Good evening! It's wonderful to see so many of you here today for the 34th Annual General Meeting of Persistent Systems. We are all here present at the Devang Mehta Auditorium, and it's 4:00 P.M. on Tuesday, July 16, 2024, at our registered office on Senapati Bapat Road. As the quorum is present, let me start the proceedings of the meeting. As an introduction, I'm Anand Deshpande, the founder, chairman, and managing director of the company. On behalf of my fellow members of the board of directors, I'm delighted to welcome you to the 34th Annual General Meeting. We are grateful to all of you, especially our long-term shareholders, for your love and affection and your support over these years.
As per our new post-pandemic tradition, today's meeting is organized as a hybrid meeting, and it is great to see many of you here, but we also have a large number of people attending this meeting online, those who could not come here in person. As we get started, I want to show you a short video of the company's performance during the last one year.
Most promising company of the year, 2023, is Persistent Systems.
It has clearly been a very exciting year. Let me first introduce our board members to you. Let me first start with independent directors who have joined us online. Signing in from New York, we have Independent Director, Dr. Ambuj Goyal. Thank you, Ambuj. We also have, signing in from California, Independent Director, Dan Levin. It's very early in the morning for Dan. He's signing in from the West Coast in California. Thank you, Dan, for being here. We also have today from Delhi, Professor Ajit Ranade. Hi, Ajit. Next, we have from Mumbai today, Ms. Avani Davda. Let me also welcome Ms. Anjali Joshi, Additional Director of the company, signing in today from London. Resolution 7 of today's agenda proposes to appoint her as an independent director for a 5-year term. I will share Ms. Joshi's impressive profile when I read the resolution.
Thank you, Anjali, for being here. Thank you, Ambuj, Daniel, Ajit, Avani, and Anjali for joining this meeting despite odd hours that you are at. Let me also introduce the independent directors who are here on stage today. We have Independent Director and Chairman of the Audit Committee and the Risk Management Committee, Mr. Praveen Kadle. Resolution 6 of today's agenda proposes to reappoint Mr. Kadle as an independent director for his second term of five years, starting April 23, 2025. Independent Director and Chairman of the Nominations and Remuneration Committee, Ms. Roshini Bakshi. Independent Director and Chairman of the Stakeholder Relationship and ESG Committee, Mr. Arvind Goel. I wish to inform the members that Roshini Bakshi, who has served the board of the company as an independent director since 2014, would be retiring from the board upon conclusion of this AGM.
I thank her for her contribution to the company during her tenure of 10 years. Thank you, Roshini. Now, let me now introduce my colleagues and executive directors who are present on stage today. Let me start with our CEO, Sandeep Kalra. Next, we have Sunil Sapre, and resolution 5 of today's agenda proposes to reappoint him as Executive Director for a term of 3 months till his superannuation, that is up to December 31st, 2024. I would also like to welcome Vinit Teredesai, who joined us as Chief Financial Officer from May 15th, 2024, to his first annual general meeting of the company. Welcome, Vinit. On stage, we have Mrs. Sonali Deshpande, Chairperson of Persistent Foundation. We are glad to share that Persistent Foundation has completed 15 years, and we will be highlighting some of the work done by the foundation during this meeting.
Finally, let me introduce our dynamic Company Secretary, Amit Atre. Thank you all for being part of this meeting. We have several distinguished guests in the audience. I'd like to acknowledge their presence. Let me start with Mr. S.P. Deshpande, better known as Dada. Co-promoter and former director of the company. It is my pleasure to also introduce Mr. Pradeep Bhargava, who was a director in the company for 10 years. Shridhar Shukla. I'm not sure if he's here. And then we also have Srikanth Sundararajan, who was our COO for when we went IPO. We also have Rajesh Ghonasgi, who was our CFO when we did an IPO. Let me now introduce Gaurav Waradkar, manager from Walker Chandiok & Co LLP, our statutory auditors. Shashi Tadwalkar, the partner, was planning to be here, but there was a family emergency, so he couldn't make it.
We also have Tejasvi Joshi and Kaustubh Deshpande, partners from Joshi Apte & Co., our tax auditors. We have Sridhar Mudaliar, Sheetal Joshi, and Meenakshi Deshmukh here. They represent SVD & Associates, secretarial auditors of the company for the financial year 2023-2024, and they are also the scrutinizers for this meeting. I also welcome Sandeep Pawar. He's here representing Link Intime India. They are the registrar and share transfer agents of the company. Thank you all for coming here and for being here today. And thank you for all your help through the year. Now, let me thank all of you for joining this meeting, too. It's good to see so many people in this auditorium. Now let me invite Amit Atre, our Company Secretary, who will share some information about the meeting to make this experience very delightful. Amit?
Thank you, Anand. Thank you, Anand, and let me also welcome all the members. The company has provided facility to cast votes electronically on all resolutions outlined in the notice. Members who have not had an opportunity to cast their votes electronically and who are participating in this meeting, will have an opportunity to cast their votes during the meeting through electronic e-voting system provided by NSDL, as well as physically through ballot paper, up to 30 minutes after the end of the meeting. The end time of the e-voting facility will be adjusted according to the actual time, end time of the meeting. Members who are attending this meeting through video conferencing are requested to refer to the instructions provided in the AGM for the pleasant experience of participating in this AGM through video conferencing.
During the AGM, in case they face any difficulty, they may reach out to the helpline numbers mentioned in the AGM notice. I would like to inform the members that the annual report for the financial year 2023-24, AGM notice, the register of members, the register of directors and key managerial personnel, the register of shareholding of directors and key managerial personnel, the register of contracts or arrangements in which directors are interested, certificate from the secretarial auditors regarding the implementation of ESOP schemes, and copies of newspaper advertisements about VC facility and AGM are made available online and in physical form for inspection by the members during this meeting. Online copies are available on the company and NSDL website. As the meeting is being held in hybrid mode, the facility for appointment of the proxies by the members attending this meeting through video conferencing is not applicable.
However, the members attending this meeting in person are allowed to appoint proxies. The proxy register is also available for inspection. The company has not received any proxy forms for this annual general meeting. With this, I now invite the chairman to share his thoughts.
Thank you, Amit. Ladies and gentlemen, I am truly honored to stand before you today to express my heartfelt gratitude to the members for all your support to the company through these years. Your unwavering support and trust have brought us to where we are today, and I cannot thank you enough. This was our first year as a billion-dollar enterprise, and we have moved into our sixth orbit. I'm glad to share that our team is geared up to continue our momentum as we march towards becoming a two billion dollar enterprise. This year was challenging, as our clients who were investing in accelerating their digital transformation journey during the pandemic turned their focus to cost optimization. This tested our resilience.
Thankfully, our global delivery business model allows us to provide an equally compelling proposition to our clients, whether they are accelerating their roadmap or focusing on better cost outcomes. While generative AI and other next-generational technologies are promising and will be disruptive in the long run, high inflation, elevated interest rates, and geopolitical uncertainties, especially in the U.S., have contributed to a market of uncertainties. We responded with alacrity as the market shifted, and we maintained industry-leading growth rates during the financial year. I'd like to thank our clients who continue to trust us and have confidence in our capabilities. I must thank all my colleagues and fellow Persistent employees. Our multi-talented global team is our strength. Their high-quality work is the reason why our clients trust us.
We believe that developers with AI will be far more productive as compared to developers without AI, and hence, we have invested in preparing our global workforce to respond to technology disruptions. We have trained more than 16,000 professionals on AI and next-generation tools and technologies during this year. Our 360-degree relationship with key partners allows us to learn, explore, and deploy the latest technologies for future-ready solutions. In tough times, our people, employees, partners, suppliers, and vendors are the source of our resilience, driving continued success. We are committed to providing our employees and their families with a holistic experience and long-term work-life harmony. We encourage diversity across the company and have continued to implement several initiatives during the year that spotlight and support diversity and inclusion.
We have a strong focus on health and wellness, and believe that healthy employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees. We have several programs encouraging employees to learn and engage in various activities beyond work. This is what we call the Persistent Way. During the year, we were consistently recognized for our achievements from a diverse group of analysts, advisors, organizations, and market observers. The highlight was the receiving of the CNBC-TV18 Most Promising Company of the Year, recognizing our extraordinary growth journey. Resilience is critical as we propel the company into our sixth orbit and reach towards $2 billion goal. To bolster our resilience, we have invested by adding senior leadership and have created new business lines and capabilities during the year to support our growth and our growth strategies.
I'm counting on your continued support as we celebrate 34 years of trust and partnership. We look ahead to shared success and to many more years of innovation, collaboration, and progress. We would not be here without you. Thank you very much. Now, let me now invite our CEO and Executive Director, Sandeep Kalra, to share the highlights of the year. Sandeep?
Thank you. So I assume everyone can hear me in the back?
Yeah.
Perfect. So let me start by welcoming all our shareholders here one more time. In the next few slides, I'd like to report the financial performance of the company, starting with the last year. In financial year 2024, we delivered 14.5% revenue growth, which was among the best growth in companies comparable to us. In terms of the EBIT performance, we delivered a similar 14.4% EBIT growth, which translates into roughly about 18% in EPS growth. From a 4-year perspective to 5-year perspective, if we look to a little bit more longer range, we have delivered roughly about 20% CAGR, which is cumulative annual growth rate from a revenue perspective, and 27% earnings per share growth, which translates into one of the highest growth in our sector.
If you were to go back to the time Persistent went IPO, from that time, we have delivered 17.3% growth. So if whether you were to look at 1-year, 5-year, or even 14-year perspective, we have delivered industry-leading growth and industry-leading profit growth in the sector. A little-known fact, in our sector, in comparable companies, the record for sequential growth is roughly about 16 quarters, and we have delivered the 16 sequential quarters of growth. So rest assured, your company is performing very well based on the capabilities that it brings to the customers and the partners it partners with. From a perspective of what do we do? Just to refresh everyone, we service three segments: the ISV segment, which we call software, high tech, and emerging industries, wherein we do product development for software companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, to mid-market software companies.
We go to market in banking financial services segment and healthcare life sciences as two other industry verticals. So in terms of the customer segments and the customers that we service, whether it is the global markets or India market, we serve some of the largest banking financial services organizations, some of the largest in software, high tech, and healthcare life sciences. To give you an example, if any of you applies for a home loan, auto loan, or loan against shares, and so on in the India market, the chances are 2 in 3, that the platform that you use is built by us on, you know, other platforms like Salesforce, working for some of these financial services organizations.
If you were to look at healthcare life sciences, for example, in India, we have worked with Narayana Health, which is a leading hospital chain right here, and also has hospitals outside India in places like Cayman Islands. So let's see what we do for healthcare organizations, which some of you also use. Can we have the video, please?
The patient relationship management was one of the critical areas for us. We were handling around 8,000-9,000 calls every day. Since we were using all these rudimentary systems, our contact center agent, you know, agents were not able to get a unified view of, you know, all this data in a single pane of glass. We are working closely with Salesforce and Persistent to articulate that business impact and present it back to our leadership. Selecting Persistent was one of the highlights of this entire engagement. Right from the word go, we were blessed with a team of business analysts and, technical workforce who were mighty skilled to execute this in a seamless manner. The depth of experience which Persistent basically brought to the table from a design and implementation standpoint, was immeasurable.
It was so valuable for us. And because of, you know, this expertise that was made readily available to us, and also with, or I would say, coupled with Persistent Center of Excellence, playing a huge part in advising us, you know, at the right points, we were able to successfully deliver this entire engagement.
All of this capability that we bring to bear, all of these customers that we service, are serviced by the team behind this. Roughly about 24,000 of us, working globally, day in, day out, to deliver all this. Now, not only do we use the Persistent technology expertise, but we also partner with the best-in-class globally. Whether it is the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Salesforce, and IBM. We have built good expertise on these platforms, and we are very well respected by all of them. We have invested in building our own learning and development infrastructure. In the video, you would have seen the Ramanujan facility, and that's where we basically certify our professionals on this.
Now, if you were to look at it, for a small company that we are in the sector, we are very well respected by the CEOs also from Microsoft, Google, IBM, AWS, and so on. We are also contributing to their forward-looking AI journey. Let's take a listen to what AWS CEO has to say about us.
Now, to understand the impact of this kind of customization, we worked with Persistent, a digital engineering provider. Now, their study showed that developers using CodeWhisperer completed their tasks an additional 28% faster with customizations than without. 28%!
Not only are we recognized for our technical chops, but we are also very well respected for the corporate governance, and we have won the leading awards in our sector compared to our peers. Whether it is the Golden Peacock Award or whether it is the Institutional Investor Award, we've been awarded and honored by various organizations. All of this has also led to us winning, as Anand pointed out, the CNBC-TV18, the most coveted, you know, the Most Promising Company of the Year award for 2023. All these activities, these recognitions, have led to the Persistent brand growing at the fastest possible clip in our sector over the last three years.
All of these recognitions, brand movement, et cetera, and everything else has contributed to us not only being included in the capital markets, various indices in India, whether it is on the NSE, in Nifty IT, Nifty Midcap 50, Nifty Midcap Liquid 15, but we also have been included in the MSCI index. Just for everyone's reference, this is a global index, so anyone in the U.S. investing in India, if they buy the MSCI index, our company gets a passive flow. We are one of the 131 listed companies, the best in class in India, who are a part of this index. All of this has led to whether you look at a 1-year, 3-year, 5-year return, or from the time we went IPO, some of the best returns for our shareholders here today over the years.
A sincere thanks to all of the shareholders, partners, analysts, customers, for making all of this happen for us. Now, if we look at the path forward, what brought us here will not take us there. You would have all heard about generative AI, AI, and the potential disruption or the opportunities that it can afford to us as a sector. We are looking at this trend very positively and are very enthused about it. From our perspective, we are implementing these systems in-house, training our own employees, taking this to market with our partners like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, many others, to our customers. We are building what we call a modern engineering framework, and I'll have a video talk about how our colleagues are working on this as we go along. Can we have the video, please?
Persistent has over 30 years of product engineering and data and AI in our DNA. We started our journey by helping companies build data products, then analytics products, and then machine learning platforms. Over the years, we have helped enterprises leverage AI in driving business transformation and transformation of their internal workflows.
At Persistent, we recognize the incredible impact that Generative AI is making on the software development process and industry and capabilities across industries.
Today, Persistent is seen as a partner of choice by every major hyperscaler because we bring a differentiated point of view, differentiated set of intellectual property and accelerators and solutions to go together with them to help solve customers' problems. We are investing in our modern delivery framework, which consists of five big pillars, from process, tools, people, culture, and metrics. We believe each of these pillars, with all the things, details that they bring to our customers, can change not only the way customers build their software, but the way their organization operates in a modern digital world going forward.
Generative AI is having an impact on Persistent across all of our verticals, across all of our offerings and activities. So we want to take a very broad perspective on the role that our company plays in adding value to our customers, and that role has traditionally been in software technology improvement, right? We've been very technically focused, which is absolutely the right place to play. But as generative AI, AI allows us to reduce the cognitive load on our developers and our other staff that's doing development, we use the cognitive capabilities now to think about the impact that we're making. For our customers, it means three dimensions of value. One, of course, is efficiency, being able to get products from concept to impact at a much faster rate than we were able to before.
So this allows our customers to create value through time to market, right? Efficiency means greater productivity, it means greater iteration of delivery, and greater, greater time to market. And the third is innovation. So the ability to iterate, the ability to use generative AI as a partner for ideation is unprecedented.
We are working with Europe's largest pharmaceutical company to accelerate the research on diabetes. So we're building a Knowledge Graph solution that can help accelerate the insights and also provide knowledge synthesis. The time reduction is as high as 50%.
We are working with a leading American financial services company, which has got over $800 billion assets under management. This is an outcome-driven engagement, where we are jointly working with them to help them improve their productivity using the latest engineering techniques, leveraging GenAI. As a part of this engagement, we are helping them set up a center of excellence, which will facilitate this productivity improvement using the latest techniques, using GenAI.
Persistent has partnered with one of the largest private equity organization, with over $100 billion assets in management. When they were looking at their portfolio, there were many projects which were kept on shelf because of the complexity involved, the cost that were against all of these work, at the same time, the go-to-market aspect there. They partnered with Persistent. They are using our Sasva platform to orchestrate, automate most of their difficult projects. We are able to deliver over 50% of productivity and much faster go-to-market at a very improved quality.
Our AI expertise not only ensures that you stay ahead of the curve, but you thrive in an ever-changing landscape. Today, we are not only using AI and GenAI to transform our customers, but to transform ourselves as well.
We are investing very heavily in every one of our employees to have them understand how GenAI will impact their ability to deliver for our customers.
At Persistent, we empower our customers for rapid, scalable growth. We deliver superior engineering outcomes at unparalleled speed, quality, and security.
Generative AI is not an evolutionary technology, but a revolutionary technology, like the internet before it. We're looking to unlock the limitless potential of generative AI to impact our business, our customers' business, and their users' lives in every possible way.
So as you can see, we are very enthused about this transformation that is happening in our industry, and we look forward to making ourselves a platform-driven services organization, not just a human-driven services organization. We're taking certain strategic bets, where we will be taking some growth in terms of building organic capabilities, as well as bringing in some inorganic capabilities. At the end of the day, it's about doing better engineering, bringing more engineering productivity, and also disrupting the business processes and doing business transformation for our customers. And if you would have noticed, we have done a small acquisition earlier this quarter in contact center space, and we look forward to building our AI journey as we move along. With this, in summary, we have delivered good growth, good revenues, profitability, and shareholder returns over the last several years.
We are further unlocking newer growth vectors using AI, GenAI, and similar technologies, and we remain confident of continuing our growth momentum. We look forward to your support in our journey, and with that, I will stop my session. I would like to invite our Chairman for Persistent Foundation, Ms. Sonali Deshpande. We're very proud of what the foundation has done over the last 15+ years, and I look forward to hearing from her over some of these snippets. Sonali, welcome.
Thank you, Sandeep. Thank you, Sandeep. Good evening. Namaste. I'm very honored to stand before you here today at this annual general meeting as part of a member of the CSR team at the Persistent Foundation. The foundation was established in 2009, and as we have heard, we are celebrating 15 years of service to society this year. During this last decade and a half, I'd like to inform you that we have been able to spend more than INR 100 crore towards CSR, influencing and affecting the lives- Thank you. Also influencing and affecting the lives of more than 450,000 individuals. So I think that is, you know, a good benchmark for CSR for Persistent over the last 15 years.
This has, of course, been possible because of the unrelenting support and encouragement that we have received from the Persistent board members, our trustees, our esteemed employees, our NGO partners who have affected and executed the projects for us, and the CSR team, and all of you well-wishers present here today. So thank you very much for your support, and we bank on continued support from you so that we can aspire to reach more such milestones in the future. I'd also like to inform you that, in the recently, the last month or so, we have also established a Persistent Foundation USA in the U.S., which will also take care of doing CSR across the world. So that is another milestone for this year.
To mark this occasion of completion of 15 years, we have curated a short film which showcases most of the highlights of our journey through the last 15 years. I would request you to watch the video and just get a glimpse of what CSR means to the culture at Persistent. Again, thank you very much, and can we have the video, please? In the year 2009, the Persistent Foundation embarked on this beautiful journey to foster positivity and create an impact in the fields of health, education, community development, and preservation of heritage and wildlife.
We are investing consciously into the healthcare of senior citizens and children alike, and for that, we have teamed up with hospitals, charitable organizations, and NGOs.
Cardiac surgeries give a second chance to these children in their life. Cleft surgeries are nothing less than a miracle. They not only correct the deformities, but they also build self-esteem in children and their families. We also work to help hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants and speech therapies, so that they can communicate with the outside world far more confidently. Through cataract surgeries, we have helped thousands of elderly people to regain their vision and independence in their daily life. The education systems determine the future of a nation. Our effort is to give equal opportunity to every less fortunate child to build their identity and shape their career. We provide infrastructure, facilities, training programs, scholarships, and financial aid to help them unleash their full potential.
Women's education must run parallel.
The Kiran Girls Scholarship, a flagship initiative of Persistent Foundation, has empowered over 500 girls to pursue computer and IT engineering. Our mentoring programs provide them with a deep understanding of the corporate landscape, giving these future professionals a competitive edge as they begin their careers. Along with education, our focus is to fulfill nutrition need of every child. We provide kids with healthy breakfast and wholesome meals, so that their bright minds can focus entirely on education. The nutrition has become a means to draw them into schools rather than pushing them into child labor. Physical fitness plays a vital role in child's growth. Through various sports activities, they learn team building, coordination, leadership, along with cherishing friendships. This builds a strong foundation for them to enter the competitive world with confidence.
It is important for the new generation or the new people to be able to stand on their feet. How do we enable them? Skill development is one part of it, but apart from skill development, people also need to get jobs.
Our partnerships with various foundations enable us to reach grassroots levels. Youth from marginalized or disadvantaged backgrounds are provided with opportunities to learn and carve out their identities and future.
We support these individuals through training programs tailored to enhance their skill sets, facilitating the tools and technology required to leverage their newly acquired skills effectively. Our cattle breeding program plays a vital role in the community. By providing nutritional supplements and regular vaccinations, we significantly improve livestock quality and productivity, guaranteeing a stable dairy income for local families. We advocate for growth that nurtures both human progress and environmental well-being. We have implemented various initiatives to enhance the environment and conserve biodiversity. We collaborate with the forest department and NGOs to support tree plantations at various locations. We have planted over 150,000 trees across 250 acres of land in different villages across the nation. In villages, we are working on soil conservation and water conservation projects and building wells.
This improves availability of water in these villages for a longer part of the year. To reduce the impact of climate change, we are focusing on renewable energy, and we are installing solar plants in both rural and urban areas. By harnessing solar power, we can significantly cut energy expenses, freeing up resources for other essential needs. Through all these projects, we continuously strive to minimize our environmental impact and contribute to a healthier planet for future generations.
There are limitations of the forest department. They don't have adequate ambulances or vehicles which can transport animals in case of an injury.
One of our projects addresses this very need by providing a dedicated animal transportation truck to the forestry division. By enabling forestry authorities to respond swiftly to wildlife emergencies, such as animal injuries, human-wildlife conflicts, or illegal trafficking incidents, the truck facilitates the transportation of animals to veterinary hospitals for treatment or rehabilitation centers for care and eventual release back into the wild.
Social responsibility for us is not just providing facilities and funds, be it environment, be it education, be it empowerment, heritage. It's about the enthusiasm with which our people actively participate in each of these activities, because finally, when they are making a world a better place, they are always making a better version of themselves.
The 23,000 employees that we have at Persistent Systems today are very eager and keen to contribute and work along with the Persistent Foundation team to make a difference to the community.
The fact that we are looking at 15 years of the foundation, where the law came 12 years ago, is indicative of the fact that Persistent is committed to its social cause much before the law came.
I'm really delighted, and I want to congratulate Persistent Foundation on completing 15 years. I expect that in the next few years, as the company grows, the contribution that we will make, both financially and through volunteering help, will be very impactful and make a difference to the community that we are part of.
I'm very grateful for having been given this chance to be able to help others. I'm very thankful to all our board members, trustees, and the employees. Your constant support has always encouraged us to dream big. The smiles on the face of the beneficiaries is the most rewarding of all. After all these experiences over the last 15 years, my heart just swells with pride, my head bows in humility, and my hands always fold with gratitude. Thank you so much, everyone.
Thank you, Sonali, for your passion and commitment. It is heartening to see the work done by the Persistent Foundation team. Now let us move to the business segment of the annual general meeting. The notice convening the 34th annual general meeting, the directors' report, the audited financial statements for the year ended March 31, 2024, have been with you for some time. Therefore, I take them as read. As there are no qualifications or observations in the auditor's report to the consolidated and standalone financials for the year ending March 31, 2024, they are not required to be read. The secretarial audit report does not contain qualifications or observations, and again, they are also not required to be read. There are 9 resolutions for your consideration today, and I will read them briefly one by one.
The first four resolutions are proposed as ordinary businesses to be voted as ordinary resolutions. First, to receive, consider, and adopt the audited standalone financial statements of the company for financial year ended March 31, 2024. Reports of the board of directors and auditors thereon. Number two, to receive, consider, and adopt the audited consolidated financial statements of the company for the financial year ended March 31, 2024. Number three, to confirm the payment of interim dividend of INR 16 per equity share of INR 5 each.... is adjusted for the split, and to approve the payment of final dividend of INR 10 per equity share of INR 5 each, recommended for the financial year 2023-24. To appoint a director in place of Mr. Sunil Sapre, Executive Director, who retires by rotation and has confirmed his eligibility and willingness to accept the office if reappointed.
The next resolution is proposed as special business and voted as ordinary resolution. To reappoint Sunil Sapre as an executive director of the company, liable to retire by rotation, to hold office for a term of three months until his superannuation, that is from October 1, 2024, to December 31, 2024. In the opinion of the board, Mr. Sapre possesses appropriate skills, experience, and knowledge necessary to hold the office of executive director of the company, and we recommend to the members to pass this resolution with requisite majority. The next four resolutions are proposed as special businesses and also voted as special resolutions. I'll read them out one by one. To reappoint Mr.
Praveen Kadle as an independent director of the company, not liable to retire by rotation, to hold office for a second term of five consecutive years from April 23, 2025 to April 22, 2030. The board, after taking into account the performance of Mr. Kadle during his first term, has recommended to the members to consider his reappointment as independent director of the company for a second five-year term, that is from April 23, 2025 to April 22, 2030. This is to ensure that there would be no gap between the end of his current term and the date of reappointment on his second term. Number seven, to appoint Ms.
Anjali Joshi as an independent director of the company, not liable to retire by rotation, to hold office for a term of 5 consecutive years, that is from June 12, 2024 to June 11, 2029. At this time, I'd like to share a brief introduction about Ms. Joshi. She has joined the board as an additional director of Persistent Systems with effect from 12 June, 2024. Anjali is an experienced technology and product leader and a professional director with more than 30 years of experience in engineering and product management. She received her BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, a master's in Computer Engineering from the State University of New York, and a master's in Engineering Management from Stanford University. She was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
She's currently a director of Xero and LocoNav, and was previously a director in Alteryx, Lattice Semiconductor, Iteris, MobileIron, and McClatchy. Anjali holds advisory positions at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education at the State University of New York, and at Insight Partners. Anjali has worked in the senior product leadership team at Google for 13 years, where she was instrumental in building and scaling several products, including Search and Maps, globally across the internet, mobile, and video platforms. Prior to joining Google, Anjali held engineering leadership positions at Covad Communications and systems engineering roles at AT&T Bell Labs.
In the opinion of the board, Anjali Joshi possesses the appropriate skills, experience, and knowledge as necessary to hold the office as an independent director of the company, and we recommend to the members that the resolution be passed with requisite majority. Number 8, to approve an amendment to the Persistent Employee Stock Option Scheme 2014, PESOS 2014, to increase the number of stock options allocated to PESOS 2014 by 1.6 million stock options. That is from 3.8 million stock options to 5.4 million stock options. Number 9, and this is the last one, to allow the grant of stock options to the employees of subsidiaries of Persistent Systems under the Persistent Employee Stock Option Scheme 2014. Having completed the resolutions, we will now move to the Q&A section of this meeting.
To help me with this process, let me invite Rajshree to the stage.
Thank you, Anand. Good evening, dear shareholders. For today's AGM, we will be taking questions from our online speaker shareholders who have pre-registered to speak at the AGM. Then we will be taking questions from our shareholders seated here in the auditorium. For shareholders attending the meeting online, you may pose questions in the Q&A box anytime during the meeting. You may also ask your questions on X with hashtag Persistent AGM 2024. We will read the questions received during the meeting through Q&A and X. After we have heard all the questions received during the meeting, we will collate your questions, group them into categories, and answer them by category. Let me take you through some instructions to facilitate your participation in today's meeting.
Since this is a hybrid meeting, we will be switching between speaker shareholders joining virtually, the shareholders we have here in the live audience, and reading out questions from the Q&A box and from the Twitter feed. I'm sorry, the X feed. For speakers joining virtually, we will call out your name and unmute your audio. Please look out for your name. If there is any trouble with the connectivity at the speaker's end, we will request the next speaker to ask the question. You will be added back to the queue, and we will try to call you again to speak once all the other speakers complete their turn. We request the speakers to be crisp and to limit their speech to three minutes. Please note that the company reserves the right to limit the number of shareholders asking questions, depending on the availability of time at the AGM.
With that, let's go to our very first speaker shareholder, who is joining us virtually, Mr. Jaideep Bakshi. Sir? Sir, please go ahead with your question.
Yes. Good evening. Am I audible now?
Please go ahead.
Yes. Good evening, chairman and board of directors and CEO, and also good morning to persons who are joining from foreign land. Myself, Jaideep Bakshi, connecting from the city of Kolkata. Thanks to our company secretary, Mr. Amit, for helping me to join and also to the secretarial team for helping me to join this video conference, and also for presenting a detailed annual report. Sir, the initial speeches were very much informative one, and also the video presentation was. So congrats for achieving of, fourteen point five percent on year-on-year basis growth in revenue, and, congrats to the entire global workforce. And also, the performance has been well highlighted in page eight, and breakup given in page 389. And also, thanks once again for the dividend you have passed on INR 52.
Sir, what is the expected results for the first quarter? Myself proud to be a part of this trusted digital engineering and enterprise modernization partner serving global market leaders. Sir, we are into cloud computing, IoT, et cetera. Sir, any new development like Gen AI or value-added service for future growth and tie up with other companies? Sir, how are we placed from peers in respect of service and steps taken to stay as a leader and be future-ready, and plans for using our general reserve for the development work? Sir, what are the steps we are taking for data protection and training and career growth for our employees? Sir, congrats once again for the CSR through the Persistent Foundation, well explained from pages 34 to 41.
Congrats for receiving the recognition for different achievements, page 13, and for making history with the 3 Guinness World Records and title on pages 18 and 19. And also for the ESG program undertaken in return to our mother Earth, as mentioned in pages 136 to 140 also. Sir, point, I have supported all the resolutions and nothing to add, and I hope our company continue its leadership in software engineering and digital transformation with the trust of all the stakeholders, with the company move to greater heights and reach our $2 billion goal in the future. And sir, continue with this VC so that we can get connected in future. Thank you, sir, for giving me an opportunity.
Thank you very much, sir, for your question. Our next speaker shareholder joining us virtually is Mr. Rajesh Chainani. Sir, you'll have to take yourself off mute.
Yes. Am I audible now?
Yes, now you are.
Yeah. Hello, respected Chairman, Mr. Anand Deshpandeji, and a very highly distinguished eminent board of directors, my fellow shareholders. My name is Rajesh Chainani, I am speaking from Vile Parle, Mumbai. At the outset, I thank our company secretary, Mr. Amit, for sending me the email notice very well on time. He called me up also to join the meeting. So he has done a very good secretarial job, because he's the link between the shareholders and the management. So the secretary team is very friendly, and they really care for the shareholders. Sir, I just wanted to know, sir, the promoter holding is 31.02%. So are there any plans to increase the promoter holding? Because SEBI has permitted us to increase it till 75%. So if you can throw the light on that.
Regarding the performance of the company, sir, it is an excellent performance, sir. From the low of 2318, we have touched the high of 4925. Today also is 4825, on the face value of INR 2. So, sir, our share capital and reserves are so much that even in future you can consider for a bonus also. Or even if you're in future now, we have gone from INR 10 to INR 5 face value. So my request is, in future, make it to INR 2, not immediately INR 1, if you are doing it. And, this, sir, is a hybrid meet, because I got a call from Amit that I'm going to join in Pune. So I said, "No, I won't be coming to Pune, I will be doing VC."
Sir, we are requesting many of the companies, TCS, Infosys, everybody, for hybrid, but no one, you know, they are just on the PC thing. So you have done a very good thing, sir, by doing the hybrid meet. I really appreciate, sir. And I thank you really very much, sir. What should I say? The performance is excellent, sir. My previous shareholder covered a lot of things with your CSR activities and all, sir. Thank you very much, and wish you all the best for the coming festivals. Thank you.
For your question. We will now take questions from the shareholders seated here in the audience. Please raise your hand if you have a question you'd like to ask. Our volunteers will get the mic to you. I would request you to please say your name before you ask your question. We can have a show of hands so that we can get the mic to you. All right, we have a raise of hand here, please.
First of all, again, my name is Shrikant Doshi. Congratulations to the board of directors for excellent results.
One moment, sir.
Hello, my name is Shrikant Doshi. I'm from Pune only. Congratulations to Persistent team for good achievement. In the last three or four meetings, the company has highlighted that they are going for acquisitions spree, and we, in quarterly results, we often read or listen about it. I just want to have a question that out of your $1 billion+ revenue, what percentage has contributed from recent acquisitions? Thank you.
Thank you so much for your question, sir. Can we have a raise of hand for the next question, please? Anyone who'd like to post a question from the audience? Okay, we have.
I thank the owner of the company, Anand Sahib Deshpande, for investing me the AGM meeting. Company should be make a profit. Company should be split face value for new investor. Company ROC is good. Company has de-delivery good profit growth, 26 CAGR last five years. And thank you, my invest me, AGM attending. Can all buddy speak to Marathi?
Yes.
Thank you. My name is Samir Kengre. I am Pune. My village is Ray Mulshi Taluka.
Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. So any more questions from the audience? Let me read out some questions that we have received from the Q&A box that's live. The very first one is, send hard copy of annual report. The next one is: Are you taking any measures to increase any operational efficiency? Have you taken any strategic goals for yourself in this regard? This question comes to us from Vasu. Prasad has asked: When can we get the access for ESOP 2024, 2025 schemes? Vijay Kumar has asked: When will the company issue bonus shares since our reserves are very good? Rashmita Swain has asked: I would like to request you to open a Persistent branch in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, so that it is easier to go to office daily, who are part of Odisha and Jharkhand.
Vijay Kumar has asked: Dear Sir, please let us know if Persistent is in ER&D, that is engineering, research, and design, which is latest buzzword nowadays. Thanks. And Vikas Dakwe has asked us: What is the attrition rate, and supports. He mentions that he supports all the resolutions. And we'll go back to the audience, see if anyone else would like to ask us a question. Yes. Yeah, can we have a mic here, please, and here, after that.
Hello.
Hi. Please go ahead.
Yeah. I'm Aniruddha Ranade. So as a service company, one metric to look at is per employee revenue per month, and, as in, I have tracked that metric for a few of the larger peers in this organization, as in, in this sector. So when it comes to our company, what is the, as in, that number is significantly higher with, what, 24,000 employees, which we have. So, could you give some guidance on that, as in how we should look at that metric when it compares to some other companies in the same sector? Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. Sir, please.
Actually, there's two parts to this question. By the way, this is Doc. Everyone knows me. The first part is, it's great to see there's some kind of enthused in-
Odisha and Jharkhand, because I actually belong to both those states. So I grew up in Odisha, and I was born in Jharkhand, so let's hope something good happens there. But one futuristic question, which I probably will put out to both Anand and Sandeep here, is if you look at the rate of hardware now from an NVIDIA perspective and the GPU perspective, one thing which we should not miss is actually creating a state-of-the-art hardware lab, where we can actually create essentially stacks which are high performing, because it's all going to keep on going in that direction. So one of the things which is missing is just that. I don't know whether it's going to be built indigenously or if it's going to be built through an acquisition, but that's a very, very critical thing to not forget. So that's-
Thank you very much for your comments. Thank you. We're waiting for maybe one or two more questions, and-
I'm not very sure whether people will like what I'm going to say, because I have a solution that Persistent has been now working for 34 years. I think Persistent should now diversify in similar activities, and so that rather than giving the shareholders bonus shares, they should give them shares of the new company that Persistent forms. There are a number of areas where Persistent can be contributed. There are a number of areas where we can at least start working on the new activities and then do it. Not necessarily only in IT, that also I must say. Because there are a number of companies which are not only working in IT, but they are working in different fields. That will also give one more opportunity, particularly in the manufacturing sector. If we start working, this will definitely increase the employment proportion significantly. Thank you.
Thank you very much, sir. Can we have the mic here, please?
Hello.
Please go ahead, sir.
With due respect, sir, I'll just sit and take the questions because it'll be easy for me to roll over the papers. There'll be a few more questions. I'll make up for the others. Please give me time. Okay. After last year's interval, I guess I've come back here, and I greatly love this company. It's been one of the most promising companies coming out of Pune for a long, long time. I think eight or 10 years ago, in a chat at the AGM, I had casually mentioned to Anand, "I think Persistent should be the Infosys from Pune." And today, I'm very proud to see that we are nearly there. If not there, I think as Samir, as Sandip has said, we'll be going from strength to strength.
But in all other aspects, in fact in some of the aspects, we are ahead of them also, like the hybrid meeting, for example. This is an outstanding decision from this board, as well as the earlier few years, to go ahead with holding a hybrid meeting. It is the best of both worlds, of all worlds. People globally, who are our shareholders, who are located wherever, can participate. People locally, like me, can come and participate, and we can engage with the management. And this is a very, very healthy development from a corporate governance point of view, and I must congratulate the company secretary, the chairman, and the board members for supporting him and ensuring that this will become a success.
Going forward, I believe this format is the format that will prevail, and we have been constantly badgering the bigger groups, including Tatas and others, that please get into this mode, because there are shareholders who are very keen, who want to come and participate. It's a once-in-a-year occasion, and people would like to actively participate. Having said that, sir, I would request the CEO to make our MD&A, Management Discussion and Analysis, especially on the business side of it, a little more meaty. Just two small paragraphs are not good enough, both for the vision that you have outlined and for the work that we have done. Because this will engage and inform shareholders what exactly we are doing, and they will also become more, you know, aligned with what your goals are, and we will understand you much better.
I would welcome Anjali Joshi, who has joined us from overseas. This is her first AGM. Welcome, ma'am, and we look forward to your significant contribution going ahead. As well as Vinit Teredesai, please come on board. Very nice to have you. I see that there is an organized succession plan. There is an overlap between the earlier gentleman, our Executive Director, Mr. Sapre, and you, and it's very healthy, which is very rare. Because I remember three years ago at a HDFC Bank meeting, I kept on badgering Puri, who happened to be my peer, "When are you going to announce the new CEO?" He said, "Nai yaar, ho jayega, ho jayega, ho jayega." Now you see what is ho jayega. Though he's a gentleman insider, well known, who knows the company well, but look how the share is just stagnating, if not going down.
In terms of total shareholder returns, it, it affects. And the visibility that it creates in the marketplace, that is something that the board must be alive and concerned. Because we need to ensure that this aspect of it is also well managed. Now, we have got one change this year from the CFO side, and going forward, as I was briefly discussing with our Dr. Deshpande, his role in the company is also slowly getting, you know, more and more reduced. Persistent must be ready, future ready, to ensure that one day he is completely out of the picture. We do not want our shareholders to take a beating that time just because Anand has stepped down. The transition from him has to be very smooth, orderly, and the nomination committee and their team members have a big role to play.
Because, you see, that is when we will truly transform Persistent into a professional organization. Luckily for us, Anand's background, with his technical thing, he's a professional, hardcore professional in software. So to call him that he's not a professional would be inappropriate. But going ahead with the team here, et cetera, one has to look 25 years ahead, not 3 years or 4 years ahead. So I think we need to look at that. One small bit of input to our company secretary. If you look at page 120 and 148, 120 is legible, 148 is not. So the ink and the type, the ink and the type. For an old man like me, it is difficult to read, so and I take great interest to read it. Cloud.
I read a recent report, and all shareholders would like to also participate, know. Cloud is a $300 billion-$380 billion opportunity, and it will add 14 million jobs. That is what the potential of cloud is as per a leading consultancy in the top four in the world. This is backed up by another expert who was in the newspaper recently. I remember 6 years ago or 7 years ago, Anand had bet on cloud. That time, TCS was the only biggie who had just started cloud. I remember Persistent saying, "We will also get into cloud." Today, I can see very clearly that the bets have paid off. We have got solid competency in cloud, and I think we're building on that in a very big way.
I'm sure this opportunity also, we will, you know, make sure at Persistent it will help us. There is a transformation from legacy to cloud across the industry, and that will be a big benefit. Again, cloud as SaaS, that is also a very promising one, and I also like Persistent's initiative into getting into consultancy. I think the consultancy initiative will lead to a lot of software assignments coming through, and there's a lot of core competency in India, and India is building a lot of industries ground up. So we will quickly bridge the gap between the global best practices and India, and that is where software and consulting will go hand in hand.
Consulting may bring the revenue opportunities, and I think most on an outsourced basis, there are lots of people who are domain experts in consulting, and Persistent should tap in them so that they will aid in building up software products and platforms. I hope I'm not boring you, gentlemen, because I have a few more points. With your permission, sir. On page 50, I noticed that Amazon LangChain has an application or a platform available. I want to inquire whether this language chain can translate into all Indian languages. The reason I'm asking this is we have, with all these Jan Dhan accounts, a massive opportunity to transform banking in this country.
From brick and mortar, if we are able to generate a voice message, let's say there is a Jan Dhan account person who gets INR 100 credit or INR 1,000 credit in his pension account, and he doesn't know to read a mobile or anything, but he gets a message. He continues his farming activity. He doesn't have to go to the bank or anything, and then he will, through UPI, use that INR 1,000 to make payments and go ahead. So virtually, banking will. No one will have to go to a bank, stand in a line, wait for the bank to open, see whether money is credited to him or not. He can start using these funds. So I think, Sandeep, if you can answer that, whether there is a language. And coming to that is UPI.
India is a global leader now in UPI. Both Western countries, Japanese countries, they are all amazed. Even in Russia, recently, when Prime Minister had gone, the president was asking, "... UPI?" So I wish to see what Persistent has got in terms of positioning itself to take advantage of UPI, because UPI is going to open up huge amounts of opportunity, and we should keep our ear to the ground and ensure we don't lose that opportunity. Sir, on the dividend side, in spite of such a fantastic year, the rate of growth of dividend year-on-year is not very encouraging. It is a measly 4%, so at least take it to your 40%. Maybe in the next interim, you can make up for it. Because now this dividend to ..., so profits are outstanding, revenues are outstanding, volumes are. My friend, Mr.
Sapre is retiring on a very high note. Very rarely, a CFO can get both the fundamental performance of the company, which is astounding. The return on capital employed is averaging 22%-25% over 5 years, is very, very rare. It's a superb company, and it's all well run by him as well as the CEO and past. Given that, headcount 22 years - 22% CAGR of 5 years volume growth means people we have hired, all our employee shareholders are today the beneficiaries of the growth. I think we cannot ask for more, except for the small dividend recompense. It is very small because I'm talking about commitment to your own policy. There are two small points on dividend, which I will take offline with the company secretary and other people. On the other, on the ... I will - I have a suggestion. Mr.
Sunil Sapre has completed his term, and you have asked only an extension for three and six months. I, on behalf of all the shareholders, would propose that he be continued as non-executive director with his permission and availability, so that the handing over or passing of the baton to Vinit Teredesai will be much more smoother. So I have a suggestion, provided the board and Sunil's availability is there, we should tap into his wisdom and not allow him to go so scot-free. So, so early. You are in good health, Sunil, so please bear, help us out more. Vinit, you have got very tall challenges now. Your predecessor has set the bar so high, so you know you will have to go for a record jump. But best of luck, and I'm sure you, it will do well. Praveen also, I endorse his candidature.
He's an old friend of mine. As the CFO forum in the economist unit years ago, I had the opportunity to be on the panel to shortlist the CFOs for those years. So I think I know him from old days, because happening to be Reliance CFO years ago has its some small benefits. Sir, on the independent director side, Anjali Joshi is also being reappointed, and ESOPs also. Do we give ESOPs to all our employees? That's one question I have, whether we, the program covers all employees, or is it only for certain categories of employees? And, on the HR side, we need to do a study whether our ESOP pricing is good enough to retain our best talent.
One of the aims of doing an ESOP at par value or something is to give a good bonanza to the guy not to leave us and go. So some sort of study should be done vis-a-vis industry practice, whether our ESOP package... Because that is a real attraction for people to be here. And looking at the share price, how it is going, I'm sure a lot of people would like to stay and exercise and also contribute their thing. Sir, with these few words, and last but not the least, I think the contribution from Sonali and her CSR foundation has been outstanding, and, of course, they have put all their shoulder to wheel, and I also see employees also helping out.
We as shareholders, if we can contribute in any which way, we would be eager to help and support, whether it is the Asra Foundation or the CSR or so many other activities. Years ago, at Powai Road, I had seen in the evening, Persistent people helping in traffic management, and I was so thrilled. At 6:00, 6:30 P.M., we could hardly move five feet in 20 minutes, but these people were controlling the traffic and helping. I think at each of our facility within a radius of maybe 200-300 meters, if we can do this, that will be our contribution to our immediate society, where day in, day out, there are problems and people will really respect Persistent much more. Thank you, and sorry, sir, to keep you boring or anything. Thank you all, gentlemen.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you, sir.
All right, anybody else who would like to ask a question? I do have one question, which does relate to the questions that have been asked, but this one came through social media. I'll quickly read it out for everyone. Ronit Verma has asked us: How can employees be eligible for ESOP option? And that's something that came to us through social media. And one more time, anybody in the audience who'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand. All right. All right, thank you very much, Dada. Sorry.
Further to my suggestion that we should diversify, I would definitely make one humble suggestion. I have been thinking about the activity of solar cell. Effectively, if we look at the power generation, we are using today fossil fuels in quite a lot of areas. Whether we use coal or even oil, they are going to be finished very soon or any time. So if we start changing over to the more and more of the solar side, which in India is in abundant availability, it will definitely help long run for the country.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Thank you all for your questions. We really appreciate your involvement and participation in the well-being of your organization. While we are collating the questions, we will play a few videos showcasing the wonderful things we do here at Persistent.
... See here, just look at the energy! People here from 5:30 A.M., and just look at the enthusiasm they're experiencing at Persistent Run 2024.
What a morning! It is so much fun to see everybody from Persistent come together, and I was really excited. Love the turnout. Cheers. Hip hip hooray! Thank you.
It was phenomenal. I think we are just getting better every year. The scale is increasing, and the energy is tremendous. Thank you so much.
This has been such an awesome experience. In a Persistent run, you feel the energy. See beyond, rise above.
Okay, thank you very much. So let me first invite Sandeep to get started with some of the questions. We'll take turns, take them in groups and answer the questions, and if there's anything missed, then we can go back through it again.
Sure.
So, Sandeep, why don't you start with the first set?
Sure.
And then...
Thanks, Anand, and thanks to the shareholders for all the questions. So I'll go in a sequence, and if I miss anything, please remind us. So first question is from Vijay Kumar, which says: "Dear sir, please let us know if Persistent Systems is in ER&D, engineering, research, and design, which is the latest buzzword nowadays." So Vijay, in fact, Persistent has been a leader in ER&D for quite some time. Since our inception, we have delivered or worked with our customers in, you know, product development, and we were the ones who pioneered the term outsource product development as well. Right from there, to doing digital engineering, bringing innovation, doing things around AI, when AI was not even a, you know, thing that was talked about. We've been at the leading edge. So yes, we are a category leader in what is called ER&D.
There's a question from Devi Bakshi on data protection and cybersecurity. Now, from that perspective, if you look at it, data protection, cybersecurity is of paramount importance to us, both as a company servicing our customers, whether it is doing product development for products in cybersecurity, identity access management, data protection, and so on. We have been doing that for many, many years, to even implementing data protection, cybersecurity frameworks for ourselves. So when we service our customers, it's paramount that our own infrastructure be very good. So we have implemented the best-in-class cybersecurity infrastructure, right from protecting/defending ourselves, to in case somebody was to infiltrate, to making sure that the damage is minimized and we have the ability to recover seamlessly from that. In addition to that, we have invested in implementing, you know, laws or, you know, tools around GDPR. We are also looking at DPDP very closely.
We have certified ourselves to global standards like ISO 27001, and similar others, to make sure that we are not just implementing, but we are also certifying and ensuring that we are, in terms of, you know, the latest frameworks, the latest adoption from there. There's another question from Jaideep Bakshi on new developments, such as AI, tie-up with other companies, and so on. So on the AI side, there are two things. What tools we are developing using the infrastructure provided by hyperscalers and others. Second, we are also bringing in companies like Starfish, et cetera, to deliver horizontal and vertical use cases. So if you look at the technology landscape, we have partnerships right from Google, Microsoft, AWS, IBM and Salesforce. On one side, these are the large hyperscalers.
Cybersecurity, we are working very closely with the likes of Zscaler, CrowdStrike, many others, like Commvault, you know, Securonix, many, many other technology providers to make sure we not just embrace them ourselves, but take them to market. The other question is from Srikanth Sundararajan, saying: Will the company go for a semiconductor business? So we have invested in a small company called Hardwire, which is founded by people who are ex-Intel and similar other companies. And this is a fabulous semiconductor company. This is trying to build semiconductors for both India market and global markets, and we will expand this investment and capabilities as we go along. And we may also evaluate from time to time if we need to acquire companies in embedded software or in hardware business as we go along.
There's a question from Erwin, which says: How do you see Persistent in a decade from now? Will it be a much larger services company like TCS, Infosys, or a paradigm shift like Google, Salesforce? So look, we'll continue to be a deep technical, you know, service provider in engineering services. Where we will definitely, you know, evolve is going from being a human-driven technology services company to a platform and technology-oriented, you know, technology services company. So it will be a combination of human beings, platforms. Somebody also asked a question about our revenue per employee and so on, so forth. So the way we are looking at it is AI, generative AI, and similar technologies give us a transformative approach where size is not a barrier. So it's not about Accenture, TCS, anyone else who has much more revenue.
Having the ability to disrupt the market, that's where people like us can rise and shine, and can grow at a disruptive growth rate, disrupting ourselves and the bigger peers, and even creating newer markets. So from that perspective, we are confident we are on the right path, and in the next 5 to 10 years, like we have transformed in the last 34, we'll keep transforming. Then there's a question from Mr. Bapat, annual report, which says: AWS LangChain, can this translate into all languages? Yeah, generative AI has excellent support from for Indian languages, not just AWS, but many platforms like Google, et cetera, et cetera. They are there. There are initiatives like Bhashini and Indian Language LLMs, the large language models, which can also, you know, enable companies do this. Even large banks in India today are using channels like WhatsApp to do banking very effectively.
So I'm pretty sure whether it is technology platforms, whether it is languages, a lot of this will get democratized and will help us all, different countries, not just India. Now, if we were to look at the question from Rashmita Swain, basically asking for a Persistent branch in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, and, you know, saying it'll enable people from Odisha and Jharkhand. Look, we have expanded our footprint significantly over the last several years. We'll keep evaluating newer locations. As we have a critical mass in different locations, we'll definitely do that. So stay tuned. As you know, we grow in size, and we have a need to open offices in Jharkhand, Odisha, and more, we'll absolutely assess and do the needful. There's a question from Vikas Dakwe about our attrition rate. For the last financial year, our attrition rate was 11.5%.
I'll not want to comment on today's, you know, last quarter attrition rate, or somebody even asked about the last quarter performance. We are in a silent period. Two days from now, I'm sure you will have all the information, whether it is the results, revenue growth or profit growth or attrition, et cetera, for the latest quarter as well. And look, we invest significantly in our employees using our learning development facility called Ramanujam, and all of this is enabling us, along with our HR initiatives, employee engagement initiatives, to control our attrition rate. Training and growth of employees is another question from Jaideep Bakshi. So the same way, like we are using learning development for hyperscaler certifications. Look, being a technology service provider, being a leading technology services provider, I think this is the biggest asset that we have.
The reason the customers engage with us is the talent that we bring to bear, the capability that we bring to bear, and continuous, you know, upgradation of that is paramount, and that's where we invest a lot. Tarun asks a question: There's a term bench in every IT service provider company. I want Persistent to change the term as team innovation, which will be used to build new ideas, prototypes, et cetera. Look, good suggestion. We'll evaluate this. And definitely, look, whether people are there on bench or on projects, it's a talent pool that we have, and it's valuable pool for us, so continuous upgradation and using them the right way around is where our leadership team is focused on a day-to-day basis. There's a question from Mr. Bapat: Is the ESOP scheme helping company retain employees?
So, sir, I'm sure this is a key part of the compensation for significant number of our employees. For people at the senior levels who carry disproportionate weight of taking the organization forward and who have highly valued skills, et cetera, there's a differentiated stock option plan as well, and I'm proud to say it has delivered good returns. The fact that for the last five years, we are among the leading service providers, we are in the top quadrant, stands for, you know, the proof of the pudding. Now, the other question is: Do we give ESOPs to all our employees or only to certain categories of employees? From time to time, we have covered different proportion of employees.
Three years back, we had covered roughly about 80% of our employees at that point in time, and as you know, we go ahead, we'll keep taking calls the right way around to cover significant number of our employees the way we can. And all of that, I must say, is dependent on the shareholder approvals. And even if you look at the shareholder approvals, it's hard to get, I may say so. And so my request is, if you believe as shareholders, that's important for the company growth, which we as management definitely do, we would look forward to your support in those, you know, resolutions. Thank you, and we look forward to the broader shareholder support as well, including institutional investors, both domestic and foreign, if they're looking, looking or listening to this particular, you know, AGM. Now, if I was to look at some other things.
So there was a question from Srikanth Joshi on what is the contribution from recent acquisitions in the billion-dollar revenue? So from a perspective of the billion-dollar journey, if you look at the last year per se, let me qualify that first. 14.5% is all organic, so there was no additional acquisitions done in the last financial year. If you look at the journey when we became a billion-dollar organization, in that particular year, from the acquisitions done, roughly about 7.5%-8% would be the contribution from acquisitions. And acquisitions that we are doing, just to remind everyone, these are acquisitions done for capability addition.
Wherever we want to expand, create new growth vectors, whether it is cloud, whether it is, you know, things like Salesforce or even the newer ones that we are doing in generative AI, all these are capability-led acquisitions, not revenue for the sake of buying revenue. Now, if you look at the other questions, Aniruddha Ranade, as a service company per employee revenue, the question is: What is the per employee revenue in comparison to the other companies? So today, if we look at it, the average revenue per employee for Persistent is roughly $50,000 plus, which is the best in class. You know, there's a range in the similar kind of companies between $45,000-$50,000 per person per year, and maybe a few international companies may have a little higher.
I'm pretty sure with our forays into generative AI and platform-related work that we're talking about, one of the metrics that we would also want to see over the next several years is to increase this by using more technology to deliver services. There's a question about UPI, the advantage of that. I'm sure Anand will discuss that in more details. I'm sure he's far more versed with this. So with this, I think, I'm done with my questions, Anand. So-
Let me ask Sunil to take the next set, and then...
Yeah. Actually, Sandeep has mostly covered the finance section. There was one question around the growth in dividend not being commensurate with the company's revenue growth. But if you recall, last year, the dividend that we gave included INR 10 as special dividend. So the actual dividend was INR 40. So the current year's dividend, which is INR 52, and on split basis, you look at it as INR 26. That is actually 30% growth in dividend. But your point is taken with respect to going towards the dividend payout, so we note that request. Yeah, I think that's pretty much on the finance side.
There is a couple of questions about bonus issues, splits, and all that. You want to comment on those?
Yeah. Yes. So there was a question, "Yes, we have done the split. When is the bonus coming?" So hold your breath. It is, of course, prerogative of the board, and we'll see this happening at the right time in our journey. So I'll leave it at that.
Let me ask Amit to quickly take a crack-
Sure.
at some of the questions that I mentioned here.
Sure.
The first is the request for the hard copy of the annual report. Those who are the shareholders and who are requesting for the annual report copy, we will definitely provide it to you. Please send us an email on investors@persistent.com. This will help us to track how many copies are being distributed and are the copies being given to the eligible shareholders. After checking the shareholding details, we will definitely send it to you by courier. We have those details. In fact, we will be collecting those details in case some shareholders who are attending this meeting at this moment and wish to have the copy, please register their names with our volunteers who are available, and we will definitely resend you the copy.
About the management discussion analysis, sir, we acknowledge your points about elaboration of some points in the next ensuing annual general meetings, annual, annual reports. About 140, page number 140, which is not eligible. I sincerely apologize for this part, and I will ensure that we will take care of this part in the future. With this, carry on, Anand. I am done with this.
Yeah. So there are a couple of other questions here that I will answer. Regarding Sunil to continue at, as a non-executive director, of course, we will take his guidance on this, but we are not letting him go away. We have enough work piled in for him for many other things that we are doing as well. So the- he is already continuing on Persistent Foundation and also other areas. So we will see what is required within Persistent, but we are not going to let him not do anything, that is clear. Regarding promoter holding expansion, while you know it's nice to say that we can increase promoter holding, there are very limited options if you don't have a whole lot of cash with you. So we'll figure out the best ways. If we do a buyback, there is an opportunity a little bit, but it's very marginal.
There's not a whole lot you can do. I think, as a company, which is a listed company, I think it's important that the value of the promoter's shareholding goes up rather than the holding as such. So that's really how we see this. Regarding diversification into other areas, I think this is a good suggestion. We'll look at some of those things. How much of it comes through Persistent as direct Persistent or through partnerships with other companies is something we can think through.... 'cause again, we have limited capabilities in other areas, so we'll have to build those. So either we do it ourselves or with some other partners, is something to think about. Regarding the succession planning, I must assure you, Vinay, that we are working on many of these things.
Regarding the CEO succession planning, for the last five years, we've had a CEO that is not me, and Sandeep has been running the business pretty much independently for the last five years. And we have well-defined processes, including leadership teams at every level, to take care of this. So we are not at all dependent on any one individual anymore. And, I have hardly any... Meaning, I'm not really involved in the day-to-day operations for the last almost four years now, so nothing will change in that context. Regarding hardware lab, I think that's a good idea. We should consider it. We have some plans in that area, but we could do more.
On the UPI and other things, we have, again, not necessarily directly through Persistent Systems, but through the Persistent Foundation, we have been looking at ONDC, account aggregator networks, and all digital public goods and DPI, as they call it. So these are the digital public rails that are being created on the government level, or rather, through NGOs and other places. So ONDC is one of them, account aggregator is the other, and there are some other initiatives around Ayushman Bharat. So we've been tracking them very closely. We have volunteers working in some of these areas, and I'm personally tracking them very closely. Now, it's not clear if how much of a business financial opportunity there exists for Persistent directly in that area. Many of our customers, who are banks, use UPI and other infrastructure, and we are providing add-ons for them.
But exclusively for us to build products on that ecosystem, it's not clear yet. But we are tracking them. At least I'm tracking them very closely, and then when we see something, we'll definitely look at it. I've been also tracking a lot of areas around biotechnology and various other possibilities around bioeconomy, and we'll see how some of them can be coming in to work with Persistent as well. For the last several years, since I have not been the chairman, or rather not been the CEO of the company, I've been spending my time on looking at some of these newer areas. So all of these will feed in into where we are today. I think with this, I have actually covered all the questions that are listed here.
I will give my fellow board members who are here, if they have any opinion or anything else that they would like to add. I will then move on to the next section of the meeting, and this is the relic of the past, but we shall do this. Pursuant to Section 108 of the Companies Act 2013, and the rules made thereunder, the company has provided remote e-voting facilities for its members to cast votes electronically. The remote e-voting period was open from 9 A.M. on Thursday, eleventh July, to Monday, July fifteenth, till 5 P.M. That was yesterday.
Further, as stated in the AGM notice, those members who have not cast their vote through remote e-voting and would like to cast their votes today, can cast them either through a ballot paper or e-voting until thirty minutes after the completion of this meeting. If members have already cast their vote through remote e-voting in the past, meaning through the period that was done before, they must not vote again today. If they vote today, today's votes will be rejected. The board of directors has appointed Messrs. SVD & Associates, practicing company secretaries, as scrutinizers to ensure that fair and transparent voting, conduct of e-voting, ballot poll, all of that happens.
Members who desire to cast their votes today can do so after the meeting, either through electronic mode for members attending the meeting online, through electronic mode by using computer machines that have been provided outside the meeting hall, where we have volunteers who will assist you, or through a ballot paper that you can deposit in a ballot box. I now request the scrutinizer, Mr. Sridhar Mudaliar, to take a ballot box around in case any of you want to vote in a ballot box. Can you please show us that it is empty? Not me, share it. And then please lock it with a lock so that it cannot be tampered. Thank you, sir. If you feel like voting in the box, we can do that after the meeting.
The scrutinizer will submit a consolidated report on the e-voting ballot paper to the company by Thursday, July 18, 2024. Once the scrutinizer submits the results, the company will immediately communicate them to BSE, NSE and also upload them on the company's website and also on the NSDL website. The results will be also posted on the company's notice board as soon as they are declared. So we'll have to find where our notice boards are right now. Subject to receipt of the requisite number of votes, resolutions shall be deemed to be passed as of date of today's meeting, that is July 16, 2024. Now, with this, we are coming to the last two things, which are more interesting and exciting as well. I'm really glad to announce that we at Persistent Systems take social obligations very seriously.
As responsible social citizens, we have earmarked funds from our net profit for donations and the average net profit for the company within the meaning of the Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, for the three consecutive financial years that ended on March 31, 2024, is INR 10,888.87 million. Therefore, 2% contribution to CSR initiatives is INR 217.78 million. This amount will be donated to Persistent India Foundation, a new Section 8 company that has been created, which will deploy these funds towards committed CSR activities. Let me now request Mr. Arvind Goel, Independent Director and member of the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee, to hand over a ceremonial check to Mrs. Sonali Deshpande, Chairperson of Persistent India Foundation.
Let me request Sonali and Arvind to please come on stage, and Sandeep as well, to join us for a ceremonial photo. And let's bring this check and-
Please stand up. You give it. Thank you. Thank you. I can take it.
Thank you, Sonali. We are now nearing the end of the meeting, and I'd like to sincerely acknowledge the contributions of Roshini Bakshi, who has been an independent director of the company for the last 10 years. Roshini has been an active member of the board and is the go-to member for the leadership team. Her guidance to all of us has helped us make better decisions. During these 10 years, the company has grown significantly in all respects, and I must acknowledge Roshini's contribution towards this journey. Roshini, your tenure with us has been defined by the objectivity you brought to the board. From the very beginning, you have steadfastly advocated for transparency, accountability, and ethical governance. Your independent perspective has been instrumental in ensuring that our decisions are made with the best interest of all shareholders in mind.
Beyond your professional expertise, your personal qualities have also left a lasting impact on all of us. Your dedication to Persistent has been matched by your respect for diverse opinions, your openness to dialogue, and your collaborative spirit. You have fostered an environment where different viewpoints are valued and consensus is built through thoughtful discussion and mutual respect. As you complete your two terms, we want to express our deepest gratitude for years of service and the independence you have so diligently championed. Your legacy will continue to guide us as we move forward, and your influence will remain a cornerstone of our governance framework. On behalf of the entire board, the executive team, and our employees, we wish you all the very best in your future endeavors, and we would like to felicitate you with a small token of appreciation.
May I request Roshini to please come on stage in front? Thank you, Roshini. So as per our tradition-
Thank you.
One minute.
That's one.
Let me hand it to Roshini, if you want to say something, please.
Uh.
I can take it.
You said keep going. Now I'm really honored, and thank you so much, Anand, for these really kind words. Well, I was told that I have to talk literally 2 minutes before I entered the board meeting. So my few minutes is gonna be very unstructured, and I will only be able to say what comes directly from my heart. I was focusing on what Anand was saying about the board, about the AGM, and did not have time to prepare, so forgive me. I've been really honored to be a part of this journey, over the last 10 years, from the time it was a 24-year-old company to a 34-year-old. You know, there have been so many things that's happened in the last 10 years. So how do I crunch it into a few minutes?
But a few things stand out, and truly, I think it's made me very proud as I will continue to stand by the sidelines and continue to cheer. So four things really kind of came to my mind. One, when I joined the company as an independent director, it was $270 million. Today, it's $1 billion plus, plus, and I'm just waiting to see it reach $2 billion, which I know it will happen much faster than even what everyone is thinking about. So that gives me enormous pride. The second thing is there were 8,000 employees, 8,000 passionate, wonderful employees and team members. Today, there are 24,000. What an amazing journey! But the third is even more, which, you know, clearly, I think all of us are extremely thrilled about it.
At one stage, I remember the share price went down to 550 rupees.... It was hovering at around 720, 725 for a long time. Everyone said it was good, and then it went down to 540 at some stage, and we all looked around and said, "Oh, my God, what's happening?" Today, if there was no share split, it would have been, it would be more than 9,000 rupees, literally. But the most important, which is the fourth point that I will always hold, is that when I joined, it, it was reputed good, great company from Pune that was coming up. Today, as I leave it, it is probably the most envied tech services company in this world. Everyone, when I speak, when I speak to people, the first thing they say is: What's that secret sauce? Can you tell us what's happening inside?
What are those 24,000 people doing? But the most important and final is that despite all of this, it still continues to remain what it started, a soul of gold, humble and continuing to strive. Thank you.
Thank you. Delighted to share that we had 131 members in person in this meeting. I should say 131 members participating in this meeting, and another 50 who signed up as virtual members. Many people who sign up on YouTube, we will not always know who has joined online. Most of the proceedings will also remain online, so many more members might get a chance to view it at another time. We are really grateful to all of you for participating in this meeting. I hereby declare this meeting closed. We will play the national anthem, after which you may disconnect from the meeting. For those of you who are physically present here, I would like to invite you to join us for refreshments in the adjacent cafeteria. Thank you. Let me invite you all to please rise for the national anthem.