Financial results for the Third Quarter of The Fiscal Year 2021-2022, ending 31 December 2021. The investor presentation and the press release has been sent to all of you and is also available on our website. Our leadership team is present on this call to discuss the result. We have with us today Mr. Arun Jain, Chairman and Managing Director. Mr. Prabal Basu Roy, Advisor to the Chairman and Director on the Corporate Board. Mr. Vasudha Subramaniam, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Manish Maakan, Chief Executive Officer, iGTB. Mr. Rajesh Saxena, Chief Executive Officer, iGCB. Mr. Banesh Prabhu, Chief Executive Officer, Intellect SEEC. Mr. Andrew England, full-time Director. Mr. T.V. Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, iRTM. Besides, some other senior members of the Intellect management team are also present in the call.
Mr. Arun Jain will brief you on the result, and this will be followed by Q&A, which will be replied by the senior management members of our management team. Once the Q&A starts, you can ask a question by clicking on Raise Your Hand, and we would unmute you so that everyone is able to listen to you. Once again, I would like to remind you that anything which we say which refers to our outlook for the future is a forward-looking statement, which must be read in conjunction with the risk that company faces. With this, I request Arun to give his briefing. Over to you, Arun.
Good evening, everybody, thank you for joining for this investor day, investor conference today. We met just six weeks back in Technology Day, where we shared with you the kind of progress we as a company making on the various technology platforms and how the tailwinds in digital space helping the company to get into a better traction which is there. I'll just take you to the small deck of the presentation. We are in a business of accelerating digital transformations by two ways because of contextuality, composability and cloud native, which is in the nature of the business is looking forward by the customers, by the customer. Today's conversation, I'll take you through the Intellect, a snapshot, just a small repeat of what we presented on Technology Day. Performance overview.
What kind of deals are we winning? I'll take you through the digital transformation, what we are doing and what kind of deals we are winning now, and some observations. If you look at us, we are providing large enterprise-grade composable and contextual solutions, driving higher business growth, reducing cost and risk on sustainable basis. Intellect is a company which has the ability to understand the complexity of top four banks or top five bank of any geography and intercept that so that detailed long-term relationship can be established by using the complete MACH solution, which is microservices-based, API-based, cloud native and headless. If I look at the slide, this is a slide which is known to all of you. We look at design thinking as a core tool for driving the last 2%- 100%.
In financial sector, it's 1% - 100% because the kind of security frameworks, the volume framework, the high-performing applications which is required, is phenomenally required very intense R&D team. I mentioned to you last time, we built up a first technology stack with the four exponential technologies. Then we have a deep data model. Then we have products which creates products. Then we host it on the cloud, which makes a platform. Then when you bring a third-party participant, plus fintech, then it become marketplace. This is our journey going forward. Last five years, we are working on the same journey. We were in first two spaces in last five years. Last year, we are moving to third step, and then the final step will happen in next two to three years.
What are the technology shifts that is favoring Intellect? There's a movement on-premise to cloud, but mainly by what we are observing, the mainly public cloud. There's a mixed feeling on the large banks that they want to set up their own cloud, which is a private cloud, but it's on a cloud. Shift to open architecture is very, very critical. So API is a medium of data exchange. Segregation of UX layer, business logic, headless architecture. MACH as a de facto standard, e mergence of fintech and marketplace and predicting trends and investing proactively. Why I'm mentioning these seven elements because that is aligned to the previous slide which is driving our growth engine. These are the four technology platforms which we have called technologies. We built up a data platform. We built up a intelligent document platform.
We built up a hyperscale banking operating system and iTurmeric API ecosystem to give a unified data architecture, API-led design, cloud-native and configurable integration. These four pieces are the core of our acceleration and the value proposition in the market. This drives us to at least 30%-40% reduction in implementations, and we are able to give a proof of concepts in a period of four weeks to eight weeks. We are able to give proof of concept to the customer, and this is leading us to shorter implementation cycle. That's why the collection period has improved substantially in this period. The other 12 product line, where we deeply go into each product, writing user journeys which we have shared already with you. Most of the investors in this call must be knowing about these 12 products.
These are four platform iKredit360, CashPower, Xponent and GeM. Now coming to the performance review of the quarter. I'm proud to be announcing that we could move from 22% to 33% on quarterly growth in this quarter. We cross INR 5 billion mark, INR 5.08 billion to be precise, from INR 338.2 crore to INR 508 crore. In dollar terms is 31% growth. The gross margin has moved up by 39% year-on-year. EBITDA moved 37% year-on-year. PAT moved 25% year-on-year. Gross margin, which I mentioned to you, almost two years back, we are inching towards 60%. So in an ideal state, our gross margin should be 60%. It reached from 56% - 58%.
EBITDA has moved from 25.5% - 26.2%. Our directional goal is to make it 30%. Collections have really catapulted this quarter, which is INR 485 crore of the collections, which leading to EPS of INR 30. The collection days has come down to 129 days, out of which global excluding India is 105, and India is 217. Over here, I want to bring one important data point over here for collection, that in a product business, there are certain revenues which are contractually not payable by the customer, and they become due only in contractual terms. That number is close to 30% of this number of the receivable is sitting in where due, which is not collectible, and they will be collectible on milestone.
Your company is zero-debt profitable global company with cash of INR 431 crore at end of the quarter three. Breaking down the revenue to next level, we are looking for SaaS and subscription revenue, which grew to 113%, moved to INR 89 crore from INR 41 crore. License revenue this quarter grew from INR 91 crore to INR 112 crore. AMC moved from INR 70 crore, INR 74 crore to INR 82 crore, 11%. Now, AMC 11% is linked to whatever the growth rate I had in year, two years before. Whatever the system has gone live, that become due for AMC. That time our growth rate was around 15%, so AMC growth is around 11%. AMC is directly proportional to our growth cycles which is there. In two years from now, AMC growth will increase appropriately.
Investment in product development, they are remaining constant around INR 28- INR 29 crore. We have won 10 deals during the quarter. I'll tell you them, what are the traction we are having. The 11 digital transformations we have completed in this quarter. On YTD, we've grown 25%. On dollar terms, 24% in Indian rupees. We have given a guidance of high teens. We are able to deliver 25% growth as of now. Gross margins grew by 30%. EBITDA grew by 38%. The PAT moved up YTD 39%. Close to 40% we moved our PAT during this period. Gross margin is 47.7%. EBITDA is 45.7%. Collections over INR 1,000 crore during this period. Other data element remains same.
Again, on a second level breakup, SaaS revenue grew 122% to INR 254 crore. License INR 278 crore and AMCs INR 243 crore. This is combined creating 57% of the revenue are license-linked revenue and 43% is implementation revenue. In this YTD in last nine months, we have invested in INR 85.9 crore in product capitalization, d eal wins is 29. goal nine again, and $28 million, INR 28 million is CSR contribution. This is an important figure over here when we say steady growth in license-linked revenue. When we started five years back, it was 33% license-linked revenue, which moves very slowly to reach 42% in FY 2019. It reached 46% in 2020, 54%, and now we are inching towards 57%.
Our goal for a good product company is to reach 2/3, 1/3 of license-linked revenue as we move forward in next two to three years. That's the cycle we look at it. Our pipeline is healthy. It's growing consistently quarter on quarter. It's INR 5,000 crore for the pipeline. We have 159 deals alone constitute $565 million for the deals. These are the destiny deals. This is a shift we made two- years back that we moved from the average deal value substantially, and we start focusing on destiny deals. That was a shift. Today we have 57 destiny deals. These deals are which stage we are qualified, we are almost at. In our cycle of sales, it's a P4 stage. There are 54 deals in that stage. That is a kind of a ledger of the deal.
It's deal ledger, how we move the deals. It is more than INR 50 crore deals, moving from eight deals to 11 deal in Q2 and 12 deals as of now, which is there. It's a 50% jump on jump on. Large size deal, INR 30 crore-INR 50 crore is 17. If you look at it, INR 20 crore-INR 30 crore bracket, there are 28 deals. There is a significant progress from 42 deals which were there in destiny deals last year the same time, we are sitting with 57 deals which need to be closed in next two to three quarters. These are financial numbers you must have gone through anyway. I'll not take much time on this. Now I'll take you to some taste of what kind of digital transformation we are doing.
This I mentioned about it, that we have 12 composable and four platforms. There are new digital transformation which we have accomplished using our suite. These are 40% faster than other players in the market because of 300 fine-grained packaged business component, 900 APIs, and low-coded and accelerated predictable implementation technology, Write Turmeric, that replaces coding with configuration. This is our secret sauce of transformation. If you look at it, what is the kind of wins we are able to have it now? This is a very celebrated quarter for us. We could able to win two new deals to penetrate two new banks in U.S., which is a significant celebration for us internally. Both are come in a space of a product called virtual account and escrow.
There's the new technology which we built on cloud in U.S., we launched in U.S., U.S. is the most difficult market for us to enter, and you were asking that question, when we'll be entering into U.S. I think two deals in a quarter in U.S. is a substantial success. One thing I want to highlight right over here on the cloud revenue, when we win this deal, there is a cycle time of between three to four quarters they will go live. During that time, the cloud revenue start ticking. There's a revenue lag of three to four quarters. Even though we would have won these two deals, but there will be zero revenue booking in this quarter on account of these two banks on a revenue bucket.
Cloud revenue lag is a one point I want to bring to your attention. Same thing happened for the SEEC revenue. We won two deals in Europe. The top three banks signed up for cash flow forecasting, which is a GTB liquidity management platform. Trade platform has been extended for Austrian bank. We won two deals in APAC. One of the Vietnam leadership is continuing. We signed digital transaction banking for Vietnam. Similarly, we signed Capital lQ for one of the Oceanic Bank near Australia. There are four deals in IMEA, India, Middle East and Africa. Leading sector bank signed Intellect LIBOR transition in Capital lQ. We have a leading deal in Kuwait, signed for the iPay360 platform. There are two major deals in Africa, which we signed up using partnership networks.
A lot of time you are asking me, how is your partnership networks moving? Now this is a proof of the pudding that we are able to use partners to win these two deals in this market. They are one is a French-speaking customer. It was difficult for us to reach there on our own, and partner enabled us. That resulted into higher SG&A because of the partnership commission. When we start using partnership more and more, our SG&A commission will go up. That is one question you might have that why the SG&A has moved so much in that quarter to quarter. The major reason is about activating the partnership network, which all love to have because that helps in growing the business faster.
This is a kind of 10 different customers who are approaching Intellect for the transformation of digital platform they want to do. Now, this is another important slide that how did we complete the digital transformation, which becomes my referencing for the future deals. When I spoke to you in 2019, we said, when we enter the new market, we need to have wait for two years for the system to go live. Sometimes we start using after six months, then it becomes a referenceable account. That's what becomes, for each market, you move from stage four to stage five. Now, since we have a, like in Americas, one of the top five Canadian bank has modernized their entire commercial banking channel with iGTB Contextual Banking, CBX for payments.
This is a very, very difficult job to transfer on corporate payments in a Canadian market. Today, we have that credibility that gone live successfully. It has been working there. Similarly, the GCB business, IDC, has gone live with another Canadian bank in less than 10 months from signing the deal to go live in 10 months' time. These two deals are bringing credibility in America. We have a referencability on our architecture that it works. It has gone live in Europe. Similarly, the trades platform which is being written on the basis of newest stack has gone live. There are two deals over there, then there are two go-lives there. There is an APAC. It is a very, very interesting deal.
One of the Intellect cards, which is we call it a stage three product right now, we are not calling a stage five product, has fully gone live for a Singapore-headquartered bank who wanted to enter into Indian market with entire merchant onboarding, customer onboarding, complete card functionality. That will give us an access to the platform in Indian market, so this could be the fifth platform we'll be looking at it in the next six months after system goes live. Similarly, entire IDC went live in Southeast Asia, large bank where they'll help transforming using microservice platform. We have looked at it. A top three Philippine bank using CashPower went live. An Asian bank went live in integrated digital transaction banking platform in Singapore and Cambodia.
In India, major system on digital lending platform has gone live with one of the largest banks on the modern architecture. In UAE, we have again one more IDC going live in this period. If you observe, the IDC is becoming a next IBs IDC and CBX, which are driving force, getting momentum now because of the reference sites. Similarly, CBX in Oman. This 11 reference sites and 29 digital transformation, which we did in the last three quarters, these 29 references have a word of mouth, and that becomes a pull deals rather than push deals. In journey, when it becomes pull deal, it becomes much simpler to do that. In this period, what we have added, one is a partnership council we added, agenda.
Second thing we added is a strategic advisory board, which consists of eight members. I discussed about this thing during the technology day, but I'll just repeat it over here. These are the this is all the spaces of the financial industry we brought in the strategic advisor from retail segment, corporate segment, and then certain market-focused people from academics, finance. This is a eight-member strategic advisory board we could able to put it together. You know Andrew England and Prabal for quite some time. Dave Revell, Pradeep Kapur, Sanjeeb Chaudhuri , Swaroop Choudhury, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch become so other members which created a strategic advisory board for Intellect. These are the small resumes about them. Dave Revell was a Chief Information Officer of CIBC.
I think he brings not just a Chief Information Officer flavor, he knows the latest technology so well and he's worked with all the players in that market that he provides a deep expertise of Canadian market. Andrew England, all of you know, he's a master of transaction banking. He's working in Europe. He worked in almost every country in Europe, from France to Germany. I think you all the countries, all the large banks, he gives an insight to us what kind of a product is required. Prabal brings finance strategy. Ambassador Pradeep Kapur brings lot of presence since he was ambassador, retired and diplomat in many countries. He brings huge amount of ability to work with the central bank areas. Sanjeeb Chaudhuri , I don't know how many of you know, he's a chairman of IDFC First Bank.
From Intellect perspective, he brings in the kind of a marketing genius what we are looking for in advisory board. Swarup Choudhury brings a partnership kind of flavors to us because he worked with HSBC, IBM, Thomson Reuters, First Data. He brings that kind of capability. Now, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch is another academician. He taught in Yale, he taught in Oxford, and through which we are building a brand I of iGTB Oxford . He brings a lot of capability. He's a. Just to mention here, I think he's connected to the Roosevelt family of famous Roosevelt. Vikram Sud has a great experience on operations, large operations. He handled Kotak operations and then before that, Citi operations. A large multi-location operations. So when we are talking to the customer on our value for their operations, he plays a critical role over there.
This eight people strategic advisory board is already set up with us. With that, I finish my call here, my conversation here right now with you. I can open this session for question-answer at this point of time.
Thanks, Arun. Now you can ask a question. Please click on the Raise Your Hand, and we'll unmute you, and then you'll be, your question will be replied by the management team.
I'll just respond to Praveen. There's a question why there's a regular drop in promoter holding. There's no regular drop. Promoter has not sold a single share in the last two years. Last five years rather, since we have taken. Which data is there? Maybe if you type it out, it will be good.
Okay. The first who has raised their hand is Baidik Sarkar. Baidik, you can ask your question. Please unmute him. Baidik?
Yeah, gentlemen. Thank you very much. Arun, hi, good evening, and congrats to you, Manish, and the entire team on a great quarter. Couple of questions. It looks like now roughly 80% of your incremental earnings are from SaaS, right? I'm just trying to understand the characteristics of your SaaS incomes slightly better here. For example, between Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, our SaaS revenues, incomes were up roughly 21%. Then again, between Q1 and Q2, we were up 13% sequentially. Q3, we were flat, which is all right. What's the right metric that you use to gauge the build-up on your SaaS revenues from here on? I'm assuming they're an ideal combination of the amount of credit and insurance you underwrite, plus the installed user base.
How should we read that, A, B, how should we understand the acceleration of SaaS from here on?
Yeah, SaaS is still evolving, Baidik. Let me be very honest with you. I also cannot judge this, and we always struggle in our management room, how do we really estimate the SaaS revenue. Though we have an inkling, I can share with you what is my understanding of it. But since it's an enterprise-grade cloud revenue and SaaS revenue, it's not a retail where you can say so many leads and so many leads are getting converted. In our SaaS revenue, the deals can be very large. So our SaaS revenue are could be as large as $2 million annualized basis. Like, typically, SaaS revenue, when you're talking about in a small company, it'll be $20,000 per customer. We have a per customer revenue pool could be as high as $1.8 million-$2 million.
Typical customer will be between $250,000 per annum SaaS revenue going up to $2 million-$3 million per year. That's where there's predictability numbers on cloud are there. Normally when deals start happening, customer initially asks for a license, then he shift to cloud, then he shift back to license. These kind of fluctuation also does happen. What we need to celebrate is that we are growing, doubling our revenue in cloud year on year. We have sufficient deal, whether it will come, it will show up as a license or it will show up as a cloud. I think license-linked revenue is a common index, if you can look at, Baidik, that will be good index for you.
My ARR today is INR 684 crore and license link revenue is 57% of the revenue. That is the right metric for us to look at it from an investor perspective.
Sure, I understand, Arun. That's very helpful. It clarifies a lot of our questions. You know, moving on, there's phenomenal traction in the sequential license wins, right? So is the breakout here a function of pent-up demand in decision-making? Or is it just organic given how the transition to digital is? If I could just kind of invite your comments on the 57 deals that you highlighted will close over the next two to three quarters. Is there a quantum value here that you'd probably like to say is attached to it? Just put a number to that.
If you just do the pattern analysis of last few quarters of when we are publishing this ledger, deal ledger. Every quarter, out of these decisions which is there, some gets postponed, some gets taken to the next year, budgets get postponed. There's a pattern there that we typically win out of this, four deals in this quarter, we won, we lost one, added eight. If you just plot it over the last eight quarters, we are winning around four to six deals in a quarter. Now our science of knowing those deals, sales processes are becoming more mature in the organization, where our win rate is increasing. Once the destined deal is there, our win rate is over 60% on those targeted deals. But if customer postpone the deal, then it delays out.
Our win rate is now four versus one loss, is close to 80% win rate. That's not the right way to calculate. I'm saying 60% we are able to win when we put our focus on winning.
That's very helpful, Arun. Congrats again, and I'll be in touch. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Baidik. Next is Mr. Mayank Babla from Dalal and Broacha. Mayank, please ask your question.
Thank you for taking my question. Am I audible?
Yeah, yeah. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Congratulations on a great set of numbers. My first question is around margins. Our vision is to reach 30% EBITDA margins. Could you give us some sense of the operating levers that we have at hand to see this sort of expansion?
Yeah. When you see the anomaly of the margins what we have, I think we book RSU cost, which is as per IFRS, which comes to 2% of the IFRS costs. We were not talking to you earlier, but now that cost over the period of time and the RSU are getting issued in the company, that cost is intangible cost in the books, but it's a cost in the books. It comes above EBITDA. This cost comes above EBITDA, not below EBITDA. This is not the other cost, it's in employee cost or in SG&A cost. That's one part of 2%. 46% is there, 2% is that. The question over here is that in this quarter, when we are building a partnership network, we were looking absolute number more than this.
Last quarter we said we should focus on the growth than the margins. We took a call. In this margin call, two places where we invested the money. One is we increase our headcount by at least 400 people during the quarter. This is for preparing the company for $75 million quarterly run rate. Earlier we were $60 million run rate. To move to $75 million run rate, we need a capacity, we did a capacity enhancement. Second thing we did is we leveraged the partnership network, and that commission cost has gone up in this quarter. It's a 30% can be achievable. It's just a matter of any quarter will be good enough quarter. In product company, the benefit is that we can't foresee the product.
This time we never look at it at 33% growth. If you would have seen 33% growth, I would not be saying high teen margins. There's a lot of deals in the pipeline which you can't predict and how it will move. You will find in next three, four quarters currently we will move to that, needle will move there.
My second question was around this capitalization of investment in product development. Around INR 28 crores-INR 29 crores per quarter and INR 85 crores-INR 86 crores YTD. Could you just give us some sense of where this capitalization is? Which product are we investing in? Or could you give us a breakdown of this investment and which products we are focusing on, and how we can expect this to pan out over the next two to three years?
Yeah. Since you may be new to the product business, I think their technology investments are quite high when we are moving to cloud. We are investing 12 products and four platforms, so all the platforms need a constant upgradation. The technology changes so fast that we need to make it. Just to remain there, you need to invest. Every product require their roadmaps. This INR 120 crore, we invest close to INR 220 crore. We write off INR 100 crore in the same year, which is around just version upgrade. But where we invest the major money is in the product where we are making them ready from India to Middle East or Asia Pacific, then ready for Europe, then we're ready for America.
Every time when we move to a new geography, we need to invest in same product like IDC, lending, trade card, liquidity, DTV, trade and supply chain finance. All the products require marketing when we are positioning a product in a market, as well as we are building the product for next generation technologies.
Thank you.
Mayank, just adding to what Arun said, you know, in terms of your first question, you know, you wanted to know the drivers of the margin, the margin profile, et c., I'll give you another cut on that. You'll be able to link it because, you see, there are three things, three tailwinds which are working very much in our favor at the moment, and they will continue from what we can see. The first is of course, as you mentioned, our change in approach to going towards more destiny deals. The deal sizes are increasing by itself. Yeah. By definition. That is one big lever. The second big lever is with better branding and more acceptability and referenceability, the pricing obviously is on the upswing.
Okay.
Third is the issue of revenue mix. If you have seen our financials for the last, let's say, 16 quarters, you would see that the licensing revenues are now much more than the implementation revenues. For 60 quarters now it's just the other way around. The confluence of all these three things, you know, which will obviously continue as we expected, are the real strong intrinsic drivers of the business from margin profiles.
Sure. Thank you so much. Thank you for answering the question.
Thank you, Mayank.
Thanks a lot, Mayank. Next we have Mr. Mohit Jain from Anand Rathi Securities. Mohit, please ask your question.
Yes. Sir, I have two. One was related to deal addition. Like in this particular quarter, the addition seems to be a little on the lower side while pipeline is up. So if you could help me understand what kind of is it more like seasonal or do you think more deals are likely in the next quarter or so? That was one. The second was related to headcount. You specified there was like net addition of 400 staff during the quarter. So where is the total count now versus let's say one year back?
The total count is. We don't announce the headcount number because product companies are not measured by headcount, but just the 400 is an incremental headcount. It can amount to 8%-9% increase in the headcount, which increase part of the cost in last quarter and part of the cost in this quarter will be added to all because of salary in that particular area, Mohit. About the deal.
You would be like closer to 4,500 or you would be more closer to like 5,000, like any ballpark range will also do.
It's okay. I mean, it's closer to, it may become closer to 5,000. We were running around 4,000, closer to 4,000, lower end of the 4,000. It may be closer.
Okay.
It may go closer to 5,000 by 31st March.
Okay. Sir, on the deal win side, like.
The deal win side, I think this is, we can't track quarterly basis. It's,
Mm-hmm.
I think it's just each product by product we are tracking. We are creating a tough criteria to be qualified as a opportunity. We are moving the gate from. We have six stages of the dealing. One P 0, which is a lead awareness. P 1, which is where customer has seen the demo and he liked the demo and then we move to P 2, when we have given a multiple conversation with the customer and then he requested for the proposal. When he requested the proposal, it's P 3 stage. When we are showing this funnel, we are showing the funnel after first three steps are not even included into this funnel. $75 million doesn't consist of any of the.
Sir, I was referring to the deals won, like, absolute number of deals won.
10 deals that time. You're talking about 10.
Four distinct deals that you have announced in the third quarter.
Yeah.
Like last few quarter we were winning at five, six kind of a deal. What I was looking for is like pipeline is up, deal count is little down. What should we expect like moving ahead?
Yeah, I didn't track it this way. I didn't look at the way you're looking at it. This four, five, six are just the numbers.
Deals are improving, increasing if you look at the larger deals kicking in.
Okay. Sir, good quarter from all counts, so congratulations. I had one point as well. Your disclosures are going down every quarter. Now from this quarter onwards, I'm not able to figure out any number on the advanced market as well. There's no currency segregation also. How do we sort of track it apart from the management commentary?
Yeah, we are just looking if these numbers, does it make sense to anybody? Because so many currencies are there, some 2%, some 3%, whether it makes difference to investor.
Sir, I mean, the key ones like USD, Euro, I mean, there are major currencies, right? At least top five or three, four, we can disclose like every other IT company does. We are also approaching $300 million as you specified in the comment.
Sure. We can publish that. There's no big issue about that. That's just a matter that whether the slides are valuable to the investor. When we are looking at a global investor presentation, we are finding that it's not significantly valuable to the global investor. That's why we don't publish it. We can publish it. If you want, we can also sub-circulate it afterwards.
That would be really helpful, sir. Thank you. That's all from my side.
Thank you, Mohit.
Thank you, Mohit. Now we have Mr. Ankush Agrawal from Surge Capital. Ankush, can you please ask your question?
Hi, team. Congratulations on a very good set of numbers. Firstly, I want to understand the whole receivables cycle of our business a little better from a basic understanding. Like say if we make a INR 100 deal, right? Of which say assume INR 50 is license, INR 50 service and implementation, right? And then we get say INR 10 as AMC after the implementation is done. At what point of time will we book each of this revenue segment separately? Like, when will we recognize it? When will we bill it? And when will we actually get it? Like for example, if the deal is signed, do we pre-book the entire INR 50 of license revenue upfront? And does that get billed upfront and is receivable upfront?
It is recognized upfront and then is billed at a later stage once the implementation is done? Basically trying to understand this because if I look at our unbilled revenue, those are like twice of our billed revenue. I just want to understand which are these revenue streams which are contributing to such high unbilled revenues when we are booking the revenue, but we are not actually collecting it.
That's right.
If you can help me understand that better.
Let me take a step back. I think this is a question which is asked by many people. In a product deal of INR 100, if you've taken an example, INR 50 license and INR 50 implementation. Let's take this example.
Yeah.
There are multiple methods of booking the revenue. Method one, when license is separated from the implementation and license is delivered on the day of signing the deal, 100% revenue get recognized into books and account. There is second type of deal where the revenue gets recognized with a proof of completion. Because in a contract, customer says that he'll make milestone-based payments and milestone-based deliveries, and there are multiple stages in the product. There we bill and book the accrual on it as and when the project is getting completed and proportionate license revenue will be booked, which is called proof of completion.
Percentage of-
POC.
Percentage of completion.
Percentage of completion basis. That's the second kind of deal. Third kind of deal is a cloud deal where we sign the deal, we set up the cloud for him, and we'll be billing when he start pay per use. This is the third one. There's a fourth deal which happens where we have the revenue, which is. This is seven-year deal, and seven-year deal licenses are there. We book the revenue based on amortized value. We will be doing a subscription. We'll charge him on an annual basis. We'll say INR 1,000 for seven years. I'll charge you INR 130 per year for seven years. Now, this is a method given to the customer to make a payment on annual basis.
Over there, our auditors look at that number saying this deal value is for seven year, which is written, signed contract, but it's only the payment terms are different. You book the full license revenue upfront because you have delivered the license to the customer, and then look at the 20% AMC on it and appropriately adjust it. There are four kind of deals which are happening in the marketplace.
All right.
Now-
Yeah. Sorry. Continue.
No, go ahead. You ask the question. It's okay.
Yeah. No, on the first deal when you said that license component is separate and implementation is separate, so in that case we'll book the entire INR 50 upfront, and that is billed to the client upfront as well, right?
That does bill the client upfront.
Right. Implementation as a base of percentage. Sir, on the unbilled revenue, which is the most dominant component? Like, it might be the implementation, I'm assuming, right?
The payment terms are milestone-based. That's why the unbilled revenue, lot of it is after they pay the license revenue, they will pay after the UAT. There's a long cycle gap. It takes six months to implement, then through.
Right.
When you're doing the completion, the money will go into the accruals, which is not billed. It's because it's not due.
Right. Got it. Right.
And-
Secondly, in our services revenue, you had earlier talked about this hyper care support, right? Which I believe is kind of a recurring component. Can you quantify that for this nine months?
Hyper care support is after go live.
Right. No, I am assuming that the implementation revenues that we have, some part of it is the hyper care support revenue, which is a recurring revenues that we get for getting our support team available at the client's place to manage their implementation. This is after the implementation is live as well, right?
We try and keep most of the hypercare on a monthly basis.
Right. I'm just trying to understand what is the quantum of that revenue.
It's not as significant. I think total implementation revenue is 43%. That will be another 3%, 4%, 5% maybe. Yeah.
Right. Okay. It's just 3, 4, 5%.
This is not a significant number for us to track. Our tracking focus is license revenues. Our tracking focus is on managed.
Right.
One more thing I want to highlight to you.
What?
In this unbilled revenue, there are two things which are there, which is increasing our DSO in India. In GeM, Government e-Marketplace, we have a contract which is not due because my payment from GeM becomes due when buyer updates the system that his sales order is fully closed. I get 25% upfront, 70% is sitting through unbilled revenue, till the time buyer updates the system. Buyer might have procured the system, but he has not updated system, my revenue gets stuck there. I have a close to-
Okay.
INR 400 crore sitting there in a bucket of INR 600 crores, which is increasing my number, which is, there's no delay from the payment from the government, but there is a
Right.
Contractual issue because till buyer is not updating it, there's a laxity on the buyer side. He doesn't update the system.
Right. Broadly, just the understanding is that in our business, for the accounting terms, we are able to recover the revenue, but because of the contractual terms, the actual billing takes place at a later stage, which is what feeds the entire higher DSO. Right?
That's it. Exactly.
Okay. Got it. That was very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Ankush. Next we have Vivek Arora , please ask a question. Unmute yourself.
Hi, sir. Thank you for the opportunity. Sir, as you said that we have added about 400 employees in the current quarter. Are the costs mostly accounted for in this quarter or should we expect some more cost increase? Because our pre-EBITDA cost has gone up from INR 3.4 crore to INR 3.8 crore almost. I'm guessing the quantum of increase won't be to the same extent going forward. Should we expect the cost to stabilize at a certain level?
Yeah. I mean, cost will stabilize to some level. For 400 people, cost is not fully taken in the first quarter, last quarter, because they joined in November, sometime in December, so the only partial cost of those months are taken care of, and a few more are to be joined to mainly build the capacity of $300 million. That's what we have capacity built up. Employee cost will go up. Sales commission may come down. As of now, the cost increase of INR 3.4 crore-INR 3.8 crore. There's a cost increase on the delivery side and there's a cost increase on SG&A side. SG&A, there is a substantial number this time. Depending upon how many deals which we are using partner-led, that number will fluctuate.
Okay. Sir, on the growth prospects, sir, obviously we've grown very handsomely this quarter. Should we expect like a 5%-6% quarter-on-quarter run rate? Or, I mean, as a management, are we not able to predict? I mean, we talked about hitting INR 400 million in the next two to four years. Given the way we are going, do you think we are more sanguine about our growth prospects? I mean, can we do better than the 20% that we've hinted at in the past rounds?
Yeah, obviously we reached 25% this nine-months period, so that's a good number from 20% -2 5%. My answer to that is we calibrated the organization at 20% growth on the top line and 30% on the EBITDA line. That's our business calibration. I'm repeating this question-answer multiple times. Sometimes we'll get some deals in a year, sometimes we may not get the deals. The fluctuation will happen between 15%-25%, and few years can be much better if the traction starts. If we get some, let's wait for a few more quarters. For investor perspective, if you, the 20-30 is a simple formula, so could be much better for us to look at it from a design perspective.
Just one more. Do we track cash flow internally? Because I think the market looks at it very closely. I mean, so in this quarter our collections have gone up quite handsomely. Is that something that we track with a focus internally? Because in the March numbers, that number can vary quite a bit if in some quarter there's a dip.
Yeah. I mean, again, there's milestone-based collections when we raise a bill. So if you look at it, our DSO for the bill is less than 30 days. So all our client pays within 30 days once we raise the bill. So that is not a major concern about our financial institutions which is there. Sometimes many projects goes live in a single quarter and you have a bulk payment some sort of that, or some license gets signed in advance system for that. So that's where the quarter-on-quarter making the collection looks difficult for us to look at it. But in year-on-year, the detailed focus is there. But every deal is very, very highly focused. Now its implementation cycles are coming down.
Earlier, implementation cycles were 18-24 months, and now we are looking at implementation cycles are coming down to six to 12 months. That is also helping us out in bringing in better collections in the system.
Vivek, you know, in terms of just, you know, because you have been our investor, you know, from the very, you know, difficult days of, let's say, 2018, when you guys obviously had questions on the cash burn and so on and so forth. We had said a lot of things which we are going to change, and it is now evident in the results in hindsight. One of them was exactly this, that we will change our approach to our capital dilutive approach.
Mm-hmm.
We took a stake in the ground and actually said that, right? At that time. We'll not raise capital and therefore we will move from a P&L-driven company to a P&L plus Operating Cash Flow-driven company, both of them. That is the mix. These are very fundamental changes in the organization which has transformed us to where we are today. That will continue. I think quarter-on-quarter, the exact number, you know, obviously will fluctuate here and there, but on a positive cash flow basis and non-capital dilutive approach, those are the pillars of the transformation process which we went through.
Thank you so much, sir.
That's because you've been there for the last so many years, yeah.
That is very helpful. Thank you so much.
All right.
Thanks, Vivek. Next we have Mr. Anil Sarin from Centrum Wealth. Anil, please ask your question. Anil , please unmute yourself.
Yeah, sure. Sorry, I took some time. First of all, congratulations. Am I audible?
Yeah, yeah. Anil.
Yeah. Great show, and I do recognize that there can be quarterly variations as Arun has pointed out, that sometimes you get more deals, sometimes you get less deals, so don't get too excited or too depressed on a quarterly basis. Well understood. I just wanted to know that you know earlier on in you know earlier calls, you would talk about developed markets or advanced economies versus developing economies. Obviously there is a trend. We are going more and more towards developed economies. What is the figure for this quarter?
The figure is, now, what happens, Anil, in last, when in the beginning of this year, we have started seeing the digital transformation is an agenda. Digital transformation can happen in HDFC Bank or in developed market like America. Both are of similar nature. The nature of digital transformation has changed substantially. Earlier, the product business was very different in nature, where Indian customers are not willing to spend that much money. We are finding today African customers are willing to spend the similar money as developed market customers. The developed market helps us out in expanding the expectation right, our architectural expectation right. We are now winning the deals of INR 100 crore in a developing market versus developed market.
That's why we, our management team has looked at it that now there's no point of looking at it whether developed market or developing market, and we should not look at it, our engineering teams, our organization to be saying, "Oh, you are working for developed market, I am working for developing market." It creates a caste system within the organization. We stop looking and comparing those two deals. We are saying any customer who is looking for digital transformation and complex enterprise grade digital transformation, we are the right vendor for that. That's why these matrices are now diluted from the investor perspective.
Okay. Thank you. That's helpful.
Yes.
Another question I had was, you know, you did two technology days last year.
Mm-hmm.
One I think in March and one in December. I mean, that was unusual. Normally companies do once a year. Obviously internally, top management is feeling, you know, that we have crossed some milestones as far as technology is concerned, and hence two technology days. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed. I have sort of replayed some of those, you know, because first time you don't understand. It's very impressive. What I wanted to know was, you know, there is this fintech onslaught upon the banks. Banks all over the world are feeling the pressure that, you know, certain parts of their business are getting nibbled away by nimble fintechs.
Now, when you spoke in your most recent technology day, you mentioned that somebody, a bank which is similar to Bajaj Finance in terms of its character, has sort of chosen you over multiple other contenders. Essentially, I mean, if I were to take it one level higher, you are enabling banks to fight the fintechs at one level, or and second is that are you also enabling e-commerce oriented players to sort of acquire bank-like characteristics? I'm asking two things. One is defending the banks against the fintechs at one level. Second, there are e-commerce players who say, "No, no, we can do buy now, pay later, we can do this, we can do that." That again becomes a target area for you. Is that correct?
Is my.
Yeah.
Understanding correct?
That's right. Rajesh, you can comment on it.
Yeah. Thanks, Arun. I think, let me take the second part of the question first. I think you very rightly said that when we, a couple of quarters and years back, we would look at only financial services as a core target market. Last year we announced a deal in Germany, which is the second largest e-commerce player in Germany, OTTO. There we talked about how we are helping them build the payment ecosystem. I think that's something that we are specifically focused in Europe market to look at an e-commerce player and enabling e-commerce player to create that payment capability. We sold a very large deal to OTTO last year, and we announced that in the market. I think that's one. Regarding fintech, I think we are doing a combination of both.
We are helping banks, for example, in one of the Middle East banks, which is right now under implementation. We are doing what we call as a super app, where the bank has tied up with many multiple third parties to offer products. I think we'll be shortly announcing going live of that, right? We are helping banks to collaborate with fintech players as well as five fintech players. It's a combination of both. E-commerce, yes, that's a new target market that we are looking at.
No, thank you. Just to follow up on that. I mean, when I look at you, I mean, the kind of the diverse offerings that you have and the target markets are very large and fast growing, there one feels that. I mean, you know, with such kind of sophistication, one needs to be much bigger. When I look at other, like Finastra or some of the other people, they're so much bigger. What am I missing? With this kind of a cutting-edge technology that you possess, why aren't you much, much bigger than what you currently are?
Just like Finastra, you have given the example, these companies are not built organically. They are built on a platform which is a merger and acquisition platform. I think growth at 20%, 30% growth is a very sustainable growth and calibrated growth. Because banking is a complex market. We cannot take any errors. The way the brand has to be built is zero defect, the security architecture. I think we can grow better. Maybe our 12 products are there. If all the products come to stage five is important, or even 50% six products come. As of now, three products are in stage five. If three more come in, the growth rate will accelerate. We are not concluding the growth rate. Potential is there.
Let's see how it is panning out. As you rightly said, we have composable technologies. Because of composability of the technology, we can apply the same technology for e-commerce player, we can apply the same technology for financial institution, and we can apply the same technology for banking institution and for different organization. Because it's like a backroom of me, it's like a Honda backroom. I created a one chassis on which I can do a multiple model design on the top of it. That's the beauty of Intellect technology architecture, and that's why we wanted two technology days. Because I think the technology are changing so fast in business that investor needs to understand how the technologies we are applying the technology in the environment. Did we expect 33% growth in this quarter?
No, we never said that in even in the month of July or October, I never said that we will be growing 33%. It was a good surprise for us.
No, what I am saying is, like, that day, Banesh's team was talking about, you know, basically disrupting the whole underwriting process and, I mean, it was so impressive to see. What I'm saying is that you people should be sweeping the market with this kind of technology that you have.
You know, I just wanna add to it, Anil. You know, while I did talk to you about it, I think what we are seeing is that there's been a lot of effort over the last many years on the channel front-end side. But when you actually look at it, there is a lot of change that's beginning to happen with existing large institutions with legacy platforms on the back end. They have to refresh and change the back end, because otherwise they don't get the agility they want for digital transformation. What is happening, for example, I gave you the underwriting example, that would actually apply to many other businesses that we do, where we are actually changing the core back-end platform for customers. But like Arun said, with a very zero defect, with a very high level of, you know, security and capability.
I think to do that, sometimes we have to modernize these platforms in stages. I think the core bank is also coming to terms with trying to understand their ability to be able to implement change in their organization across the broad spectrum of products that we have. Now, we built this composable platform across products where they can start with something and keep adding other capabilities on top of it. Now, I gave you the insurance example where my main competition is still the old legacy policy admin systems. I'm actually taking underwriting out of it and actually trying to therefore change and digitally transform the insurance business away from their old legacy platform because they can't manage those back-end platforms as easily as today we could offer them, you know, in our cloud sort of composable architecture that we talked about on Technology Day.
No, great. Thank you so much. I think I have used up more than my allotted quota.
Yes.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks, Anil. Next we have Mr. Manish Dhariwal from Fiducia Capital. Manish?
Yeah. Good afternoon and thank you so much for this opportunity. I have been you know associated with this organization for the last maybe couple of years now. I'm also you know participating in the way this organization actually is flowering. I go back to like you know 2014 when you had taken the decision of demerging it from the original Polaris company, and then you know you had that vision that you know I wanna basically make a product company and obviously like you know it has been a very eventful journey, I would say. Well, see a lot of it like you know Mr. Anil Sarin in the previous question also shared.
See, what we understand is that, today, Intellect has been able to create a very huge bouquet of products. Each of these products are, you know, like, the worldwide competition and the big companies in the global market like billion companies. You know, here we are in our organization, we have so many diverse products. Also we are a product company. You know, the growth again is like not a percentage basis. You know, it is the growth grows in a different progression.
If you could just kind of, you know, give us a flavor of that, you know, when are the these diverse verticals that we have, meaning what is holding us from all of these products, we are across the world, you know, like we are 97 countries. Why is it that that base was still so small? I'll again repeat that.
We all want to be big, so including you and me all wanted to be big. I think we need to calibrate and step-by-step approach of looking at it. We don't want to make any accident, I mentioned to you. We want to calibrate. The simple process for you to understand, we said we have three leadership quadrant products. Leadership quadrant means stage five product, which is a stage five where we have a referenceability, we are best in class. We are last 2% is 200% has been taken care of. Now, these products are giving high, very high deal wins. Now we are looking at the next three set of products which we want to bring into the Stage 4 to Stage 5. That's it. Like payment system going live in Canada makes us credible in U.S. VAM, escrow getting into U.S.
Once they go live in U.S., it becomes credible. VAM will move from stage two to stage four now. Stage four to stage five will be only when it goes live in U.S., because people want a local reference in the country.
Correct.
Out of 12 products, suite which we have, now the simple equation is that why shouldn't each product do me $20 million license revenue per year, it becomes $240 million dollar license revenue.
Right.
Simple math from an investor perspective can be this. The same math as a Chief Executive Officer, I will have the same math for my leaders which are running. There's no difference that will be there, but it's a question of journey. When you are stage three, you will do $3 million-$4 million a year. Then you are at Stage 4, you'll do $7 million-$8 million a year. Then you are in Stage 4, you'll do $20 million a year. Stage 5 product will get $20 million a year, maybe. Then the market scenarios are there. Sometimes market is hot, some market is poor, budgets are there, budgets are not there. Those years of the drought can also happen during this journey of a $20 million license per product, but that potential is there.
I mean, the point is, since you supported the company for so many years, I think that we are excited about it. We have built up a design thinking culture of delivering the products so beautifully. There's a huge opportunity for all of us to enjoy this India-leading fintech player. We say eight, zero, one, two. Why do I call it eight, zero, one, two? I don't know. Did I share it? I always believe that the financial technology of the world should come from a latitude of 80, 18 and 12 degrees. That's the latitude where we build the financial technologies of the world.
Okay.
When will it happen? That's a kind of a conviction we have in 2013 when we set up a design center that we will be building the financial technology. Few people believed in us, few people didn't believe in us. It's okay.
Fair enough. Look, thank you for sharing these insights.
Yeah.
Can you also tell us as to, you know, how is this INR 100 crore AIF fund that we had set up? Meaning how is that shaping up, and what opportunities is that bringing to us?
As of now, it's a legal process going on, application filing, SEBI approvals. It's an issue that's staged right now. Nothing much happening.
you know, what's our vision? Like, you know, how is it gonna be helping us in our development as a, maybe a mega organization?
That's right. We moved in this, if you look at slide number four, where we say technologies plus data, product. Product plus cloud, platform. Platform plus FinTech players and an associated company, marketplace. That marketplace as soon as in next 18-24 months we move towards marketplace, that time AIF fund will be effective there. Last time people have misunderstood this AIF fund in that we are doing something tomorrow or day after. I mentioned clearly in the last message that it's a part of CEIR agenda which we are setting up now, and it's not a hurried situation. It's a question of some technologies, spaces where we have white spaces. We like to invest in them to the AIF fund, so that we don't have to invest our own R&D dollar in driving those technologies.
We will take minority interest in those companies and leverage those technologies for our marketplace.
Okay. Wonderful. How is our GeM opportunity kind of bringing us? Meaning, where are we on that? Meaning, what kind of revenue build-up's happening there?
I think GeM, a lot of questions could be there. I think some of the investors I'm seeing, they are going to the websites and looking at the order book numbers. I want to clarify as those order book numbers are bid numbers, not order book. Bid numbers, when the customer bid, that get published in a website of INR 1,76,000 crore, which is done. A lot of investors are calculating how much is the GeM revenue and most of the revenues are maybe coming from GeM. That's not true. Our GeM growth is happening very well. Lot of adoption is happening in the market. Substantially, buyer market is getting adopted. Government is now we built up a credibility that IAS officers lobby are saying this is the best way to purchase.
It's reducing their cycle time of purchase from 6 months to 2 weeks. They are committing themselves because they don't have to go through any government process of purchasing which there were earlier so much difficulty to purchase. That momentum is happening on acceptance of IAS lobby or bureaucrats to accept this is our best platform to have. Our technology teams have done phenomenal job of wiring the GFR rules, government purchase rules. There are hundreds and thousands of those rules to be embedded into GeM, and that's the complexity which has been put together in the GeM. The growth is natural, but our revenue is, as you know, if any system like that, it will be on link to the volume discounts. Up to INR 50,000 crore, there's a one discount value. One value we get.
After INR 50,000 crore, we get second value. After INR 100,000 crores, we get third value. Another INR 50,000 crore, we'll get fourth value. The average will come down from a perspective of revenue realization, which is fair from the deal perspective, because our efforts also are lesser when the volume goes up on the platform. That's the current system, but we are delighted to see that it's making a difference to India.
That's wonderful. In terms of billing to us, meaning, is it quarterly billing or, meaning, I mean, how is Intellect getting the revenue or the income from this particular initiative?
It's a transaction basis, a basis point on the order book on the system.
Okay, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, sir, and all the very best. We're all awaiting, you know, how we become a mega organization ourselves.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you, Manish.
Yeah, just one minute. I mean, just one second.
Yes.
See, Manish, there is one question which you obviously are very perceptive investor, so this will help also understand the AIF thing in a different perspective and which is very important, which has been central to our thinking. Tarun mentioned about the ecosystem, right? About building going from products to marketplace, and all of that, for which you need an ecosystem. No? Let me give an example which you can touch and feel. For example, you know, as we grow, we need, let's say a fingerprint recognition system, for example. Now, we don't necessarily want to build the capabilities for that, right? So we could either buy out a company, which is the Wipro's, you know, string of pearls strategy, so they keep on buying companies.
We could take a stake in a company at, for a much lesser value of cash outflows, and then still direct the company towards, you know, enabling our ecosystem, right? If you link it to the question answer I gave some time back about the capital allocation, thinking of the organization, this is essentially very efficient way of allocating capital and getting the same benefits. That is the thinking behind all of this. This is obviously a medium-term thing, you know, it won't happen immediately, all of that. Instead of buying out companies at a certain cash outflow to the organization, for a much lesser amount, we'll be able to influence an ecosystem as we build it. Two very different strategies, but essentially on the capital. Efficient allocation of capital is the driving force behind it.
Okay. Wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you. .
Thank you, Manish. Next, we have Mr. Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Rahul?
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. Just quick, two quick question. Firstly, if we follow the total count of the IBS deals, which they usually publish in their annual survey, we have seen that there is not a significant increase in the total number of their deal, and it's been hovering around that 350 number, plus minus 20, 30 the last many years. However, we have been consistently growing over this last four, five years, which means it has come at the cost of winning more market share. When you think this might come as a constraint for growth for you, are you seeing there's a significant improvement in market expansion as well?
Rahul, we are just not touching any limits. As of now, we are just. If you have a 12 product with $250 million revenue number, none of the product is taking $500 million market share. That is not a constraint right now for winning the deals in the market. The percentage of deal is important, coverage is important. Many markets we are present, very skeletal presence. We even say 93 countries presence. We are not really present in 93 countries. We are present because we have implemented the solution, we've won the deal there. We may present to the partners there. I think our investment in each country by country, that makes a expansion of the deals because of the superior technology.
Right.
I think, Rahul, just to add to what you said, the other data point, Rahul, to look at is, look at the same, what analysts are saying, buy versus build. How the buy percentages are growing. That will also give you another aspect from a third party independent source. The market is expanding from that perspective for the product business and the platform business.
Manish, any number you or Banesh can throw in terms of what is.
I presented for commercial banking in my technology deck. You can look at it. I can send it to you also.
Yeah. I mean, my question was in terms of percentage growth, is there any expansion in the growth of the market that we are looking at?
No, that's what I said. Now the buy versus build is growing. That's a data point for you to look at that, for us, the space is expanding from that perspective.
Okay. Understood. Secondly, specific to the U.S. market and also in the light of these two deals that happened, one with Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase, possibly with Ensono and Thought Machine. Were we part of such, you know, opportunity? If not, why not? If yes, what was the experience?
Rahul, let's keep working on it. We are doing a few deals which are more than $50 million deals. I think management has only finite bandwidth to take care of it. We have to try choose our battles. The Thought Machine and these deals of a new fintech world, we are the only fintech. They are not profitable company. We are the only profitable company in this space with generating a decent margin of 26% EBITDA and net cash into the company. All these companies are buying the deals here. We don't know the contours of these deals of J.P. Morgan Chase Versus Thought Machine, whether who is invested where and what kind of strategic elements are there.
I think we are a straightforward player, keep contributing in digital transformation to the banks and keep working 20%-30% growth year-on-year. I think let's not build up overexpectations on the team, but it will be consistent. In one of the conversation I mentioned, I got inspired from HDFC. The consistent performance, I love it compared to any very high performance. That's what the story we are following right now.
Right. Just lastly, if you could share more thoughts. Of course, you have alluded about, you know, two North American deals which has helped your visibility significantly in the North American market. But in general, overall sense, product-wise or market-wise and our opportunity, if you could share that, how that market is playing out versus what it was, let's say a year or two years ago.
Yeah, U.S. is a difficult market for us because U.S. has all the players, all the markets, and they don't like an Indian player to come there and sell. Or European player. Even European player has not succeeded in U.S. market. It was a difficult journey for Manish to take on that head-on bet with local players. He spotted a white space. Uppili Srinivasan and Manish spotted a white space. Manish spotted a white space in that whole. There they are, now they are able to establish a first footprint in U.S. market and their solution cloud. American market is a very, once you sell and implement for high players, suddenly market can shoot up substantially. That's what we are seeing.
We took some time to identify what is the right space in which we can position ourselves as a company in America. That required a huge investment. I think we are seeing some silver lining right now.
Now you've seen that we do learn and expand. It's very important to make every implementation a successful one. It's you've seen me always go deep into the accounts. Each of these accounts are marketplaces, literally. These are very, very large banks which we are breaking through in. Keep your support on with us. We will make it large.
Sure. Thank you for the color and best of luck and congrats on very strong numbers.
Thank you, Rahul.
Thanks, Rahul.
Next Arun, we have Kunjan from First Global. Kunjan?
Yeah. Hi, can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah, Kunjan.
Hi. First of all, congratulations on the great set. Just a quick question. There was a Q&A in the chat box. Someone asked about the low promoter, decreasing promoter holding. I think there's a confusion. Because of the RSUs and the ESOPs, the percentage of promoter holding is decreasing. I wanted to understand what is the annual, you know, equity dilution in terms of RSUs and ESOPs in our company. I know it is important for us to pay the employees since we are a private company and we are doing great in our business.
I just wanted to understand what is the annual dilution, and to, you know, support that, could we have a option for buybacks, which usually U.S. companies does, so that our total overall equity position is intact and the dilution doesn't take place.
Yeah. I think it's you can take it as a total 10% of the ESOPs, RSUs, which AGM has cleared. Those are the RSUs which are there with us. 2015, 2016, 2018 schemes we have RSUs available. If you take annualized basis, it will be between 1.5%-2.5% would be the increase. Okay. That was the reason of promoter dilution. Okay. I didn't understand promoter dilution, so it's a percentage of it. Thank you very much for updating me. That's 1.5%-2.5%.
Just to follow up on that, I mean, can we have a, you know, a buyback of shares so that the overall equity is not diluted for everyone, for shareholders, for the promoters, for FII and everyone? Just your thoughts on that.
Sure. No, sure, we'll do it as soon as we are generating more cash, sustained manner. We can look at it, buybacks. Not immediately, but we are, our board is looking at it. At appropriate time when the sufficient cash is there, buyback can be looked at.
Got it. Thank you. Thank you. That's all.
Yeah. Praveen, that's okay? Or somebody else is there?
Praveen, you're on mute.
Sorry.
Praveen, you're on mute.
Praveen? Has he gone?
He's on mute.
He's on mute, I think.
Praveen, you have to mute.
Yeah. There's another candidate, Vaibhav. I think he's there. You can ask the question, Vaibhav.
Yes. Next is available, Vaibhav. Yes, Vaibhav, please ask your question.
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Just two small questions from my side. One is that if you can give us the number of sales people for last three years sequentially, just wanted to know the trend there, direct sales people that we have. That's first question. Second, on the revenue, basically, you have a different revenue recognition model for different operating structure like cloud and SaaS and everything. From the perspective of the fact that for cloud and SaaS, you know, whatever technology changes that happens, I think the liability rests with us to continuously update the product.
Absolutely.
Right. If there is a substantial technological change that is there, then probably we might need to invest a lot in the product. How that is taken care of in the pricing? Because pricing might be fixed upfront itself for next six years, seven years, or what is the contractual period? Just wanted to understand these two things, that would be it from my side.
Because the contract is signed on six years basis, even my stack and scope is also defined in that six years. Normally we, for that period of time, the technology shift which has happened will not be available to that customer. That's a typical way of managing the cloud. If something is required, he has to pay separately because as a contract, we have both the things there.
Okay.
Price and fixed scope.
Mm-hmm.
That's how we're protecting ourself on commercial interest. On your sales system, I'll send it to you later on.
Okay. Okay. No problem. I think that's it from my side. Thank you.
Thank you. Now it's 6:30 P.M. Let's close the call here.
Arun, can we have a couple of more questions?
No, no, it's 6:30. I have another call to go, so. Thank you, everybody. We are sorry that I'm not able to take all the questions. No, please write to us and your all the questions will be replied by us. Thanks for joining today.
Thank you, Arun, and the management teams.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now you can unmute. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, everyone. You can log off now.
Yeah, yeah.