Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q4 FY25 earnings conference call of Newgen Software Technologies Limited, hosted by ICICI Securities. As a reminder, all participant 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 this 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. Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Thank you, and over to you, Aditi.
Thank you, Pooja. Good evening, and welcome to the Q4 FY25 earnings call of Newgen Software Technologies. It's my pleasure to introduce the senior management team of Newgen. We have with us today Mr. Diwakar Nigam, Chairman and Managing Director; Mr. T. S. Varadarajan, Whole-Time Director ; Mr. Virender Jeet, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Arun Gupta, Chief Financial Officer; Ms. Deepti Mehra Chugh, Head Investor Relations. I now hand over the call to Ms. Deepti for further proceedings. Thank you, and over to you, Deepti.
Thank you, Aditi. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Deepti Mehra Chugh, Head Investor Relations at Newgen Software Technologies Limited, and I welcome you all to the Q4 FY25 results of the company. Before we move on to the discussion, let me highlight that this call may contain certain forward-looking statements concerning Newgen's future business prospects and profitability, which are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could materially vary from the forward-looking statements. Past performance may not be indicative of future performance. The company does not undertake to make any announcements in case any of these forward-looking statements become materially incorrect or update any forward-looking statements made from time to time by or on behalf of the company. For further details, you may please refer to the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now hand over to Mr. Varadarajan for presentation of the results, which will be followed by a Q&A. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to report our results for full year and Q4 of FY25. FY25 was a year of healthy revenue growth and margin expansion for Newgen. We witnessed revenues of INR 1,487 crore, leading to a growth of 20% worldwide. The year unlocked new opportunities for us, identifying fresh venues for expansion. We witnessed strong growth in our license and implementation revenues. License revenues witnessed a growth of 41% worldwide. This is expected to generate further downstream revenues moving forward. Implementation revenues grew by 25% worldwide. For the year, our annuity revenues were at INR 834 crore, comprising 56% of our revenues. Our business model is well diversified across geographies, with each geography meaningfully contributing to our growth. APAC has been the highest growth market for us during the year, witnessing a 59% worldwide growth.
The year witnessed some landmark wins in banking and in the government sector for records management in the region, strengthening our market position further. India and India continue to be the largest contributors to our revenues. As digital transformation continues to accelerate, banks are facing increased pressure to adopt AI automation and data-driven decision-making. With the adoption of Newgen's solutions, banks are able to enhance business volume, improve operational efficiencies, and provide better customer experiences. Our efforts have started yielding results in the US region also. The region witnessed a strong growth of 20% worldwide in the revenues, and we have seen some early success with deal wins, especially in the insurance sector in the last quarter of the year. We expect these early wins to open the door for broader regional adoption.
Continuing with our emphasis on catering to larger-scale clients and those who significantly contribute to our business, we saw an increase in the number of customers, with billing over INR 50 million from the last 65 of the last year to 87 in the current year. Moreover, we added 62 new logos during the year. Coming to our products, we embrace AI as a core enabler, transforming it into a tool that augments human intelligence, automating classification, extracting insights, and streamlining workflows. As part of our AI-first strategy, we are making significant investment in AI-driven products and solutions. We are moving towards conversational agentic frameworks where voice will play a central role. By leveraging AI, we can help boost productivity, decision quality, and even employee engagement with these enterprise systems. During the year, we have launched our groundbreaking AI agents, Lumen, Harper, and Marwin. Lumen is a growth intelligence agent.
Harper is a conversion intelligence agent to boost engagement and sales. Marwin is a productivity agent for task automation and efficiency enhancement. These products are designed to deliver cost-effective and cost-efficient value while prioritizing transparency and governance. These agents have already demonstrated their potential through several promising and rich use cases. Some of our compelling use cases include an AI-based case management solution to streamline, automate, and enhance the management of cases. These would be extremely critical in reducing the processing time significantly across knowledge industries, regulatory and regulatory authorities, and so on. Another interesting use case based on our AI agent, Lumen, includes an AI-first early warning system for corporate financial institutions and SMEs, which has been designed to proactively monitor and identify potential risks such as credit default, fraud, liquidity issues, or systemic threats in order to take preemptive action.
These systems use machine learning, data analytics, and real-time monitoring to detect warning signs from various data sources across around 1,500 parameters at account and borrower level. In the insurance sector, we are working in the agentic workspace for underwriting and claim processes to enhance the decision-making and make it more straight through by clearing anomalies and exceptions, underwriting cases, data-driven models for faster, more accurate, and more consistent decisions. We anticipate further growth and innovation in AI-led journeys as we build upon these use cases and successes. We have provided a vertical-first go-to-market focusing on various journey clusters on the basis of their revenue potential, product maturity, investment, and portability across geography. Newgen's transformative growth vision includes targeting banking at scale across these regions and expanding in insurance and government segments. We are also strengthening our partnership with advisory firms, system integrators, and independent software vendors.
In Q4, Newgen has been named a leader in the Forrester Wave content platform. That is in Q1 2025. Newgen One Contextual Content Services received the highest possible scores in 10 criteria, including metadata, search, content migration, lifecycle management, intelligent data extraction, document generation, and digital process automation. The report recognizes that Newgen continues its solid innovation strategy with a focus on AI automation and app design capabilities. Our culture of innovation, combined with deep domain expertise, is what truly differentiates us. Out of our global workforce of over 4,600 professionals, we have more than 600 people spanning product development, AI engineering, and domain consulting. During the year, we have added senior leadership talent to strengthen go-to-market, delivery, and innovation capability also. We are proud to be recognized as a great place to work.
This certification is a testament to our unwavering dedication to fostering an empowering and dynamic work culture where our people thrive and deliver outstanding results. Coming to profits and margin, we delivered healthy growth in profits and expanded margins during the year. Profit after tax was at INR 315 crore, which is 21% of revenue. We continue to prudently invest in R&D and sales and marketing activities. During the year, we have invested nearly 10% of our revenues in R&D initiatives and around 21% of revenues on the various sales and marketing activities. On the balance sheet front, we witnessed robust cash flow generation, with our net cash generated from operating activities for the year at INR 215 crore. We have declared a dividend of INR 5 per share. Looking at Q4 results, we crossed quarterly revenues of INR 400 crore for the first time.
We witnessed 15% worldwide growth in the quarter to reach the revenues of INR 430 crore. Our profit after tax reached INR 108 crore in this quarter. We are excited about the future and expect to continue to maintain the growth momentum with our unique solutions in the financial services, insurance, government sector, and innovation in AI-led journeys. These solutions and our result-based services help our customers with their revenue enhancement, optimization, and efficiency improvement. Our strategy is built around the full lifecycle of our users, and that journey-led mindset is paid off in stronger engagement, retention, and growth. While we remain mindful of the broader market conditions, we are confident in our ability to continue delivering value to our customers and shareholders. That is all. Thank you very much, and we are now open for the question and answers.
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 the touchstone 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 Ruchi Mukhija from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. This is a question. First, if I look at the annuity revenue mix, it's been trending down even when I look at the annual number. Could you help us understand why we are trailing behind or why the annuity revenue mix is trending down?
Hey, Ruchi, thank you for your question. You are absolutely right. The growth on this year, especially this quarter, has been predominantly on license and implementation. As you understand, the annuity revenue is typically a downstream revenue. In our last quarter, we had clearly mentioned that some of our larger deals have delayed annuities kicking in. We had given a projection that by Q3, Q4 of this year, we should be able to restore our healthy annuity growth rate. It is a temporary phenomenon. We do not see it as normal, but the business automatically compounds annuities. There is not a question about that. Yes, in the short term, since the license growth rates and the implementation growth rates are higher side, you do not see the annuity growth rates proportionately.
We do think that in the next two quarters, we should be back on the track so that the growth rates can be restored onto the annuity side of things.
Secondly, if we look at the growth numbers, this year, we saw successive growth moderation for Q2. Q1, we had 25% growth rate. Now, we are ending Q4 with 15% worldwide top-line growth. When you look into the deal wins, what do you see the near to medium-term growth that Newgen can have?
Yeah. While you look at the 15% growth, this is a large quarter for us. If you look at our deals in momentum, I think this has been one of the very good years for us. In fact, we have won 62 large logos this year, which is significantly much higher than the previous year. Not only that, some of the challenges in the US, they have been addressed in Q4 with almost 10 large deals incoming from the US. APAC has grown. On India and Middle East, which are primarily large markets, I think we just recalled that last year, our growth rates were almost 40% in Q4. Relatively, their growth this quarter was muted.
Going on, in terms of looking at the number of deals which we have won, the larger license growth of 41%, we do have confidence that downstream revenues will start kicking in. The way the market currently is shaping, and in spite of uncertainties, since our revenues are pretty diversified, they are now equally APAC is playing a very important role in the revenue. It has reached a significant number. India and Middle East continue to be large markets for us, and the US kicking in. We are still positive to maintain a growth momentum going into next year.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ruchi.
Thank you, Ruchi. The next question is from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on EMEA market. Specifically, in Q4, what has led to your decline in EMEA? Was there any unexpected rundown?
No, Ruchi, not really. I think this is a Q4 is a very large market. I said last year, we had like a 40% growth. A lot of them were license deals. This year, I think we missed some of the deals coming which were about to come in Q4. That is the number. Since on a quarterly basis, and when you divide the whole annual number to quarterly, and then you also divide by regions, a few deals make a huge difference in performance. They are not the true reflection of how the market is behaving. We have not lost any major deals. We have just been able to close a lesser number of licenses which were anticipated to be closed. That is it. There is nothing bigger than that in that.
Do we expect these license deals to close in Q1 or Q2 or FY26?
We do hope that. We do hope that. Unless the deals come in, we are all waiting. Yeah, the market is still weird. This is a strong market for us, especially in government and financial services. We expect the growth momentum to continue out there. We have built some very, very large deals in last year. Some of them should surely come up in Q1, Q2.
Okay. Got it. I have a follow-up on the question which Ruchi asked. If we see for Q4, the support revenue has dipped worldwide. If I understand, the support revenue run rate should continue because, I mean, can you just help us understand why the support revenue has dipped?
It's a marginal dip. I think it is a kind of a correction in certain accounts. We have some in terms of quarterly adjustments. We are still working with the customer to get those revenues back. Right now, since they were held by the customer for a particular while. If you look at it on a quarterly basis, a single deal or a single case makes the difference in the revenue. We do not read too much into that. We think.
Okay. We haven't seen a drop on worldwide basis in support revenue since FY 2022. That is why I was curious to know. Does it mean that the client has not renewed our support or not going to renew them further?
See, sometimes the timing of the contract happens. Sometimes there's an adjustment, or sometimes there is also an element of churn in the business anyway. But those churns are in the minor 1% or 2%. They are not the effect. There is no major change or major loss of client. It is more about adjustments or more about in terms of the timing of the deal happening or renewal.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay. Got it. On the implementation revenue, for Q4, we did see strong growth both in QOQ and worldwide. Does it mean that the deals which were stretched for our Indian PSU banking clients for implementation that were stretched, that is progressing well? When should we expect a major part of that to get completed?
Yes, so I think we had strong implementation revenues projected coming into Q4. We are still in the process of executing some of those projects. I think most of them will be in the more final stages in Q3, Q4 of this year. That is where we are hoping to kick in the more support revenues and the ABS revenues we should get.
Okay. Okay. Can you remind us what is typically what is the percentage of support and implementation revenue as compared to, sorry, support and AMC revenue as percentage of your license revenue?
Basically, ATS, AMCs have direct correlation. They're somewhere between 18%-22% of our revenue when they kick in. Support is depending on more about the complexity of engagement. Clients could have a disproportionate. Clients could have a support team of five, or they could have a 50 support team. That's more to do with the kind of work and where they are rolling out. It does not have a direct correlation.
Okay. Okay. Can you share the order book number as of end of FY25, how much it has grown?
I think at the end of FY25, our order book stood at, yeah, it's INR 1,640 crore. INR 1,640. INR 1,664 crore.
Okay.
I think the order books do not give the complete picture. I think the way we look at it is we look at order book and the unexecuted order book which is going into the next year. I think we expect a more healthy growth on the unexecuted order book side going into next year, which results in more business in control specifically either renewals or unexecuted order books. We are seeing a strong growth of more than 20% in the business in control part of our business.
Okay. Can you share what has been the unexecuted order book number?
I think Ruchi can share those numbers accurately. I do not have right now on that, but she can share it for the last three years.
Okay. Sure. Thank you. Last one, on, we have seen moderation in banking revenue. We have seen strong growth in banking for the last few quarters, and now we are seeing the growth moderating. Is it because for our large clients in India and EMEA, we have implemented our key solutions and the demand is now saturated? Can you share the growth outlook going forward over here?
You're absolutely right. I think we have seen this year there is a higher jump in insurance and government growth. The banking growth is more at, I think, 11-14% of growth, if I'm correct. 15% growth in banking rather than close to 20%. You are right. I think last two years, there was a huge momentum around public sector spending on banking, especially also on the digital lending side, which we are trying to do in both India and Middle East. Some part of that has been serviced, but still the unserviced part is very, very large. I think it's still since our growth rates last year were very high, and we are still in the process of executing some, we see slightly muted. We don't see that for the next few years. Still, banking is going to be the predominant growth driver for the company.
While insurance and government will start taking up some market share where we can have accelerated growth. For the company to grow, we still expect the banking to do extremely well. We have cases going forward both in India and Middle East this year. We do not see a challenge to maintain a growth momentum. I think this current year's 15% growth, which is 20% growth in banking, I would still treat as an anomaly rather than that as a trend going forward.
Okay. Can you talk in a bit detail about the unserviced part, which client segment or which solutions comprise this?
See, I think while even on the core product of lending, we have covered most of the public sector and maybe some tier-one banks. There is a huge set of markets still, which is typically talking of doing second-generation of transformation on those products. Private banks are available to us. There is a large list of what we call finance companies or NBFCs, which are our products. Last year, we got around six of them. There are still in India, roughly around 30 more, which is an addressable market for us. Beyond that, we sold some of things like payments and trade in some tier-one accounts. There is a huge probability of multiplying those businesses across all both in India as well as in Middle East.
I would say continued momentum in lending plus more to do with payments and trade in tier-one banks is going to provide a wider market for us. Then supported by the deals which we can do in financial, what you call NBFCs.
Okay. Got it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is from the line of Pranav Mashruwala from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Just one on the broad revenue and revenue outlook, considering the overall macro situation, any pockets of headwinds that we are particularly seeing in terms of delays. We have seen certain delays coming out in our SaaS and also in some of our licenses. Any headwinds that you would like to call out for FY26?
Sorry, I think there's a lot of disturbance. I think you can go ahead.
Yeah. Is it any better?
Yes. Thank you. Pranav, I think as you were rightly saying, I think right now everything is pretty uncertain, and we do not know how things are going to shift. Having said that, as I said, we are pretty diversified. There is not a single market or a single client segment on which we are dependent. Some of our markets do seem to be less affected initially. I think our markets like India are less affected right now. We are also looking at working in APAC. The third thing is the financial services companies where we are dealing with predominant and insurance. They probably have second-degree impact and third-degree impact. We are in the beginning of the year in our planning stage. We are clearly driving for growth this year. We do not see any larger challenges hitting our way. Having said that, I think we will be cautious.
We'll be assessing the situation every quarter. As of now, in the beginning of the year, we are looking at our historical growth rates and trying to do better than that.
Agreed. Also, just coming down again on the growing the SaaS business, do we expect SaaS to decouple some of the slower growth in FY26, considering some of the deal pipeline that we have been building in base as well as our marketing teams in the US?
No, I don't see that. I think some of the momentum which has come in the U.S. and also momentum in other geos like Australia and U.K. should push the SaaS revenue up. We are hopeful that I think in next year, we should do a better number on SaaS. SaaS is, again, it's a kind of where we are providing software as a service on cloud. Beyond that, our license deals are equal into SaaS deals. In the U.S., we are doing both combination of some tier-one accounts are looking at even license deals. Mostly are looking at SaaS. Any growth in the U.S., Australia, U.K., and even some in other markets is tending towards SaaS. I don't see any challenge in SaaS business next year.
Great. Just also one on the margin aspect. We are clearly right now exiting Q4 on a high note. How would you see margins trending over for the next year?
See, Varadarajan, I think we have been always maintaining this for our company. We always operate for higher growth mode. Initially, upfront, we have cost loaded. Somewhere between 16-18% is what we load cost in the beginning of the year as a part of the plan. Any growth which we hit in above 20%, our margins should keep on expanding. I think unless we are more aggressively able to invest in growth. In any eventuality we fall below 17-18% of growth, we may have flat margins or contracted margins. Margin is a function of our business. We have, at a gross level, above 64% margins. As long as we can maintain a healthy growth rate, the margins will keep on expanding.
Finally, on the expected tax rate for FY26, Q4, we exit out on 23%, and Q3, we add about 16, 16 and a half. It is under 1%.
This is the base. I think it's because of the SEZ full benefits and now partial benefits coming in. Now, the current base of 23% is going to be the likely base which will continue going forward. Last year, we had roughly around 17.5%, or I think more close to 18% tax plan. This year, we are operating at 23%. This is the new base. I don't think this can ever go back unless we have some change in government policy. This is going to be the new norm on operating at 23% tax plan.
That is it from my side. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Akshat Agarwal from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, Mr. Varadarajan. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. I have two questions. Firstly, to follow up on one of your other participants' questions, where you said that you could take about a couple of quarters for the annuity revenue rate to come back to double-digit levels or mid-teens levels. If the first half is going to be in single digits and annuity forms a bulk of your revenue portion, is it fair to expect that you would be able to grow 20% in FY26? That's the first question. Secondly, when I look at the reason why margins, India margins have gone down from mid-20% levels to 15% levels in FY25 versus FY24. What would be the key reason for this? Those are the two questions. Thanks a lot.
Akshat, nice talking to you again. Akshat, what the issue is, as I'm saying, annuity margins recovery is we are talking of all our ATSs start kicking in back and support revenues start coming in. While that is happening, we still are selling aggressively more licenses and more deals. Like in this quarter, also in previous quarter, we have continued to sell more licenses and our license growth rates are 40%. I do hope that while the annuities take some time to pick up, our new deals and our what you call deals in existing accounts should be able to compensate for that, and we should be able to maintain a healthy growth momentum on that. On the region-wide margin, it's the same function. I think India has not grown at the pace we expected it to grow.
It's more like a growth rate of, I think, 14-15% this year, while the cost in India has grown at 17-18%. There is a margin contraction out there. Yeah, I think it's again, at the beginning of the year, if we take a call again this year, we will be taking a call of growing our cost at 16-17%. We are planning that India should be able to go back to the 20% or above 20% growth mark. I think these are momentary things, I don't think annuity holds us back for the larger growth. I think if you look at Q4 phenomena of growing at 15%, it's a function of also very high growth rates last year on Q4, plus the annuity things not kicking in in terms of some of the large deals.
I don't think both of the problems are in Q1 and Q2. Q1 and Q2 are relatively smaller quarters for us. Large deals can compensate; new license deals can compensate for a lot of growth rates and slow down in the annuity side. In the meantime, also, we are looking at multiple ways to enhance the support revenue stream and enhance the ATS support stream. We are looking at rates revisions. We are looking at, again, price renegotiation in certain cases, which should also give us few percentage points going into next one or two years.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Veejay Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Veenal Garra from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. A couple of questions. We have seen that Q4 is typically a stronger quarter in terms of license revenue booking, but we do not see this panning out in the current quarter. I am cognizant that Q3 was a good quarter in terms of these bookings, but is there any other reason which has attributed to this deceleration?
I think on a Q4 basis, it has been always a strong quarter for us as a percentage of annual revenue. This year, also, if you look at our annual revenues and divide it across quarters, Q4 is the largest quarter for us. It has grown. The challenge has been that Q4 last year has grown at 40%, both on Y on Y and also sequentially to a very large number. When it comes to license sales, I think if you look at this year's license sale, Q4 to Q4, let me look at this number. We have grown at 31% Y on Y on the license sale. License sale momentum has kept up.
The point we were discussing about some of the annuity schemes have not caught up with the same thing, which is to do with our in terms of our ability to execute large projects and make them live. It is a momentary challenge. We think in a couple of quarters, we should be able to take that. You can clearly see our deal momentums in Q4 are the highest. I think this is probably the highest. We have gone up to INR 97 crore of license sale, which is our highest-ever license sale. Even Q3 was very strong at INR 93 crore or something like that.
Okay. Okay. A follow-up to that. You mentioned the implementation, which got delayed, which has kind of impacted our revenues. Are there any corrective measures which need to be taken from our side probably to avoid the same in the future? If you could just help us understand what exactly has caused this delay?
Yes. Okay. It's a longer story. I think if you look at a couple of years back, I think last one and a half year, we have entered into much larger deals, which is more traditionally. There are also deals which are more complex and more large in which the downstream revenues, which typically start accumulating after the projects complete finish, have got delayed. Typically, projects used to be six, seven months. Now they are one and a half year to two years. It was a part of great wins. This is the impact of that. What is happening right now in most of these projects, in the next two, three quarters, we are towards more closure of those projects. They are almost now closing at the same time.
The next stage of large deals are also coming at a faster execution cycle because now we have done most of them. We are trying to compress the timeline. This is a function. It's a one-time impact which came to our business. It was a bit of a surprise because we assumed that annuity automatically compounds, but it did not compound. We do hope that as soon as our projects get live, we should be able to restore most of that revenue coming from those clients.
Sure, sir. Thank you for that. In the current quarter, we saw a couple of large deals being closed in the US. I just wanted to understand what is the strategy that we are using here and what is the potential opportunity that we are looking in this geography. Maybe if you could give some timelines.
Yes. In the US, we have been investing very aggressively for a long time. We created a strategy with one of the consulting firms to address three segments: banking, health insurance, and the insurance market. We had hired, beginning of last year, we hired complete teams to drive these markets. Now we are getting the early results of that. We have broken into cases this quarter in enterprise. We have broken into health insurance. We have broken into insurance, and also a large deal from banks. Almost all four areas have fired this quarter and resulted in deals. In fact, this was the first quarter we got 10 deals from the US and some very marquee deals. Now that we have got these wins, we expect the growth rate and the momentum to continue building.
We will have to wait for a few quarters seeing how consistently we can grow. We are hoping that next year, US should be our growth driver. The market for us out there, the global area we are targeting, in banks, we are targeting roughly around 80 large banks. We have pivoted away from the larger set of 1,000 banks. Similarly, in insurance, there are 120 companies. Again, in the health insurance, there are another 40-60 companies. This is a universe we are targeting, and we're trying to build much deeper relationships and build multi-year contracts with these kinds of customers. Does that answer your question?
Absolutely. How about in India? I mean, India has traditionally been a growth driver for us. What is the TAM that we are looking at here? What is the kind of scope that we do see to further mine the existing clients that we already have?
See, I think we don't have very, very detailed reports of the TAM, but I think we are one of the larger players in the market where we do expect our market share is at least more than 20% in the whole of the space we operate. The market itself in India is expanding, and we are expanding it by getting into more and more areas. The way we internally look at is that all our territories have large potential. I think we really would like that India does INR 1,000 crore in the next two, three years. That's our plan. I don't think the market opportunity size is limited to our own ability to execute. We are going after that in a very aggressive way over the whole market.
Thank you so much, Varadarajan. Lastly, just, I mean, more of a very long-term question. GenAI has been one of the big tech disruptors. Is there a case where we probably see this could cannibalize Newgen revenues, probably on the content management or the BPA end? Is there a possibility of that?
I think this is a question for service companies, not for product companies. Technology is our enabler to sell. GenAI has actually reinvented all the use cases across industry for kind of things which we sell. In fact, using AI for content ingestion is one of the most hot cases right now in the market, by which the last quarter, out of around six deals we got in US, three to four are just around the AI capabilities of our product, which is typically a combination of Andal and GenAI. See, we are leading this right now. I can with confidence say I think we are one of the most content management and low-code AI-led products in the market with our Marwin, with Lumen, with Harper. Most of the cases we have won in the last two quarters, AI has played a very important part of that.
The way you see the content management and GenAI complement each other, so far people used to retrieve content. Now they can discover more value out of that content. That is why GenAI works on that content, either through RAG or vector embedding or many other technologies like that. There is a renewed interest in the enterprise content management space globally right now, both on the ingestion and the management and knowledge management side of that. We got two orders in Singapore government which are to do with kind of things we are talking about. We got one of the largest orders from the primary regulator in India, which is AI-led content management. Similarly, we got three to four orders in the US around insurance companies which are around document ingestion, which is AI. In fact, this is what we are excited about, not threatened about.
Okay. Understood. Great. Thank you so much for patiently answering my question.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Baidik Sarkar from Unifi Capital. Please go ahead.
Hey, T. S. Varadarajan. Hi, good morning and congratulations on a good year overall. There was a time in the previous years when you specifically called out that order book growth was higher than your revenue booking, right? Obviously, that was most sentiment-led given how strong FY24 was. If I just backtrack to just the current quarter, not perhaps Q3, but the first month of April and Q4, how does that sentiment look on the ground today? I ask it in the context of oil crisis in the Middle East, the US-led issues, and broadly probably a situation of banking product-led demand in India. Just keeping this in perspective, how would you define the sentiment as things look today?
Hi Sarkar. I really don't have an answer to that. I can look at only our business, and what I tell you, our Q4 order book was pretty strong. I think in fact, we had a Q1, Q2, Q3 was a weaker order book than the Q4 order book. It was predominantly, in fact, maybe it grew by around 30% or something, year on Q4 order book. Q1 order book, I can only tell you after the end of Q1 because 70% of our business comes at the end of the quarter in the last three weeks. That's the nature of the license business. See, everybody is cautious right now. Most of the customers we talk about, nobody has given an indication of holding back the projects, especially in the spaces we are, but they are cautious about.
There may be a kind of an impact of wait and watch, but right now, I think in our sales planning and in terms of what we hear from the market, we have not seen too much of an impact. I hope that it remains the same way for the year.
Sure. Sure. I understand. In terms of the complicated 18-24 month projects that kind of have a long gestation period, which are the primary geographies that saw that? Is it primarily in H1 or this year? Sorry?
India and Middle East are the primary geographies which are typically having those large gestation projects running for us. I think for most of the Middle East ones, we are very close to closing, and some of the Indian ones will take a couple of more quarters to do that. These are the geographies where we are. Other geographies, we do not have such a problem.
Okay. My question was that given that you specifically called out that H2 of this year will be a far stronger year in terms of revenue booking, is it fair to expect some kind of a YOY margin compression as far as H1 is concerned, given that we have fixed costs to be taken care of and we can't pull back on hedge gen commitments? I'm just trying to get an understanding about margin propensity in H1 this year.
No, I don't think so. See, when you are saying Y on Y, it will not have a compression. I don't think there's any reason because our costs are flat and we are still growing at a good, healthy growth momentum. The margin compression only happens and I think we look at margins typically at the annual side because on a quarterly rate, they can change because still there's a kind of revenue distribution which is not very even, while the cost distribution is fairly even on that. We are slightly being cautious about looking at our investments along with the returns which come in quarters. We should be able to manage this. Unless there's a huge surprise on top line, which we are not seeing, I don't see any challenge in market.
Right. Right. Being in the H2 estimates, you're still saying that there's no risk to, I mean, we ended this year with about 20% growth, which is a healthy number. With that number of between 22-25%, will that continue to be a sanguine expectation for at least 2026 in terms of top line?
See, I don't know exactly what we will end up doing because we end up always planning a lot and then delivering something. We historically delivered about 20% or near 20% growth. In this year, we don't think our plans don't change much. We still expect to do that. We internally would end up trying to do a much better number. Surely, when it comes to budgeting, we do plan for that much of growth and that expenses accordingly. What will happen at the end, we'll all have to wait and watch for.
Okay. Very lastly , will growth stay for FY2027 onward? Will that be driven by our investments in new product use cases, or is it the deepening of the market for existing products that we have? How should we read this?
I think we look at growth from two areas. One is about expanding our coverage in a vertical, getting more deeper into banking, selling more solutions to banking, insurance. The second is also getting better penetration in the actual market. These are the two areas we are looking at. How much more revenue contribution can come from markets like US or Europe, and then how many more new logos we end up winning. Also in the same logos, per account realization, how can we improve? You can see a lot of while we have churned out a lot of smaller accounts out of business, you will see revenue per account has constantly grown. Accounts greater than INR 50 million revenue have constantly grown at a much higher speed.
That is the churn we are driving, and this is being driven from two things about going wider into each account and selling more to them and also getting a healthy number of new logos which are sizably large.
Thanks , and best wishes. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ask a question, you may press star and one. The next question is from the line of Mihir Manohar from Carnelian Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, thanks for giving the opportunity. You mentioned about the 10 deals won in the US. These 10 deals are for the full year or are they for the quarter?
These deals are generally for us in perpetuity because customers have long-term relationships. Generally, these are license plus implementation, which may have a cycle of 7, 8, 9 months, 10 months.
Sorry, I meant to say in the U.S., the 10 deals were won during the year or during the quarter?
Okay. Okay. The winning is for the quarter.
Okay. Understood. Out of these 10 deals, how many of these deals would be with larger tier one accounts where we can have a bigger revenue potential?
See, all these 10 deals are with sizable, see, what we have already pivoted towards only large accounts. We do not do small account deals anymore in the US. We are targeting, these are either tier one, tier two insurance companies, banks, or health insurance companies. All of them are large accounts for us.
Understood. Sure. Sure. These are coming largely from insurance and health insurance side, right? Banking would be lesser as of now, or how is it?
I think three from banking, I think three, four from insurance, and a couple from health insurance. I think that we can send you a direct distribution about these accounts.
Understood. Sure. Sure. The second question was on these annuity kicking in for some of the dealing businesses in India and Middle East. Now, when annuity starts kicking in in the second half, does the annuity percentage which you mentioned, 18-22%, that remains the same or that changes?
That is the % payout of annuity for ATS on licenses. That probably remains same. It does not change. The only thing what happens, it starts kicking in. That means now it is due and we can recognize the revenue from that onward.
Understood. Sure. The third question was on the new products. This is like two, two and a half years back. We were looking at a $500 million of a business. Naturally, the progression has happened well over the last two years. Just wanted to get a sense for us to have that $500 million kind of a number. Do you feel any specific products need to be developed, product gaps which could be addressed, any development or any color around new products that would be really helpful?
Mihir, I think this is work in motion. Last year at the beginning, we defined a strategy about where we need to invest. We had to verticalize our insurance products across domains and then across geographies. I think 80% of that work has been already done. We expanded our banking portfolio like in Islamic banking and then also building banking integration. We expanded our insurance portfolio with integrations with companies like Guidewire and all that. A lot of that has been already in place. Beyond that, in the last two quarters, we have doubled up on creating the AI roadmap for the whole product because what we are seeing, the AI is driving most of the use cases. A lot of our investment while increasing our vertical products and making them more relevant for the market is one dimension.
The other is creating the AI-led interfaces for most of the content management, the low code, as well as the customer communication products. I think between these two, there is enough market and now it's our ability to go and execute and sell.
Understood. Sure. Will be looking at the core banking part of the piece to enter the corporate core banking part of the piece?
No, we have not. We have not considered that and we are not interested in that. I think we work in the layer of innovation where most of the action is happening about banks, which is about journeys, processes, reinventing them. Core is where we end up making sure that we sit on, integrate with the core, and keep on expanding the functionality of the core. Core is a different business. It takes a lot of time to build credibility in the core and then build systems in core. So we are not interested in core. The only thing what we are slightly interested in, some in health space and insurance space, we are interested in building policy administration services, which are kind of semi-core out there. Those we already have some products and then we are trying to expand out there.
In banking, we are not interested in core.
Sure. Sure. Just one last question from my side. What was the order booking growth for the year on a YOY basis?
I think our order booking was at 1,564, which was almost 10% or around compared to last year's same time.
Okay. Understood. That's it from my side. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Chirag Kachhadiya from Ashika Institution Equities.
Yeah. I have a question on order book only. What is current value of unexecuted order as well as the new one which we received during the year?
I think if you can write a mail, we can sell you those. It is those numbers. I do not have the unexecuted exercises. As I said, our unexecuted order book compared to last year's same period has a healthy growth. I expect more than 20% growth in that.
Okay. Is unexecuted order book likely to come in execution in FY26 or will it establish for one in FY27 as well?
We are talking generally unexecuted order books which are relevant for the next year.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the follow-up. I have a question on Singapore or sorry, the APAC market. It has grown strongly for us in FY25. Which verticals and which countries have driven this growth, and how do we see growth outlook over here for FY26?
Yeah, this is thanks. Aditi, you are absolutely right. APAC has grown strongly, and I think the business has gone in two areas. One is around government. We have consolidated our position in the Singapore government space. I think we have won some market accounts out there, and we expect that momentum to grow into next year. I think some of the strategic deals out there we have been able to close. The wider market is still banking and insurance for us across all these markets. In APAC, I think predominant market is around for us, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore. We are also trying to do something in Vietnam and other areas. This is the market. Most of these deals have come in banking and government space, which has given us that.
It has become a substantial part of our revenue, which has almost now reached around 15% of our revenue, which is a good thing. We are quite hopeful that I think the APAC can maintain a growth momentum. Also, having said that, I think if you look at last year, APAC growth here much muted. Since they did not have high growth, this year numbers almost jumped out almost 60% of their growth, which is. I think there is a considerable improvement in what our entitlement to win in government and APAC, especially in Singapore. That is what we can ride on next year. Some of the marquee banks which we have acquired, we should be able to expand both in Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and some more countries.
Okay. Got it. One question on the DSO days. DSO days increased by 7 days in FY25. What led to this increase, and what is our target range?
I think the culprit was India out there. Some very large payments got a bit delayed out there, which I think some part of them has been already recovered in some. I think that has been predominantly. Rest, I think the larger deals that we have got into slightly, the improvement in DSO for the last year was more flat. On Q4, since some large payments got delayed, I think that's where the DSO jumped out there. I think we should be able to do fine in the next couple of quarters. We should be able to bring it back on track.
Okay. What should be our target range for DSO? Last year, it was 130 days.
See, our average, we look at it will keep on coming down now since it's a smaller quarter because Q4 is very large. It always goes very high on that. On the so we think on average for around 120 for a year, and then we can improve it from there. I think it will keep on becoming better for next Q2, Q3. Q4 again becomes high because of a very large amount of our billing happens in Q4.
Okay. Got it. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. This was the last question for today. I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you so much, everyone, for joining in. For any further questions, you can connect with me or go to the website. Thank you.
Thank you. On behalf of ICICI Securities, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.