its weakest, right, in FY 2021, when most of our competitors were shrinking, we delivered, you know, a very impressive 8%+ growth. That's because I believe that we have a unique combination of people, of a playbook, and of platforms for this business. We also have, you know, a client set, right? A unique client set. A client set across geographies. Whether it's in the US, where we work with eight of the top 10 banks, or Europe, where we work with four of the top six banks, or Australia, where we work with three of the top four banks.
The work that we've done, you know, from a cards perspective, all the networks, all the merchant acquisition providers, all the issuers. A significant amount of presence in the insurance space as well. A deepening presence with the fintech community. A combination of, you know, of our solution offerings plus the client base that we have has given us this growth. We're not resting on our laurels. We have created, like I was saying, a very significant playbook, a very significant digital transformation playbook for this industry. If you look at some of the components of this playbook, right? If you look at, for instance, the first point, be a digital attacker. We are helping our clients who are, let's say, like Citizens, regional banks or super regionals expand nationally.
How do you build out a national footprint for what has essentially been a regional or a super regional bank? Or if you're an investment bank that is looking to create a wealth management offering or a mass affluent offering. We have a playbook for this. We have specific solutions for this. If you look at customer journeys, customer journeys are being transformed like never before, right? With a combination of, you know, eKYC, you know, you have dramatic improvements from an RPA perspective. You have e-signatures. You have new standards in terms of customer experience and user experience. We have a playbook for dramatically transforming customer journeys. We have built a significant number of algorithms that work as an AI flywheel for you, right?
Whether it is from a customer acquisition perspective, a customer profitability analysis perspective, credit decisioning, monitoring and collections, you know, forecasting, smart serving. You have algorithms that really serve the entire value chain of the financial services business. It comes with a convenient playbook for you, for a bank or for an insurer, to take the components of it that you want to really transform your business. Data-driven lending, you know, the use of not just traditional data sources, but also alternate data sources for customer profiling, for customer segmentation, for credit decisioning, you know, and for collections and monitoring. These are dramatic tools that we have created for a business, for a lending business, that is growing very quickly.
From a self-service perspective, we are working with our clients as they move their contact centers to the cloud, as they move from you know to more digital call deflection. It's been a very successful offering for us. Again, a remarkable set of playbooks and a significant amount of work with our clients, right? I spoke with Citizens previously, but Citizens is transforming itself into a fintech. They are transforming themselves from a collection of you know hundreds of applications like a traditional bank to now a set of digital platforms, right? To a set of digital cloud-native platforms that we have worked with them to create the vision, and then we have worked with them to create the actual platforms as well. We've also worked with them to make the organization agile, to bring in engineering focus within the organization.
The work that we have done with Frost Bank, for instance, as they re-enter the mortgage space to completely reimagine, you know, the mortgage experience, a digital and a human experience for mortgages. The work that we have done with Select Portfolio Servicing in driving very significant productivity by the use of AI in the mortgages business, which has historically been a very paper-intensive business, to drive almost 95% productivity in the bulk books that they buy. The work that we have done in insurance, again, using our McCamish platform. We just completed the migration of one million policies for a very large U.S. life insurer. This is among the largest migrations that has happened. Again, a combination of, you know, of our capabilities through the playbook and the platforms and the people is what has helped us differentiate.
Just a minute on Finacle now. You know, Finacle, as you know, has been a banking software platform that we've had for many years. Finacle, over the past couple of years, has seen incredible success. We have rebuilt Finacle to be a cloud-native API-first platform, and it truly is a combination of digital product engines that go to, you know, from everything from, you know, savings and checkings to treasury capabilities to lending capabilities to markets capabilities. Combined with these digital product engines, you have a significant digital engagement suite from a front-end perspective and from a middleware perspective. Finacle has had incredible success. You see the logos over there. These are traditional banks that are looking to transform into digital attackers. You have digital-only banks.
You have FinTechs that are providing some banking capability. You have non-bank institutions that are providing, again, some banking capability. We've had success across all of these and across the markets in which we work, right? You will see a mixture of, you know, of Asian names, but also names from the Middle East, names from Europe and from the US. It truly is a global platform with a presence in over 100 markets and over 1.7 billion accounts and over onne billion customers on the platform. What is driving the success of Finacle, right? What is driving this traction that we're having in the marketplace? I think it's a couple of things. One is, like I said, customer journeys are transforming.
Banking-as-a-service essentially means that you now have to provide significant API capability for banks to be able to transact in embedded finance. There's still a significant focus on cost. We did an analysis, and Finacle customers on average have a 3.9% lower cost-to-income ratio than non-Finacle customers. It is because of the significant amount of automation that has been built into the Finacle platform. We're also seeing, again, just a transformation in software in banks and a real openness to look at the digital product engines and the front-end experience that we provide in Finacle. Again, a very close tie-in with the services organization, so that we are growing together and we're able to expand beyond, you know, beyond the core as well.
We're also building out. Salil and Ravi spoke about Cobalt, right? We're building out very specific financial services capability in Cobalt. You're not just buying, you know, cloud capability. You're buying a financial services cloud capability, right? What this means is that when you buy, you know, this, fs.l ive.cloud from Infosys, you have all the Cobalt capabilities, but you have security built in. You have specific tooling around data encryption and data deduplication built in. You have specific tools, for instance, for reconciliation, or you have specific tools for interest calculation already available on this core platform. It's a significant upgrade over buying a plain vanilla cloud capability. We've had success in the market. You've seen with MarketAxess, for instance.
We were able to provide them a recon capability on the cloud almost from the get-go, saved them a significant amount of CapEx, and it's world-beating capability available on the Infosys cloud from a financial services perspective. Finally, the world is changing, right? We are seeing new technologies on the horizon, and we're already starting to work in these areas. The Metaverse, for instance, you know, a combination of physical and digital. We've already done our first pilots in this space. We worked with a very large payments company, for instance, to build their virtual lounge in the Metaverse. The virtual lounge, you can maintain a wallet that has multi-currency, fiat currency options, that has NFT options, that has, you know, crypto options.
You're able to, with the ecosystem, buy and sell NFTs and cryptos and store them on the wallet. But you also have a lounge capability, right? Where you can interact with, you know, with other customers. You have a financial literacy component to this, Metaverse lounge. I'm sure this is the first of many, Metaverse capabilities that we will be building for our clients. From a blockchain and crypto perspective, we have built this, you know, for ourselves as part of the work that we've done, for the Blockchain India company. Again, using Finacle, to build a trade platform, a domestic trade platform for India that will be transacting billions of dollars worth of domestic trade, you know, assets and receivables.
Also the work that we're doing with leading blockchain and distributed ledger companies like Digital Asset Holdings, for instance, where there's a significant amount of interest in tokenization. In tokenization, so doing projects for exchanges, for custodians. There's a huge amount of work that custodians need to do, for instance, to be able to store digital assets and, you know, this requires a lot of work from a tokenization perspective. This is already a significant area of focus for us. Banking-as-a-service I spoke about. Finally, quantum, 5G, and AI, right? Quantum is still relatively new and still more conceptual, but banks are thinking about what will quantum mean from a cryptography perspective for me? What will it mean from a portfolio optimization perspective, from a planning perspective for me?
From a 5G perspective, again, the low latency and the high data capacity that 5G offers means that for insurers and for banks, this is a very interesting space now. We're building out the lab capability and the research capability to work with our clients as they start to explore these more cutting-edge technology platforms. That in a nutshell is it, you know, a little bit about the sales transformation, the success we've had, but more importantly, the focus that we have for the future. From a financial services perspective, again, some of the themes that we're working on from a platform perspective, from a playbook perspective, and from a people perspective to ensure that we're, you know, we're as successful if not more successful in the future as we have been in the recent past. With that, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Joshi. With that, ladies and gentlemen, what we're now gonna do is head for a quick break. Looks like we managed to gather some very important data points from this side of the hall. We're gonna take a 20 minutes break, so I'm gonna request you all to please cordially join in for the high tea that's taking place outside. Let's also have you all back exactly at 5:25 P.M. I repeat, 5:25 P.M. for our next set of conversations. Please do take care of your belongings, most importantly, but see you all exactly at 5:25 P.M. again, and please do join in for the high tea that's being served outside. Thank you.
Cobalt is everything you need to speed up your cloud journey, discover new cloud-based business models, and move your business from cloud chaos to clarity with innovation, speed to market, and security. Scale up innovation by leveraging our cloud community and a rich catalog of over 35,000 cloud assets. Accelerate your speed to market with over 300 industry-specific blueprints available off the shelf and easily customizable. Secure your globally dispersed enterprise with Infosys Cobalt.
That sounds great in theory. How about some real-world examples?
Glad you asked. For instance, we're helping large FMCG firms transform the way they look at data on the cloud. Infosys brought the special sauce to help a consumer goods conglomerate create a global condiment data hub. We partnered with a global retail chain to reimagine the retail experience with the power of the cloud. Infosys Cobalt helped to unlock and monetize all the data that was trapped in legacy systems. Cloud is driving the future of financial services as well. Infosys Cobalt has empowered a leading global bank with transformational tools that turned it into a better performing bank. When a global powerhouse in wind energy wanted to scale globally with a merger, we helped to seamlessly unify their post-merger IT infrastructure. Infosys Cobalt took tennis to the cloud by changing the game at the French Open with artificial intelligence, 3D, and cloud-first solutions.
Wow. That sounds like game, set, and match.
Yes, we can discover new cloud-based business models, integrate AI, deliver and scale new customer and employee experiences, and a whole lot more. Well, we could go on and on. Let's team up and navigate from cloud chaos to clarity.
As an enterprise, what is it that you can do in the metaverse? The question is, what can't you? At Infosys, we've virtualized tournament experiences, personalized the future of insurance. We've created stores that never close and built breakthroughs with digital brains. To us, these new worlds are where your next opportunity is, and navigating it is Infosys Metaverse Foundry. Here, we accelerate your path from incubation to innovation. To discover value now with assets that you can plug and play. To create for next in environments you can collaborate immersively, and to keep scaling by harnessing an entire ecosystem of creators. Whatever virtual path you choose to explore, we make it real. Building, augmenting, sensing, exploring, evolving. To the future of the internet and your enterprise. To reshape business processes and reinvent human experiences. Ask yourself again, what can you do in the metaverse?
The future awaits, and we are ready to take you there. We are Infosys Metaverse Foundry.
Cobalt is everything you need to speed up your cloud journey, discover new cloud-based business models, and move your business from cloud chaos to clarity with innovation, speed to market, and security. Scale up innovation by leveraging our cloud community and a rich catalog of over 35,000 cloud assets. Accelerate your speed to market with over 300 industry-specific blueprints available off-the-shelf and easily customizable. Secure your globally dispersed enterprise with Infosys Cobalt.
That sounds great in theory. How about some real-world examples?
Glad you asked. For instance, we're helping large FMCG firms transform the way they look at data on the cloud. Infosys brought the special sauce to help a consumer goods conglomerate create a global condiment data hub. We partnered with a global retail chain to reimagine the retail experience with the power of the cloud. Infosys Cobalt helped to unlock and monetize all the data that was trapped in legacy systems. Cloud is driving the future of financial services as well. Infosys Cobalt has empowered a leading global bank with transformational tools that turned it into a better-performing bank. When a global powerhouse in wind energy wanted to scale globally with a merger, we helped to seamlessly unify their post-merger IT infrastructure. Infosys Cobalt took tennis to the cloud by changing the game at the French Open with artificial intelligence, 3D, and cloud-first solutions.
Wow, that sounds like game, set, and match.
Yes, we can discover new cloud-based business models, integrate AI, deliver and scale new customer and employee experiences, and a whole lot more. Well, we could go on and on. Let's team up and navigate from cloud chaos to clarity.
As an enterprise, what is it that you can do in the metaverse? The question is, what can't you? At Infosys, we virtualized tournament experiences, personalized the future of insurance. We've created stores that never close and built breakthroughs with digital brains. To us, these new worlds are where your next opportunity is, and navigating it is Infosys Metaverse Foundry. Here, we accelerate your path from incubation to innovation to discover value now with assets that you can plug and play. To create for next in environments you can collaborate immersively. To keep scaling by harnessing an entire ecosystem of creators. Whatever virtual path you choose to explore, we make it real. Building, augmenting, sensing, exploring, evolving. To the future of the internet and your enterprise. To reshape business processes and reinvent human experiences. Ask yourself again, what can you do in the metaverse?
The future awaits, and we are ready to take you there. We are Infosys Metaverse Foundry.
Ladies and gentlemen, we kindly request everyone in the pre-function area to please proceed inside the hall and take your seats as we're about to get started with our next set of sessions. We kindly request everyone in the pre-function area to please proceed inside the conference hall. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we kindly request all of you to please take your seats. We also request everyone in the pre-function area to please proceed inside the hall. We're about to get started with our next set of sessions. Welcome back, everyone. I'm gonna request you all to very quickly please take your seats. Also a humble request to please keep your mobile phones on the silent mode. As I can see, it's a houseful evening here, so I just thought I'll also quickly make a safety announcement for the benefit of the audience.
In case of any fire hazard, ladies and gentlemen, please note that we have three exit doors to your left and one right behind. Please do be sure that any kind of emergency, rush to the nearest exit, and then you can tweet or talk about it later. Most importantly, safety first. That being said, it's time to also spearhead another interesting session. Joining us this evening, I'd now like to invite on stage Mr. Krishnamurthy Shankar, Group Head, Human Resources and Infosys Leadership Institute. Please put your hands together. We managed to have a good dose of caffeine with our tea and coffee. Can we have an energetic round of applause? Please help me welcome Mr. Krishnamurthy Shankar.
Thank you. Okay, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to this event. I think you've heard some very interesting sessions pre-tea. Now let's look at this post-tea, where we're going into this whole session on people. Yeah, people management. I think what I'm gonna do is the first few slides, I'm gonna talk about some of the key highlights, and then I'll go into how we're looking at into the future, because over the last two years we've seen big changes happening in the whole people area. We're really gonna talk about what are some of the things that we are doing looking forward to this. I think the first thing is our headcount. Yeah? You can see that this has been growing consistently.
Last year, we've had almost a 21% growth of our headcount, but this has been something which we have been growing very consistently over the last three years. Significantly last year. I mean, this is like a huge amount of huge growth in headcount last year. Now, that's been supported by a huge amount of hiring. Yeah? The hiring that we have done is something that we have never done before. It's a huge amount of hiring. 142,000 people. Almost 2.2x what we did in FY 2020, which was pre-COVID. You know, in a normal year, like, we did 65,000. This is almost 2.2x that. So huge amount of hiring, and that's really what this industry and what Infosys we've seen in the last year.
As I look into hiring, I just wanna give you some color about the kind of thing that's been happening in hiring. I think what is the objective? Really to strengthen our talent and also ensure that we manage our pyramid pretty well. Yeah? That's been the whole objective, and that's what we've been doing. A large amount of freshers, we've hired almost 85,000 freshers, both here as well as on-site, and lateral hiring. Yeah? I think, you know, if you're looking at this never ever done before kind of hiring, that's been done due to many things.
Lots of use of technology, because if you look at all the hiring has been completely remote, completely virtual, and managing all of that has really meant a lot of new technology that we've gotten. Looking at all our processes, looking at newer sources of candidates. Actually, you know, doing things like for our freshers, we have something called HackWithInfy, which is like a coding competition, where we've got lots of people almost joining in, and that's been a great source of hiring for us. We've also gone off campus last year. Normally, we go to about 300 engineering colleges, but we also went off campus to really get into a wider pool of people. We also have something called InfyTQ.
Now, InfyTQ is a kind of, you know, based on what Mohit spoke about, Wingspan, which is our internal Lex platform, where engineering graduates, final year students can really go through and upskill themselves to be industry ready. They also do a test, and once they pass the test, then they can really get fast-tracked into our own, into our training and, you know, offer. I think that's been another great source of hiring for us. Overall, I think a lot of work which has gone on into hiring, and that's really expanded how we've really hired. This is the other one which is very interesting. I think, attrition. You know, given the high demand that you've seen, we've also seen that attrition was a little high.
If you look at it, our attrition in Q4 was about 27.7%, but that had actually come down by about 5 percentage points from Q3. You can already see that attrition has come down. I mean, from a high of Q3, we've seen a five percentage points drop. Also because there are a lot of things that we did. We've been looking at compensation corrections. I'll talk about that in terms of a little more detail in the next chart in terms of what are the kind of things that we have done. Faster career growth, because as the industry is growing, we've got greater opportunities. We've been able to grow our people much more faster. Skilling has been a big focus area, and I'll talk about some of the things that we're doing.
In this industry, our focus has been to really make our people really ready for the future. That's been a key focus, and we've really done a lot of work around the whole reskilling area. Of course, engagement. We've seen that our engagement has probably been very high and sometime maybe, you know, a figure that we've not seen before. All these have come together. If you look at what we've done in compensation, I think from January last year and now in April, we've rolled out three compensation increases. We did one in January, we did one in July last year, and now in April we've rolled out the compensation. Three general increases in compensation. In addition, we have done various other things.
We've done a skill-based compensation increase because we found that that was one area we had to really take care of, and that was something that we did towards middle of last year. A lot of retention and budgets across various geos, Australia, US, Europe. I think those are areas we've really looked at. Various other things. Retention bonuses where needed. I spoke about promotions. Ensuring that we even increase the stock grants over last year. I think all these have really been investment in people, given the high demand for talent and the kind of people that we've been hiring. A lot of work that's really gone on and how we've invested in our people over the last year.
I think now what I'll do is this is just a quick idea of huge amount of our workforce growing, hiring growing, and all the work that we've done really in managing attrition and in the whole compensation area. If you just look into what has happened over the last two years, you know, there's been a huge change, you know. This working from home or working remotely was a big thing in this industry, and that's changing many things around. What we have done is we sat together and reimagined everything. You know, how is work going to be done? What is the change in the workplace that is needed? Because there are some elements of workplace that needs to change.
Also our workforce, because given this change, given the high growth, what are the kind of things that we want to really work with our people? These are the three key things, and I'll just talk a little bit about each of those. If you look at work, I think clearly in the industry, we are now looking at what we call as the hybrid work. Yeah? What are the key considerations? I think one is what the client wants. Clients sometimes want people. It depends. I think we've got to put the client needs first. There is the employee need. Employee needs more flexibility. There are some people with different needs. We've got to keep that in mind. There's also a need for the team to come together.
You know, the whole social capital, the team and the organization connect. That really is a fuel to get teams working and, you know, engaging them better. That's also another need that we see. Lastly, there is this regulatory, where there may be a need from, either a CXO or something for people, to be present on and off. I think we keep all of this together, and based on that, we really say, what is our, what is going to be our hybrid work kind of a model. I think in the end, we're gonna end up with a group of people who are gonna be permanently working from the office. There could be a group of people who may be permanently remotely, maybe come once a quarter or so.
There'll be a significant group which will probably come flexibly within the week. Yeah? That's how we're gonna be. This is evolving as we go forward. I think what is gonna be the key is for people to toggle seamlessly between home and work. Yeah? That's where the whole work model as well as technology will have to enable that. Given this flexibility, we're also getting a staggered return to work. I think we've seen increasingly people coming back to work, and we'll see how it evolves over the next couple of quarters. The other thing is we have a lot of people, because of the pandemic, who have gone, and we have hired people from across the country. We've got people staying in different parts of India.
What we are doing is to actually reach out, and we are now setting up four new centers, you know, development centers, in Coimbatore, Vizag, Kolkata and Noida. These will be areas because this is a huge captive people, our employees are there, and that'll help them really make it easier for them. Plus, we have our other centers. We have one in Indore, we have Nagpur, we have Mohali. These have all been centers where people have moved to, and therefore they've all grown in numbers now. I think all these centers, given the widespread we have, will enable us to really get more people connect with each other. Of course, in the US, similarly, we have six hubs.
These hubs have really been a great source for getting talent, training talent, and also, you know, deploying them. The last part, as we look into this hybrid, when we're really looking at a return to work, it also needs a lot of technology. I think our team has really worked on it. Various things. You know, right from I spoke about recruitment, but even everything to onboarding to engagement. How can we do it in a better way, in a virtual way, is something that we've really worked on and we've invested. I mean, learning is another big area. I think all this together is what we've got to really look at as this new hybrid model evolves.
If I also look at a more macro level, what we've also seen is a couple of things. There is this growth of our nearshore centers. We've had huge growth in Canada and Mexico over the last year. Also Europe. Eastern Europe is another area we've seen our headcount growing because of talent, as well as Philippines. These are areas you can see, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Lithuania, Mexico, Canada, and Philippines are areas where our nearshoring has increased. In India, I've spoken about the new locations that we're gonna go. Four new locations where we are gonna be setting up centers. Increasingly with our clients, human capital is becoming a great part of our engagement.
Either reskilling or rebadging or, you know, helping them build a captive on a BOT basis. Various things are coming up, and I think that's an area we see greater engagement with our clients. Now, let me move on to a workplace. You know, the work we have discussed, you know, hybrid work model and how it'll be. Now let's move on to the workplace. I think the workplace also has to change. I think this is because in a hybrid way, how are the things that we're going to, you know, get people engaged, and how do we work with each other? I think what we did together is recraft our purpose. You know, we always had a very strong purpose, as the heart of Infosys, but we kind of articulated much more clearly, and you can see that here.
I think the whole idea of this is for us as Infosys is to amplify the human potential to create the next opportunity for our employees, clients, and everybody. We are now using this purpose. Our C-LIFE values are there at the heart of what Infosys, every Infosian does, and that's something we've been there. The part of our culture, which we've been kind of, you know, building over the years. I think these are important, what I call building blocks of really looking at the workplace of the future. This workplace, you know, this will be the foundation of that. We've got to have newer focus. I think there's got to be greater focus on flexibility that I've spoken about.
Greater focus on well-being, because with people working remotely, how do we get, you know, better connection and, you know, and our focus on well-being? I'll talk a little bit about that. Getting a more diverse and inclusive organization. Yeah. Those are some of the things that we will build as we go forward in this new kind of hybrid way. I think wellness is very important. I think during COVID, this really came into the forefront. We, as Infosys, have been actually, you know, doing a lot of things leading the way on it. For example, vaccination. We've got almost 96% of our employees vaccinated, as well as five of their dependents at company's cost.
We've set up vaccination camps within our centers, as well as in many towns across the country, you know, in partnership with hospitals. Various hospital tie-ups, dedicated COVID care centers where people could stay, and various other things. You know, we've been really supporting that. That has just moved on, and now I think there's a lot more focus on how do you create this mental well-being, how do you create emotional well-being, the stronger social connect with people. Therefore, you can see a lot of things that we've been working on. You know, we have something called Samaritans, where employees are trained to really be kind of first aid, kind of, you know, counselors to people. So we've really grown that.
We have wellness coaches that people can reach out to at a call. Various online tools, for example, people can do a test about how they, you know, any anxiety levels or their stress. Once they get a feeling they are, there's something, they can really reach out to us and we'll help them with that. Of course, various training programs that have been done. At the same time, what we are trying to do is get people to connect. What we've started is events where people can come to the campus. We've been encouraging small team huddles to happen. Virtual communities have been built.
We've also had times where we are saying no call hours, so that people can have time to really kind of, you know, do things, you know, they don't feel overworked and stressed. I think all these are there. All this we've left it a lot more with each team and their manager to say what is best for them. Yeah. That's how we've really built around it. This has been an area of focus, and I think as we move into the hybrid, this is really important for us to really work on. The other part is diversity. You can see the growth that we've had in diversity. You know, this is thanks to a huge amount of hiring we've been...
The extra efforts that we've gone to really retain, women and hire women. We had a program called Return to Work after Maternity about three years back. Only 60% of women came back. Now we've reached the stage of almost 90% of people who are coming back after maternity. That's a big thing, and that's one big focus with us. We have another program called Restart with Infosys. These are people who have taken a break, who've gone on for a break of more than two, three years, so we are getting them back. They could have been in any company. I think getting them back and retraining them, giving them a, you know, a couple of months of training so that they can then be deployed. That's something that we've had.
We've got a program called Orbit Next, which is ensuring that we develop our engineers to become managers. You know. Therefore, we've now got about 350 enrolled next year. That's going to go up to almost 1,000. Hiring diverse leaders at the you know leadership level, that's been another great focus. We've got a very strong LGBTQ network across India, globally as well. Various employee resource groups. You know. There's one on InfyAbility, which is about people with disabilities. There is the Pride group, which is on LGBTQ network. We've got all these groups that have been really very vibrant, and we've really helped them you know actually have a voice and engage with each other much more. Of course, as a company, we've got 156 nationalities working for us.
I think in line with the ESG vision, diversity is a priority for us. Yeah. I think we can see that our focus has continuously helped us grow it, and this is something that we'll continue to keep. In this workplace of the future, while it's all a flexi thing, I think our culture, the focus on well-being and diversity and inclusion are gonna be important as we go forward. I'll then move on to the workforce, because now we've got to really talk about what can we do for our people and how do we keep them ready for the future. I think the first thing is our focus on training. I think Infosys has always been well known for the training, right? Six months, any fresher who comes from any engineering college goes through a very rigorous training.
I think that continues. We now have Lex, and Lex is our internal platform, which is really, you know, quite world-class. We you can see the number of people that have really come onto Lex. Almost 295,000 people are on Lex. We've got almost every day about 22,000-23,000 people coming on and learning there. They spend more than 34 minutes learning average learning time a day. You can see the kind of focus that Lex has had. We have created various programs. You know. People can learn a skill, and once they kind of, you know, there are various things and not only learning something, they can work on the cloud. They can really do hands-on work on the cloud, which will help them build that skill.
In addition to Lex, I think we've also had a great program for our managers, where we have tied up with Cornell. We call it the Great Manager Program, because managers are critical to our growth. They hold the team, they kind of, you know, manage the group, and that's another one that we've really worked on. Our focus really is get our people trained for the future, invest in them a lot more, so that they can be ready for, you know, the whole transformation that is happening. The other part is what we call as create more agile careers within the organization. What does this mean? This means that we want people to really grow faster, you know, because there are greater opportunities for them.
We want to ensure that there are faster growth opportunities, but also more predictable. I think that's something that we have really worked on. We wanna ensure that people see faster and more predictable growth for our people there up to the middle management level. The other thing that we have introduced is what we call as a bridge program to really ensure there are greater opportunities for people to move around. This bridge program takes people who are, like, doing the software engineers in the project management stream to do this program, get selected and move on as a consultant, yeah. Therefore, they can move to the consulting stream, or they can move to what we call as our digital specialist stream or our power programmer stream.
These help them really, you know, multiscale and, you know, expand and grow. I think the bridge program has really been very successful, and we want to ensure that is at the heart of it to give, you know, greater career opportunities for our people. You can see the number of promotions that we've had, almost 3.5x over what we did last year. Greater internal movements. Our focus is open up, create an internal marketplace so there are greater internal jobs for people. They get trained. They can also move around and ensure that, you know, they see a greater career within the company. The other thing is our focus is on skills. We spoke about it. I spoke about training, et cetera. We want a clear framework of how do we look at skills.
You know, we have something called a skill tag, and a skill tag really comes if suppose I want to be a cloud architect. You know, I do various courses on Lex. I do something, you know, some hands-on work on the thing, and I pass the test. I go to work on the job. If I work for six months on a job, I get a skill tag. I can call myself a cloud architect. Therefore, that's how we create a unique way of, you know, identifying people with skills. You know, it's quite a rigorous process. We've then created a kind of a framework of how we look at skills. We have these skill tags depending on the skills, a premium skill or a normal skill. Then we've created what we call as digital specialists.
These are really, you know, premium kind of digital transformation people who we select after very rigorous training and tests. The power programmers or the experts. These transformation specialists command higher billing rates, and we select them based on very tough tests and a rigorous internal process also. To really drive this whole growth, we've created something called a digital quotient, which really measures the skill level of individuals. Each one can have a DQ, and we say, "Listen, your DQ is now 40. You take it up to 60." You know, that really helps people go up and our focus is on getting them interested in improving their DQ.
I think our focus on skills along with Lex has really made this a powerful engine of, you know, helping our employees upskill themselves. While we're speaking about skilling, there's also a big focus on leadership. Yeah. One of the key things you've seen in Infosys is stable leadership. You know, in the last five years, we've got very stable leadership with Salil leading it. Now, you know, we had Praveen, our COO. After he transitioned, I think we've really, in the last six months, things have seamlessly moved on, and we've really, you know, managed that transition. How has that been done? I think a focus on leadership development. There's a strong focus on succession, where we identify, you know, key roles.
We identify who are the people there based on assessments, you know, career conversations, and also coaching. You know, where needed, we provide some coaching. This has really helped us retain our leaders, you know, in a significant way. You know, for all our leaders, we have programs both with Stanford and with Harvard. These are really top of the world programs which really help them. You know, in the pre-COVID era, they used to go to Stanford twice a year for a week and then one week in Bangalore. That's now become virtual, and we are trying to get back to a thing. Those kind of programs have really helped upskill our people, you know, and we've invested in them.
What we've also done is do a lot of what we call organization Moonshot projects. You know, people have worked on it. Like, for example, how do we grow cloud? Our leaders, our emerging leaders have worked on it, and that's really helps them develop themselves but also contribute to the company. All this has also helped us get an award for excellence in leadership. While we are looking at diversity, we also have a big program for improving our diversity of our leaders. We have a program called I Am the Future, where more than 350 of our women have been enrolled. They've gone through a program at Stanford in addition to mentors that, you know, senior leaders have become mentors in helping them.
I think this has really helped ensure that we invest in our women and also grow them into bigger positions within the company. I think at the heart of all of this is really our value proposition to our employees. What is it? I think there are three key things that we are really looking at. The first one we say is, we want to inspire you to make an impact. Yeah. It's meaningful, purposeful job where you can feel that you're making an impact. Yeah. You can make an impact with your client in whatever you're doing and create what's next. That's the first thing that we've been working on. The second one is to ensure that they are continuously learning and we call it your career will never stand still.
They're keeping on learning, and they can move around and grow within the company. That's the second part of our value proposition. The third part is our culture, where we say, "Listen, together you navigate further," which is about the employee experience that they have, the culture, the teams that they work with, and all that I spoke about inclusion, wellness, everything. I think these are three at the heart of our employee value proposition. That's something that we've been working on. I'll just sum it up. Some of the awards that we've won. We are a global Top Employer, I think among the 11 Top Employers which are globally certified. We
Great Place to Work in various countries among the LinkedIn top companies and various other awards for things on leadership. On our onboarding and hiring, we've got an award. SHRM award on analytics. Of course, best employer for diversity and, you know, best company for women, which is of that. I think significant recognition there. To summarize, I think there are these four or five key things that are there. You know, number one, you can see that our headcount has been increasing. Yeah. Last year, more than 21% increase. Great growth in our headcount. I think our recruitment has been at an all-time high, and that engine is really working, you know, in a smooth gear, really, and kind of, you know, that's helping us grow all across.
A great focus on training, and you can see great infrastructure and how we've been training and reskilling people and the whole framework of training and skilling that we've got. I think that's been very strong. Diversity at the heart of what we've been doing, and that's something that we are really passionate about and growing. To sum it all up, it's huge growth in our employee engagement. I think engagement early in the past, it used to be in the 70%s, now it's about 79%, which is pretty good. I think we've seen phenomenal engagement through various things that we've done. I think that's all I have to say. I can summarize that. I think there's been a lot of action, a lot of change.
At the same time, we've really ensured that we are clear on what we wanna do. Focus on growth. Focus on recruitment and reskilling and ensure that our culture is there, which really takes the company forward. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Krishnamurthy. In fact, there was so much of passion and enthusiasm in all that you shared, and that was definitely one of the functions that was massively disrupted, yet one of the most pivoted. Thank you so much for sharing those insights. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I do hope you also park the questions because post our next session, we will be scheduling the open house, the Q&A session. So please do be sure you've kept the questions ready. After the next session, we will schedule the open house. That being said, it's now time to gather more insights on fueling growth and delivering margins for which, if I may please invite the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Nilanjan Roy. Please put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen. Please help me welcome Mr. Nilanjan Roy.
Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Wonderful to see so many familiar faces after so long and look forward to our engagement post this event as well. There's a saying attributed to Lenin. I think it is Lenin, and it says that, you know, "There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks and months when decades happen." I think all of us will agree this is one of those times, right? There's so much change around us. In that background, I think our performance in financial year 2022 was truly remarkable in many respects. Industry-leading growth, largely organic, if not entirely organic of 20% year on year. I think it's important to understand that this was on the back of a growth of 5% in FY21.
There was not really a bounce back effect, because in FY21, we were probably the only ones of our scale and size which actually grew and didn't decline during the peak of COVID. Operating margins in this challenging macro environment continue to hold up at 23%. Digital growth, which really is differentiating us and helping us gain market share now at 57% of a share of revenue. 94 large deals at an impressive $9.5 billion, right? I think the number, I think a lot of people are comparing with FY21, etc., and we know some of the impact of that. In FY21, we had 76 new large deals, and large deals are $50 million+ TCV. This year we've done 94 of these, right?
This gives us an opportunity to further expand or mine these accounts in the point which Mohit had made to make these, you know, into the $50-$100 million annual bracket and then take them up. That's, I think, a metric which sometimes is underappreciated in terms of the number of large deals we've done last year as well. Very strong FCF conversion focus on cash in CapEx, and finally in DSO and ROE at a record 29.1%. The holy grail of all of you, TSR, and we continue to be very, very focused. This is of course linked to employee compensation in our 2019 plan and continue to be at the top quartile of that.
What I'm gonna talk about is as we look ahead, you know, usually this would be a margin slide. I think this is about both fueling and driving growth, creating the headroom for the organization, right? That we can actually support this growth initiative, but at the same time being relentless and ruthless in taking out inefficiencies and costs from the system, right? That's the whole, you know, purpose of this. It starts off with making sure that we are able to fulfill the supply side opportunity which we see at times, and we'll talk about that. How are we taking out costs from our margin drivers?
Pricing, I think the industry has largely been very squeamish about this, but really this is something we will have to address as a company and how do we bake and sell pricing to our clients. Building strategic capabilities and the investments we have to do about it and some of that, some of the speakers have talked about. A really programmatic M&A and a disciplined M&A approach for us and finally rounding that off with our sustainability and ESG credentials. Starting with the supply side, really this is a demand. Frankly, we have to fulfill at any cost, and that's what we are seeing around there. We do not want to leave demand on the table, right? There's always a time we know we can optimize on the costs, right?
Therefore, in a way, with this demand comes, are we able to fulfill it as an industry? The reality is that both in terms of sheer numbers of headcount and the skills which you need, there is a gap, right? You cannot train people fast enough. You may not have enough freshers coming in who have to get skilled and then, you know, onto a new technology, rotate people inside. Some of this is a short-term, you know, timing issue as well. But until then, I know we are very clear that either we have to get subcons in, right? We have seen our subcon numbers, and some of you have asked questions around that. Some of these are on tap, on demand, which we are.
Not the most preferred way, but like I said, we have to find ways to fulfill this demand, which is, you know, in front of us. Increased compensation investments. Krish talked about that, the various wage hikes we've done during the year. The one which we are planning now and from first of April at the cost of promotions, progressions, and finally the fresher intake, right? You know, the 85,000 freshers coming in, we will train them, we will skill them, but of course, they will have their own time to get utilized, right? You cannot put them into production, into projects from day one. Of course, that will have an impact on, you know, on your overall cost structure.
Having said that, we know that if we leave a five-year deal on the table, right, it's better for us to get this demand and then look at costs later rather than saying, we just can't fulfill this demand. Therefore, these investments are, you know, truly required. From a margin drivers perspective, I think the levers many of you are familiar with, the ability to create a pyramid on-site, again, very unique for us with our six hubs. For instance, in the US, we now hire about 3,000 freshers in the US alone, right, each year. The ability to build a full pyramid, which earlier used to be largely an offshore sort of a mechanism. Now you can actually build an on-site pyramid as well and actually take out costs.
Internal rotation and promotion, and of course, higher fresher intakes. We've talked about 85,000 freshers last year, and this year we've already said we will start off the block with 50,000 freshers at putting that into our overall pyramid. Subcon costs. You know, we used to be about 6.5%, you know, before the pandemic started. Today, we are at about 11.1%. Of course, these come at a premium, but we know this is a lever which we can deploy both in terms of volume and the number of subcons we have, which is a program we run called Subcon to Hire. Which is when we can hire a subcon as an employee, or we can replace a subcon with an existing employee.
Also in terms from a rate perspective, because subcons come at a remarkably higher premium. Whether we can buy much more efficiently, consolidate the vendors we are buying from, looking at more buying programmatically with a rate card approach rather than margin approach as well. More innovative ways of looking at subcon hiring. Automation, that's the bedrock of our cost optimization. It is embedded into everything we do on a daily basis. In fact, that's the whole program. Over the last 3, 4 years when this program started, it was run more like a project, you know, cost optimization project. Today, it is seeped into whatever we do in all the functions, in all delivery.
It's not sitting there as an afterthought to say, "Okay, what do we do tomorrow about cost optimization?" This is now very ingrained into the way we work, every day. Automation, we've talked about the 24,000 bots. You know, make it industrialized so that we can repeat many of these use cases across industries rather than creating a new solution each time you want to automate certain work in a certain client. On-site, offshore, nearshore. I think the biggest underappreciated impact of COVID is the ability that work in future can get delivered anywhere in the world. I think this is in a way a very tectonic shift which has a very positive impact on our industry. In the last two years, whether it's clients, whether it is shared services, whether us, you don't know where your employees are.
They're all over the country. They're all over the world, right? Therefore, if organizations earlier used to question that this work is so mission-critical, it has to be done in front of me in my office in Rochester, that's no more the truth, right? In the last two years, you don't even know where those employees are. I think that, in the long run, opens up a lot of opportunities for us and our global delivery model to deliver work, whether it's on-premise, whether it's in our hubs, whether it's in nearshore locations, and of course in offshore locations. I think that has, you know, in a way you've seen that in, you know, from 30%, four years back in terms of our on-site, offshore, it fell to about 27%.
The last four or five quarters, it's come from 27% to 23%-23.5%, right? You have already seen a lot of that shift of global delivery helping in offshoring. Finally, operating leverage, right? In terms of our SG&A costs and our higher growth gives us that benefit, and at the same time allowing us to plow some of those margins back into our investments. Pricing. Again, something, you know, industry has always shied about from talking. I think there's never been really an ask. I think the reality is today, the kind of wage inflation which we are seeing across, it is something which we have to put on the table. We have to have a conversation with our clients. We are seeing this in two, you know, aspects.
One is, of course, the pure inflation-linked, right? You know, how are we addressing that? Now, for instance, for new deals, automatically these will get built into, you know, your deal pricing system, right? They, of course, will unwind as the deal goes on. We will start seeing the benefits. You have clauses around cost of living adjustment with some clients, right? How are you able to enforce those clauses? How are you able to build such clauses into new agreements which you are doing with clients? Can you speak to existing clients and opening up existing contracts and say how you can have a gain share in terms of investing back into your own talent with the money which you give them?
Because at the end of the day, all this, I mean, we are servicing our clients, right? You know, our employees in a sense are part of the extended team. What can we do from a wage hike perspective, which we can plow back into our teams? Discounts, right? Has always been the bane in terms of when it comes to renewal, clients ask for productivity. You know, what's your positioning there when clients come back for the next year's renewal? How do you push back? What conversations do you have? That's the whole discussion around, you know, inflation side. The other side which is more about how do we sell fundamentally on value, right?
It's easier said than done, like as I said, because you have to have these conversations with clients and move away fundamentally, you know, from a cost and a rate card into how do we influence outcomes? How do we influence your net promoter scores? How do we influence your time to market? How do we influence your promotion, your innovation cycles? Can we link outcomes based on pod pricing? These are the things which we have started discussing with clients. I think first you have to have this conversation with your own sales force. For many of them, this is new, right, who've never sold like this. I think then the conversations which you have to have with the client. This is something very central for us, what we're doing.
We're running a lot of training with our salespeople as well, monitoring this account by account. The reality is that, you know, the way wage inflation is we will have to continue to push the pricing pedal, which historically has not been something which the industry has really done. Non-CIO buying centers. I think that's a very important part because usually we've seen that these are not fundamentally budget-constrained buying centers, right? They are more business transformation projects. Attacking many of these buying centers, you know, you can see a larger value delivery sort of a concept to give rather than a rate card sort of approach we would have had with more of a CIO buying center. Investments behind strategic capabilities.
I think if you go back, rewind in 2018 when we started the new Navigate your Next strategy, we had talked about some of those investments we would require for the future. In a way, we have seen over the last four years, the results which have come out. I think there are two or three areas we are clear we will fund from our internal margins as well. We've talked about the whole digital and cloud opportunity, investing behind that, both from a delivery capability and from a GTM capability as well. The full stack approach. We are hiring much, much more in numbers now, not just pure college freshers, but at the top layer, the power programmers and of course digital specialists. These are career streams for full stack programmers.
They're coming from much higher level of colleges, more premier colleges. Of course, you are forced to pay a much more higher compensation as well. I think we've talked about the whole opportunity on tech natives. In a way, the whole COVID opened up the way these tech natives are competing more with the Fortune 500 companies as well. In a way, we are building out our services and our GTM for this new age of born in the cloud sort of companies. We still have an opportunity as we understand whether it could be from a cost perspective, whether it could be from tech ops, but we are building out a whole suite on how to address this opportunity.
Finally, as Krish talked about our investments behind our employees, around their careers, a more predictable career plan, higher, you know, internal talent rotation. Of course, coming with that skill-based compensation and differentiation so that we can retain top talent, highly skilled talent as well. M&A for us, I think is one of the cornerstones of our, strategy as well. It has been, like I said, it has to be very programmatic and disciplined. We did frankly nothing in FY 2022, right? We must have seen hundreds of assets. We just wouldn't pay, you know, a dollar more than what we think it was worth, right? We are very clear it has to fit into our Digital Pentagon. It has to speak to what we require from a digital capability perspective, but we will pay the right price for it.
If you see from the right side what we've done, it has largely been around the experience layer, right? Which has traditionally not been the strength for many of the Indian IT services companies. Most of digital transformations actually which start with experience. We've invested very heavily in that recently with oddity. Going all around the Digital Pentagon, of course, Accelerate is one of the largest in the core of digital transformation, and including Innovate. As we look ahead, a lot of where we will look for our M&A would be fundamentally speaking to this Digital Pentagon, looking at the cloud verticalization and horizontal capabilities as a second one. Geographic footprint, including Europe, would be another thing which we would be interested in.
More importantly, I think for us, the business case is about the synergies which we are able to give as forward synergies to the acquisition, our targets, and vice versa, the synergies they give us, right, in terms of the higher billing rates, et cetera. The synergy case has to be very strong both ways in terms of these acquisitions, which we do. Finally, ESG, I think this is something very core to what Infosys stands for. This is from the days of the founder. This is very core to our company, that sustainability is interlinked with business, right? We don't see it differently. You know, stakeholder value and shareholder value for us is very inextricably linked, right? That's in whatever we do. We laid out our ESG 2030 vision, two years back. A very comprehensive document.
I would urge you all to see our latest ESG book, which we released last week. We are very clear it's milestone driven. All of it is measurable, with annual, you know, targets given out. It's part of the ESG committee of the board. I think one of the few companies in India which has a ESG committee at the board level. Senior executive compensation is clearly linked to ESG targets and meeting ESG targets as well. This is something which we have actually again internalized around the organization. Again, like this is something which is if you see what we're doing, whether it's on climate, whether it's doing on sustainability or digital, talent at scale, it's all what we do on an everyday basis. This is not sitting outside there. We have no ESG budget in the company, right?
Everything has to be part of business and the way we do business on an everyday basis. If I look at, you know, one of the aspirations which we have, which is about engaging with clients on climate, right? Again, the credentials which we've had, and Mohit talked about it, right? What we've been doing inside, we have said, "Why don't we offer it as a service outside?" We now have. The sustainability business unit has been created. We have six large offerings there: energy transition and transmission, ESG finance, the circular economy, smart spaces. For instance, we've talked about how green data centers is a big part of the cloud transformations as well.
In fact, a large data center we moved from a big client in Europe, we moved it to actually an old abandoned mine in Norway, right? It gets cooled by natural running water in the mine, right? Because of the temperature there. These are just some examples of leading-edge green data centers and many others on the decarbonization footprint which we have. Sustainability practice, for instance, is now embedded into our ESG goals. If I look at enabling digital talent at scale, right? We have taken a target of having 10 million digitally trained people starting from school kids, whether employees and their clients' employees through our Wingspan and Lex initiatives. Part of that is our CSR initiative around Infosys Springboard, right? What we said is let's democratize learning across the world.
We have actually opened up all our learning courses free to students both in India, in the U.S. and Europe and Australia under the Springboard initiative. A number of partnerships with content providers who are very happy to give us free content, looking at the work which we are doing around this, as well. We are partnering with the government now and getting accreditation from many state governments in India. This is aimed at both digital skill and life skills. We already have in about a year, about two million people who have registered on this platform. I think in terms of the growth rate, we are very, very pleased that this is going to enable a much more wider democratization of learning across the environment.
Just one of the ways, opening up our Wingspan library and making it much more available externally as well. The point I'm making is ESG just getting embedded into what we do on a daily basis, as well. Looking at the value creation finally for shareholders, a very strong FCF conversion, 100% + in FY22. It was 113 in the previous year. Return on equity continues to be around our focus. From 25.8% in 2020, we are already at 29.1%. A lot of focus on CapEx, a lot of focus on cash collection, and our ability to deploy that is in the capital returns. You all are aware of our FY20 to FY25, 85% commitment to return FCF.
In the first three years, we've already done that, with a combination you can see of the dividend, a steady progressive dividend from INR 8,200 crores to INR 11,513 crores, and topped up by the buyback of INR 11,100 crores. Of course, we remain committed to our, you know, articulated and very transparent, capital return policy. Finally, over the last four years, our TSR continues to be industry leading at 141% against our measured peers, which we've announced in the 2019 plan, and continuing to drive that as well. In summary, I think we will continue to do what's required to support the demand environment, supporting our client needs, right? Relentless focus on costs.
We have a number of margin drivers which we can deploy. Scaling up our strategic capabilities behind digital natives, behind investing around talent. Driving pricing improvements. This is a key initiative which we kicked off. Of course, this will take time. We know that this is not conversations which can immediately turn into margins, but I think this is a journey which we started, and over a period of time, we should see the benefits of that. Finally, leveraging our sustainability credentials, which we've gained over the years and how do we take that to market for our clients. Okay, thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Nilanjan Roy. Thank you once again for sharing those valuable insights.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, it's literally time to switch the gears because we're now about to get up with the open house session. While we're setting the stage, let me also quickly share some important pointers. In order to ensure that we can get maximum participation, we're gonna request for one question per person. We're also gonna request you to please raise your hand so that the mics can be passed on to you. As you all know that the event is being recorded, we're gonna request you to please share your name and the name of your organization before you share your question. So please do so. Again, just a quick request, one question per person in order to ensure maximum participation. That being said, looks like we're already seeing the hands raised.
First up, let me invite on stage, once again, Mr. Salil Parekh and Mr. Nilanjan Roy to please come on the stage. It's time for the open house session, and it's time for your questions to come on board.
Ankur has got his hand up already.
Ankur, are you asking or are you answering?
Actually, the first table should answer. From Kawaljeet onwards, all of them are here.
Go ahead.
Hi. This is Yogesh from HSBC.
Sorry. Okay.
Sorry. Just one question. First of all, thanks, guys, for the presentations. My question was, like we've discussed since morning, lots of COVID habits are reversing. People are traveling and shopping online. Lots of U.S. results are showing e-com results that people are back to the physical world.
If you see, companies also saved a lot of money last few couple of years, and those savings are reversing as well now. Why would the tech spend not reverse back to the historic growth rate of 3%? I mean, it for a few sectors, like autos, it may not, but for banks and retailers, why would it stay elevated and not go back to the 3% run rate? Thanks.
Thanks for the question. What we are seeing today, as we look out over the next few years, is the demand environment has changed in a couple of ways. One, digital, that we've talked a lot about, which is really every company is attempting to make sure they reach out to their customer, work with their employee, work with their partners in the supply chain, in a digital electronic online format. That needs a lot of work that has to be done on their tech spend. The second also, which we talked a little bit about, is automation, where anything that is going on in the client's technology landscape which can be improved with efficiency, we have an ability to do that.
We see, from our perspective at Infosys, much greater ability, both on automation and digital to drive that overall growth. The third, Nilanjan alluded to a little bit, also in his session, which is, everyone has now understood from a client perspective that work from anywhere can be applied to almost any role that was going on within their organization. That is not something that will happen overnight, this quarter or next, but it expands the available target opportunity that we are going after in terms of the type of market.
From our perspective, given all of those parameters, we see the demand environment looking to be quite strong and looking quite secular at this stage, where there's early stages of cloud and digital, early stage of efficiency and very early stage of this addressable work from anywhere.
Hi, this is Ankur from JP Morgan. You know, obviously the most interesting stat for me so far is the 85,000 graduates Infosys hired last year. I know Infosys has a great history and a legacy of training. How relevant is it in the digital world? I mean, my question, but, I mean, at the bottom of it is how do you, A, train and deploy 85,000 people, partly digitally, partly in the physical world right now? Secondly, how do you imbibe culture in them, especially if they can't come to your campus? I mean, I'm sure this bothers you, Salil, as you think about, you know, scaling the firm.
There you know, on the training, I think we are first very excited with that number, 85,000 college graduates. We have just recently restarted our in-person training, which is very well known in our Mysore location. We've also put in place this online learning, which Krish referenced in his session, which relates to having all of our employees access an online learning platform. Our sense is, over the next 12 and 24 months, there's an initial training which everyone's going through, but over the next 12 and 24 months, more and more between in-person and online, the training will happen and people will become deployed and working on client engagements. I think the point on building the culture and the social connect is extremely critical.
What we are starting to see is more and more of our employees are coming back to campus. If you look at many of our employees at the senior levels, a vast majority of them are back in offices, working three, four, and five days a week. More or less where we were pre-COVID, not quite at that level, but pretty close. For the other employees, again, you saw in one of our sessions, a percentage of those are actually not in our main campus locations today. They're in their home-based locations. Slowly we are seeing those also starting to come back, either in the new hubs we form. There are four that were mentioned, for example, Coimbatore and so on, or back into our campus locations.
We feel that social connect is going to be important for building the culture. Employees are also seeing that. It's not gonna happen overnight. We see several quarters where it'll start to come into play. If we have this sort of a situation where the COVID prevalence is low, as it is today in India, we will have more and more of that connect happening, yeah.
Yeah. Hi.
Go ahead.
Yeah. Okay. Hi, this is Kawaljeet from Kotak. With your permission, can I ask two questions instead of one?
It's very difficult to stop anything.
Thank you. Okay. The first question is on large deals. While there has been plenty, you know, written on Infosys' success on the sales side of large deals, the focus has now shifted to execution of large deals. There are various interpretations one can draw on how well the deals are being executed. On the positive side, one can always take an assumption that revenue growth is good, but the moment you look at the volatility in the segmental profitability, that makes you wonder whether the large deal execution is progressing on, you know, track. Just wanted some broad indicators, either in terms of CSAT scores or otherwise, which can give comfort on the large deal execution of Infosys.
There, Kawaljeet, the way we are seeing it is we have had, you've seen all the stats, you know, 90-odd large deals last year, even year before that, a significant number. Today, if I look at some of the largest deals we've done, for example, a deal in Europe or a deal in U.S., our delivery on the most complex cloud data center transformation is going very well. We have extreme comfort in the way our delivery is going on those large deals. Of course, there are many large deals, and starting those programs, we always have to make sure that the start goes in a smooth way. There is no concern from our side with respect to delivery.
That, I feel, is one of the things where Infosys has a very strong track record over the years in delivering very well to what we've promised to. We have never had a situation where we've given some sort of a commitment which we've not been able to deliver to. To answer the point you make, our delivery on large deals today is going very well.
Okay. Thanks a lot. The example that you gave was quite an interesting one as well, European client. Okay, the second question that I have is more hypothetical. Now this is based on constant questions that we get from investors, so I thought I'll, you know, lob it back to you. The question is that let's assume that we head into recession sometime next year, right? A customer who wanted to spend, let's say, $100 on, you know, tech transformation as well as run operations, decides that, okay, let's bring that down to $90. Now, if, you know, you were to imagine yourself in the client's situation, you know, how would a client go about, you know, rationalizing the spend?
Which are the areas, you know, which he will, you know, cut back on? Would there be consolidation decisions taken? How does a client ensure that they get the maximum bang for the buck even with reduced spends?
To that first, Kawaljeet, I think it's difficult for us to have that sort of a view because there are so many factors, let's say a few quarters from today. Maybe to address some of the elements of what you're posing. What we see are client discussions which want to launch transformations, also want to make sure that they can gain some efficiency from their current operation. There are multiple ways they're looking at it. One, we've discussed a few times, is automation. One that you brought up and we are seeing that we have been the beneficiary of is consolidation. There are several discussions going on even today with clients where we are potentially receiving benefit from their consolidation. Who are they consolidating?
There are, which you know very well, several, quite large companies which have some issue, whether in, delivery, whether in the way they're going to market or whether in the way there is some governance. We feel comfortable that we are consolidating from those companies, quite regularly. Many of the clients at an individual level take a view that they need to drive the digital work. They can do it from their OpEx. They also are opening up their CapEx to do it, so it opens up a little bit more of the spend. Then they're using automation or consolidation to get some benefit from it. Given all of that, today, our discussions with clients remain, good on demand.
I think Mohit shared earlier, our pipeline today is looking very strong, and that's where we're coming from, given the macro environment that's going on.
Fantastic. Thank you.
Any more questions?
Right here.
Yeah.
Apurva Prasad here from HDFC Securities. Thanks for the presentations. Salil, my question is on the cost structure, delivery structure rather, and the evolution of that. How do you see that over medium term? Is the fresher intake or the fresher hiring a lot more institutionalized and therefore you think the bottom of the pyramid as a percentage of the overall can expand? And does that also imply that attrition can remain elevated for longer periods of time?
On the college recruiting, in fact, Nilanjan and Krish have put in a program where we have the ability to do, let's say, a target X, and then we have the ability to flex it on a more monthly, quarterly cycle. That gives us a tremendous advantage, and that's part of the reason why we saw this large college recruitment program that happened in FY 2022. We already have set a target for FY 2023, and we are well on our way to execute that. The idea, I mean, as you know very well, our business model will be to make sure that essentially our cost per employee, the average, remains within what the band we want to be in across the whole company. It is not just at one level or the other.
Attrition, you heard also from Krish, first in Q4, it's come down by about five points from the previous quarter. We also see generally speaking, what we see with the initiatives we put in place, the faster progression, more predictability, the comp increases that we've put in place, we see generally speaking, attrition coming more in control. Anecdotally, we are also seeing some of the startup ecosystem starting to face some issues in their funding. That was one source where we were seeing attrition going towards. Some points, you know, small x points will be reduced in attrition because that ecosystem seems more fragile and there'll be less uptake into that as well. We generally feel attrition will remain more in control and campus hiring, college hiring is looking good.
Yeah. Hi. Pankaj here from CLSA. I understand the macro risks are yet to show up in clients' decision-making on their IT spend. I was wondering how are you thinking about your own spends, your own investment plan for the year? Have there been any calibration or any thoughts of the investment that you are planning to do this year? You think it is still too early, maybe look at some of the cost measures, some of your hiring plans, example. Are you thinking about it or you think it's still too early to start preparing for any kind of a slowdown on the demand? Thank you.
Let me start on that, and if Nilanjan has some points. I think on the cost, you know what Nilanjan mentioned, we have a very strong cost program that runs basically all the time, but with new targets every year. Not that we have taken anything because of the macro, but in general, we have a high cost program approach. We've, of course, had three wage increase cycles, so that's been more of a driver than the external environment. On investments, again, what Nilanjan shared in his session, we've looked at what we where we wanna build capability, and that's something we wanna go ahead with. We also have looked at what we wanna drive in terms of the employee connect, and that we wanna go ahead with. Those have continued.
We have not made any changes to that.
This is Girish Pai from Nirmal Bang. I had two questions. One was with regard to your retail CPG business. We've had a few retail companies in the U.S. come out with fairly bad results and also commentary for the rest of the year. In that part of the business, are you seeing any kind of initial pressure from conversations on sales cycle or implementation of projects or discussions on value-based pricing? Is there any pushback coming from them? Second question was regarding your value-based pricing proposition itself. Is it a little too late in the cycle to talk about it? Because now we're kind of going into a bit of a slowdown situation.
On the retail, at this stage, we've not seen any change in the pipeline. What we do see is there are some of our clients who are well on their way to e-commerce transformation, omni-channel journey. They are accelerating what they want to drive through. We've not seen anything which has come subsequent to the results that you mentioned. On the value-based pricing, anything you wanna add?
No, I think the problem still is there. I mean, if you see the latest, US economic stats, there are 12 million jobs and there are six million people applying for them. I mean, wage inflation is five to six percent in the US, right? Consumer inflation in the headline last month, 8%. This is not a typical recession. This is a stagflation-led recession if it's going to overcome, right? Therefore, I mean, clients are seeing that same pressure internally within their teams as what we are seeing with our attrition. Many of our clients actually who have attrition figures are saying they're seeing the same kind of, what, you know, wage pressure.
Therefore, I think both on the inflation side and going back to clients to talk about wage inflation, how we can plow back some of what they give to us into our own teams. The other side, change overall on a longer term basis, how we, you know, transform businesses, right? We have to move away as an industry because today we are core to business transformation. We are no more outsourced to India because it's the cheapest place in the world you can do a BPM transformation. That is history. That was 10 years back. Now we are centerpiece in large deals, right? You're sitting centerpiece into the IT landscape of the company. Anything which touches you will touch, you know, the transformation you're doing there. I think the narrative has to change the way we are selling to our clients, right?
Like I said, it starts first with making sure our salespeople are educated on what value we are able to get and making that a wider conversation. I don't think the opportunity has left us at all.
Yeah, hi, Sandeep from Equirus. This question is almost similar to what the previous participant asked. I think you as well as some of your global peers, MNC vendors have also alluded that the pricing hike may come with a lag. If we look at from where we are today, when the pricing hike are due, the macro headwinds may further worsen. In that scenario, do you believe this pricing uptick commitment can be reversed or tough to get in that scenario?
Yeah. I think again, it's horses for courses. I mean, you can't say, you know, all clients will go out and next day have a pricing conversation. In some places, you may be the fourth or fifth, you know, vendor, right? You can't suddenly become a price leader, right? In some cases, you may be the number one vendor. You can start a pricing conversation. It will actually depend across industries, across the relationship with your client, the kind of work you have. Are you doing T&M? Are you doing FP? What in-flight program? It is going to be very, very customized to each client. The reality is that you will have to have these conversations across the board. I mean, we tell our sales guys to converse with the client and say no, right? That's the worst that can happen.
Must go out and have those conversations now because that's what we are seeing in our structure. If we don't, we aren't able to, you know, in a way pass that benefit on to our employees, in a way it will tell on attrition. It's in the client's interest as well to make sure that some of these which we can plow back into their teams, into retention bonuses, et cetera, and they see as this linkage in what they are doing with their own teams inside, right? If they are plowing back, you know, wage hikes to their own teams because they want to curtail attrition, we are part of the extended teams. Those are the kind of conversations we will have to have.
Yeah. Hi, Mihir Desai from Carnelian Asset Management. I had a question on spends on Horizon Two and Horizon Three. I mean, how should we see the spends on Horizon Two and Horizon Three versus Horizon One, and, you know, when should that start kicking in? Some quantification, some understanding on that will be helpful. What kind of services will largely be catered by Horizon Two and Horizon Three, kind of services?
There, you know, we showed a little bit about what we are doing with the seeding of the future growth. We are not, we've not quantified that externally today, but typically speaking, these things are more in the three-year and plus type of a range in terms of financial years. But the thing with these things is we've got a set of technologies, Ravi highlighted some of those, which we start to build out today. Sometimes they kick in in 18 months, sometimes they may kick in in four years. It's not a very definitive view, but it's something certainly which is outside of the current financial year.
Hi, this is Atul Mehra from Motilal Oswal Asset Management. Just one question again on pricing. In a fairly strong demand environment, where obviously, post the pandemic demand has been extremely strong, what has been the biggest constraint on pricing? Like, is it every company's wish to grow top line at a much faster pace and what are the constraint, underlying constraint to pricing? Or is it client constraint in terms of not like, obviously they are facing inflation in their own entire cost structure. What is the key in terms of constraint to underlying pricing going up? Thanks.
Yeah. No, I think, I mean, like I said, every client is very unique, right? It is not that you can go tomorrow and ask your 1,800 clients that my wage inflation, I've given two and a half wage hikes. Now I think I need to give, you know, a 10%, you know, increase I need from you. I mean, it just doesn't work like that, right? It is different for different contracts, like I mentioned, right? You have to go to some clients and say, position yourself in terms of how you're influencing outcomes, right? Rather than saying it's a rate card. Because the easiest way that a client can knock you down is because there's somebody else who's at a cheaper rate card. How do you, why do you wanna hike?
These are conversations and the way you sell, which are very nuanced by client by client, right? Therefore, some of them will have to be places where you can say, "Okay, I'll have some skin in the game," right? The way I sell to you. That it's an outcome-led pricing. Can I, can I influence Net Promoter Score? Can I influence innovation cycles? Can I have a certain, you know, skin in the game in terms of your outcomes? Those are the things which we are doing. For high-skilled digital talent, right? Which we fundamentally know is in short supply based on experience, right? If you want somebody with, say, seven years of experience who's worked on some digital programs, can you get a 20% premium on billing for that client? These are conversations, like I said, which will happen.
Some of them you can hear, you know, ourselves already picking up that conversation, but these are longer lead times. They don't just kick in overnight where clients will immediately say, "I agree to you." So I think this is a longer term thing, but more importantly it is something which we have started programmatically inside the company, right? Looking at digital programs specifically at the time of striking new deals. What are you doing on T&M? What are you doing on smaller innovation projects? I think that's the entire approach. It is not one size fits all really, which is, you know, if an answer you're looking for.
Hi. Hello. This is Gaurav from Morgan Stanley. Two parts to my question. Firstly, you talked about very strong demand in Europe, whereas we see maximum disconnect with the macro. Trying to understand the demand drivers there. Secondly, you also talked about doubling down your investments in Europe. If you could quantify in terms of how much of margin drag is coming through in fiscal 2023, and what is the payback period when you think that starts reflecting in you know, incremental revenues or margins and that comes to our numbers? Thank you.
On Europe, I think the way we wanted to share is, this is an outlook that we have for the next phase of our strategic journey. Think of the next, let's say, you know, four or five years as the horizon for what was discussed when Mohit shared some of that, I shared some of it, Nilanjan pointed to it. The thinking for us is, we have a very strong business in Europe, but there are still more opportunities and there are a few geographies within Europe where we think we can go faster. We have some clear focus on what we will do to drive that, but we've not taken a specific external investment and return parameters and share it externally.
It's part of the mix that we have, that as one of the initiatives we wanna drive is to make sure we further expand in Europe, and that among the other things we discuss, will give us a growth rate which is ahead of where the market is, and we'll continue to gain market share on an overall basis.
Yeah. This is Vimal Gohil from Union AMC. My question was on the large deals. The construct of the large deals seems to have changed over the past couple of years, where we've seen a couple of very, very large deals which have involved significantly higher pass-through costs. Correct me if I'm wrong, that has probably led to higher unbilled receivables, which has sort of our free cash flow would have been even better than what you've reported. Going forward, how should we look at this? Inherently, will pass-through costs remain elevated and probably have higher unbilled receivables? Could you help us explain how do we sort of account for the pass-through? Is it that we've front-loaded some of it while the revenue hasn't come?
Which relates to Kawaljeet's question on the profitability of the segments. Manufacturing-
Yeah. Sure.
had weaker profitability this time around.
Sure. I think they're two different questions. I think unbilled and pass-through is actually quite different. I think one of the reasons of the unbilled question is largely many of these large deals have a large transformation element to it, right? They're not just simple T&M month-end bill every month, right? They are where you are involved in transformation milestones over a longer period of time, right? Therefore, their billing cycles do not necessarily follow a typical monthly billing cycle or quarterly billing cycle. That's why you are seeing this gap. It's nothing to do with whether you have a larger pass-through and you have a larger unbilled relative to it. That's the biggest reason of the unbilled. It's basically more transformation programs being done.
Sure. One follow-up here. Will these continue? I mean,
I mean, I can't answer, you know, in future what sort of deals we're doing.
No. What I meant was, when you actually go and bid for these larger deals.
Yes
Does it inherently have a clause wherein, you know, the pass-through cost will be probably higher than what you've been historically comfortable with?
It doesn't. I think today, like as Ravi mentioned, a lot of deals which are there are end-to-end as a service deals, right? That's the end objective. The client really frankly doesn't want to see the nuts and bolts of what you're doing, right? It is bundled with service, it's bundled with software, it's bundled with cloud, it's bundled with hardware. The client is immune. That's the best position because then you can leverage that because the moment the client starts buying hardware chips and servers, et cetera, then there's a cost transparency. If you're giving an end output and say it's per transaction, per gigabyte processed, which is what cloud is about, right? You don't care how many x86 Pentium servers you're putting. You're saying, "How much VMware capacity I can process in a microsecond," right?
That's the best way for the industry because then you've created this opaque layer of, you know, end-to-end delivery, and that's what as a service is about. You will see bundled deals happening, and that, as Ravi's slide said, you know, at the infrastructure layer moving up, and then finally business as a service.
Hi. Mukul from Motilal Oswal. You know, if you can indulge me, two questions from my side, including one follow-up. On the Europe side, Mohit mentioned that next, you know, next four to five years, the spend will be in line with the spend which is happening in the US. Is that more to do with US being more mature market, growth is slowing down there vis-à-vis Europe? You know, again, the model which has followed in Europe over last many years is a higher share of rebadging versus how things are in US. Is that likely to continue or is the model changing there?
On Europe, I think what Mohit was sharing was, we see now a greater openness for the large companies in Europe to look at both digital transformation and also global delivery. We've seen, you take an example, let's say a country like Germany or you take the Nordics countries, we see the discussions there that we are having with the CxOs. Mohit is very well positioned by being in that geography. At a very high level, the discussions are about how will those transformations happen. The sense we had was we think that that will give us more opportunity. It's nothing to do with U.S. being less in that sense. It's more that those discussions are giving us the confidence.
The US, we still think will grow pretty well, but this has that newer set of clients which seem to be more keen for this, digital transformation and the global delivery programs.
On the nature of rebadging in, you know, which has kind of prevailed in Europe in the past, will that continue?
What our experience is we've done work where we've taken employees over from clients in the US. We've done work where we've taken employees over from clients in different countries, in continental Europe and also in the UK. We have a specific method of doing it, which is, you know, we are not taking employees just for the sake of taking employees. We have a view that will we be able to now look at placing those employees on other programs in the future? That is one lens we have. Then we have a lens on the skills that they're bringing in which can be relevant. We are doing it from that perspective. Then the clients both in Europe and US are seeming to be more open.
We are also a very attractive employer, so typically we have seen the rates at which the employees join us are fairly high, and that gives a feeling that as an employee brand, we are very strong with those employees.
The second question was more conceptual. You know, keeping aside all the macro concerns which are out there, you presented a multitude of opportunities today, you know, during both yours, Mohit's sessions. There are many segments which by themselves are billion-dollar businesses now and growing really fast. Then you also mentioned, you know, every $1 spent results in 2-3 times spent on services, in many of the cases. Then why it is the case that your addressable market is still growing in mid-teens% and not faster? The second way, you know, which is also there, is there a likelihood of a winner-loser kind of a scenario, you know, coming up in IT services or is that a remote possibility?
Because that's the only way for any company to meaningfully outgrow, you know, the peer set.
What I understood is you think that it should grow faster than the 13% or high-teens growth.
The industry growth, you know, the forecast were about 14%-16%.
Ah.
You know, the end markets are growing much faster.
Your point is valid. There's a lot of opportunity set that exists. The way we took that was from external data sources that 14%-16%, from what the industry, you know, the industry analyst people put together, and that was a consolidation. One of our external providers gave it to us. My own sense is 14%-16% is a very strong growth rate for the scale that we're talking about. Because at the end, this is, you know, if you looked at that addressable market, that was about $400 billion. That's a very large chunk of the overall tech services market which, you know, let's say anywhere between $1 trillion-$1.2 trillion depending how you count it.
It's a very large chunk of that which is growing extremely well, and there are pieces within that which may grow, as you said, at the rate that you were describing, even faster. For example, we see even within that, $400 billion, the cloud piece, however you cut it, let's say just take the SaaS services piece, that's growing at a much faster rate. That is why that Cobalt investment capability is very important for us because we built it all out. What Ravi was describing, the team has built it. It's ready now. You know, what Mohit shared, we are putting industry solution. We are well ahead of where any peer is on that. Our objective is like we had last year.
You know, we get 4%, 6%, 8% growth faster than anyone else in the industry. That's a significant outperformance for us. We are not thinking of 20 points. For us, 4%-6% would be very good. Any growth which is greater than the industry, peers or industry leaders will give us some traction. As Nilanjan described, we have the levers for margin. You know, that's how we created the business model. That we get the growth, and we make sure we drive the levers for the operating margin.
Thank you.
In the back.
Yeah, hi. This is Ashwin Mehta from Ambit. I have one question. Over the last two years, we've added almost 106,000 freshers. That's almost 1.5x your net headcount. Addition is almost one-third of your current headcount. The question is the demand becoming more complex or less complex for us to induct so many freshers? Secondly, the follow-up is that, does this fresher lateral ratio continue going forward? Or as you get into the next year or the year after, the lateral backfill will possibly increase. The third associated question is, if the staffing is so fresher-led, will the clients be paying you extra?
What we've seen is the first point on what is the type of demand and can, you know, a larger number of college graduates help us sufficiently fulfill it. What we see is there are a set of methodologies and tools. Mohit referred to some of the platforms that Infosys has built, which is allowing us to make sure that many of our employees are getting skilled on that quickly enough and making sure that they become much more productive vis-à-vis what the clients are looking for. Now, equally, what the clients are looking for is complex in the digital transformation arena.
We are making sure that with the tools that we build and the training that the individuals get, plus the remaining people within the company which are not college graduates, we have sufficient depth in delivery to make all of this happen. Now, as we look ahead, we don't have a specific view on the mix between as you called it, lateral recruitment and college recruitment. What we are very clear is there'll be more and more emphasis on fulfilling internally. It's not 100%, but it's more and more emphasis on that. That gives us a way to build out what was described, you know, as a pyramid from internal basis, which gives a lot of confidence to the people joining the company that they have a long and predictable career within the company.
Thanks for the second opportunity. This is Girish Pai from Nirmal Bang. Couple of questions. Ravi mentioned about business shifting from IT towards business operations. Would that mean you do more rebadging going forward? That's question number one. Second, there was also discussion around experience studios being insourced by clients. What is the logic behind that? I mean, how would that lead to more business coming your way?
On the IT and ops, I think what Ravi was sharing was there is more and more connected decision-making when we are working with clients to not just look at tech, but look at tech and ops as a combined piece, and making sure that the ops is also leveraging some of the new automation capabilities we have. I don't think it necessarily will translate to a discussion on client employees joining us or not, but it's much more that there's a. The more of these things that are becoming integrated, you know, what we spoke earlier, the more this one Infosys model becomes more relevant because that in itself is something which differentiates us. Not so many of our peers are able to bring all of this together with client discussions.
Now on experience, I didn't follow what you meant.
Ravi mentioned that some of the experience studios are being insourced by customers. I felt that was bringing in people. Now, how does that help you because you would be losing business?
No, I think what I thought Ravi was sharing there is there is much more emphasis on the experience capability today with clients. What he said with insource is what we see is the WongDoody Digital Lab is placed within a client organization while we are making sure that it's being run with those methods of human experience. It's not just that the clients are coming to our labs, it's like we are building a center within their organization in their headquarters, so that allows them a greater usage, and then it brings to us more capability as they use it. Not that they are taking it from an outside provider and taking it in, but putting the WongDoody Lab inside the client.
Yeah.
Hi. This is Rahul from Dolat Capital. Just on the subcontracting initiative that you shared in the slide, what are the easy efficiencies that we can bring in in FY 2023 or maybe near term, that you could do with some of the three or four things that you shared? Is it like more getting freshers, helping out, easing on that number or even from any other form?
Yeah. I think, see, it's the whole recruitment model is very interconnected, right? It's interconnected with freshers, it's got lateral, it's got an attrition element, it's got a fresher element, and in a way, subcon, quote-unquote, "is a balancing figure," right? Because that's the way the whole operations model of this industry works, right? Therefore, all these four have an impact on number of subcons. Theoretically, if attrition comes down, you won't need so many subcons. Theoretically, if freshers, you can put more, you need, you'll have to have less subcons. These are all, you know, interrelated.
Some of the programs which we are consciously driving and not waiting for the outcome of attrition or not waiting, you know, for more freshers to come in, they'll get deployed, is for instance, the subcon to Hire, right? Reaching out to many of these subcons and saying, "Okay, a permanent employee position, it doesn't demand this kind of a wage premium," because the flexibility cost of subcons is that you want that wage premium because they don't have, you know, fixed jobs, right? You hire them, and then you don't have to pay that kind of a, you know, wage increase which the subcons demand, right?
You replace them because now you already know there's a steady state demand already available for this job, and therefore in three-five months of redeployment, you actually replace them with an employee. Those are some things which, you know, are quick levers which we can deploy. Like I said, even on the rate side, you know, looking at other ways of how we can bring down the rates of subcons through vendor consolidation, et cetera. There are a number of levers which we can deploy, and we will already see some effects of that.
Thank you. Just one question on, you know, if there is a slowdown, for example, second half of this year or sometime next year. There has been a historical perception that Infosys has a higher proportion of discretionary services, compared to many of your, you know, large peers. If there is a slowdown, it might be more exposed. Now, we don't have a service line split anymore because you've been sharing with us only the digital proportion of business. How should we think about it right now in terms of what proportion of your engagements are likely to be reviewed if there is a slowdown next year, versus the rest? Is proportion of fixed price contracts one relevant proxy, for example?
For us, what has happened with the change, both to this digital and also to the larger deals is, in general, without giving percentages, there's more of a shift to the managed services approach. I don't have a specific view on what the market considered discretionary in the past and what will it be in the future. Our mix is definitely much more managed services, much more medium to long term in the way we are working with clients. We will see, of course, in the event that you describe, if that sort of a thing happens, what it looks like. That's how our mix has changed.
No, just to add, I think this was a question when COVID struck. I think most investors asked, you know, Infosys, quote-unquote, seems to have the most discretionary. We were the only player which grew in the period of COVID when this cut down in runway happened, right? I think that should give you an answer of, you know, how widespread our services and embedded they are.
A related question, maybe a follow-up, is if we look at the nature of deals you've been winning, the proportion of large deals has been high. It's been a significant success story for you. However, the large deals that you share has been sort of plateauing for the last year or so. I think one of the assumptions we've had, and I think you've shared this as well, is there's a high proportion of medium-sized contracts, smaller-sized contracts where you're winning with clients, which is not visible in what you publish, normally. Is that something which might be a source of risk for you and perhaps for the industry?
If the proportion of small-sized deals and smaller contracts is increasing, they are easier to not renew or easier to shut down as opposed to large contracts which you were winning, let's say, at a higher proportion a year ago.
For the large deals, the way we are seeing it, at least what I think we've shared in the past is, our large deals are deals over $50 million. They are already significant sized deals. We only refer to what we call some mega deals, and those we said are more, not predictable in the sense of we don't know which quarter they may come in and they may come across a year, two years. We still, as I look at our pipeline, have mega deals in our pipeline. The large deal number, which is what, Mohit shared, and, Nilanjan shared, the number of over 90, that number is increasing. These are not small deals. Meaning these are not deals which are $1 million and $2 million dollar deals. These are deals each over $50 million.
Today when we look at the pipeline, that pipeline is looking strong for us, and we feel comfortable with that sort of a pipeline, what we've closed, and that looks good for our guidance for this year.
Okay.
Hi, this is Ayush from BNP Paribas. I have two questions. First question is, in today's world, clients are at a different stage of transformation, and so cutting their IT budgets today will make their existing investments as a sunk cost. Do you agree with this? Then only we will see the less tech spending this time. The second question is considering the current market, current macro environment, do you think the current growth guidance is at risk?
I think on the first one, what I understood is the IT is very critical, so they may not cut the IT. Is that what you were saying?
Yes.
What we see is, there is a strong prevalence within large companies that we are working with to drive this digital transformation because it's helping them position themselves better. They're also using both OpEx, sometimes some CapEx, so that gives them a little bit more flexibility in how they're looking at their budgeting. They're also taking, because of automation, consolidation, some funding out of their existing landscape, which is allowing them to fund this. Given all of those parameters, we see the digital transformation continuing. On the second, our guidance at 13%-15% remains where it is. We feel comfortable with our guidance given where we are in the environment.
Hi, it's Puranik from INM. I have a question on the pyramid, the whole pyramid architecture. If you hop back to the early 2000, the first tech boom, a lot of hiring happened and a lot of promotions happened very quickly. Those who were promoted quickly, they become the target for pyramid correction later because there were capability issue of those guys who have been promoted earlier. Do you see any correlation to what happened that time and today in the context of people working from home today? Would some of these guys would get into a situation where they may not be very relevant unless they are trained very well?
I think what happened in 2000, I don't have a strong sort of a correlation with what we are seeing today from that perspective. What we do see is the duration of the skills relevance is shorter today. What could have been, you know, 10, 15 years for, let's say, an SAP ABAP skill, today in the world of cloud, cyber, is probably five, seven years where you have to replenish your skill. What I feel happened in the past, if people were willing to reskill themselves, even if it was longer duration, their longevity in the career was higher in terms of percentages. It'll be the same if people are willing to reskill.
Let's say in this five-seven-year horizon, which is a shorter horizon. If at the end of that horizon people say, "Look, I'm gonna reskill and build a new whatever that skill, quantum, meta, whatever that skill is of that day, then that longevity will increase. The thing with Infosys has always been, which is a very strong company value, is if people are willing to reskill, they will continue. We are not a company which is churning people just for the sake of it. We are much more a company which is reskilling. That's how I think it can play out if people choose to reskill.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have room for last two questions. Yes.
Hi. Krati from Credit Suisse. Wanted to understand what... Infosys, the next year guidance is 14%-16%. Last year you grew-
Twenty.
20%. What is stopping Infosys from growing 14%-16% every year for the next five years, six years? Is it? Because of COVID, people have accelerated their digital spends. There is a huge market which is not digitalized yet. What is stopping Infosys from growing much higher? Is it just lack of sales force on the ground, or is it because there is a market that Infosys will never pitch in for?
For us, the guidance for this financial year, April to March, is 13%-15% for growth. We don't give a guidance which is a multi-year guidance, so we don't have any specific view for the year after. Of course, last year we grew at 19.7%. We had a guidance which we changed a few times in the year upwards. The way we look at the guidance, as you know, is, you know, where we have the deals that have worked for the previous few quarters, what we see in the pipeline and how we are converting at that stage in the market. Of course, we would like to grow at a rate which is above the market.
What will happen in the sort of the year after in the financial year, we don't have a view of. What we tried to do today was more give you a sense that if you look out over the next few years, the demand environment is fairly solid, with this cloud and digital, and our capability is very strong. We will play well in that demand environment, and we will more than likely grow at a rate which is above, so that we gain market share from our peers.
Wasn't looking for a guidance specifically, but wanted to understand, in your mind, what are the constraints that cannot let this industry grow higher than this for continuously every year?
I don't have a specific view on the industry. For Infosys particularly, I don't see any constraints. We have a very strong engine. It's just that we don't have a view of what that number will be in that second and third year.
Thank you.
Any further questions? All right. On that note, ladies and gentlemen, we conclude the open house. Thank you very much, Salil. Thank you very much, Nilanjan-
Thanks.
For sharing your thoughts as well. On that note, we officially come to the end of the event as well, ladies and gentlemen. First up, we'd like to thank you all for joining us this evening. Let me remind you that the audio file of the event, the presentations, and the transcript will be provided on the investor relations website. That being said, it's now time to cordially invite you all to please join us for dinner. Looks like there might be still some more questions, looking at the curiosity in the eyes. Please bring forth your conversations over dinner, and kindly join us for dinner that's being served just outside the conference hall. Thank you so much again for being part of the event. Thank you, and take care.