Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Mastek Limited Q3 FY24 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all the participants' lines will be in listen-only mode. 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 and then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand over the conference to Ms. Asha Gupta from EY Investor Relations. Thank you, and over to you.
Thank you, Muskaan. Good afternoon to all of you. Welcome to the Q3 FY24 earnings call of Mastek Limited. 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, and Mr. Arun Agarwal, Global CFO.
Hiral will start the call with business update, which will be followed by Mr. Arun providing the financial update for the quarter. 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 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 the SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find it on our website. Having said that, I will now hand over the call to Hiral Chandrana. Over to you, Hiral.
Thank you, Asha. Good evening, everybody, and happy New Year to all of you. I'll cover three topics: a financials recap, update on our business strategy and strategic priorities, and view of as we look forward, how we are well-positioned to sustain the success ahead. On the financials, we reported 17.4% year-on-year growth on revenue terms in U.S. dollars, and our EBITDA expanded to 17%. Our order book backlog year-on-year grew 21.2%.
We're very happy with the deal momentum as well as the orders that have been booked in Q3, and we see continued demand as we look at the future quarters. Our operating cash flow as well as our business metrics on utilization improved, as well as we've declared a dividend of 140%, $7... seven rupees a share.
BizAnalytica has been completely integrated now as part of Mastek family, and we are very happy with the momentum that we see in the data automation and AI space. As far as the overall business is concerned, I'm gonna break it up into a couple of parts and talk about some of the client wins as well. As we have been communicating for the past many quarters, our U.K. public sector business continues to be very resilient. We are not only working and expanding our footprint in the existing departments, where we are very strong, which includes immigration, asylums, biometrics, but also starting to expand into newer areas and policies. We'd announced a large deal win last time at the Cabinet Office. Pleased to inform you that that has been delivered in the first milestone, and we continue to do more with the Cabinet Office.
As it relates to other departments in the U.K. public sector, our team is doing a fantastic job in running very targeted campaigns with new policy areas and frameworks, and we feel that in spite of various changes in the U.K. geography as such, we believe the areas that we are working in will continue to be resilient going forward.
Our U.S. business continues to operate in a steady fashion. A lot of foundational work that has been done in the last few quarters is starting to pay off, both in terms of demand as well as in terms of types of deals. We closed a large global deal in a $5 billion manufacturing company. It's a truly transformational approach to looking at end-to-end processes, from order to cash, procure to pay, record to report.
Our global teams came together in Europe and U.K. and in North America to deliver that win. The Home Office, where we do some significant work on immigration, is starting to look beyond, and we are strategically working with many departments to see how we can align to the ministerial priorities of 2024 in creating more efficiencies and reducing their backlog.
We've had some very interesting wins in Middle East, and this goes beyond Oracle Cloud as well. We are getting opportunities in ServiceNow, in Microsoft. Happy to report that AWS is another growing partnership. We were recognized by AWS as a top three upcoming partner.
The Tech Market View, which publishes transparently the progress, identified Mastek in the U.K. as one of the suppliers on the rise, and our healthcare momentum in the U.S. continues to be very strong, both in terms of pipeline as well as the type of wins. We've won a new logo in a Fortune 500 company. We've also made some progress in some subsectors of financial services... and believe that there's more to come there.
As we look at the data automation and AI space, now with the amplified capabilities of BizAnalytica and Data Cloud data modernization, we are starting to see some very strategic plays in Snowflake, Databricks, but more importantly, looking at the customer's entire data landscape.
Many of the wins that we've had in the last few months included looking at unifying their data platform and making sure that they are getting ready for the Gen AI and AI use case. We are also working with many of our top 30 clients in not just identifying some of those AI use case, but also showing them a roadmap, in some cases partnering, of how we can deliver that roadmap.
As we look at our utilization and operating lever, Arun will cover in more detail our financials. But we are happy to expand our operating margin and continue to focus on making sure that we are repurposing, so that we can invest in future emerging areas. Our confidence level in U.S. and U.K. in our strategic priority areas, particularly public sector in U.K. as well as healthcare in U.S., continues to be very strong.
We've also gotten much more razor-sharp focused in areas that we do not want to play in, and a result of that, we've started to exit certain geographies like Malaysia, Singapore, and the India business. That has resulted in a little bit of attrition spike, but we believe that will stabilize and keep going down in the future quarters. Let me shift to the market going forward and how we see FY 25.
While we don't provide any guidance on financials, we continue to believe that top three priorities in the company, which is our government and secure government business in U.K., our healthcare business globally, and the types of wins that we are having in the healthcare business, plus the data and AI space, will continue to be the top three areas that we'll focus on.
Having said that, we've made a shift in the last 18 months on how we think about account mining, as well as how we look at our strategic clients. While we have more work to do in that area, we've started seeing some excellent progress on pockets of clients, which have moved from $1 million to $5 million, $5 million to $10 million. In many cases, we are building a pipeline of more $1 million accounts so that those accounts can become future $5 million, $10 million accounts. Many of them are large brand names, in some cases, Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000 clients.
So we believe that now with the enhanced portfolio of services, which is Salesforce in our front office, Oracle Cloud in our back office, some of the digital engineering work that Mastek has always been good at, plus the amplified data capabilities, give us a much broader right to win in our chosen markets and verticals.
Having said that, we recognize that there are client decision delays, there are certain macro uncertainties, but our confidence level on the pipeline and our order book backlog is strong, and we believe that the areas that we are focused on in terms of our strategic priorities will continue to grow.
There is a shift that is happening in the buying behavior of our clients as well, in terms of value-based delivery, in terms of smaller projects, in some cases, very quick wins, much more agile delivery, even in large transformation programs, and we believe that plays to our advantage. Happy to answer more questions as we get into Q&A, and with that, I'll turn it over to Arun.
Thanks. Thank you, Hiral. A very warm welcome to everyone on the call. Wishing you a very happy New Year. We have calculated the deck and the presentation in advance, so I'll be focusing more on the financial and the operating levers, representing our performance for the quarter. We reported revenue of INR 784 crore for the quarter.
It's up 2.4% quarter-on-quarter in INR terms, and 19.1% year-on-year. This performance is after taking impact of furloughs, which has happened across the geography, and quite traditional quarterly challenge, which all of us face, and the performance is despite that challenge. In constant currency terms, it reflects growth of 2.7% quarter-on-quarter and 13.4% year-on-year.
As Hiral mentioned, we have completed integration of BizAnalytica during the quarter, and this quarter represents full quarter revenue of BizAnalytica, which was $4.3 million. On an organic basis, our quarter-on-quarter growth represent 0.7% in constant currency terms. We added 27 new customers during the quarter, as our hunting engine continues to add and expand the customer base across our U.S., U.K., and some of the Middle Eastern market.
As Hiral mentioned, it's a consistent order booking, which we are seeing across our geographies, including U.S., U.K., and Middle East. Our twelve-month order backlog for the quarter stands at $248 million, reflecting a growth of 11% quarter-on-quarter and 21% year-on-year. Our operating EBITDA moved up to 17% during the quarter, an improvement of 90 basis points quarter-on-quarter.
This EBITDA expansion has been led by operating levers improvement, including utilization and other levers, including your grade mix, et cetera. I'm really glad to inform our U.S. profit has moved up significantly, which further supported the overall operating EBITDA 17% for the quarter. Our utilization has moved to 85.4%, 130 basis points improvement quarter-on-quarter. This utilization is excluding leave to represent the actual utilization of the headcount as they join Mastek.
Our profit after tax has improved to INR 77.7 crores for the quarter. It is up by 19% for the quarter and 15.8% year-on-year. Our collection continues to be robust. We are improving our DSO quarter by quarter, reflecting a strong gross cash addition to INR 404 crores for 31st December 2023. Our borrowings stood at INR 464 crores at the end of December, and we are having debt net of cash at INR 60 crores at the end of 31st December.
Our closing headcount was 5,518 headcount at the end of the quarter, representing net reduction of 80 headcount as we continue to improve our utilization. As we are adding more and more customers, we'll be looking to increase this headcount in the coming quarters. Let me thank all of you again for your patience and continued trust in the Mastek. Going back to the moderator to open the house for Q&A. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wish 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 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 Ravi Menon from Macquarie . Please go ahead.
If I got my numbers right, looks like in the U.S., you still had 2%+, you know, organic growth quarter-on-quarter, despite the furloughs. Just wanted to validate that, right?
Ravi, your voice was not completely clear. Can you repeat the question, please?
Yeah, I was just asking about the organic growth in the U.S. It looks like that is more than 2%, quarter-on-quarter. Is that correct?
That's... Yeah, that's roughly correct. Yeah.
And secondly, it looks like, you know, where, where you described the cross-sell, you know, and the strong order wins this quarter, it looks like there was already a lot of traction building in the U.S. Could you talk a bit about, you know, how many services are we cross-selling on an average? You know, do you have any measure of that across your accounts currently? Any examples of BizAnalytica clients where you managed to already cross-sell some of Mastek services at all?
Yeah, no, that's a great question, Ravi. And, and as I mentioned, towards the end, we've been running a disciplined account mining, focused initiative for the, I would say, last, 15-18 months. And, while part of it is obviously cross-sell, where we measure the service line penetration. So we have four kind of plus one service line, and, and we start looking at even sub, practices within each service line.
So the proactive proposals, as well as how we shape some of the conversations. Within our top 30 accounts, we have now, more than, one service line in about 15 or 15-16 of them. And in some cases, we now have three service lines, operating in some of the accounts. So, so that's, that's one dimension.
But then beyond just the service line penetration, we've also revamped some of our account managers and client managers, client partners, also looking at how delivery can contribute to account mining. Plus, getting ready to understand the customer, be more intelligent about the landscape, you know, their spending areas, their new initiatives, so that we elevate our position in newer spend and newer strategic areas as well.
So that's for the top 30 accounts. We're being very, very rigorous. Having said that, we are also doing some cross-sell in the next 20-25 accounts. As far as BizAnalytica is concerned, it's a little bit early, but we're very happy with the deal momentum, even in the data space.
We were expecting that the first few quarters would be more focused on the U.S., given that, you know, the acquisition is mostly based in the U.S., but we are seeing really good demand in U.K. and many clients outside of U.S. as well. That's been really encouraging because data, you know, having the whole data foundation, the modernization journey of moving it to the cloud, is a common topic across all clients. So yeah, I mean, encouraged with the cross-sell progress, but there's definitely more to do there.
Great, thanks. You also spoke about some traction with and some Fortune 500 clients now. So, you know, are these new wins over the last 12-24 months the new logos that you managed to add?
Yeah. So, we have been much more careful in terms of the new logos, and you would have seen that trend in the last at least 3 quarters, maybe 4. It's partly to ensure that we don't get into clients which are $500 million or, you know, sub-$1 billion, right? We are mostly focused on now clients above $1 billion, in many cases, $2 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion clients. So the quality of new logos that we are adding is much richer. Obviously, that means that they have higher budgets.
There will be more competition in some cases, but in the areas where we have the right to win, where we have differentiation, which we do, we feel that that's the best approach. Having said that, the Fortune 500 client I was talking about, which is in the U.S., was a new logo. There are a few other logos where we had entered earlier in the year, and now we are expanding them to the earlier point that you made on process.
Great. Thanks so much. And one last question on the U.K., if I may. Any sign of a revival? We saw that you announced you win there, with one of the U.K. government departments. So any sign of an improvement in spending?
You know, we, we are—we continue to be, you know, bullish on overall U.K. public sector. Again, I'm being very specific here. Because if you look at the government spending, right, roughly it stands at about GBP 12 billion. And central government, defense and health makes up almost about 75% or more of that spend.
And those are the areas that we are playing in. In fact, we are playing in even local government and education. But the areas that we are focused on is really the central government and defense. And in there, there are some, you know, very significant and longer-term policy decisions that will continue to be part of their national critical infrastructure activity.
So for example, you know, we've not even entered some of the new areas and departments like Department of Justice, Police Protection, where we've started to gain a lot more traction. So, so in general, we believe, while the cycles are longer, just by the nature of the adjudication process and, the time, it takes.
But in terms of our ability to win in that market, given our longevity, our security cleared resources, and our differentiation, because we've been managing some of these systems for 15, 20 years, is very high. So yeah, we, we, we like that. We continue to like that sector and we'll, we'll grow in there.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is the line from Mohit Jain from Anand Rathi. Please go ahead.
Sir, congrats on a good quarter, especially on the margin front. One is on the health segment. Now, there is some increase which we have seen in this quarter. So is it on account of the acquired entity integration and more in the U.S.?
Or should we assume that the issues we faced in the U.K. are now behind, and this account has started growing for us? So that's one. And second, now that you have alluded to the fact that government spending is high, on the IT side, so what kind of growth rate should we really expect, from a Mastek standpoint, say, over medium term?
Yeah. No, so, Mohit, good questions. Let me first cover the healthcare part, right? So, see, in healthcare, it's one of those verticals where we are present globally. And, in fact, I'll even say that, Middle East and Australia, where we do business, as you know, we've had some, you know, healthcare wins there as well.
But our biggest focus when it comes to healthcare in terms of just the sheer volume and the size of the opportunity, is in the U.S. And that is in the payer and provider space. Very specifically in the payer space, we are going after Blue Cross Blue Shields, and we are going after regional health plans. These are companies anywhere between $4 billion-$10 billion.
In the provider space, which is the hospitals and the senior living facilities, we have some good traction with our Oracle Cloud and our back office transformation capability. So now, as we look at that healthcare space and, and your, your specific question, most of the, the growth that you've seen, and you'll -- that you'll see even in the, the coming quarter, is due to the U.S. healthcare and the, Middle East and Australia healthcare traction.
On NHS, which has been a specific, account where we've had challenges in the past, due to reasons even outside of our control. Like I communicated in the last quarter, we now believe it has bottomed out.
We've in fact renewed one of our key existing engagements with some small uptick in business in there, which gives us confidence in staying stable over the coming quarters and years in that, in that area. Now we've hired a new healthcare leader in U.K., who's just been onboarded two months back.
There is a outside agency that we have hired. We are actually getting some really good insights. I wish we had done that earlier, frankly. And now we have a complete plan for NHS revival and growth path, where the team is plotting not just one area, but multiple areas beyond the central agency of NHS. There is secondary care, there is arm's length bodies.
And so we believe that, you know, that NHS account will grow in FY 2025, but, I think I mentioned this last time, we are cautious, you know, on that. So all around healthcare, we feel really kind of bullish about some of the deal momentum, and it'll grow globally going forward.
Right. And second was on the government segment, like if you exclude this, the way we report government and education.
That's right.
What kind of growth rates do you expect there?
Yeah. So, see, higher education is an interesting sector. There is definitely... It's not obviously a very large spend area, but it has some interesting dynamics that it's going through, and we have had some wins, even in this quarter as well as in the last few quarters. So, University of Nottingham, you know, University of Durham, so we see some momentum out there.
But, from a prioritization perspective, the secure government services, which is really the central government and defense spend combined, is 70% of U.K. public sector, and so that's where we want to focus on. So that particular area, which is a very big part of our business, will continue to grow at a company average, you know, going forward.
There might be other areas that will grow as well, like education, but that may not necessarily be at the same level.
Right. And, one for, one on the margin front, now that we have done 17%, is there a possibility that with U.S. profitability coming back, and I think there's more confidence in U.S. growth, that company-level margins can move up more towards 19%-20% over medium term?
So, Mohit, as we have said in the past as well, our endeavor is to operate between 17%-19%. So that will continue to be our effort, and that's the direction, Mohit.
But from your standpoint, specifically coming out of this strong quarter, so there's no headwind though given that wage hikes are behind, U.S. seems to be turning around.
Yeah. So Mohit, this is Hiral again. So I think we had pointed out that the last quarter was more of an aberration because of wage hike and a couple of other areas. We believe that this 17%+ and 17%-19% range. We're making some fundamental changes in operating model and efficiency, so that is definitely going to help.
And like Arun said, you know, we feel comfortable in that range. Obviously, we want to continue to invest in the right areas for the future. But yeah, that 17%-19% band is, you know, very, very steady and can be consistent going forward.
Third quarter has no one-off in margin, right?
No, it's broadly there.
Because in one of the footnote you guys had mentioned, like, I think margins could have been higher if the one-time expenses would not be there.
That's predominantly because the way accounting happens, your PP amortization, unwinding of interest, all those gets reported as part of your depreciation and the interest cost, right? So what we have highlighted is this acquisition, because of this acquisition, it's not the business profit, right? This accounting cost comes and your business profit starts seeing in a different way. So that's what we try to highlight.
And, uh-
Yeah, it's all just below everything.
Yes.
Yeah. And Mohit, the BizAnalytica margin profile, as you know, and might recall, was lower than the overall company.
Right.
The team has done a really good job in making, not just integrating, but just making them part of the family, and it has improved margins, you know, getting very close to the overall company average. So that has helped as well.
Perfect, sir. All the best. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Before we go to the next question, as a reminder, all the participants are requested to press star one to ask the question. The next question is from the line of Ravi Naredi from Naredi Investments. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much to give me the opportunity. But in last nine months, we grew 44% revenue in U.S., which is very much impressive. Secondly, from U.K. and Europe, we grew 11% only, and our profit rises 3.55 only. So from about table, we conclude U.S. business is growing, while U.K. and Europe is steady and giving less bottom line downward than U.S. It is true?
So, Ravi, this is Hiral. I'll start and then request Arun to add. See, our U.K. business is operating at very strong margins already, right? And in fact, we have a very differentiated business, particularly in the public sector, as you know. And that margin profile is really been consistent and steady. Having said that, we are starting to participate in some larger deals in larger transactions. So, we are willing to make the right bets, and sometimes that might trigger, you know, quarter-on-quarter fluctuation. But broadly, it is still in a very healthy range.
Our U.S. margins historically have been on the lower side because of subscale nature of our business and, you know, in some cases a combination of organic, inorganic companies that have come together. But now, last quarter, we crossed kind of a $100 million run rate, so the quarterly run rate, and now we have a fairly solid integrated business.
We hired a new U.S. leader about 10-11 months back, and he's doing a good job in bringing multiple, you know, entities together as just kind of one Mastek. So part of it is just that. But second is, of course, there is a very rigorous qualification process that I was mentioning earlier.
So, in some cases, we're actually getting out of accounts, which are low margin, and making sure that new business that we win is in quality accounts. And again, the team has done a good job in really implementing some of the operating levers. So we feel good about the margin improvements in the U.S.
In fact, even Middle East has improved a little bit, and they'll continue to improve going forward. So all in all, we wanna make sure that all geographies are firing, not just on the top line, but on the bottom line as well. But U.S. will, you know, have a slightly different margin profile, but we're very encouraged by the margin growth this quarter.
Right. Thank you for detailed answers. Secondly, our revenue backlog grew, but not our margin. So what step in our mind to reach back 15% profit after tax margin?
... as Ravi, we mentioned, you know, again, it's a combination of both improving your operating profit, which is reflected through operating EBITDA. So if you notice, we have reported 17% now, and as we mentioned in the earlier comment, that we want to operate between 17%-19%.
Unfortunately, what happens because of whenever you make an acquisition, there are accounting-related costs which comes into your P&L, like PPI, purchase price intangibles, which get amortized. You start getting unwinding of interest from the earn-out. So all those notional costs, which are not business item. Again, it's accounting. I'm not saying cost is not there in the P&L. It's more about, you know, your accounting-related costs, which optically reduces your PAT percentage.
So when you see 9.9% PAT, that would have been far higher had this accounting was not there, right? So as we start operating and improving our EBITDA, that will get reflected into our profit after tax as well.
Right. Right. Okay, thank you very much for nice reply.
Thank you. Thank you, Ravi.
Thank you. As a reminder, all the participants, you may press star and one to ask a question. The next question is from the line of Amit Chandra from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, and thanks for the opportunity. So my question is on the strong order book that we have shown, and it has been there for the last two quarters. So if you can provide more color in terms of what can... You know, what kind of business we are winning and in terms of mix, whether it is more U.S.-heavy or we are also seeing good part of you know, U.K. private in this.
Yeah. So, Amit, the order book momentum and the orders that we have closed, like you rightly said, our backlog, the 12-month backlog has consistently grown quarter on quarter, last couple of quarters, is actually across the board.
So that's why I'm actually more pleased, because it's been consistent, but also across all geographies. You know, one of the deals which I was mentioning earlier that we've reported, even in the investor deck, that particular deal, as an example, is a $10 million deal for a complete Oracle Cloud implementation and a business transformation. It's actually a global account, but to be executed in North America. And the time period for that is 18 months, right? So that should give an example of that deal.
A couple of other deals that we announced, are, you know, in the range of $4 million-$6 million. And some of those, you know, have, you know, anywhere between 6-12 months in terms of timeframe, right? And, the public sector deal that we announced, is an expansion of the existing work. So that's a key differentiation, right?
Because our credible delivery and our client intimacy in some of these areas is very strong. And, as more enhancements need to be done, as the landscape of the systems that we have built, need to be modernized, and in many cases, we are now converting the development work and the build work that we do into managed services. And so that is also, giving us a more annuity, sticky, you know, revenue as well.
So yeah, short answer is across all geographies. But the U.S. order book is definitely, you know, now steadily growing quarter-over-quarter with net new logos as well as net new deals, which are larger in size.
Yeah. And sir, on the U.K. government, so, you know, we know that in this quarter there was a furlough impact. So apart from the furlough impact, are we seeing any, like, issues in terms of decision-making or any, you know, delays in ramp up? And can we also see extended furloughs in the, you know, in the U.K. government for next quarter? And apart from that, how do you see your penetration strategy in terms of penetrating into other departments, like within the U.K. government?
Yeah. Yeah. So, Amit, I... First of all, we don't see any extended furloughs. I know that a couple of other companies have announced some extended furloughs, but we don't see a risk of that. Point number two is, we will continue to...
The Q3 is obviously a furlough quarter, but we will grow in the sector that I was referring to, which is a good part of our business in U.K., which is the secure government, includes central government and defense. That sector will continue to grow in Q4 and beyond in FY 25. And, so that's the first part of the answer. As far as new departments are concerned, we have a very clear strategy of policy over technology.
When we say that, we are aligning to the top policy areas in U.K. public sector. The areas that we are present in right now, for example, in immigration, in borders, in biometrics, in asylums, are already key policy areas.
The new policy areas, the Government Digital Service, the GDS Cabinet Office win that we announced last quarter, is a new area as an example. Now, within that, we are cross-pollinating, because that One Login program, like I mentioned last quarter, it's like your Aadhaar card, right? It cuts across the entire U.K. government and all departments, like HMRC, Home Office, even NHS, use that. So we're starting to see new areas as a result of that, and there's some common themes that are evolving. One common theme is biometrics, because the DNA database that we have built applies to multiple departments.
The second is immigration. Now, immigration is a big problem globally, including Europe and U.S., so we're looking at that in terms of potential replication. And beyond that, there is a campaign that we are running on new departments.
Now, these new departments are also aligned to certain policy areas, right? You know, for example, there is a agriculture, food, rural environment department, right? Called DEFRA. There is a Department of Justice, and within that Department of Justice, there's many sub-departments. There is police protection, where we've actually hired civil servants. You know, one of the very encouraging signs that we have here, and that's why we're so passionate about this business, is that a lot of our ex-customers are actually willing to join Mastek.
In fact, many of the civil servants that have joined have made a big difference because they come with that domain knowledge. They have worked in that industry. So yes, I mean, you know, that sector is a massive spend area, and you'll continue to see good growth going forward.
Great, sir. And, like, you know, final question on the margins. So obviously, the margin performance has been impressive, and it's mostly led by, you know, recovery in the U.S. margins. So how do you see the U.S. margins going ahead from here in terms of, you know, still it's like below the company average. So is it fair to assume that, we have reached the optimal level or still there is scope for improvement in the U.S.? And, at the overall, is it fair to assume that, you know, with the, you know, the margins in the U.S. recovering, we can be in the higher end of the, you know, range that we are, retargeting?
Yeah. This is kind of the... There's a few different variables in this question, right? So that's why I'll maybe take a minute here, because it's an important area. See, our U.S. business has definitely branched off now into, you know, reasonable size. I mean, it's still small in the grand scheme of things, and we believe there's so much more potential even in the verticals and the accounts that we are playing in.
But having said that, you know, there is a good threshold of $100 million that we've crossed, and that's now giving us confidence that, hey, we can aim for the next $100 million, right? So yes, simple answer is there's definitely more leverage that we'll have, and the margin profile will continue to improve.
But I think it's important to understand that we are going to start competing in larger deals. We will start going after some larger accounts, and even within our own accounts, we believe there's a lot more cross-sell room, and upsell room in terms of account mining. Some of that might come at margins which are below in the short term.
But as long as we are confident that we can drive operational rigor, efficiencies, automation, and making sure that overall profitability is kept at company level, we'll go after some of those large deals, right? What we sometimes don't talk about enough is our Middle East business. It actually has great, you know, deal momentum and order book.
Having said that, the margin profile of that geography is typically low, and there also, we see visibility on improving the margins of Middle East. In fact, in Middle East and EMEA as a whole, we sometimes don't go after certain deals, right? We could grow much faster in that geography, if we wanted to, but we're being very careful.
So yeah, the combination of Middle East margin improvement and some continued steadiness in margin improvement of U.S., will bring the overall profile to, you know, fairly maybe in the midpoint of that range that we're talking about, between 17%-19%. And then there onwards, right, we'll have to make calculated decisions on which accounts we want to invest in, what newer areas. I mean, there's a lot that is happening in generative AI.
We've not talked about it as much, but we are seeing some amazing examples of use cases, you know, in various functional areas from customer service, even industry-specific AI. We talked about healthcare as a priority. Even within healthcare, there's specific areas within the payer and provider segment, in the clinical documentation areas, where we see tremendous opportunity. So we will have to look at where we want to invest going forward and still maintain our margins in that threshold.
Great, sir. Thank you.
Thank you. A reminder to all the participants, you may press star and one to ask a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for the moment while the question queue assembles. As there are no questions, I would like to hand over the conference to management for closing comments.
So first of all, thank you for all the questions and support, your trust in Mastek. We appreciate the interaction and hopefully you got a flavor of where we are focused on, where we're prioritizing. It's been a decent quarter. Like I said, happy with the orders that we've booked, the order backlog, visibility that we have into the future demand, and even more encouraged that this momentum is across all our geographies. Specifically, the U.K. public sector, the U.S. healthcare business, and healthcare as a whole globally, and data and AI as a key service line and horizontal, globally as well.
Having said that, we have some very strong business in our Salesforce capabilities, as well as in our Oracle Cloud capabilities, that continue to give us great differentiation from front office to back office. And combining that with our new capabilities with BizAnalytica in the data space is definitely giving us end-to-end differentiation in many of our clients.
Having said that, you know, we feel that there's much more to do, and as an organization, we are moving the needle in a right direction as it relates to account mining, like I mentioned earlier. And even when it comes to larger deals, our average deal sizes have improved, our client intimacy has improved, and so I'm fairly pleased with the tremendous job that our teams have done.
Want to obviously thank our customers, our partners, but especially our Mastekeers and our teams for their commitment towards the organization and our clients, and of course, all the investors and analysts on the call for your continued support. So with that, thank you and have a great day.
Thank you. On behalf of Mastek Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your line.