Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Mastek Ltd Q4 FY24 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants' lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Asha Gupta from E&Y IR, thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Thank you, Manuja. Good evening to all of you. Welcome to the Q4 and full-year FY24 Earnings Call of Mastek Ltd. The results and presentation have already been mailed to you, and you can also view them on the website at www.mastek.com. To take us through the results today and to answer your questions, we have the top management of Mastek represented by Mr. Hiral Chandrana, Global CEO, Mr. Arun Agarwal, Global CFO. Hiral will start the call with a business update, which will be followed by Arun providing the financial update for the quarter and year gone by. As usual, I would like to remind you that anything that is said on this call that reflects any outlook for the future or which can be construed as forward-looking statements must be viewed in conjunction with the risk and uncertainties that we face.
These risks and uncertainties are included but not limited to what we have mentioned in the prospectus filed with the SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find on our website. Having said that, I will now hand over the call to Hiral Chandrana. Over to you, Hiral.
Thank you, Asha. Good day and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. I'll start with the summary of Q4 and FY 2024 financial performance, give you some flavor of how FY 2025 is looking, and also touch on the progress that we are making on our strategic priorities. We'll then turn it over to Arun for the details and the financials, and then we'll open it up for Q&A, like Asha said. Let's start with Q4. This is our last quarter for the fiscal year. We closed at $93.7 million in revenues. This was a disappointing quarter for us from a revenue perspective as well as below our expectations. We had two or three specific client situations that I'll talk about in a minute. Our EBITDA was in the 16% range, and that also was below our expectations.
We held on to the resources that we believed were needed for future growth, and hence we took the hit in Q4, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Our order book backlog was a highlight. We closed at $260 million, which is our 12-month order book backlog, which we track closely. This is a lead indicator that gives us the confidence of going forward. And this was a record order book for us in the history of Mastek. The 12-month order book backlog grew 19% year-on-year. As far as Q4 is concerned, there were three specific client situations that I want to elaborate on a little bit. Point number one, there is a financial services customer on our data business where we ended up with a delay in execution.
We had revenues from that client in Q3, which is a previous quarter, and were not able to recognize revenues from that particular client in Q4. We've completed our milestone post-tax, and we'll continue with that client going forward, but we could not recognize that revenue in Q4. There was a large program in our healthcare customer. We've talked about this customer in the past. It's now a $14 million account for us in the U.S. This particular program, we decided to move a particular program from onsite to offshore. This was the right thing to do in the medium to longer term. It established a platform for managed services as well as stickiness with a customer, but unfortunately, it did hit our Q4 revenues.
And the third item, which was again in the U.S., unfortunately, was we had alluded to a consolidation of a particular customer, but we were confident of offsetting that with another ramp-up in our Salesforce client. And this particular program, we had won in December of 2023 where our resources were ready and ready to start in January itself. Again, because of a dependency of a previous phase, which was beyond our control and the delay of that phase, we were not able to start that program. And that hit our Q4 revenues as well. So again, some of the pluses and minuses were offset. We had some good quarter execution by our U.K. and Middle East business. But these three specific client situations, two of them which we will bounce back and recover in Q1 and beyond, is what hit the Q4 revenues for us in the quarter.
Having said that, we do have a strong order book backlog, like I mentioned, and have the confidence going into FY 2025. Our FY 2024 as a whole was still pretty healthy. We grew 15.8% year-on-year. Arun will give some of the numbers in rupee terms because those numbers are a little bit higher, but I'm giving you U.S. dollar terms. $368.4 million is where we ended for the full year FY 2024, and that was roughly about 15.8% year-on-year on a dollar basis. Because of the Q4 hit, this was still below our expectations.
But as we look at some of our strategic priorities, we're confident that our growth in healthcare in the U.S. with strong deal momentum, our continued progress in U.K. public sector, which we'll talk about in a little bit more detail, and some deal momentum that we've continued to see in Middle East and Australia is giving us confidence for Q1 and FY 2025. I'd like to talk about two or three customer wins, which were milestone wins for Q4. We got selected as a key supplier in the defense department in U.K. This particular framework called the Digital and Professional Services Framework, called DIPS, is a large GBP 1.2 billion framework where you have multiple lots and multiple suppliers. The total number of lots that we bid for were six. We got shortlisted and finally selected for two out of those six lots.
In one of the lots, we are a prime supplier, which means we directly bid for the different deals that get adjudicated. In the second lot, we are a subcontractor. The primary lot where we are a direct supplier is in the context of solution architecture, technical assurance, knowledge management, and data and innovation. The lot two where we are a subcontractor is in the DevOps and application support area. This is important because this is a four-year framework where our addressable market between these two lots is roughly about GBP 400 million. Within this, there are five suppliers in lot one and eight suppliers in lot two. We believe that we have an opportunity to win multiple deals, and the first of which we've won last quarter.
This was, again, in the architecture and the service as a service area, a critical step for future deals in lot one. Over a period of four years, we expect roughly about GBP 50 million-GBP 60 million worth of revenue coming from this particular framework. We had a marked win in the U.S. healthcare business. And again, this was a five-year, $17 million win. So we're getting a seat at the table at larger deals. Some of this is reflected in our order book backlog, which I mentioned earlier. And clients are trusting us on longer-term offshore development center deals. This was one of the first for this healthcare client who had never done offshoring in the past.
In Middle East and Australia, we also closed some marked deals across financial services, banks, healthcare clients, one of which we announced publicly, which was a cement company, which is going through a complete front office to back office transformation. We've been working with this customer for a few months in the areas of back office. And this particular deal was in the lead-to-cash cycle where we have built integrated applications connecting their web and mobile to their back office with IoT and Industry 4.0 initiatives that they've been on the supply chain side. We also leveraged our VolteoEdge investment for this acquisition for this deal and established a complete connected enterprise solution story with this customer. Apart from this, there were many wins in the U.S., in the U.K., in Europe, and in Middle East, Australia.
Like I mentioned, our order book and deal momentum continues to be strong. I want to repeat, we are disappointed with the Q4 revenue results, and we'll bounce back in Q1 and beyond. I want to give a quick flavor on the four key priorities that we have been talking about. I mentioned about the public sector in U.K. Beyond the deal that I talked about on the defense department, we continue to make good progress across borders and trade, across the immigration initiatives that the U.K. government is driving. There are new initiatives around police protection and Department of Justice where we are running campaigns. We believe that our presence in U.K. with security-cleared resources and incumbency of having designed, built, and maintained some of the critical national infrastructure systems positions us strongly going forward.
Our order book in the U.S. in Q4 and for the whole year was, again, at a record level. While we are disappointed with the Q4 revenue, the momentum on the deals continues to be strong. Our focus on healthcare, particularly with payers and providers and within payers and providers, within the Blue Cross, Blue Shield, the regional health plans, the senior living facilities within the providers, and the midsize hospitals, which are our sweet spot, is really paying off. That combined with our capabilities in Salesforce and Oracle Cloud and our industry-specific solutions is helping us differentiate with the customers. Beyond U.K. public sector and healthcare in the U.S. and healthcare globally, frankly, where we're seeing really good momentum from a demand and order book perspective, we have data and AI, which continues to be a key priority.
We'll talk about that in a minute when we talk about FY 2025. But here again, most customers, as part of their future AI investments, are revamping their data foundation, which really means they have to create a unified data platform, move data to the cloud as needed, and modernize their data landscape so they can run some of these large language model and use cases on AI. And that positions us well with our enhanced capabilities in Snowflake, Databricks, and AWS Cloud. We also have been running a key priority on account mining. We've talked about that in the past. It has gone slower than what we expected. Having said that, the identified top 30 accounts globally in Mastek now contribute roughly about 57% of our overall revenue. This is a significant movement.
We've made sure that the client partners, the delivery teams, the prioritization on service line alignment and capability focus on these top 30 accounts is unmatched. We were pleased to see much better customer satisfaction inputs and results in the recent CSAT survey that we conducted. We believe that these top 30 accounts will continue to grow where we have more $5 million, more $10 million, more $3 million accounts than the past. With the continued focus on these four priorities, which is, again, public sector in the U.K., healthcare globally, data and AI, as well as account mining, we believe our execution needs to be stronger in Q1 and beyond. We have taken a few steps in action so that we don't get into the situation we got in Q4.
With that said, looking forward in FY 2025, customer buying behavior and market demand is still going to be cautiously optimistic where customers are not necessarily stopping their AI or digital initiatives, but they're working on optimizing their base, repurposing some of their savings to newer programs. With that, there is a landscape where most platform companies are embedding AI into their solutions. And with that, what you'll see is that there is a need to orchestrate and integrate many of these solutions, which is a combination of cloud investments, data investments, edge investments, and now AI investments. Our positioning as a differentiated business outcomes provider is critical here because customers are looking to break down many of the larger deals into more midsize manageable chunks. They're also expecting more for not just cost and productivity, which is a given, but also in terms of quality of resources and talent.
We believe our combination of industry expertise, our solution focus, plus the technology and functional depth positions us well. At an overall financial level, while Arun will cover more details, we're happy with the progress on utilization, which reached, again, an all-time high beyond 80% during the quarter. We also improved our cash position in Q4. We declared a dividend of INR 12 per share. We also continued to focus on operating efficiency so that we could reinvest in our capabilities and in our AI initiatives. With that said, I'll turn it over to Arun, and we'll be happy to take questions after that. Over to you, Arun.
Thanks, Hiral. Welcome to everyone on the call. As Hiral has shared quite a detailed perspective on the business, the detailed presentation is already shared and circulated with all of you. I will focus upon critical financial metrics representing quarter four and the full year, and also which will give you certain ideas and the lead indicators for FY 2025, how we are shaping up the performance for next year. For this quarter four, we have reported revenue of INR 779.7 crores, which is up 9.9% year-on-year in INR terms. Full-year revenue was INR 3,055 crores, up by 19.2% year-on-year in INR terms, but including BizAnalytica acquisition, which was consolidated for part of the year. As Hiral alluded to, we had three negative impacts during the quarters, including the healthcare customer, which we moved offshore, and the other one.
Hence, our quarter-on-quarter revenue was below our expectation as it degrew by 0.6% quarter-on-quarter in INR terms and 1.4% in constant currency. On the order book side, we have seen consistent upward trajectory in the last three quarters, and quarter four has been really phenomenal. We have secured the highest-ever order book during the quarter, both in the U.S. and for the group, leading to a strong order backlog of $260 million, which is up by 5% quarter-on-quarter and 21% year-on-year in INR terms. We have added 22 customers during the quarter, so our customer acquisition engine continued to be effective across verticals and across geographies. Our operating EBITDA for the quarter was at 16%. It declined 100 bps quarter-on-quarter.
As we mentioned about three impacts in revenue, one of them had cost included, where the delivery challenges have been now completely taken out and the customer is onboarded. We expect the revenue to continue to come in the coming quarters, but the cost was there in the last quarter. So that revenue decline has slowed down to the margin, impacting our operating EBITDA. On a full-year basis, our EBITDA growth was 11.6% year-on-year. Utilization without taking impact of leave was 86.5%, which has improved 110 basis points quarter-on-quarter. Our profit after tax for the quarter was at INR 94.4 crores, up 21% quarter-on-quarter and 30% year-on-year on a quarter basis. During the quarter, we had one-time tax credit in our overseas geography, which led to lower tax costs and also supported profit after tax for the quarter.
Our collection has been very strong in the last three quarters. Our DSOs are consistently coming down, quite detailed focus happening across geographies. Consequently, our gross cash has increased to INR 473 crore as we closed March 2024 versus INR 404 crore, which was reported in December 2023. Our borrowings now stood at INR 487 crore as of 31st March 2024. We have a detailed installment plan agreed with banks as part of loan borrowing. We are meeting all our installment commitments, as we have said, and will continue to discharge these borrowings in the next two to three years as planned. Our closing headcount was 5,539 at the end of March, marginal increase by 21 resources versus December quarter. We continue to onboard both trainees and also lateral hires as we want to deliver growth for the company as a whole.
The company has recommended a dividend of INR 12, which is subject to shareholders' approval. Post-approval, it will be distributed to the shareholders. That was the key highlight. We will take more questions very specific to the ask here. Going back to the moderator to open the house 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 touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Mohit Jain from Anand Rathi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, sir. If you could help us understand on that U.S. part? And the second is a follow-up, by when do you think we can recover back to our original revenue levels or like we had and what we did in the past few quarters?
Mohit, I think your first question was a little bit more color on the U.S. Can you just clarify?
Yes.
Okay. Yeah. So the three specific client situations that I mentioned, one financial services customer on our data business, the offshore movement of a healthcare client, and the third customer, all three, unfortunately, were in the U.S. Two out of those three are transitory, so we expect that to come back in a positive way in Q1 and beyond. One of the clients where we decided to move was the right decision, even in retrospect, because healthcare, as some of you might have heard, particularly the health plans, have been hit by lower reimbursement from the government. And many of them are looking at cost savings. So this was a good calculated move, which impacted us in Q4. Having said that, from a U.S. overall perspective, we have four specific broader-level strategies that we've talked about in the past, right?
One is within the U.S., we have 20 accounts, which we have shortlisted. This is beyond at a global level, we have 30 accounts, but within the U.S., we have 20 specific accounts. Healthcare, which is powered by Oracle Cloud and Salesforce in the front office, that play continues to be very strong. While we don't report PCV order book, just to give you some flavor, while on a small base, the healthcare order book in the U.S. grew 250% in FY 2024. So it was a marquee year for us, transformational in some sense in terms of our payer and provider focus, which we've been talking about in the last few quarters. In addition to that $17 million deal that I mentioned, which was a longer-term, five-year contract, we also closed a few deals below $10 million, one of which was an $8 million deal.
Again, these are longer-term deals, four to five-year deals, which is not seen in the past in the U.S. market. And that's giving us confidence in the long-term trust from our customers. So large deals, account mining, healthcare focus, which includes Oracle in the back office and Salesforce in the front office. And last but not the least, in our data and digital engineering services, we're starting to see some good momentum of cross-sell. While it is connected with the account mining point, we believe that more can be done here, particularly with our global capabilities of AWS, our global capabilities of Microsoft, as well as some of the data investments that we make. So combined together, we believe the U.S. will bounce back in Q1. And from there on, we have fairly ambitious plans for FY2025 and beyond. The theme is get up to deliver.
It's definitely a disappointment in Q4. But as we look forward, our U.K. engine has fired well. Our Middle East and APAC continues to improve margins while driving growth. And we believe that the U.S. will fire in Q1 and FY 2025 in a very strong way. So we're optimistic, Mohit, on FY 2025 as a whole.
So, one Q, we should build in that recovery back with some loss because one client, as you mentioned, you have canceled. So, we'll not be back to that level, but a little lower than where we were in Q3.
Yeah. Yes, yes. I think that's a fair statement. We will significantly lower what we saw, and we should be crossing that in the early part of Q2.
Okay. Second, sir.
From a specific U.S. perspective, yeah.
Right. And on the U.K., it looks like the order book is growing very fast, and we have also been able to execute well from a quarterly standpoint. So what is your outlook from a U.K. growth standpoint for next year, potentially FY 2025, given where our order book is?
Yeah. Our order book, actually, like I mentioned, was overall record levels. We crossed a milestone quarter for the U.S. order book. Our U.K. order book as a whole was definitely better in FY 2024 compared to FY 2023. There are a few specific frameworks and campaigns that we've been running. Some of these take much longer. I mentioned the Department of Justice, some of the Driver and Vehicle Agency, and police protection frameworks. These are longer-term campaigns, which we believe will crack in the later part of this year, if not in Q2 and Q3. Having said that, the election year does put some slowdown in terms of decision-making. We were expecting a couple of deals to be adjudicated on the data side in our Revenue and Customs department. That basically went on hold and did not get awarded to anybody.
So that's just giving you an example of some of the safer decisions that the government is making. We continue to make good progress in the Cabinet Office. If you remember, this was a deal that we had closed a few months back in a managed services engagement. And now we are actually the chosen partner for ServiceNow implementation and AWS work in that same customer where they're doing development and enhancement work. So this is good progress for us in the Cabinet Office. And our private sector business, which is a small base, but we're happy to see some really good progress. We won a new framework, actually, two new frameworks in the financial services side.
This is leveraging some of our presence in the government work, but Bank of England was a key framework, and we won our first deal within it. It's a small deal, but we won our first deal within the Bank of England. It was a $2.25 million deal that we won. And we believe that's setting us up well for financial services focus in the U.K. And Europe, lastly, while again, the focus has been mostly in the Oracle Cloud side and manufacturing clients, we've got some really good global clients out there, which are scaling well. And compared to FY 2023, FY 2024, from a pipeline and deal momentum perspective, definitely picked up in the second half. So while we are not hugely focused on Europe because we are very specific in terms of which country, but we do expect continued deal activity in certain countries.
All in all, our U.K. and Europe will definitely deliver double digits, Mohit, in FY 2025.
When you say signed orders, like orders on hold, they are not signed orders, right? They are put on hold or during the award process itself. But the order process.
Yeah. So there are two. Yeah. Yes. So the data orders that I mentioned in the revenue and customs department, those never got adjudicated. Those never got adjudicated. The orders itself were put on hold. They did not get decided to any supplier, right?
The order backlog that you report is only on signed orders, right?
Order backlog is only on signed SOWs. And even there, we take the specific signed SOWs, which are full-year values that we're confident of. So if there's a call-off value, which is a large four-year or five-year deal, it does not get reflected in the 12-month order book backlog. So that is visibility of only one year. So that's a fairly credible 12-month order book backlog as an indicator.
Right. And to you, Arun, sir. Sir, in terms of margins, we had this earlier guidance of 17%-19%, and now we had some one-offs in the fourth quarter. So should we take your guidance numbers similar to what we had last quarter, or is there an update? And last is on tax rate. What should be the tax rate that we should take for 2025?
Yeah. So thanks, Mohit. So in terms of margin, yes, 15% is a blip to us. Our endeavor is to go back to 17% as we reported in quarter three. That will be our endeavor. But at the same time, the focus is more on the growth. So I'll keep that range at 17% for now. And in terms of tax rate, on a normalized basis, 27% is a good reference. There can be plus and minus depending upon multiple countries at which we operate. But I think 27% would be a good range.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Hussain Kagzi from Ambit Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hi. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. So the first part was that you mentioned that the share of top 30, which is your focus client, was 57%. So can you give some more color on how this number has trended over the last few years and what would be the growth in this overall?
Yeah. Sure, Hussain. So we initiated our focus on account mining in FY 2023 because a little bit maybe 30-second context. As a company organization, we believe we have way too many clients and much more than we actually need. And many of our projects and implementations in the past used to essentially kind of conclude, and then we moved on to the next client, right? So while we were opening new customers and smaller deals, there was a lot of churn in our existing clients. So we started this initiative on account mining, which, again, is more standard stuff in the IT services industry. But from a Mastek perspective, we outlined these top 30 accounts. And just like anything else, every year, we evaluate this, but during the year, we want to stay consistent on these accounts.
So in the past, that number used to be more in the 50% range. Now, just keep in mind that a couple of clients come in, a couple of clients go out. But give or take, that has progressed a little bit slower than what we anticipated, but definitely progressed in the right direction. So the number I gave you is the current number of FY 2024, which is the 57% of our overall business. And these are some market clients, right? We have very global names out here, and some of them we've shared in the past and are on our website. We continue to focus on opening new clients, but those are much more qualified and much larger enterprise customers where we can grow downstream. And so our goal is to make sure that at a net-net level, we don't need to necessarily add too many clients.
The clients that we'll add are going to be much more qualified, larger deals, larger customers. We want to continue to cross-sell and mine our existing accounts. That number of 57% is expected to continue to grow up. Then at the same time, we have our next 20 clients. Each region has identified additional clients, which they believe can grow to $3 million, $5 million in the future. Those could become part of our future account mining strategy as well at a global level. Hopefully, that provides some favor, Hussain.
Got it. Got it. So if I got it right, roughly around from earlier, say, before our strategy started, around some 50%, come to around 57%, right?
That's right.
Secondly, thank you. That was helpful. Secondly, extending onto the margin question from the earlier participant, so if I see—I mean, we did start FY 2024 with much of the headwinds of FY 2023 behind us, but we had the new BizAnalytica acquisition, which was lower than our margin profile and, of course, the Q4 part. So excluding those, what would you allude the margin weakness to, number one? And could you also quantify the impact that BizAnalytica had on margins for this financial year? Just in some ballpark number, I mean, for our understanding.
Sure. So I'm taking it very quickly, Hussain. In terms of the levers which have impacted the margin at broad profiles, the talent cost because 90%+ of our business is cloud and digital, right? While there's an attrition which is coming down for the industry, but the kind of talent we operate with, with very less of legacy business, the talent is always at the high demand. So your talent cost keeps going up, and you need to pay well to get the right talent onboarded to your company and to deliver to the customer. So that's one of the areas. Second area is we are also investing significantly for growth. Our expectation is not to operate just in nine-minute industry. We want to perform better than the industry, right?
There are investments which have been gone into particular regions and particular verticals so that we can drive that momentum. Those are the two important areas of investment which has gone as a company. BizAnalytica impact would be broadly in the range of 30 bps-40 bps for full-year basis. That's what we indicated at the time of acquisition. Max 50 bps is what we were anticipating. I think it's broadly 30 bps-40 bps which it has impacted us for the year.
Got it. Got it. Thank you. Just last question. What would be our organic growth for this financial year? Thank you.
Maybe, again, I don't have specifics now, but 3%, you can assume broadly high level. We can do specifics and come back, but broadly, 3%, you can assume would be dilution because of the inorganic play.
Thank you very much. I request all the participants to restrict your questions to one per participant in order the management is able to address questions of everyone in the queue. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ravi Menon from Macquarie Group. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. Here's just one clarifier on this Ministry of Business deal. They were a customer of yours already from what I understand. So is this all net new, or is there any part of it that we should think of as them finishing one set of work packages and then awarding a next set?
Yeah. So Ravi, it's a good question. We have been working with the Defense Department, as you pointed out, over the last few years. We continue to do that work. It's a decent-sized account for us right now. It's within that top 30 and one of the faster-growing accounts. That work continues in terms of some of the data warehousing, identity, and access management work that we do. This is a new framework. It's a new set of initiatives from the MOD. And this will be incremental in, like I said, different areas and different lots, the lots that are relevant to us I mentioned earlier. And the work that we're currently doing will continue. And as we get more wins as part of this DIPS framework, that will continue to add and grow the MOD account.
Follow up on that. Salesforce, as a company, has not been really reporting, I think, very strong growth. How are you seeing this, and for you, is there still an opportunity to grow, maybe even faster than their license growth, or how should we think about that?
Yeah. That's a really good point because Salesforce used to grow at 23%-25% year-on-year range at one point a couple of years back. Their latest guidance for this year at a company level is, I think, 8%-9% year-on-year growth. So they've definitely slowed down. And we are seeing in certain pockets where organizations might choose a ServiceNow or some other alternative platform. Having said that, Salesforce is a very large ecosystem, and there's significant incumbency in terms of the customer 360-degree platform. So this is, I'm talking about Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Integration Cloud. These are the ones that we're focused on. And we believe it's still a good mining opportunity because we have some really good capabilities, particularly in healthcare.
And the area which has gone slow for us is the state and local government where Salesforce has also been slow to win, and that has impacted us. But at an overall level, we're taking the Salesforce capabilities global. So we expect to penetrate that in the U.K. and beyond. And we still feel it's a growing ecosystem, although at much slower rates. The one other point which applies a little bit more broadly, but since you've asked about the Salesforce in particular, is that our capabilities are also functional-oriented, right, in many cases. So in some places where we saw for example, if you remember, we had a hit a little over a year back on the Oracle Cloud Commerce, and we were able to retrain and reorient them into newer tools, newer commerce tools or newer Adobe tools or even Salesforce in those cases.
So we'll always continue to keep a watch out there because the fungibility of our skills can always be cross-trained. And that's something that we've done in a couple of cases in the hyperscaler area and in the front office area as well. But yeah, I mean, in general, Salesforce is still a positive story for us going forward. We did see a slowdown in Q4 that impacted us. But otherwise, as a whole, it will continue to grow in FY 2025 and beyond.
Thank you. Best of luck.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Naveen Baid from Nuvama Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Thank you. So can you give some guidance on the organic growth expected for FY 2025?
Naveen, sorry. You talked about organic growth for FY 2025?
Yes.
Okay. So see, again, we don't give guidance as a company, as you know. But if you like Arun alluded to, right, I mean, in dollar terms, again, just like-for-like, FY 2023 sorry, FY 2024 over FY 2023, full-year basis, we were 15.8% on U.S. dollar terms. If you roughly remove the BizAnalytica 3% or so, that still is a 12.5%-13% type of year-on-year growth, right? That was for FY 2024. So we believe that.
Do you expect a similar number for FY 2025?
FY 2025? Sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah. So I was coming to that. So I just wanted to make sure that I baseline the organic view, right? So for FY 2025, we believe that our aspiration is, of course, to do better than that. And we think that we can exceed that number in FY 2025 in terms of full-year numbers. There's always a potential to see a little bit quarter-and-quarter differences between the quarters. We do have some seasonality on certain quarters. But in general, for a full-year FY 2025 level, we expect to beat that FY 2024 full-year number.
Okay. Thank you. My other question was on the tax rate. So what caused the sharp drop in tax expense this quarter?
Yeah. So Naveen, this time, we had certain overseas geographies where we got the tax credit. And that was one time relating to earlier years, which was accounted for in the quarter, led to overall reduction in the ETR for the quarter and for the year.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Nilesh Jethani from BOI Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good evening, and thanks for the opportunity. My question was on the margin profiles. I wanted to understand, historically, we had guided that post-US ramping up sharply, coming to a good growth rate, and BizAnalytica reaching about double-digit margin profile by end of FY 2024. What is still not allowing us to guide on improved margins going forward?
Yeah. So again, there are multiple factors, Nilesh, which we have to keep operating. One is the balance between growth and the margin, right? So our process is definitely we want EPS to continue to grow. And to make it as a combination, we want growth to be much faster, and definitely, quality of earnings has to be healthy. So our outlook at this point of time is to operate closer to 17% and 70%+ in the medium term. And as the expansion of revenue comes across geography, in the U.S. in particular, as you rightly said, because a lot of investment has gone in there, with certain size and scale, we will start leveraging our SG&A investment. And then we can see upward improvement in the EBITDA margin profile as well.
What could be the levers for driving, apart from U.S.?
There are multiple, like our EMEA margin as well. Middle East margin is much lower than the company average. As we are coming out of the smaller accounts, focusing upon account mining and just picking up the customers who can become the customer for life, as it's been very, very selective. So the focus is, how can we improve margin out there? There are a lot of operating levers. How do you manage your grade mix? More trainees inclusion into it, your subcontractor reduction, your offshore-onshore mix? So all those combinations, part of our operating levers on top of SG&A leverage will help us drive this improvement.
And maybe one other thing. This is Hiral again. Just one other thing to add there is our utilization that I referred to earlier is definitely on an improving trajectory.
In fact, we believe it's at a peak level right now in terms of some of the operating improvements that we've made. We had a program last year in FY 2025 sorry, FY 2024, which we will continue in the form of Project LEAP, which is focused on continued improvements in operating levels with the intent of repurposing that into GenAI and newer area investments, right? So that balance of repurposing will continue. But the blip we saw in Q4 obviously will recover in Q1.
Got it. Got it. That was helpful, and thank you so much.
Thanks, Naveen.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Amit Chandra from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Sir, my question is on the impact that we had in the U.S. geography. So you mentioned that there were some client-specific issues. So if you can quantify the exact amount that was the impact in this quarter and also the issue started at the start of the quarter or it was a phenomenon that you saw at the middle of the quarter. And are these clients the clients that are facing the issues, are these clients the acquired clients from the recent acquisitions? And also, if you can give, are these in the top five and top 10 in the U.S.?
So Amit, the multiple questions, let me try to break it up into two or three parts, all good valid points. The two clients out of the three are part of the acquired clients, right?
So, that is, I'm starting with your last question. None of them, sorry, one of them, the client that we talked about, which we moved business from onsite to offshore for a particular program, that is in the top client. Actually, that is in the top client, right? And that's the very reason why we made that move because it did establish strong continuity. And in fact, post that, we are continuing to see good opportunities in that healthcare client in newer areas, right, as they're looking at cost savings and few other transformational initiatives as well. So that's the second part. And then the other question was on the quantum.
While we cannot share the exact specifics, but just ballpark, each of these three situations, three very specific situations that I talked about, right, give or take, each of them created a little over $1 million each of impact. So you can kind of do the rough math there. I mean, total, of course, is higher because each of these three particular customers had an impact of more than $1 million each for the Q4 timeframe. Like I said, two of them we should be able to recover in Q1. One of them, which is the offshore movement, we continue to grow that client. So hopefully, that addresses all your questions.
Okay. Sir, the second question is on the margins. Earlier, we were in the band of 17%-19%, but now we are taking towards the lower end. Is it because of these client movements or something that has changed very recently, or is it more structurally, we are seeing no pressure in terms of the margins that is coming through? From here on, is it the new range in terms of the margins?
Very quickly, Amit, and I think I gave the same reflection to previous question. So since we are operating at 16 now, our endeavor is to first reach 17, which we are very confident about. We'll reach to that number because there are certain as I said, because revenue loss has reflected into the margin profile because cost was incurred. So we should be able to come back to 17% very quickly. In the short term, we want to operate closer to 17 and 17%+ . Medium to long term, as we go and as we start delivering with a scale in the U.S. market, our Middle East markets start improving the margin, we'll come back to our trajectory of 17%-19%. But for short to medium term, you should take more 17%-18% for now.
And sir, the.
Mr., I request you.
[The Minister of Defense].
I request you to rejoin the queue for further questions.
Just one question.
On Amit's question, again, it's a valid question. Arun covered it as well, but we do see the data and AI, particularly with some of the initiatives, while it has become a lot more realistic now in terms of use cases, customers are talking about, where is it working? How do we make it work for our but the investments and solutions, investments in industry-specific use cases is critical. So some of the operating lever improvements, we do plan to repurpose for differentiated GenAI and AI solutions. I think that'll be critical for us in FY 2025 to not just ensure market share of that but also our differentiated position. So hopefully, Amit, that covers that part as well. Yeah. Go ahead.
Okay. Thank you and all the best. Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Krupa Desai from Electrum Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hello. Am I audible?
Yes. We can hear you.
Sir, my question was, why are our fixed-price contracts going down? Usually, it used to be around the 50% level, and now it is around the 40% level.
Arun, go ahead if you want to add.
Yeah. Yeah. So Krupa, again, the kind of business we are in, most of the work in the digital and cloud are outcome-oriented. The contracting is sometimes at the insistence of the customer where they want to do T&M rather than fixed-bid engagements, but it's only the billing type which they choose. Most of the work which we do is outcome-oriented. We decide what kind of staffing we want to do, what kind of grade-mix we want to do. There could be certain requirements from the customer side as well. Obviously, we have to work together to ensure the outcome is delivered. So I'll not be too much worried between fixed-bid and T&M ratio at this point of time. But yes, as an approach, we want more fixed-bid so that you are able to drive much better control over the execution rather than discussion with the client.
Broadly, it's more the contract methodology rather than the work which we do.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Jalaj from Svan Investment. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. This is for Arun. First question, could you give me the margin walkthrough of why there was what explains the dip?
Yeah. So as I mentioned in my opening commentary, and as Hiral mentioned, we had three challenges in the U.S. market with three customers. And specifically, one of them while all three have some degree of influence, but one of them where we have done the work in this quarter, but there was delivery challenge, which has been completely resolved now as we speak. But we couldn't recognize any revenue last quarter because the customer was not ready to agree to the change request. But we wanted the customer to be happy because that's a long-term relationship. There's millions of dollars of opportunity lying with that customer. So we had to take the cost hit in our P&L in quarter four for which there's no revenue, which has impacted our margin primarily. There are other plus and minus reasons, but predominantly, that's the reason which has impacted the EBITDA profile.
We can expect the revenue to come next quarter. Is that so?
That customer will become BAU next quarter. As Hiral said, out of three, two will reverse. One will reverse immediately in the current quarter. One will reverse over the period because what we have done in offshoring, it will come back, but it will come back gradually as different pipelines are building up. So in a different transit, it will come back. But the one which got impacted, our margin will come back in quarter one.
Got it. And maybe just one more point to add, Arun. This is Hiral. I also alluded to one Salesforce program where we were dependent on the previous phase to complete. That particular program was ready to start, or we were ready to start in January. Now, we, again, made the call to hold on to those resources. Unfortunately, the previous phase got delayed from another provider. Now, we are starting that program this quarter, but it did create a delay. So we were able to offset some of these things. We're starting to see some larger deal activity in U.K. as well where the pricing will be competitive. And like Arun mentioned, talent costs definitely will have a bearing to it. But most of those, we've been able to offset through some of the operating lever improvements that you see in some of the metrics, right?
So this particular blip that you saw in Q4 with the U.S. client, that will come back in Q1.
Got it. And this is with regards to the not per se the guidance, but directionally for FY 2025 and ahead. So what sort of.
Mr. Chandrana, I request you to rejoin the queue.
I think the question was going on. Let's continue this question, please.
Okay.
Thank you. So FY 2025 and beyond, so for the growth per se, so what gives us confidence, or how do you see it across geos? Maybe if you could give us some flavor onto that side, that'd be very helpful.
Yeah. You're referring to revenue growth, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm talking about so there was Hiral mentioned that we are looking to do better growth in FY 2025 than this. So maybe we can refer to the geo-wise. And maybe also, you could talk about the large deals. Thank you.
Sure. Sure. I'll take that. And Arun, feel free to add. So if you look at the three geographies, let me start with the Middle East and APAC. Kudos to the team there. There's a really solid in-quarter execution and overall momentum that that geography has. Now, it does come with certain margin challenges, but our revenue growth has been very solid. We're taking a much more qualified approach in the Middle East because we want to go after very specific larger clients and deals which are more medium to long-term sustainable, right? But the geography will continue to grow double digits. U.K. and Europe as a whole, which as you know, U.K. continues to be our biggest geography and public sector within that business, we are seeing, again, decent deal momentum. Our private sector actually is looking up here in the last two or three months.
We see some really good lead indicators of the deal momentum in our private sector. So we think that there's going to be some slowdown in decision-making because of the election year in U.K. particularly, but the pipeline continues to be rock solid. And again, U.K. is also projected to be at least double-digit in terms of year-on-year growth. U.S., which we had a challenge in Q4, like you said, will bounce back in Q1 and will grow much faster compared to the entire company. And we see some of these accounts that we have been talking about starting to become larger accounts. I mentioned about the $14 million account. There is a few more accounts that will become $5 million, eventually $10 million. And so that account mining focus and healthcare focus in U.S. will drive much faster growth, right?
So that's how we would break down calculated double-digit growth in the Middle East and in APAC, at least double digit in U.K. and Europe, and then, of course, much faster industry leading when it comes to U.S.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Sudeep Duggar from Finacle Venture. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hello, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. My question is specifically with regards to the earnouts that we pay out. How does it affect the P&L and the balance sheet, if you could explain? Okay. So you're.
The [CMPS] indicator, if I'm not wrong. And how does it work is all the earnouts are provisioned at the time of acquisition. It lies in liability, and as you make the payment, it goes from the liability, right? If any payment goes beyond those liability, then it goes through the P&L and think about if it is lower than what has been accrued. So what I can answer is. It is provided for in the book with the right approximation with the help of valuers, how the accounting happens. So we don't need any significant ups and downs coming into the end.
So the earnouts, suppose in the components of the ESOP, so it hits the employee expense. In case of cash payouts, it hits employee expense and other expense.
No. So what happens in case of ESOP, it goes to P&L. In case of earnout, earnout is nothing but the date of acquisition. And all the payment happens through that liability which you create on day one. So it doesn't go through the P&L. If your estimation on day one is not correct, then adjustment in that estimation goes through P&L.
Okay. It's amortized as intangibles?
Those are.
The amortization and your fair valuation of contingent consideration goes through P&L, which is a mandatory requirement. So there's an interest line. There's a depreciation line which gets impacted.
Okay. Got it. Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question is from the line of Sarang Sanil from RW Investment Advisors. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity. Firstly, can I know what the revenue of BizAnalytica was this quarter? I believe it was $4.3 million last quarter.
Arun, go ahead.
Yeah. So again, I think our expectation was that the quarter in which we make the acquisition will report it. And since it was so quarter two, we reported because it was mid of the quarter. And quarter three, also, we reported because it was full of the quarter. Now, the business is completely integrated. And it's as much as integrated because data is a requirement from every customer you go to. So for example, we have got a new deal with our existing client, Kellanova. Existing client in the U.S., it's more than $1.5 million data deal. It becomes difficult to classify whether it's BizAnalytica acquisition-related deal or it's related to Mastek, right? And hence, as we have integrated it completely, we have stopped giving that information separately because it will not be a true reflection on the numbers because it's one united business now.
Sure. Okay. Okay. And so secondly, the initial comments pertaining to the margin dip, you had mildly touched upon the case of U.S. where you had to move from onsite to offshore for a particular client. What was the impact from that? And would you want to quantify any other impact that we had this quarter?
Look, as we mentioned, there are three impacts onshore to offshore. One, insourcing client dead because of the acquisition done by their end. Third was this delivery challenge which has been resolved now. And the fourth, which Hiral said, because there was one deal which was awarded to us, and we believe that will offset. And the phase one was delayed by the previous vendor, and hence, we couldn't start the work. All four put together had some of the impact into the margin because you had the resources already lined up, right? As we get into quarter one, the two will reverse, as Hiral said, and one is permanent.
Obviously, we will take the resources out as those will not be required for that client, but we will use them in some other program because this is a similar work talent which we need for any other program we operate in for.
Thank you very much. As there are no further questions, I will now like to hand the conference over to management for closing comments.
All right. Thank you. So first of all, thanks for the engagement and the questions. Hopefully, we were able to cover good ground on some of the specific reasons for the Q4 revenue drop and disappointing performance in Q4. Having said that, our lead indicators of order book backlog, our demand and deal momentum continues to be strong. All three geographies have some really positive progress that we've made in our key strategic priorities, and we believe continued rigor and execution on them will be important in FY 2025. We are positioned really well when it comes to our top clients but also our next 20 clients that I was mentioning earlier. So the whole account mining focus is starting to pay off for us in terms of stickiness.
But at a more broad industry level, our key positioning in terms of Oracle Cloud, in terms of Salesforce, in terms of data and AI, and our entire digital engineering as well as experience capabilities will help us position us strongly as the demand continues to improve. As you can see from our backlog, the year-on-year growth and the quarter-on-quarter growth of our order book momentum gives us confidence in our FY 2025 outlook. The investments that we've already made in the last year and a half, two years in not just acquisitions but also in terms of organic capabilities in our accounts as well as our ability to win large deals and larger clients is starting to reflect in, again, growth in specific areas that we want to focus on.
So again, while we saw results which were below our expectations in Q4, we're confident about bouncing back in Q1 and having a solid FY 2025. Thank you again for the trust and commitment toward Mastek and joining the call. Thank you.
On behalf of Mastek Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.