Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to LatentView Analytics Limited earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant line will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing the star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Miss Asha Gupta from EY Investor Relations. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Thank you, Steve. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Q4 and full- year FY 2024 earnings call of LatentView Analytics Limited . The results and presentation have already been mailed to you, and you can also view them on the website www.latentview.com. In case anyone does not have the copy of press release or presentation, or you're not marked in the mailing list, please do write to us, and we will be happy to send you the same. To take us through the results today and to answer your questions, we have the CEO of the company, Rajan Sethuraman, whom we will be referring to as Rajan, and we have the CFO of the company, Rajan Venkatesan, whom we will be referring to as Raj. This is just to avoid the confusion while doing the transcript.
We will start the call with a brief update on the business, which will be given by Rajan, and then followed by financials given by Raj. As usual, I would like to remind you that anything that is mentioned on the call that reflects any outlook for the future or which can be construed as forward-looking statement, must be viewed in conjunction with the risks and uncertainties that we face. These risks and uncertainties are included, but not limited to, what we have mentioned in the prospectus filed with SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find on the website. Having said that, I will now hand over the floor to Rajan. Over to you, Rajan.
Thanks, Asha, and thank you all for joining this investor call. Wanted to first of all kick this off by saying that this year, while it has been a bit of a challenging year for most organizations, we are very happy with the kind of performance that we have been able to put out. Close to 19% growth under uncertain economic conditions. I'm sure that many of you are following the results of other companies in the space, and you've been witnessing the impact that the macroeconomic scenario has been having, right, on these organizations.
Of course, in quarter three, we were a little bit more optimistic about how quarter four could turn out for us, given the conversations that were happening at that point in time. I do have to indicate that some of those conversations are taking even longer to transpire, and therefore, our quarter four quarter-on-quarter growth has been only of the order of 3.6%, though the year-on-year has come in at 21.7%. Overall, I feel that the general sluggishness and uncertainty, while it is resolving, it is still gonna take some more time for it to play out.
We are energized by the fact that all the renewals that we want to do by the end of the year, they are all done, and we are able to start the year on a fairly solid footing. But of course, the challenge around winning large discretionary projects continues to remain. I think that the confidence in undertaking initiatives that are anchored around new ideas and innovation will take some more time. There will be, of course, a lot of pilots and experimentation that will happen. For us as well, that has played out well in the fact that we have won six new additions to our account list, where projects have been kicked off.
We also saw a lot of new initiatives on a smaller scale being kicked off by our existing accounts and our existing stakeholders. So all of that gives confidence that the general interest and experimentation is still on, especially around the areas such as generative AI and leveraging the entire large language model and GPU technology that is available. On that note, some of the highlights that we had this quarter, other than the additions to the client list itself, we saw a good traction in terms of our generative AI solutions and our pilots. We were able to kick off a lot more.
Our LASER and AI PenPal solutions continue to find traction in the marketplace, and there are new conversations that we are adding to the list with every passing week. We also formed a partnership with NVIDIA on the generative AI tech stack. You all know that NVIDIA has been the leader in terms of the GPU technology and the chipsets, and there is a huge waiting line for NVIDIA GPUs in general, given a huge amount of interest that the world is witnessing on large language model and GenAI in particular.
NVIDIA has also been looking at how they can create more stickiness by not just doing the chip on the hardware part, but also creating a tech stack that can enable the usage of the GPUs to deliver on use cases that can give business impact. So this tech stack is what we are leveraging in the partnership with with NVIDIA, and we have been working on multiple use cases with clients, as well as some internal pilots. And early results are very encouraging, especially in areas where you need a huge amount of compute to handle streaming data and create real-time analytics and insights from there on. So this NVIDIA partnership is something that we are really excited about. We also launched a marketing analytics center of excellence on horizontal.
We have been doing a lot of work in marketing analytics over the years. We felt that, on the back of all of that, it's a good time to put our arms around some of the latest and greatest that is happening in that space, especially around full funnel growth marketing and how we can look at a B2B company for revenue generation through marketing mechanisms. These will be areas of focus for the marketing analytics team. We are also going to be leveraging GenAI solutions for creating that kind of use cases and value propositions. You have already been updated about the acquisition of Decision Point . We are still in the final stages of diligence and paperwork.
Expect that this could take another three, four weeks for us to conclude. The last couple of weeks, I and some of our leadership teams were in the US and in Mexico, meeting up with clients of Decision Point as well, and we were very energized by the conversations that we have had with them. In terms of one, just the stickiness and the quality of work and the impact that Decision Point has been delivering, but more importantly, the synergy opportunities that come about because of interest in the solutions that LatentView has built in the area of R&D and innovation, in the area of supply chain, on-shelf availability. These were solutions that were of interest to the stakeholders and clients of Decision Poin t as well.
On the flip side, we also see a great deal of interest among our sales and client partner personnel in bringing the RGM solution that Decision Point has built into the clients that we work with on the consumer packaged goods side. So overall, excited by the progress there, and we are expecting that more will happen, right, in the coming quarters on the back of Decision Point. In fact, if I were to kind of put out our projections and expectations in a two-year time frame, we are expecting that our consumer packaged goods practice could potentially get to about 20% of our revenue on the back of this acquisition and further investments that we will make in that area.
Finally, I just wanted to wind up with one other exciting thing that happened this quarter. We were selected as the Partner of the Year by the International Myeloma Foundation, and I was in New York a couple of weeks back to receive the award. Very excited about that because while a lot of the work that we do for our clients is in the area of top line and bottom line impact, given that they are for-profit organization, the International Myeloma Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that has been focused on helping patients diagnosed with myeloma to one understand their scenario and context better, and then start preparing for how they can handle the situation.
Shortening what we call the time to hope, so that they can find the way by which they can get back on the recovery track. So we have been helping build the kind of data platform that is necessary to assimilate information from multiple sources, so that doctors and caregivers and patients can get a full 360-degree view of everything that impacts them, right, on their journey to recovery. So this, in some sense, is really a life or death type of challenge that we have been tackling. And I think this is a matter of great pride for all of us, you know, that we have been able to impact this in a meaningful fashion.
So more to come along those lines in the quarters, hopefully working with the International Myeloma Foundation and other similar organizations. Yeah, with that, I will pass it on to Raj to touch upon the financial highlights.
Thank you, Rajan. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us in our earnings call. This will be the last earnings call for the financial year FY 2024. We are happy to sort of end the fiscal on a strong note, right? While I know at the beginning of the year, I think we had planned for a much faster rate of growth. You know, like Rajan just elaborated, the overall macroeconomic environment continued to be fairly challenging through the year, and therefore, we are particularly delighted that despite the overall sentiment being quite muted even now, we managed to deliver a 19% growth year-on-year basis.
Traditionally, Q4 of our fiscal is in some sense it's a bit of a soft quarter for us, right? Because Q3, which is the last quarter of the calendar year, tends to be the strongest. And in that sense, Q4 is generally soft compared to the Q3 quarter. We're happy to report even despite that, you know, overall trend, we were still able to clock a decent 3.6% growth on a quarterly basis, and a 21.6% growth on a year-on-year basis, right? In constant currency terms, we grew by about 3.8%.
I think for this particular quarter, we've had overall a bit of a depreciation on the dollar compared to the previous quarter, right? So that also had a little bit of an impact on overall rupee-denominated growth, right? In terms of the other income, our other income for this particular quarter stood at about INR 15.8 crore, a decrease of about 31% on a sequential basis, which is fairly large. This was primarily driven by the forex losses. These are essentially loans that have been given by LatentView India to its group companies in Europe as well as the US.
We had a gain of close to about INR 5.5 crore in the previous quarter, which was offset by, in this particular quarter, we had a loss of about INR 1.5 crore on account of the reinstatement of offset loans, and that sort of offset, you know, the other income that we clocked for Q3. But from an operating standpoint, EBITDA for this quarter stood at INR 40.4 crore, reflecting a growth of about 9.8% on a quarter-on-quarter basis, right? And a 34.2% on a year-on-year basis, right?
We are also happy to report that we, you know, we sort of delivered to the promise that we had put out at the beginning of the year. That our EBITDA, you know, margins will sort of inch back towards the historical levels of 25% plus levels, right, by the end of this quarter. Of course, we would have ideally liked this to be largely driven by revenue growth. But, you know, we've been able to get to these levels through a combination of revenue growth as well as, I would say, strong fiscal discipline that we were able to exercise. Plus some of the operating efficiency that we were also able to see in Q4 of the current fiscal, right?
One of the other factors that also led to, in some sense, the EBITDA margin improvement was some level of rationalization that we had done in some of the GTM investments that we'd made in Europe, where, you know, some of those, you know, based on performance reviews, we did some bit of rationalization in our go-to-market spend specifically. Which also resulted in the margin expansion in this particular quarter, right? Our PAT for this quarter stood at about INR 45.3 crores, reflecting a decline of about 2.8% quarter-on-quarter, and a growth of about 32% on a year-on-year basis, right?
On a full year basis, revenue stood at about INR 640 crores, reflecting a growth of 18.9%. As we had outlined at the beginning of the year, the endeavor was to drive growth in the region of 25%-30%, even if that meant that, you know, we had to sacrifice margins a little bit. I think some of these actions that we took at the beginning of the year, where, you know, we went ahead of the curve and we made a lot of significant investments. We've also reevaluated and recalibrated some of those investments that we've made. We believe that the current EBITDA margin levels are sort of sustainable going forward as well.
If we're able to repeat the revenue growth that we clocked in the current year. In terms of the overall geographical split of revenues, US continues to be the dominant geography, contributing 95% of overall revenues. Europe contributed about 1.4% to the overall revenues, right? But we are seeing good traction in Europe. Rajesh spoke about revenue growth being also driven by some new logo additions. We continue to see new logos in both Europe and US, and which is quite promising, right, for us, right? Ideally, going forward, we would want in the coming fiscal, we would want Europe and APAC to contribute at least 5%-6% of our overall revenues.
And we will, we'll be able to give a better outlook on the contribution of Europe as we get into FY 2025, right? Overall, in terms of our balance sheet, our cash and cash equivalents, including the IPO money, sorry, excluding the IPO money, stood at about INR 1,100+ crores as of March 31, 2024, right? The Decision Point acquisition will be funded through a combination of money that we had raised through the IPO. So you would recollect that we had earmarked about INR 147 crores out of the IPO money towards inorganic expansion. So we will be fully utilizing that as a part of the Decision Point acquisition.
Incrementally, the additional outflow that will happen, which will be close to about INR 180 crore, will be funded entirely out of the company's internal cash accruals, right? Our overall headcount for the quarter stood at about 1,280 people. As we've always highlighted, we will continue to invest in people. We onboarded close to about 133 people from campuses in this particular quarter, right? And as we head into FY 2025, we're fairly optimistic that some of the relationships that we've built through the course of FY 2024 will start yielding results, and our strategy will play out positively. With that, I'm gonna hand it back to Asha, and we can open the floor for Q&A.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handset while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Vimal Ramdas Goyal from Alchemy Capital Management. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, and, congratulations on a good set of numbers. Sir, my first question is overall on the growth in the margin outlook that you provided. In a very turbulent year, you've been able to sort of grow at high teens in dollar terms. So just on the trajectory, and especially after the acquisition that you've taken, you look at the synergies that we will have that will prove to be an additional lever. Maybe the environment could bottom out in the first half, so in the second half, we could see material acceleration. Any thoughts on that? And the second question is on margins.
Given the fact that, you know, Decision Point operates at 30% EBITDA, we front-loaded some of our investments, and despite that, I think you mentioned that the margins could remain at these levels. So if you can just maybe clarify that, your comment on EBITDA margins, was it including the acquisition or excluding that? Thanks.
Yeah. Hey, Vimal. Rajan here, and thanks for the question. Yeah, in terms of the growth that we are expecting, obviously it's good to be optimistic, but you will also recall that when we started out the previous year, the expectation was kind of similar, that the first half will be a little separate and things will pick up in the second half of the year. Now, reality has been a bit more challenging than that, with the uncertainty and the sluggishness extending right throughout the year. And at this point in time, the general commentary, I mean, that you will be hearing from other companies as well, is that we are still not out of the woods, and then it will take some time.
As I said, we are energized by the fact that all of our ongoing work has been renewed in entirety, and we have a good foundation. The pipeline building, though, I would have to admit that it could have been much better in comparison to where we are today. There are a few opportunities that are large, $2 million and more, but the larger opportunities, especially if these are new initiatives, they are taking a lot more time to fructify. And the expectation is that we will start to see some acceleration, right, in the coming quarters. So, I would say that, you know, we are still cautiously optimistic, right, about how things can pan out in this year.
Of course, the addition of new capabilities such as revenue growth management, right, that is coming on the back of the Decision Point acquisition, plus also the investments that we are making into the marketing analytics horizontal, the NVIDIA partnership, the Fabric, Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, right? These are all things that we expect will pan out well for us in terms of creating new conversations and opportunity, and therefore, we should see an uptick, right, on the back of all of these things. So yeah, that's where we are, right, in terms of still cautiously optimistic about things will pick up. I will request Rajan to comment on the margin impact, right, of the acquisition.
So specifically on the margin impact of the acquisition. So obviously, while Decision Point does operate at, you know, 30%+ EBITDA margin level, so definitely in that sense, the acquisition will be EBITDA accretive for us once we start consolidating these numbers, right? But again, we'll also have to appreciate that, you know, at the current size, Decision Point is roughly about one-seventh of the size of Latent View, right? So therefore, it will not meaningfully move the needle, right, in terms of an overall EBITDA expansion, right? Now, when it comes to our own organic, I would say...
In terms of our own organic EBITDA goals for the next year, right, our goal would be to sort of stick to this band, right? Which is where we've operated in between 21%-23% for this year, right? We will still continue to invest for growth, right? And we will keep looking to invest in capability building as well through the year, right? Not just in... So I think from a go-to-market standpoint, I would say a lot of the investments that we wanted to make are already fully baked in, right? This is. I'm talking about account managers, I'm talking about farmers and hunters that we have in the market. So most of those investments are all fully baked in.
Where we may still continue to incrementally invest would be on the capability building side, where we are either building some of the new-age solutions. You know, Rajan spoke about the GenAI, some of the interesting solutions that we are building. It could be in partnerships, it could be in marketing events, right? There we will, you know, be, I would say, fronting some of the investments, in the beginning of the year, it's in the, in the first half, because that's the, that's the only way we'll be able to build momentum and, and pipeline as we get into the fiscal, right? So I would say definitely for the first half, we will continue to remain in this band of 21%-23%, right?
Our growth, you know, sort of comes back to the 6%-8%, the 10% sequential quarter growth. We should be back at the 25% EBITDA margin levels towards the end of the year. But definitely for the first half, the first half of the year, we want to remain in the band of 21%-23%.
Understood, gentlemen. Thank you so much, and all the very best.
Thanks so much.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mohit Jain from Anand Rathi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, sir, on the growth part in FY 2025 versus 2024, so if you could help us give or maybe from a pipeline perspective, you spoke about it, that pipeline is not as great as you would have expected. But can you give some perspective on a YOY basis, how is it looking? And also if you could comment a little bit on the TCV side, like is it up, down, flattish? So how should we see numbers panning out in FY 2025?
Yeah. So, hey, Mohit, Rajan. The pipeline is obviously larger than definitely at the start of the last year or even at the midpoint of last year. What I meant is that we would have liked to see more large initiative opportunities, right, in the pipeline. Much, much of the conversation still seems to be incremental in nature, and that is where I think the uptick will start happening when we have even larger conversations that get into the pipeline.
But that, having said that, it is where we are at this point in time would be that, the confirmed revenue that we have, on or the order book that's 100% confirmed, plus the extensions that we are in the second half of the year, largely, they already add up to more than what we have done as revenue, right, for the last year. Because the run rate that we have at the end of quarter is really what is going in into the next year. So, we are a tad above the revenue that we would have done for the last quarter.
The pipeline at this point in time, if I take the pipeline and then apply probabilities on that, and then I look at what that will get us, it will give us a further growth of close to 20%, right, of what we have done for the last year. Now, of course, there is this job of converting the pipeline, and then there is the job of adding more into the pipeline as well. So in some sense, based on all this, what guidance we can provide at this point in time, it will probably be around a similar kind of a growth rate, right, compared to what we have seen in the last year.
Now, the expectation would be that we'll be able to fill in more into the pipeline, as well as improve the chances of conversion, right, as we go along. Now, some of the things that I talked about earlier in terms of the investments that we are making in the marketing analytics, for example, the fabric ecosystem and the partnerships with them, these are all expected to provide more fillip. What I am saying right now, though, just the organic part of it, we have not factored in the revenue that will come in from the acquisition. Of course, the inorganic acquisition related revenue will be all on top of what I'm talking about. So, that's where we are at this point.
Organically, we should be very similar to FY 2024 from a growth standpoint and also from margin standpoint?
That's correct, yeah. Broadly, that's the kind of guidance that we are able to understand.
Right. And second, we were very positive on Q4 at the beginning of the quarter. So and while we ended up slightly slower than what we anticipated, so is there some cancellation involved here, or do you think it is just the elongation of deals, which is, which is resulting into slower growth compared to... Or maybe just a gap of three months, the growth is slower in Q4 versus what we anticipated earlier?
Yeah, there's no cancellation. We are not seeing any adverse developments at all. It's just that the optimism that we had in the first half of the year and even getting into Q3, some of that is taking much longer to really convert. So we were expecting that we would close a few more opportunities and then commence work on them in Q4 itself. What I see right now is that these have taken longer. Some of these are very interesting opportunities. In fact, there are at least two, three of them, which are at least $500,000+ in terms of the revenue side.
As of today, I mean, for the first quarter, we see that the growth could again be back in the 6%-7% range, quarter-on-quarter. But of course, we have to... I mean, we have, like, you know, a month and a half, right, kind of like remaining in terms of getting some of the work underway. We'll have better clarity on how quarter two and the rest of the year pans out, right, over the next couple of months. But at this point in time, I would say that, yeah, it's the Q4 being tepid is largely around the decisions getting delayed and no adverse development, right, in terms of ongoing.
And last for Raj. So we will be integrating from Q1 for the entire quarter. Is that correct?
So we will not be able to get the full benefit of Q1, Mohit, if I can answer it correctly. Our, yeah, our target date for closing was initially around the fifteenth of May, but there are some regulatory approvals that need to come in, and some of these things are sort of beyond the control of you know the companies, right? So it may take us a week or two more to get this done. So hopefully our endeavor is to at least get one month of results consolidated with, we start seeing the full benefit of the consolidation of the acquisition from Q2 onwards.
Understood, sir. Thank you, and all the best for 2025.
Thank you.
Thank you. Participants who wish to ask questions may press star and one at this time. The next question is from the line of Srinath V from Bellwether Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Congratulations on the good set of numbers. Wanted to understand, you know, how did Decision Point perform in Q4 for the full- year? If you could share some numbers and, you know, how are we progressing on integrating Decision Point with our CPG business? Our CPG business probably did not have a kind of suitable performance that we would have expected at the beginning of the year. So how are you looking at it? And, from my understanding of Decision Point, do they have the kind of capabilities for developed markets, or are their products more suited for developing markets, where we may also have some, you know, sales network where we can take them to?
So can you kind of explain how Decision Point and our CPG business will move forward, say, with a kind of a three-year outlook? That would be great. Thanks.
... Srinath, I'll sort of take that first question on the full- year performance, right? So this is something that we had also indicated when we did the press conference for, you know, on the back of the acquisition announcement. So there for the full- year, their last fiscal, their revenue was close to about $12.8 million in revenue. And their margins, like we've mentioned, were in excess of 30%, right? So that's what they recorded for the whole of last fiscal, right.
They are, you know, of course, from an outgroup standpoint, you know, given the smaller base and also the fact that they operate in fairly high growth areas, right, of RGM as well as GenAI, the expectation is that they should be able to grow at a much faster rate than the LatentView growth rates, right? So, you know, we expect them to continue to grow at, you know, anywhere between 25%-30%. However, to your point, right, on whether how much of that their current solutions and sort of services that they render in LatAm markets, how much of that can be replicated in the US markets? I think that's specifically the area where LatentView will sort of come in.
I'll let Rajan talk a little more on the go-to-market activities that we are already sort of jointly pursuing, as well as some of the initial, I would say, feedback that we are getting from joint prospecting that we are doing. But we believe that the solutions that they built, while historically they've grown on the back of their strength in Latam, they should be able to replicate some of that success in our focus markets of US and Europe on the back of our go-to-market teams.
Yeah. On the integration, there has been progress that we have been making already over the last month, month and a half. In fact, I don't know whether I mentioned this earlier, but I and Krishnan Venkata, our Chief Client Officer, were in the US and in Mexico, meeting with their clients and also their personnel over the last couple of weeks. And we were very energized by what we saw. There's a great deal of interest amongst Decision Point's current clients on the capabilities that we bring to the table around R&D and innovation, and around supply chain and on-shelf availability. Likewise, there's a great deal of interest within our teams on the RGM capability, right, that we can take into our existing accounts.
So from an integration perspective, we have already put a structure in place where Ravi Shankar, who is the founder and CEO of Decision Point, will take on the overall responsibility for the CPG practice. We have deputed one of our top delivery person into managing the combined delivery, right, of the CPG organization, right, on the back of his acquisition. In addition to that, we are also allowing for full overlap of sales and revenue credit between the two teams, so that there is absolutely no friction between the two organizations in terms of pursuing opportunities in the market. Jointly going to market, where we are able to pitch the full suite of solutions, right, that we're able to bring to the table.
And making sure that we are actually getting the synergy benefits, right, of the relationships as well as the capabilities that have been built by both the organizations. So I'm expecting that the integration will benefit from the structure and the incentive and the other mechanisms that we have put in place. And we should be able to see some rapid acceleration on the growth of the CPG practice, right, on the back of that. Of course, this is all planned. We do need to execute well, but that's what we are all here for, right? And we'll be focused on this from the day one.
So you believe that this product can be basically taken to developed markets as is? You know, because it's a, it's a product stack, right, in that sense. So that, that's where I wanted to kind of quiz you a bit.
Yeah, Srinath. So it's a solution. I wouldn't put it as a product at this point in time. I mean, what they have built is an RGM capability, which is a combination of the frameworks and approaches that they have built, plus the IP that they have created, right, on analysis, around pricing, around promotions, pack size optimization, right, and so on. So, it is still being offered in a services model by Decision Point as well, but the IP that they have built, which helps them deliver on that, is a fairly strong IP. This apart, there is a solution called BeagleGPT, which is leveraging large language models and operates within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. But to deliver the insights and the results of the analytics, right, to the decision makers, the end decision makers.
So it's a fairly strong combination of solutions, accelerators, and IP, right, that enables the delivery of services. So that's what we have been talking to with our clients as well. Many of our clients are today in the US and in Europe, and our teams are very energized by the early conversations that they have been having. RGM is a fairly important topic for most CPG organizations, irrespective of where they might be located today, right, from a geography standpoint. If you're able to demonstrate a strong capability in that area, there is quite a bit of traction. That's what we are seeing in our early conversations. The expectation is that there'll be a good pipeline, right, of real opportunity that we can build and convert going forward.
Perfect. Just a last question. How do we see inorganic going forward? You know, is it that we would kind of pause looking at... I remember we have a team looking at prospective companies. Do we pause and work on integration and come back 12, 18 months later? Or it's a much more parallel process, given that-
... other parts of our business may have some interesting synergies with other, you know, prospective companies, maybe, you know, in industrials or data engineering or so on and so forth. So how do you see inorganic opportunities, you know, now going forward, given that we have had a significant recent deployment?
It will be a parallel process, Srinath. We do not intend to take our eyes off the opportunity funnel from an organic standpoint. In fact, next week, I and the leadership team are going to be in Pune, meeting with another prospect in the data engineering space, right? Data engineering, plus they have built a platform. There are a few areas of focus for us. One, as you pointed out, is data engineering, with focus on strong capabilities, even in one of the hyperscalers, right? That could be a really interesting opportunity for us. We are also looking at BFSI and retail as two other industry verticals where there could be opportunities.
And if it's a combination of those two dimensions, meaning data engineering work for financial services companies, then that will be even better because it ticks on both the dimensions. So that will continue to be an activity going forward. And we are, in fact, continuously engaging with some of the third-party, the external partners that we are working with as well. And we will be looking at opportunities that are available. I think the timing also today is very interesting because many of the smaller companies in the last 12, 18 months, because of the macroeconomic sluggishness, have faced challenges, and then there is a more realistic kind of an expectation from a valuation standpoint. And therefore, the window of opportunity will be available, and we would want to leverage it.
I don't think there is any plan to slow down or not look at opportunity. Of course, some of the management time and bandwidth and attention will go into the integration itself. So to that extent, we will factor that in. But clearly, the lookout for opportunity is always on.
I'm sorry to interrupt, sir. I would request, Mr. Srinath, if you have any more questions, I would request you to please come up in the question queue again. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Aravind Shetty from Diamond Asia. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for taking this question. I just wanted to understand, we are expecting first half to be relatively muted, but Q1 would, despite that, Q1 would be look more like 6%+ kind of a sequential growth. And, in the exit of the year, we would like to hit about 8%-10% sequential growth. Is that the kind of aspiration that you're gunning for?
Sorry, the first part of your question, can you just repeat that once again? Sorry.
Just correct me if I heard it correctly. The first half of FY 2025 is expected to be muted, but the first quarter could be more like 6%+ kind of sequential growth. Did I get that correct?
Yeah. So it's not like the first half is expected to be muted. Of course, you know, one of the things that Rajan did speak about is, we have to continue to build on the pipeline that we're already seeing, right?
Mm-hmm.
But our sense is, at this point in time, based on the visibility that we have, we will be able to generate a 5%-6% sequential quarter growth for Q1. Specifically, when it comes to H1, we expect that some of the deal conversions that we will see in Q1 should also give us additional sort of revenue sort of visibility as well as uptake in Q2, right? So at this point in time, we will not be able to give a quarterly guidance for Q2 specifically. But we do expect that, you know, the expectation is that growth momentum could pick up in H2 compared to H1.
Got it. Our aspiration to reach about 25% margin in exit quarter, and that would be achieved if we sort of hit that 8%-10% kind of a sequential growth. So from a YOY standpoint, do we see that, you know, our revenues on a YOY basis keeps improving through the year?
That is correct. So, like I said, right, a lot of the investments on the go-to-market side, right, have already been fully baked in current cost structure, right? So we don't intend to add incremental headcount on the go-to-market and sales functions, right? So that is something that we have already... in some sense, we have sort of fully factored that in. Where we will look to spend incrementally would be on the capability building side, the solutioning side, and also to some extent on the marketing spend itself, right? I think where we believe some of these spends will help us sort of set us up ourselves, set ourselves up really well for FY 2026 and 2027.
So with the three-year view, I think some of the investments that we will be making in the current year may not give us immediate revenue uptake in the current fiscal, but we believe these are essential for us to continue to deliver the 25% type growth, right? Over the next two to three years, we need to make some of these investments on marketing as well as solution building. Now, to answer your question on margins itself, like I said, right, our for the first two quarters we will, you know, try to keep the margins in the band of 21%-23%. That's where we would like to keep them.
You would also appreciate that Q1 typically has the full impact of wage increments that we have given out, which in the current fiscal for India-based roles, we've done increments in the range of 8%-10%.
... on an average. And for US roles, these have been in the range of 4%-5%, right? So, there will be, I would say, some level of impact on margins in Q1 on account of the wage hikes, plus also seasonally, you will have higher visa spends, right, in Q1. So we believe this will have some short-term impact in Q1 specifically, but we are fairly confident that we should be able to maintain a band of 21%-23%. If we're able to get back to the 6%-8% sequential quarter growth, we should be inching up on the margin side as well, towards the rear end of the year.
Okay, sir. Just last question on Decision Point. If you can, Decision Point revenues for Q4 and the headcount addition that we have done in this quarter, I believe it does not include the employees of Decision Point, right?
That is correct. It does not, because it's also because we have not consolidated, we have not closed the acquisition, right? So we will start reporting numbers on a consolidated basis by, by Q1, at which point in time we will also include their headcount when we report numbers.
Sure. And Decision Point revenues for Q4, if you can?
Again, like I said, right, they are a privately held company right now. They are still in the process of closing their books and getting their accounts audited. So we will not be able to give out those numbers at this point in time.
All right. Thank you, and all the best for FY 2025.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Karan Uppal from Phillip Capital India. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Two questions from my side. Firstly, on the hiring. So if you look at the hiring for this quarter, it is probably the strongest since the IPO. However, the commentary on FY 2025 growth is a bit cautious. So how shall we interpret this? Are you being more conservative, given that FY 2024 was a bit weaker than your expectation? That's first. And a related question to that is, if you can give us the vertical outlook for FY 2025. In FY 2024, the growth was led by technology and industrial verticals, but retail, CPG, and BFSI were a bit muted. So the growth outlook, vertical-wise, would also be helpful.
Yeah, I'll... This is Rajan here. I'll take the question on the, on the outlook for the full- year, right, and I'll get, Raj to comment on the, on the verticals. Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether I should say that we are being conservative, but, obviously, the general, as I said, you know, the uncertainty, in the, in the economic, in the macroeconomic scenario is, is still there. I mean, it is not completely sorted out. Most organizations, would be making similar commentary. As I said earlier, I mean, a lot of the work that we are already doing, it is fairly important and critical, and that is the reason, the book of work has been renewed. But newer initiatives are still, experimental in nature.
There are a few good big-ticket opportunities, but it is not the gush of opportunities that you would have liked to see, right, when we start the year. So that is the reason for the kind of outlook that we currently have in terms of how the year will pan out. Of course, these things can get impacted by the initiatives that we are spending money on and investing. I talked about the partnership with NVIDIA. I talked about the marketing analytics horizontal, right? I mean, these are the bets that we are making, that these could provide the new ideas and the innovation, right, that clients are looking for, and that could spur growth.
But we will want to see how this plays out, okay, over the next one quarter or so, right, before we are able to give better guidance. Raj, do you want to add on the verticals?
Yeah. See, in terms of the verticals, I would say, you know, as we get into the current fiscal, I think, we will... technology will continue to be, I would say, the, the sort of, the big vertical for us. But we are definitely very excited by the prospect of partnering with Decision Point, which will significantly add to the capabilities that we can take to market jointly, right? One, it opens up a new market as well for us, which is Latin America. And, we're happy to report that some of the early conversations that we're having, even with clients in Latin America, seem very interesting for some of the work that we do, which is on the marketing analytics side.
So CPG will definitely be again, you know, we are, we are expecting this year to be a fairly strong year for the CPG vertical. Financial services, again, will be a vertical where there will be a big focus this year, right? So some of the clients that we work with, we are seeing some early sort of conversations where there are significant large opportunities that are getting created in financial services. And apart from that, industrials would be the other big focus vertical. So for us, technology, followed by CPG, followed by financial services, followed by industrials, would be the in that order, would be the sort of verticals that will drive growth for us this year.
Okay. Just a follow-up on the first question. So the hiring is very strong. So are we hitting the peak in terms of our utilization, and hence the hiring is very strong?
So the hiring is partly also a commitment that we made in the campus. So-
Right.
We have taken a look at how the next year is going to pan out based on the early indications that we have, and then we have gone ahead and onboarded most of the campus offers, right, hires that we did. So at this point in time, there is only a small batch of 30 people out of the 450 offers that we had made on campus. So we already onboarded close to 360 people. There were some dropouts because this year has been a bit protracted in terms of the onboarding. But of course, many of them also held on to the offer because of the general scenario in the market.
Out of the people that we have onboarded, we have already deployed about, I would say 40% of the people, right? And the rest of the people are in either boot camps or they are shadow mode, and so on. So there is a very strong, I mean, there's a significant amount of campus hiring and onboarding that we have done. We have tempered the next year's hiring, right, on the back of what we have seen this year, given that some of the people that we have already onboarded will be available, right, for upcoming opportunities. For next year, we have made only about 250 offers, on the campus list.
So partly what you see as the headcount addition is, really on the back of all the campus onboarding that we have done, and we will watch in terms of where the utilization maps. So right now, the utilization is lower than where we would have been in the first half of the year. It has gone down on account of the campus hires. But this is something that we have anyway factored on, right, in terms of the margin profile that we want to maintain, right, at this point in time.
Okay, thanks. Thank you a lot, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rishabh Shah from Buglerock PMS . Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. So in one of the calls, you said that you are doubling down your investments in the CPG consumer retail. And even today, you are saying that the growth in FY 2025 will be led by CPG, CPG, the consumer retail. So why do you think so? What could be the next trigger point for LatentView in coming years in the CPG, CPG retail, consumer retail segment?
Yeah, so the inorganic investment completely in the CPG space does a lot of their work in the CPG space, so obviously there'll be a huge chunk of investment going there. But even if we look at our own organic investments, right, in terms of adding to the front, adding client partners, we have made investments in the CPG space. So we are expecting that that will pan out. So in terms of the contribution, CPG, the expectation is that we will inch towards about a 20% kind of a contribution, right, over the next 24 months. For the last year, we were probably at about 8% or so, right, in the single digits. So there is an expectation that CPG will contribute quite a bit, right, to the revenues.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, we are always on the lookout for inorganic opportunities, and we are also making investments in the financial services and in the retail. Retail probably will be slightly behind in terms of financial services, the investments that we make in financial services. Retail will be a tad lower. But at this point in time, the plan is that we will be shoring up on what we can do in the financial services space. So if you ask me how the scenario will look, say, 18-24 months' time, definitely the contribution from these two verticals, CPG as well as financial services, should be much, much better than where we are today, right? Today, both are in the single digits.
We are expecting that both of them will be in the high twenties. Sorry, high, I mean, close to the 20% mark, which means that technology as a vertical, right, anyway, the contributions will come down as a on a percentage basis. I mean, we're expecting growth to happen in all the three verticals, but on the back of the investments, the growth should be stronger in the CPG and the financial services space.
Okay. My second question is: So how big will be the data and analytics market? So the estimate put around 2024 was around $300 billion. So do you think that it will be achieved in the calendar, in this calendar year? And what's your aim for the next five years? Where will this market be, and what will be our market share in this entire universe?
The market share, I think we are too small, okay, in the entire ecosystem. So today-
Let's say, where we stand in the universe, where will we be in the next five years?
Yeah, yeah. I'll get to that. So the expectation... I mean, in fact, we recently commissioned a market intelligence exercise, and that is starting to give us some input as well. The expectation is fairly similar, right, to what we had seen when we did the IPO, right? If you remember, at DRHP, we had talked about a market size of potentially $300 billion in a three-year timeframe, right? At a CAGR of about 18-20%. It's fairly similar. Of course, a big chunk of that is also including captives of multinationals. But the market is, and as I said, now we are fairly small in the scheme of things. So therefore, there is a lot of headroom for growth.
Our expectation is that we will be able to get on to a 25-30% growth trajectory over the next three- to five-year timeframe. Of course, that is the organic growth trajectory. With every acquisition, we will be able to create a step change as well, and the intention will be to try and at least replicate, if not improve upon the growth rates, right, on the back of the acquisition. Now, you can do the math based on this, right, to see what it will lead to in a three- to five -year time frame. The point, though, is that, I mean, you know, there is enough headroom for growth.
25%-30% kind of a growth trajectory should be very much doable, provided we don't have too much of the sluggishness. I mean, of course, the last 12-18 months have been extraordinary because of all the interest rates and other challenges. Of course, I mean, it's not that, like, we won't have any such challenges in the future. We will have to, of course, look at what is the impact it is having. But broadly, from a long-term trajectory standpoint, I would say that 25%+ growth rates are very much possible.
Okay. My last question is, so from the last two to three quarters, we are witnessing that the addition of new accounts are smaller in size. So, has the management's focus changed from the bigger accounts to a smaller accounts? So any specific reason you would like to highlight?
Not really. I don't think there is any. There is definitely no deliberate choice of going after smaller organizations. Our focus continues to remain the Fortune 500 companies. The acquisitions, the new logos, revenue that they are bringing in, though, is on the tad lower side, okay? In a sense that most companies, right, even large Fortune 500 companies, are reluctant to kick off substantial new initiatives, given the uncertainty that prevails. The one redeeming area has been generative AI and related technologies, but even there, it's still largely pilot and experimentation that is happening. Too many big, substantial initiatives, right, that have been kicked off.
I mean, we had one win, which was close to the $500,000 mark, and we have a second win recently, right, with one of the large auto manufacturers in Europe, which is also close to that mark. So we are expecting that that will pick up, in the coming months and quarters. Largely, the growth is on the back of the ticket size of the initiatives, like, to get in with in the new logos and not necessarily any change in the strategy in terms of which accounts we go after.
Okay. Okay, thank you so much, sir.
Yeah, sure.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Agam, from Raj Trading. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir, thank you for the opportunity. Congrats on good set of numbers. Am I audible?
Yeah, yeah, we can hear you, Agam. Go ahead.
Yeah. Just a quick question. I missed your opening remarks. So for the other income, you said that some loans you have given to your global subsidiaries . So can you talk on that? I just missed that, part.
Yeah, the other income is typically, I mean, these are, you know, part of the IPO proceeds that we had raised, that there we said that we will capitalize some of our overseas subsidiaries in Europe and US.
Okay.
Right? You will understand that some of these... So one of the subsidiaries is in UK, and one of the other subsidiaries is in Netherlands and Germany, right? Right. So these are the interest-free loans that have been given out, right, and which are repayable over a three- to five -year period. The loss is on account of because, you know, as per accounting standards that we have to comply with, you know, we need to restate these loans every quarter. And whenever there is a sharp sort of movement in either GBP or euro compared to the rupee, we have to book these mark-to-market losses as part of our fees for that quarter, and that is what you see over here.
But at a consolidated level, ideally, because, you know, the gain in one place is effectively the loss in another place. But unfortunately, the loss in this case is, you know, not counted as part of the P&L. It actually goes into other comprehensive income, and that's why you see the impact on at a-
Okay.
PAT level. Yeah.
I wanted to, as a previous participant, you said that you'll be reaching 25%-30% growth in three to five years. So should we assume this post three years or one year down the line?
No, no, sorry. I didn't mean that we will reach 25%-30% in a five-year timeframe. What I meant is that if you take the entire period of time, a CAGR, right, of 25%-30% is very much possible, given the market potential and the focus that we have, right, in the select area. Now, currently, as you see, right, for the last year, we have done about 19%. How quick we can move from 19% to 25% plus will be based on how the economic scenario turns out, right, in the immediate future. And of course, if you take a long enough timeframe, like five years, there will be other bumps also that one will witness. But a CAGR of 25-30% within that period is very much doable.
Thank you. We will move on to the next question. The next question is from Akshay from 360 ONE Asset. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and thanks for the detailed explanation through the call. I just had one clarification on the comment you made on FY 2025 and Q1, so just trying to work some numbers. You mentioned how you may have a visibility of 5%-6% growth next quarter, and you also mentioned that FY 2025 on an overall organic basis should be similar to what you did in FY 2024. Now, if I look at your exit run rate and take a 5%-6% sequential growth, then the next quarter run rate itself gives you that, a similar growth which you did in FY 2024. So obviously, you will be growing in the coming quarters, Q2, Q3, Q4 as well.
I'm just trying to understand what, what's behind that commentary of similar FY 2025, while the numbers suggest otherwise?
Yeah, I'd say, you know, so, you know, obviously, as we stand at the beginning of the year, I think the commentary and the guidance that we want to give out or put out is based the visibility that we have for the full year as of this point in time. Obviously, we all understand that the order book and the pipeline keeps getting built up through the course of the year, right? Also, you'd have to appreciate and understand that our, you know, the type of business that we are in, typically our client contracts are, you know, up to a period of one year, right? So we don't generally have visibility, I would say.
While we have a good visibility in terms of what are the projects that are likely to get extended, right? But we don't have multi-year relationships with a lot of the accounts. Which is why the guidance that we are at this point in time able to put out is on the basis of the visibility that we have at the beginning of the year, which is based on the current order book, plus the high probability pipeline, right? But of course, you know, as we execute through the year, and as the visibility gets better, these growth rates can be improved over the current period. But obviously, there is pipeline that needs to get converted.
What we've also seen in Q4, in fact, one of the questions that we had answered, I think, was by one of the other earlier analysts had asked. That while the initial indication was that we will grow at about 5% or in this particular quarter, we did also see some deals that we were hoping to sort of close out, which sort of slipped into the next quarter, right? So some of these things will also play out, right? Which is why we want to give out a guidance which is more reasonable and achievable, and we will update the guidance as we head into the year, depending on the visibility.
Got it. Got it. But just to—for my confirmation, the numbers which I called out, was it a fair calculation or was I missing something in those numbers?
It was. I mean, it was a fair calculation, obviously, you know, but then you also have to understand that we are not a—at the end of the day, you know, we are, in some sense, right, we are not a, we are not a SaaS business, or we are not a product business where, you know, the run rate can be given, you know, taken to be like a given for every quarter, right? So we are, at this point in time, what we believe is fairly reasonable and possible is the growth rate that we had achieved between 18%-20%, for the year. But as we continue with the year, some of the deals that we are actively pursuing, right? Rajan spoke about the pipeline.
There are a few large opportunities also in the pipeline. If we're able to convert some of that, we should be able to accelerate growth, but at this point in time, the 18%-20% is what we are comfortable guiding.
Got it. Thanks for that. And one last thing on margins. While a Decision Point comes at higher margins, and you guys have been talking about exiting the year, again, expanding the margins through the year. But I'm just curious to understand, you seem quite-
Hello?
Sorry to interrupt. The current participant has been disconnected. That was the last question for today. I would like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So yeah, I mean, I would, I think we covered most of the ground in terms of, the highlights that we had to share and, also the outlook that we have, of the business. I think, some of the additional momentum, will come from, opportunities that, we are able to create on the back of, the initiatives that I talked about. Whether it is in generative AI, whether it's, Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, or whether it's the NVIDIA partnership or the marketing analytics, horizontal or, or the opportunities that we can create through the acquisition.
Obviously, the intent and the planning, there's a lot of thought that's gone into it, and we are focusing our time and attention right on what we can do on this front. Of course, how all of this pans out will also depend upon how much spending and optimism returns to the market itself. We are seeing early signs that the investments that we are making are all in the right areas, on the back of the conversations and the leads that we are getting. We do want to keep focusing on them so that we are able to convert them into opportunities, real opportunities and real project work, right, that we are able to win.
Overall, I would say that, at this time, given the performance that we have had in the last year, where we have done reasonably well in spite of a full- year rate of sluggishness, we are expecting that we will be able to do better in the coming year. But as I said earlier, it is a tone of cautious optimism that we would like to adopt at this point in time. We'll be able to update you on how things pan out in the coming quarters. The expectation is that things will be a general uptrend from Q1 to Q2 to Q3 to Q4. We don't see any other significant adverse things that might be happening, right, just within the data analytics space.
But overall, that space will continue to grow, and the areas of our focus will give us even further momentum, right, in comparison to the industry growth rate. So we are confident, right, that our strategy will play out well on the back of optimism returning back to the market. Yeah. With that, I think we have covered the ground that we wanted to cover, so we can close the call. Thank you all for joining today, and look forward to engaging again soon.
On behalf of LatentView Analytics, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.