Q3 20/21

Jan 29, 2021

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Persistent Systems Earnings Conference Call for the '1 Ended 12/31/2020. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in listen only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Please note that this conference is being recorded. We have with us today on the call, Doctor. Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Managing Director Mr. Sandeep Kalra, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Mr. Sunil Shapai, Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer Saurabh Dhivivedi, Head of Investor Relations and Mr. Amit Adri, Company Secretary. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Sandeep Kalra. Thank you, and over to you, Mr. Kalga. Thank you. Good morning, good evening, everyone. It is good to be with you once again. I hope you are all keeping safe and 2021 bodes well for all of you. Coming to our performance for the quarter gone by, we are happy to share that we delivered yet another strong quarter with significant progress on all major business metrics. The revenues for the quarter came in at 146,150,000.00 giving us a growth of 7.4% quarter on quarter and 12.9% on year on year basis. In rupee terms, the quarter's revenue give us a growth of 6.7% quarter on quarter and 16.5 year on year basis, respectively. On the margin front, all the margin parameters, right from EBITDA to EBIT, showed considerable improvement. Our EBIT for Q3 translated into 12.7% in rupee terms and gave us a growth of 12% quarter on quarter basis, 16.92 year on year basis. For the nine months year to date, the total revenues came in at US413.3 dollars which gave us a growth of 10.3% over nine months of FY 'twenty. In repeat terms, the year to date revenue growth was at 16.5. The EBIT margin for nine months year to date came in at 11.7% compared to 9.1% for the nine months of FY 'twenty, which started it translates into an EBIT growth of 49.6% through the year to date period. In terms of employee numbers, we had a net addition of 1,600 plus FTEs in this quarter. This is the highest number ever added in a quarter in our history. 70% of this number came from lateral hires, the rest are freshers. Our attrition came in at 10.3% compared to 10.6% in the last quarter on trailing twelve month basis. We implemented the salary increments for our employees effective November 2020. On account of COVID related uncertainty, this salary increment had got delayed by a few months from our normal increment cycle, which is effective to that. However, compared to the rest of the industry, we are happy to say that we were the first few companies to have implemented the rate increase. For clarity, the increments are in line with standard practices and have not been impacted due to the COVID related uncertainty. A number of you have been asking us about the order bookings. So starting this quarter, we are announcing the order bookings. For sake of clarity, the order bookings that we will announce from here on are total contract value across all kinds of deals, small to large, renewal and new. For this quarter, we came in at $3.00 $2,000,000 in TCV terms, which is one of the healthiest from the time we have started measuring it over the last five quarters. This includes new business and new accounts, existing business, renewals and existing accounts, new business and existing accounts for the sake of clarity. We had a pretty strong quarter from a collections perspective. The collections through the quarter came in at $150,400,000 This brought the DSO down to fifty seven days, which is also a pretty strong DSO in the last few quarters that we had. The cash on the books ended at US258 million dollars roughly about INR1880 million. Our Board has recommended an interim dividend of Rs. And Sunil will give you more details later in this call. On the M and A front, we completed the acquisition of Capiod Software in the November. As a result, 200 Capiod employees became part of the Persistent family, and we also added to our capabilities on use of Tickco and Red Hat platforms. We are seeing pretty good traction for these capabilities in our existing and new customers. We are pretty confident on this acquisition, building well for us and our new Capyot team members along with our customers. Now moving on to giving you a little color on the vertical performance and service line performance. On a quarter on quarter basis, Technology and Emerging Verticals led the growth at 13.2%, followed by Healthcare Life Sciences at 6.4%. BFSI vertical declined slightly by 0.8% quarter on quarter. This is attributed mostly to cost control by a couple of large customers in terms of furloughs and some intermediate ramp downs. We do expect this to get normalized, and BFSI vertical will revert to its traditional growth in the near term. Just to remind you, Q on Q year on year comparison, the vertical grew by 9%. And for the first nine months, the verticals the BFSI vertical grew by 18.4%. Moving on to the service lines, we saw good traction across all service lines. Product engineering, cloud, security and sales force led the pack, and pretty much there was a secular growth across both. From a geographic perspective, we saw secular growth across North America, Europe, India and rest of the world. North America is the biggest volume for us, and more than 80% of our business comes from there. And I'm happy to state that, that grew 5% quarter on quarter. Europe, India came in at pretty high growth percentage wise, although they have lesser contributors in volume terms for us. Turning the track to organizational units that we have, Technology Services continued to grow sequentially at 6% kind of rate for this quarter. The revenues for Technology Services came in at about $111,600,000 The acquisition of Tapiot basically gave us about $1,000,000 in this quarter in that 111,600,000.0 Alliance business came in at a revenue of $34,600,000 with quarter on quarter growth of 12.2%. This growth was driven by seasonality in IP revenue as well as there were some upticks in the reseller revenue, both contributing nearly equal to the growth. Let me give you an additional color on the progress of Alliance business. I'm sure a number of you are looking forward to it. I'm happy to share that we are seeing pretty good traction in the Alliance business as we have been sharing in the last few quarters. We are confident this business will return to significant growth in the coming financial year. To give you a little bit more color, we continue to expand our relationship with our largest customer, IBM, and are strategically aligned with their new leadership's vision in the pursuit of hybrid cloud market. Last year, we were one of the named partners in IBM's financial services cloud. This year, we have expanded it to include IBM's new telco cloud, and that includes some of the IT from our side as well. We're deeply aligned with IBM's strategy in Cloud Pak, including being a development partner for Cloud Paks for data, Cloud Paks for integration, Cloud Paks for multi cloud management. We've also created Cloud Paks deployment services in order to help IBM in their deployment in enterprises. We continue to grow key IBM businesses in security, automation, data and AI and Watson Health. We've also become an advanced peer partner with Red Hat, and we are helping drive modernization mission across IoT and enterprise markets globally. Finally, from a pipeline perspective, we are seeing good traction on large deals in our Alliance business. In fact, we won some large deals in the Alliance business, which are ramping up, and we pretty much expect it to come to revenue starting the Q1 next financial year, and that gives us the confidence of a healthy growth trajectory in our NICE business going ahead. Now in terms of client wins, our press release has a significant number of client wins. I'll just focus on a few of them. In banking financial services and insurance, we won a large multiyear deal to deliver a solution for regulatory compliance, customer due diligence, data quality and tech automation, one of the top five banks globally. We'll be helping the bank to comply with the rules issued by U. S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, through identification and verification of beneficial owners of legal entity customers and so on. Broadly, the theme that we saw in banking financial services was driven through compliance, modernization, launching new products in digital banking, making new digital products more secure and so on. From a health care license perspective, the theme that we saw came across DigitalFundor, which is basically the consumer experience on one side in terms of providers. On the instrumentationmedical device kind of companies, we saw acceleration of product development roadmaps given the COVID opportunity in terms of providing services and products for them, and we are very well aligned to their strategy. We also saw some wins in doing AI machine learning work. For example, for one of the leading chronic kidney disease kind of companies, we are doing AIML platform in health care. On the software, high-tech and emerging verticals, we continued this is the traditional stronghold of Persistent, and we continued our journey in terms of larger longer term events, including with large U. S.-based software companies where we are doing the engineering and support of core and mature security products. We are working with a telco software company on five g communication related wipe related test software and so on. So pretty much a healthy growth across board in all these segments. Now moving on to the analyst recognitions. So this quarter voted well for us in terms of analyst recognitions as well. There were a number of those, including the ISV booming 15 global for the sub billion dollar category. We were the only provider recognized consistently for the last four quarters. Why this is important is this means we are being consistently seen by people like ISG, our category in larger deals that are being fought by people like us in the enterprise space. On the Xenov side, we won the recognition as a leader in Xenov's ER and D services report. We were recognized out of 50 plus providers as the top three in consumer software, enterprise software and platform engineering. That bodes well for us in terms of our consistent recognition in the market. Also, this is the segment where we have the highest calculation from a capability and a customer's perspective. The average group recognizes us as a major contender in Salesforce Healthcare, you know, services peak metrics for 2021 based on the strong offerings we have in this market space. We continued our journey with the likes of AWS, winning or achieving the AWS financial services competency status. We also won an award from ServLink for helping their customers use the next generation identity governance solutions. We were recognized as a rising star for 2020. I'm pretty sure a number of you are curious about our work from home, work from office related progress. So we are happy to say we have our facilities open in a secure manner. We are starting to implement a hybrid working model. We are encouraging our employees to come partially to office, and we are hopeful that with time, more and more, as the COVID things settle down, more vaccines are rolled, we'll come back to a little more number of people working from office, and we'll keep reporting on the progress as we go along. With this, I would like to hand over to Sunil for a detailed financial commentary. Sunil, over to you. Yes. Hi. Thank you, Sandeep, and good evening, good morning, everyone. First of all, wish you a very Happy New Year. I hope you all are keeping safe and doing fine wherever you are working from. The, you know, business outlook, deal wins and trends in the segment that we saw has been covered by Sandeep. So let me now walk you through some more details on the financial performance for the quarter. Very quickly, the revenue at 146.15 with Q o Q growth of 7.4% and Y o Y growth of 12.9% and in INR terms at INR10754 million, a growth of 6.7% Q o Q and 16.5% Y o Y. And for the nine months ended thirty first December, the revenue came in at $1.0.4132 a growth of 10.3% and in rupee terms, 745,030,000 with a growth of 16.5% Y o Y. Coming to the composition of revenue this quarter, as you know, was seasonally strong for the IP led business, which grew by 19.8% resulted in lower provision for doubtful debts as compared to earlier quarter. It helped margin by about 0.4%. UCSR spend was also lower As you know, we have contributed significantly in the first few quarters towards COVID related donations. So this spend was slightly on the lower side this quarter, primarily because we expect some spend to happen over the next few quarters to complete our committed INR25 crores that we have committed for COVID release. So the EBITDA for the quarter came to 17% as against 16.4% in the previous quarter. On the depreciation and amortization, it is in range at the same level at 4.3% like last quarter. The increase that you see in absolute terms in amortization is mainly because of the Capiod acquisition. With that, the EBIT was 12.7%, a growth of 0.6% over 12.1% of the previous quarter. Treasury income came in higher at INR288 million as against INR208 million in the last quarter, primarily on account of higher mark to market gain on mutual fund investments and also partially because the increase in the underlying treasury size. ForEx loss was much less at INR 2,000,000 as against INR 51,000,000 in the previous quarter. The profit before tax was INR $1,650,000,000 at 15.3% as against 13.6% in the previous quarter. PTR for the quarter was 26.7% and PAT was INR $12.00 9,000,000 at 11.2% as against 10.1% in the previous quarter. And for the nine months, PAT came in at INR $300,129,000,000 at 10.2%. The operational CapEx for the quarter was INR 52,000,000. Sandeep has already mentioned about the cash on the book. It rose to about INR $258,000,000 in longer term. The DSO, fifty seven days as against sixty three days in the previous quarter. So you would have seen a spike that had happened in the DSO in the first quarter due to the COVID impact. We have been significantly able to improve the collections over the last few quarters, which has resulted in very good cash conversion. Forward contracts outstanding as on thirty first December was 128,000,000 at an average rate of INR 76.93. And as we have seen, the Board has declared an interim dividend of INR 14 per share. With that, thanks, everyone, and I hand it back to Sandeep. Thank you, Shalin. So from here, we are open for questions. So please go ahead. Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. The first question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirial Securities. Congratulations on a very solid, consistent, strong execution quarter on quarter. Just Sandeep, wanted to understand how to read employee addition of 15%, of which you are saying close to 70% of them being lateral. So is it fair to say your growth momentum could be even stronger than what we have witnessed in the third quarter in the coming quarters as a whole? Because most of the addition being lateral as a whole, and that is also reflected in the order book where book to bill has been about two x as a whole. So, Sandeep, good question. And, yes, from a, you know, hiring perspective, obviously, we are trying to hire ahead of the curve, and we are trying to do a few things. If you look at not just this quarter earnings, if you look at the last few quarter earnings, we have been announcing larger deals. We've been announcing multimillion dollar, multiyear kind of deals. A number of the hiring that we have done goes towards fulfillment of earlier deals, ramping up the deals that we are doing or we have announced in the last quarter and the anticipation of what we expect over the next few quarters. Out of the thing that we talked about, sixteen eighteen hires that we talked about, roughly about 600 are freshers, which will take about six months to get productive. The other people are the ones who are getting deployed over the orders that we booked in the last few quarters and this quarter. Also keep in mind that a number of our peers are also announcing good results. What that means is there could be a potential spike in attrition going ahead. So we are being prudent in hiring a little ahead of the curve, making sure that we are able to fulfill our commitments to our customers. And, yes, that should give you some confidence in overall Okay. And, mister, thanks for start disclosing the order booking numbers. But how do we because it includes all kind of deals. On And a book to bill, it's a 2x. So is this trend generally, remain at this kind of a book to bill ratio every quarter? Or this is at very high rate and you're not continuing going forward? So book to bill ratio, Sandeep, usually is if you are talking about annual contract value kind of things, right? So total contracts can be over three years, five years and so on. So this overall number is basically across all kinds of things. If I was to, you know, say, going forward, what we will also try and do is give you the backlog for the next, you know, twelve months in terms of executable backlog. So that is also something that we will start announcing overall. If you were to look at new part of it, roughly, you can look at about 175,000,000 out of this TCV was new. In existing customers or new customers that should give you some of the thing. And there's no average that can be consistent over quarter, so I don't want to put an average duration to this. But going ahead, in the next few quarters, we'll also start the next twelve months executable order book as well. Thanks, guys. And just last question on margins. Looking at this quarter, despite wage inflation and such a robust lateral employee addition, the employee cost has just gone up by four percentage Q on Q. So is it fair to say the employee cost will have some headwind in the coming quarters because that might have been added at the end of the quarter and the margin may not sustain at the current level? And what is an outlook over medium to longer term on terms of margin? I'll take the first part, and then I'll hand over to Sunil for that. So I don't think you should read it as a headwind for the future quarters. So look, what we are trying to do is this. We have a number of orders that we have booked. We are trying to kind of pull through them, and we are trying to hire in time. And even when you hire, you take a little bit of time to deploy. That's a natural business cycle. If you look at our utilization, our utilization has not suffered despite our bringing people over a period of the quarter and so on. So I don't think you should read it as headwinds. You should read it as more, you know, fulfilling in time and maybe being proactive about hiring and being prudent about any potential spikes in attrition that might happen. Sunil, over to you for the rest of it. Yeah. Sure. Sure. So, Sandeep, what we mentioned, about the headwind can happen only if, you know, these people do not actually get billed, which is not the case because of the, deals that have been booked. So it's just the week to week, you know, deployment and availability efficiency which we track internally, which, should ensure that there is no impact out of the employee addition. The other part that just to note is the pay hike that we had was the effect was for two months. So to that extent only, the full pay hike, impact will come in the next quarter. But with the efficiencies on multiple other areas that you are seeing, the overall, employee cost, we have been able to manage with utilization staying in the band of 81%. We have also seen some operating levers. And as you know, this quarter gone by as seasonalities like furloughs and other things, which should not, impact us in the next quarter. And to that extent, there are some levers which can help us, you know, continue the, approach on margin expansion. Okay. Okay. Thanks. All the best. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sushnit Patodia from Motilal Oswal AMC. Please go ahead. Yes. Good evening. Wishing the team a happy New Year. Great performance from Deep and team. This was really great. My first question is from a medium term perspective, you think the best of attrition and cost is behind us, and now this will become a challenge again. And I understand that you have probably advanced your hiring in anticipation of this, but how do you see this landscape evolving? So see, from an attrition perspective, I don't think it will be a huge uptick or anything. But look, the overall IT environment or overall the environment from our, you know, peer perspective also, everyone is reporting good results. It bodes good for our industry, and I I hope it remains the same way. And if that is the situation, then, obviously, the talent pool the good talent pool comes under pressure. So while we believe we are a very strong company to work for, a lot of our employees are long term employees and so on, there may be a little bit of blip here or there. So that's where we are being prudent in making sure we are well staffed for the demand that we have. Now a small bit attrition here, there is a healthy thing any which way because that also reflects on the overall demand environment. So that is where I will leave it. I don't want anyone to be overly concerned about this. The other part, if you can ask again, I'll answer that. Cost part, what exactly did you mean by that? So basically, I wanted to understand is best of the margins done in Q3 because you have 100 basis point savings from travel. As you rightly said, attrition will slowly pick up and some resources may be under pressure. So I'm just trying to understand, is 17% EBITDA pretty much optimal from your perspective? Or are there more levers left? Because at some point, travel costs will also come back. Right. So from our perspective, the revenue growth thing that we have achieved, we believe there are some deliverables, as Sunil earlier referred to, while the costs may come back in terms of travel facilities, etcetera, as things open up, and we wish they open up faster than otherwise. But we do believe the revenue acceleration that we have brought in, the kind of deals that we have won, the kind of pipeline that we have will help us keep the revenue momentum going higher, and that should also help us in various ways in margin improvement. Outside of this as well, there are a few other levers, whether it is in our Reliance business, IT business, wherever else, that we are exercising, which will also help us optimize the cost. So we are reasonably okay at this, and we believe there is some more room to go. And my last question is on capital allocation. Now that you have DSOs, which are probably best in class in your peer set, so cash flow would not be a problem. What is the Board or the management thinking about the INR $1,819,100 crores of cash? So the high level answer to that is we announced the dividend, which we increased from the last year. That's point one. Point two, we are actively looking at acquisitions. That would be the way to go. Given the market where it is, it doesn't make sense doing any buybacks at this point in time. And we are more inclined towards giving return to shareholders through our growth. That would be the strategy for the near term. Got it. Thank you and best of luck. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mohit Jain from Anand Raji. Please go ahead. Hi, sir. I have two questions. One is on the Alliance Business. So in the opening remarks, you spoke about Alliance business growth picking up significantly for FY 'twenty two. So where do you think this could be? Can it match up to the company level? Or do you think it will still be lower but much better than what we have seen in the last two years? So again, I will not make forward looking statements on the company level growth and all. All I would say is it will be better than what we have seen in the last few years. We already have booked some deals. We have a pretty good pipeline. We are seeing very good traction with the biggest customer that we have in all the pockets, sell to, sell with, sell through. So we are fairly confident it will come up, and hopefully, it will be in line with the company average. Okay. And second is on the IP net revenues. So we saw positive momentum after long gap. So given our portfolio of IP products, now there were two observations here. One, of course, this revenue decline, which has completely stopped. Second was its impact on margin was not visible on a sequential basis. So going forward, from an IP perspective, do you think we will see more stagnation rather than decline given your portfolio of offerings? And second, what impact would it have on the margin side broadly, IP versus services? Sure. Margin part, I'll let Sunil answer. On the overall IP part, look, there is, at times, seasonality in the IP business. That's the nature of the business, and that is not just with us. If you look at any of the companies that in our industry have IP, that will be the same with them or with the software product companies as well. So there is going to be seasonality. Although, you know, we are working hard to make sure that we cover that seasonality through services on top of it and so on and so forth, Broadly, we hope to stabilize it. And then any which ways in the alliance business and otherwise, the revenue growth should take care of overall, you know, the growth, and that should not impact the company growth per se. On the margin front, Sunil? So, you know, Mohit, you would have also observed that, so far as the IP, related person months are concerned, we have been continuously working to optimize that. So some of these, you know, areas which help us in cost optimization also ensure that our margins are in control. And, the seasonality that, you referred to with respect to, the IP led business, it sometimes also happens because of the customer's CRM kind of situation. So we have seen this happening probably several times in the past, as Sandeep mentioned. And not a whole lot needs to be worried about that. More keenly, we are observing that we ensure that the margins in both the portfolios, can be improved on a sustained basis. So we should more look at it from a Y o Y perspective. The improvement we have seen in 3Q is more or less sustainable is what you guys are saying in terms of IPTV. Yes. Okay. Thank you, sir. That's all from my side. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ditesh from MK. Please go ahead. Congrats to the very strong execution and robust performance. Two questions. First about, just want to get your sense about mining trend. I think we report only more than five in one to five. But if you can help us give some data or maybe qualitative comment, how you are seeing the twenty, thirty, ten, fifty million kind of account progress for us, and how one can look at playing out on medium term? And second question is about how you missed your deal intake number. If you can provide deal intake component of it. Okay. So let me start with the deal intake and the new component part of it. So the deal intake was $3.00 2,000,000 in TCV terms. Out of the $3.00 2,000,000 in TCV terms, 175.5 was in new new and existing and new and new customers. If you want to even though look at the ACV terms, it was 256,000,000 in ACV terms, 140.11 of that ACV was in new and existing and new customers. Does that answer you on the lead intake? Yes. Thank you. On the mining trend, look, we announced the numbers between the top one, top two to five, and six to 10. If you look at it, the numbers there have grown healthy. But if you were to take the top 10 out and look at the growth overall, even the overall growth beyond the top 10 is fairly healthy. And we will look at giving you details in the fact sheet going ahead for the rest as well. But if you calculate it, pretty good healthy growth across both. The mining efforts have been fairly effective, and there's a number of proactive proposals that have been won when I talk about the new wins as well. So we are seeing a fairly healthy growth in both existing accounts and new accounts outside of the top line as well. Sandeep, I ask because we give customer engagements by more than 5,000,001 to 5,000,000 book rates. We are seeing steady progress on more than 5,000,000 where we are at 17 on this quarter, But one to 5,000,000 seems to be largely stable. And so that is where I wanted some detail. Maybe if you can go. See, from an overall perspective, if you look at it, there are a number of customer wins. Where we are focused is getting the new customer wins also to be in the category where we can do multiple year kind of a business. And some of those that we have won over a period of time will start moving into those categories as well. I'm pretty sure you will see the movement quarter on quarter increase on that in the subsequent quarters. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Prashik Shandarkar from Elara Capital. Please go ahead. On great execution. Sandeep, just one question. Could you talk about the trends in DFS spends from a calendar 'twenty one perspective? What you're seeing, is there a possibility that they can surprise positively? And I mean, how is Persistent positioned, especially from our top 10, top 15 banks perspective? So from a BFSI perspective, look, the trends that we are seeing at a very high level are more related to the digital banking side of it, where more and more banks are trying to launch newer products on the online space. Now we are working with the likes of Mambu and similar other providers where we are taking their solutions to market, whether it is a large bank, whether it is up to a credit union. So the entire nine yards is a span out there. Then there is a number of initiatives on the modernization space. A lot of banks, large and small, are looking at their tech strategy. They're looking at their road maps, working with the hyperscalers on seeing what can go to the cloud, what needs to be in a hybrid cloud kind of environment. They're also looking at compliance related things because as you put more products on the digital side, there is issues with respect to security, fraud, authentication, many of those. So we are looking at a whole lot of compliance and security related initiatives as well. Those are the broad contours. We are involved with some of the larger banks. And in fact, one of the top five customers is one of the largest banks in the world. And we are also seeing some traction with other large banks here in The U. S. Hopefully, that answers you in a summary. That's helpful. Thanks for taking my question and best wishes. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Reva from Edelweiss. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi. Good evening to the management team, and congrats on excellent execution. Also, I wish you a very happy New Year. Sandeep, I have just a little more question on the strategic and long term side. If you see, we had some challenges in last four, five years, both at the industry level and at persistent level also due to some transition and other things which are happening, some kind of pain which came from the non enterprise side, ISB side and all. Now we are in a situation where we are actually you know, we have solved broadly all the problems. We have sectoral tailwinds. We have have the leadership and very strong, you know, dealings and everything with us. And we also have, you know, the problems which we are bringing down our growth in the past, they are also behind us. Moreover, if you see last fifteen, twenty years history, it has never happened that robust growth of in the cycle has come and it has the margins have gone down substantially ex of currency. It has never happened because operating leverage always comes to play. So my question is that with so much of tailwinds with you, the sectoral tailwind, the internal tailwind, the business transition tailwind, and you yourself are aware that the kind of cycle for cloud which has come, that is not going to that is not the way technology works. So then why we are so cagey about not, you know, giving a clear direction of how we are seeing growth from next year, four year perspective, not in quantitative number, but at least in qualitative number that, yes, next five years looks much better than the previous five years because of these three tailwinds. And the margins also not the currency challenges or some cost escalation because the demand is good, so we may have to hire people at little higher prices. But other than that, the margin should also be good. So what is stopping us to take some more time before you call it out? Are you thinking that this is a better way to look at one quarter at a time? It's a good question. And number of things in that. So, Sandeep, here is what I would say. Look. A lot of things that you said are right. There's a secular trend. We are seeing a trend, which is potentially a three to five year up cycle for companies like ourselves, especially with companies like us who have forward looking capabilities, whether it is on the cloud side, whether it is on app modernization, hybrid cloud security, data, AI ops, and and we are confident of our ability to execute. I'm sure that track record over the last five quarters, consistent growth. Now we have also given the order book and so on. We'll also give executable order book, the all kinds of metrics that, you know, you folks look for, and we are confident in our journey. Having said that, nobody has a crystal ball of how this COVID thing is gonna go by. Yet it would be prudent to wait for another three to six months before starting to, you know, kind of give overtly confident commentary and so on. We would want to wait for that. Second, we are also working towards doing an investor meet, hopefully, in the q one beginning of next financial year. We were trying to do it in person, but looks like it will be, you know, a little while before that can be done. And we'll address a number of these questions when we meet. But at a overarching level, are we confident of our journey over the next few years? We are absolutely confident. We have the right skill sets. The company's foundation is fairly strong. We were always on the cutting edge of technology. And even if we were to announce some M and A in the near future, that would be on these lines itself on the cutting edge of technology. So rest assured, we are well poised to ride this wave. But in terms of, you know, putting a stake in the ground of what percentage growth, what percentage margin, etcetera, we would want to take a little bit more time and do it prudently. Hopefully, that gives you confidence. Okay. And Nathan, another question, maybe you or I don't know if Sunil can answer, and it is very speculative right now. But there has been consistent hammering of the global tech companies in last few weeks that, you know, not on the stock price or the business price, but, you know, from the commentary which are coming globally that, you know, they will be punished in some or other way or there'll be like, today, there was a comment from a comment that, you know, Global Tech will have to pay additional tax or something like that. So what is your sense is, have you seen this ever in the past or or specific any additional taxes, something which has been proposed and passed or this is for the first time you are all you guys are also saying it? So, Nilal, I defer this to you. No. So, Sandeep, your observation is right. It's probably what is happening, are right now passing through some kind of a contradiction. And while some sectors of the economy have been going through lot of pain, there is income distortion, there is revenue distortion, and all that. And because that sector is requiring certain help, the tailwind is in favor of our sector. So probably, it is playing on the minds of various regulators in various countries that probably here is an opportunity to balance some of these things at least in the near term. So probably that's the way I read it. I don't think it's something that, what you call, should be concerning in a big way. But, yes, it's something that you'll see. The corporate tax rates have brought down in The US, in India, and many other countries, to levels like 21% in US, 25% in India. So they probably are looking at this aspect that why is it that this particular sector which got the tailoring, should contribute a little more to what the commentary has put various resources to play. So we'll watch the development that they have. So, basically, also doing business, right? Correct. Thanks. That's all from my side and best of luck for the coming quarter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sandeep. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ritesh Rathod from Nippon India. Congratulations on good set of numbers. This this question of on on the client mining of more than 5,000,000, even though you don't give us the bifurcation further, but what had led to such a strong performance in last four to five quarters? The the numbers have been going up. If you can help us in terms of on ground work, how you're changing incentive structures or or few more qualitative details will be helpful. Sure, Ritesh. So I'll try and keep it, you know, simple so that we can take some more questions as well. But at a high level, here is what we have done in the last five quarters. We had a fairly strong foundation as a company. We organized ourselves into vertical and service lines. We cost incentivized the teams to go and do the best of the services, do if we were selling one or two services in a customer, we went and, you know, tried to upsell ourselves into a customer, get more wallet share from the customer perspective. That was one side. Second was where we went into making sure that we a set of new partnerships. We focus on the partnerships that we already had and added to the partnerships. So I'm talking about hyperscalers, whether it is AWS, GCP, Azure on one side on the other side. We doubled down on things like IBM Red Hat. We doubled down on Salesforce partnership that we have. We've worked on the channels like ISB, WaveStone, and a number of other, you know, sourcing and other advisory companies like Everest so on and so forth, you know, of this world. So we looked at every part of our ecosystem from a market facing perspective in order to service our customers better on one side, you know, bringing in more sharpness into service lines and our vertical offerings on one side. On the other side, expanding our, you know, presence in front of customers and prospects through various, you know, industry influences. We also, you know, corrected the incentive part on our side to be able to incentivize the behavior in which we are looking at not just short term projects, but we are looking at longer term and bigger kind of, you know, constructs with our existing and newer customers. So a bunch of these things started playing in. And, you know, obviously, things like this are backed up by our impeccable delivery, the kind of awards that we won, the ISB award that we won where we, you know, surprisingly have beaten pretty much it right. Everyone from Accenture to an IBM to an HCL to Wipro to whoever else in our industry. So there's a lot of those things that came together, and that started yielding with us. And, obviously, you know, confidence based on confidence, whether it's our sales team or even the customers and so on. And if you look at our execution, we have been heads down on execution for the last four, five quarters in a very disciplined manner. So that's that's where it is. And the team has come together well. We have also added wherever we had white spaces in our tenant. So a number of those things are the ones that are behind our growth, and we we have fairly disciplined execution engine in place. So if I see your services revenue base of $100,000,000 quarterly or maybe 120,000,000 as of now for now, and in the last nine months, despite this pandemic, you have grown at a rate of 16%, 17% year on year. So on the other side, if we see the Eastern European companies, their five year CAGR has been 23%, 25% kind of revenue CAGR in last five years. Is it possible for us to do that kind of CAGR on such a favorable base? I'm I'm I know you you said in the previous question not to call out, but there are no disadvantage on your side in terms of portfolio mix or vertical mix or any kind of disadvantage, structural disadvantage that doesn't allow you to perform for at that run rate? Actually, there is no disadvantage. I don't see a reason why one could not perform like that. Obviously, it's a tall order. I I wouldn't want to commit to those numbers, but, you know, structurally, there's no issue. As a company, as I said, we have a fairly strong foundation. We have built very good service lines and vertical, you know, offerings. We have good set of partnerships. We have a disciplined execution going, so there's nothing structurally that is stopping us from achieving. The next question is from the line of Nitin Padmanathan from Invested. Congrats on a great quarter. I just wanted to check, considering that this quarter has been very strong, both on IT and services, and historically, we have seen that after a strong Q3, typically, Q4 has been relatively soft because of the IP revenue sort of coming up. And typically, there's been a revenue decline. Do you think the current pipeline sort of will ensure that there's no decline in Q4? It's a very good observation, and that observation is not lost on us as a management team. And that's a healthy challenge that we have taken, and hopefully, we'll come out of it well. That's where I will be better. We have a good pipeline. We have good bookings, and our eyes on the volume. Okay. Two other questions. One is on the net new of 175 are the tenures like the usual four, five year type? Or are they slightly longer? No, sir. They are not longer. They are, in fact, shorter. Because, see, that 175,000,000 that we talked about is new business in existing accounts and new accounts. And that is basically spread from small projects to large three year, five year kind of deals. I would say that is much lesser than even three year if you look at the average part of it. So and as we go along, we'll give you the executable order book, so you don't have to keep guessing about all this. Sure, great. And one thing I think I missed in translation is, I think somewhere along the way, you mentioned a number of $456,000,000 ACV. Did I hear something wrong? Or what was the exact context to? I don't think I said $450,000,000 ACV. What I said is, let me repeat, $3.00 2,000,000 TCV overall, including renewals and new, $256,000,000 ACV. Out of that, 175,500,000.0 new TCV, 140.11 ACV. That, if now you translate into your earlier question and do your math, that will give you the duration average, whatever it is. Sure. Fair enough. Thank you so much. That's very helpful. All the best. The next question is from the line of Satish from MK. Is it possible to I think you said some of the service line, the product engineering, cloud, Salesforce. So is it possible to provide some scale where we are in those service line, and how you expect them to play out over medium term? We can include that in the fact sheet somewhere down the line. I don't want to, you know, give it right now because it's a whole lot of data points, and we have eleven minutes left in this call. But, you know, if that is an request from the investor community, we'll start including it down the line in terms of service line revenues as well, the way we will give the vertical revenues. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Greval. Please go ahead. Sandeep, I have one question which I missed last time. What is your strategy for next four to six quarters or eight quarters, whether you want to just focus right now to strengthen your existing services and geographies and verticals? Or you are also looking to add some of the high growth verticals as we move forward? Because, basically, there is a lot of delta in some of the very big right now. And would you go for that strategy, you will first consolidate your existing verticals in a very strong way? I would say the latter. We would first consolidate the industry verticals in a stronger way. But more important than that, look, where are we the sharpest? As persistent, we are the sharpest when it comes to service lines, when it comes to the technology expertise that we bring to the table. A number of the technology expertise respectfully is agnostic of the industry verticals that we service. So if we sharpen our industry service lines, that is where the most amount of growth will come. That is where you will see us. If you look at the future, let's say, six, eight quarters, organically and inorganically, we will be focused there. If we do inorganic, that may bring us more into geography focus as well as Europe. It may bring us more into the technology focus that we currently have. So our focus will remain on being the best in wherever we are right now. And as we go along, if there is opportunistically something that we can enter into in a bigger way, that's a separate issue. But for the next four, six, eight quarters, this is where we are headstone, and there's ample amount of market for us. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equatorial Securities. Please go ahead. Thanks. Thanks, Nava. Just, Sandeep, wanted to understand on the Alliance side, last time you said that you are opening many purchasing windows outside even the technology domain area of your top. So any status updates on that in terms of health care and the BFSI subsegments of your top line? Sure. So good question, Anthony. One of the larger deals that is there in our fact sheet as well as in the press release is in the health care space with the same customer that we talked about, and it is fairly large. So we are definitely opening newer avenues of discussion. We are very well aligned to their new strategy, whether it is on their product slash services side. So, from that perspective, yes, the expansion will be in different parts, whether it is in the health care, whether it is in the telco, whether it is in financial services space with the largest customer as well. And we are seeing very good traction there. Okay. Okay. So is it fair to say your strategy in Alliance is to keep creating opportunities within services, which will help you to compensate the volatility in the IP side of the business, which you earlier indicated it's not very bullish scenario where your focus is more on margin rather than optimizing the IP revenue within a bank? Yes. To a certain extent, that is right. So let's quickly go over it. So the services part is one part where we deliver a sell to kind of services to the largest customer. The other part is also working with them on our customers, joint customers, newer customers, and so on. That's another revenue stream, and that's equally important. Because if you look at, you know, the IBM strategy, they are getting big on Red Hat. They're getting big on hybrid cloud and CloudFacts and so on. So as they look to partners like us, you know, we are very well positioned because of our long history with them. We have worked on many of their products. We have even taken many of their products onto the Red Hat environment and so on. So we are well poised much ahead of other GSIs in going to market also with them. So all of these three revenue streams are there. And as we build our business on these three revenue streams, the volatility, etcetera, will be much lesser. And this part is so this business is roughly about 22%, 23% of the business. The rest of the business, any which way, is going very well. So there are many benefits of this. So not only will we grow the enhanced business, but also take away the volatility and overall as the company grows. Okay. And Sandeep, just last thing as a strategic question. It is perceived that the Persistent portfolio has a very low legacy services or legacy business. So as you grow your order, say, most of the orders which will translate into growth versus for many years, the baggage leads to a leakage in the revenue and the new order range does not trans to growth. So for you, it would be a reverse. Is it the right way of looking at it? At a high level, I would agree with what you're saying. And, that would create a healthy set of backlog for us and help us grow. Okay. Thanks and all the best. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Duresh Bai from Devalbank. Please go ahead. Yes. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions. One is on IP. You mentioned that you would be spending, quite a bit of money on M and A. Do you foresee, spending that on IP? So M and A would be more in terms of getting capabilities on cloud, security, data, any of these kind of things. When we look at companies in that space, we are looking at companies which will come with capabilities and some kind of an IP, may not be a product. We are not into the products business. The IP is around, let's say, they have built some reusable frameworks, which make them sharper around a certain partner or a partner technology and so on. So that is the way we are looking at it. We are not looking to acquire IP based companies. Okay. My second question, there has been a lot of repadging kind of deals that have been announced in the industry in the last, I would say, six months plus. Are you looking at any of those, maybe scale that some of your larger players have been doing, but somewhat on a smaller scale? Yes. So if you look at it, a few quarters back, we had announced a large deal to the market as well. And that included rebasing roughly about a 200 plus team members from that customer to us. There are a few other deals that involve this, but they are not at a huge size and scale. There are a few of them, and those are business as usual constructs what we need to do. Okay. Lastly, on, Europe, any any thoughts on Europe? What do you intend doing there? You have a very large exposure to US. Yeah. So as a strategy, we are absolutely looking to double down on Europe, And it's both from a geopolitical risk mitigation perspective, but also from opportunity capture perspective. There are significant opportunities in Europe as well. As you know, we made a couple of acquisitions in Europe over the last few years. We have a small footprint, but a growing footprint. If you look at this quarter's numbers as well, on that small footprint, have grown decently well. We are adding to the leadership team in Europe. You will see some announcements over the next few months in that. We are also looking at acquisitions, which can give us an intersection of European presence and the technology capabilities or the vertical capabilities that we want. So you will see something from those lines as well in the next few quarters. So absolutely, Europe is a focus area for us. And three to four years from now, when we look at it, it should be 15% to 18% at least of our revenues, if not more. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. As there are no further questions from the participants, I would now like to hand the conference back to Mr. Kaura for closing comments. Thank you. So first of all, thank you all for participating in our investment. We hope this year goes very well for all of us. We also would like to thank our 12,000 plus employees and our customers for their support in our growth journey. And we look forward to being back with you in three months from now and reporting on our progress. With that, we would like to close the call. Thank you. Thank you very much.