Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Persistent Systems Earnings Conference Call for the second quarter, FY 2024, ended September 30, 2023. We have with us today on the call Dr. Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Managing Director. Mr. Sandeep Kalra, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Sunil Sapre, Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Saurabh Dwivedi, Head of Investor Relations. Please note all participant line will be in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management's opening remarks. Should you need any assistance during the conference call, please raise your hand from the Participant tab on the screen. While asking questions, request you to please identify yourself and your company. Please note this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sandeep Kalra. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, moderator. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning to all of you, depending on where you're joining from. Please pardon my scratchy voice as I'm just coming off a viral infection. I would like to start this quarter's call by sharing with you that I'll be completing 3 years as a Persistent CEO on 23rd October, four days from now, during this auspicious days of Diwali. I'm grateful for the responsibility that was entrusted into me by Anand and the Persistent Board of Directors, and the support and guidance I've enjoyed from them during this period. Also, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Sunil, our CFO, and the entire leadership team, as well as all our 22,800+ employees in 21 countries around the world.
It has been a privilege to work with each one of them through a period which has seen Persistent grow from one pillar of strength to the other and emerge among the growth leaders in global IT services industry. I would also like to thank each one of you on the call, as well as our broader investor base, customers, partners, for the support and continued trust in us during this period. With that, let me now start with our quarter definitions. We are pleased to report yet another quarter of healthy revenue growth despite an uncertain macroeconomic environment. The revenue for Q2 came in at $291.71 million, representing a growth of 3.1% quarter-on-quarter and 14.1% year-on-year in US dollar terms.
In rupee terms, this translates into a growth at 3.9% Q-o-Q and 17.7% on Y-o-Y basis. Coming to EBIT. The EBIT for the quarter came in at 13.7%. The EBIT margin declined 120 basis points, quarter-on-quarter, owing primarily to the wage hike we awarded our employees from July 1, 2023. We gave an average hike of 7% offshore and 3%-4% onsite. We were able to partly mitigate impact of the wage hike and higher SG&A investments through revenue growth leverage, higher utilization, as well as lower visa cost. Sunil will provide much more color on the EBIT margin movement later in this call.
We remain committed to our goal of improving EBIT margins by 150-200 basis points over the next 2-3 years, as we have stated prior to this. Coming to the order book for the quarter. The total contract value for the quarter came in at $479.3 million, with new order book TCV coming in at $313.1 million. The annual contract value component of this TCV is of the order of $315.9 million, of which the new ACV component contributed to $184.2 million. The order book number for the quarter includes some of the deals spilled from the last quarter, as we had alluded to in the last earnings call.
While the demand environment remains uncertain, our razor-sharp focus on staying close to our core customers and focus on large deals, aided by our healthy order bookings in Q2, has remained steadfast in our growth journey. Please note that, as always, these total contract value, annual contract value numbers include all bookings, small and large, renewals, as well as new bookings across existing and new customers. Coming to the client engagement size. We witnessed healthy growth among various client buckets, with our top five customer revenue up 4.5% Q-o-Q, top ten up 2.8% Q-o-Q, top twenty up 3.4% Q-o-Q, and top fifty up 3.7% Q-o-Q. As you would notice, our top fifty customers is a portfolio of our marquee relationships, delivering a secular growth quarter-on-quarter.
In this quarter, the portfolio of the top 50 customers delivered 3.7%, which is better than the overall revenue growth of the company. The progression of our customers across various engagement sizes continues with a total of 175 customers in the greater than $1 million bucket in Q2, an increase of eight over Q1. I am happy with the entry of new customers in the $1-$5 million and greater than $5 million buckets, which are likely to scale up further in future quarters. As you would notice, there's a growth in customer count in all categories other than greater than $20 million and less than $30 million bucket, where the count reduced by 2 due to movement of one into the higher category and one into the lower category. This is normal, given certain amount of project ramp ups, ramp downs across quarters.
In terms of geographical breakup, North America revenue grew in line with the company average at 3.1% Q-o-Q in USD terms, while India revenue grew by 1.3% Q-o-Q, and rest of Europe revenue came in at 0.3% Q-o-Q. Rest of the world revenue was up 41.8% Q-o-Q on a low revenue base. Coming to the people front. In Q2, our total headcount stood at 22,842 as of September end. This is a decline of 282 FTEs from Q1. While we gave industry-leading wage hikes in FY 2024, we also took suitable measures in line with our stated policy for the bottom performers within our employee base.
The gross hiring overall was a little lower than the total exit of employees in Q2, which led to the decline in employee headcount, leading to better utilization. We carry significant dry powder in terms of talent to be able to deliver to the growth that we aspire for and in line with the bookings that we've done. In terms of freshers, we onboarded 277 freshers in Q2, and we will focus on their deployment and existing bench while hiring for critical skills laterally based on project requirements over the next several quarters as we move ahead. The blended utilization for the quarter came in substantially higher at 80.6%, compared to 78.3% in Q1. This was aided by volume growth and decline in net headcount.
We continue to focus on increasing utilization of our existing employee base while adding lateral hires to augment for critical skills. The trailing twelve-month attrition for the quarter came in at 13.5%, compared to 15.5% in Q1. The attrition has come down to a comfortable band compared to the last several quarters. The decline in attrition should nonetheless be seen in the context of general moderation in hiring across the sector and positive outcomes from our employee value-related interventions. Moving on from operational metrics to certain other strategic highlights for the quarter. First, on generative AI. As a testimony to the generative AI focus that we have had over the last several quarters and the various investments we have undertaken, we today have some exciting Gen AI customer stories to share.
To give you some examples, we worked with a sports technology company that provides motion analysis and performance insights to athletes through an app-based biomechanics coach. This is aimed at providing personalized insights and recommending specific actions to the athletes. Persistent leveraged the Gen AI technology stack, encompassing AWS Bedrock, Titan, and LangChain to help analyze the unique and large database of 350 million baseball and golf swings data, and give personalized insights summarized for its user in an intuitive way, ultimately helping the user fine-tune their skills and become better at their game and analyze the game in real time. This solution will also allow our customer to expand their addressable market beyond elite athletes to mainstream users and unlock newer streams of revenue through tiered service offerings.
We recently engaged with a Fortune 200 molecular diagnostics and technology solutions provider to address the productivity challenges in writing clinical study protocols using historical protocol documents, other internal content, and information available in public domain. The clinical study protocols, for everyone's reference, are comprehensive documents that outline detailed plan for conducting a clinical trial or a research study, and this work was currently being undertaken by a 100-plus people team, largely through a manual process, which was time-consuming and also prone to errors. To address this issue, we leveraged a Google Vertex AI-based custom GenAI solution using advanced natural language processing and information retrieval.
The solution is helping the customers streamline the protocol creation process and reducing the time requirement by up to 90%, thereby enhancing the productivity of the team, while at the same time enhancing the quality and giving time to man-market benefit for the customer. The quarter gone by, we also worked with a top-tier biotechnology firm, which was looking to modernize its image processing application that captures images from various kinds of medical instruments. Typically, in such scenarios, the development team would manually study the source code base and have experts translate that to target technology stack and test the application.
Persistent, using our Wingmate Accelerator, an innovative integrated development environment, an IDE in technical terms, an extension that seamlessly merges traditional coding practices with the groundbreaking potential of Gen AI, powered by Azure OpenAI, was tuned to automatically understand the legacy source code, build a test suite, and ultimately migrate the application in 30% less time compared to the manual approach. This approach also helped our customer de-risking themselves from the labor shortage on legacy skills and open a wide array of possibilities to accelerate their modernization journey across various enterprise applications. Coming to Persistent as a Gen AI customer zero for ourselves. Embodying our commitment to innovation, we are integrating Gen AI through the various facets of our own organization, delivering new internal efficiencies and enhancing the employee experiences with intelligent solutions. Let me give you a brief overview of a few of these case studies.
PiBot, which is Persistent Intelligent Bot, is a digital assistant powered by Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI that houses all company-related policies, processes, and brings curated guidance to our global employee base based on the geographies they operate from. This platform provides a single window to all enterprise interactions, like timesheets, leave management, internal service requests, personalized learning path suggestions, skill progression, among others. This is geared towards enhancing employee experience while reducing the dependency on shared HR services and the likes. Leveraging this, any Persistent employee can seamlessly access any information needed for their day-to-day working and undertake several workflow actions without the need for any human intervention.… Moving on to another example. Smart QMS is our internal quality management platform, powered by GenAI and Azure Cognitive Search, ACS.
The Smart QMS enables our developers, project managers, and architects to access engineering frameworks, Persistent proprietary tools, and other processes and knowledge assets across the organization. This platform is currently being used by more than 5,000 employees to reuse 1,500+ assets across the organization. Over time, the Smart QMS will not just bring our engineers better efficiency by leveraging AI assistance, but will also help them benchmark their own performance with similar cohorts across Persistent while anonymizing the data. We'll continue to take best practices that we learn from these internal projects to not only become more efficient ourselves and deliver better services to our customers, but to also take these assets into our client GenAI engagements. On to management updates. In line with our growth aspirations, we continue to add muscle and fortify our management with the inclusion of several well-respected industry groups.
We welcome Rajiv Sodhi as our Senior Vice President for Hyperscaler Business and Strategic Alliances based out of Seattle, and Ayon Banerjee as Chief Strategy and Growth Officer based out of Gurgaon. Rajiv joins us from Microsoft after spending 16+ years in various leadership roles across U.S. and India. Rajiv will be responsible for managing our 360-degree relationship with Microsoft, Google, and AWS, as well as overseeing the strategic industry and technology alliances for us globally. Ayon joins us from Avasant, where he was our president, prior to which he was Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group, BCG, leading their transformation practice within India. With more than 30 years of experience across consulting and operational roles in large enterprises, Ayon will drive Persistent strategy as we charter our journey towards our $2 billion goal and beyond. On to strategic investments.
At this point in time, all our earlier acquisitions are fully integrated, and deal wins are also fructifying through the combined capabilities of Persistent and our acquired entities. We are once again active on the M&A front, and will report progress on this front as we make significant progress over the next several quarters. Coming on to the administrative side. On the administrative side, we inaugurated a 250-seater office in Kolkata, West Bengal, in our continued efforts to reach out to locations where our employees are based. We are also in the process of opening new offices in Chennai and Cochin, and also expanding our facilities in places like Noida and Hyderabad. Our endeavor is to provide world-class facilities to our employees in locations close to them, and encourage them to work from office at least two to three days every week.
Let me now move to a unique achievement by Persistent, which all of us are very proud of and are excited to share. As Persistent crossed the billion-dollar annual revenue milestone in FY 2023, we decided to send a token of appreciation to our global employees for their contribution to our continued success. Among the choices given to our employees were an electronic audio device, travel accessories, bicycles, and a few other alternatives. To our pleasant surprise, 9,000+ of our employees opted for a bicycle, which prompted us to also initiate a Guinness World Records attempt and further encourage the fitness journeys of our employees. We are very proud to state we have received three Guinness World Records that include, number one, creation of the company logo with 704 bicycles, which is the best in class, the world class for its unique.
Number 2, viewership of recycling awareness tutorial live by 7,348 Persistent employees and their family members concurrently. Number 3, an online video album of people riding bicycles with 5,098 individuals contributing to it. These achievements, though small, they clearly commemorate not just the billion-dollar annual revenue milestone for us, but also reiterate our and our employees' commitment towards, you know, the environment and employee wellbeing. In summary, we are pleased with our performance in Q2 FY 2024 in a challenging business environment. I'd like to now invite Sunil, our CFO, to give a detailed color on the quarterly financials and related matters. Saurabh will come after Sunil's comments to give you some color on the key key deal wins, key client awards, analyst awards, and other recognitions for the quarter. Sunil, over to you.
Thank you, Sandeep, and good evening, good day to all. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. Sandeep has walked us through the business outlook and a lot of details, including market perspective. Let me now walk you through the financial details of the quarter. The revenue for the quarter at $291.71 million had a Q-o-Q growth of 3.1% and 14.1% Y-o-Y. In rupee terms, the revenue was INR 24,116.7 million, reflecting growth of 3.9% quarter-on-quarter and 17.7% Y-o-Y. We closed H1 with total revenue of $574.61 million, with a growth of 15.6% Y-o-Y.
In INR terms, it translates to INR 47,328.5 million, with a growth of 20.5% Y-o-Y. Coming to sequential growth for the quarter in terms of segments, healthcare and life sciences grew by 7% quarter-on-quarter. High tech and emerging vertical grew by 3.8% quarter-on-quarter, while BFSI remained flat for the quarter. This quarter, we focused on improving utilization, and as Sandeep mentioned, the improvement was significant, from 78.3% to 80.6%. Attrition declined to 13.5% from 15.5% in the previous one. As you are aware, we have our regular pay hike cycle in Q2 every year. That's effective first July.
And we have given pay hike to all our employees, which was about 7% to offshore employees and about 3%-4% for on-site employees. The total impact of pay hike was about 2.7% on the margin, which was partially offset by improved utilization, currency benefit, and the absence of visa costs. We have continued our investments in sales and marketing. There were certain marketing events this quarter, such as re:Post and AWS Summit, which led to some one-off expenses in this quarter. Additionally, certain expenses were incurred on exited employees. Both these one-off expense items were offset by a corresponding one-off credit on account of reduction in liability towards performance-based earnouts in one of our acquisitions. With this, the EBITDA came in at 16.8%, as against 18.2% in the previous quarter.
Depreciation and amortization was within range at 3.1%, as against 3.2% in the previous quarter. The EBIT came in at 13.7%, as against 14.9% in the previous quarter. For H1, the EBIT stands at 14.3%, vis-à-vis 14.5% in last year's H1. In absolute terms, the EBIT grew by 19.4% Y-o-Y. Treasury income for the quarter was INR 166.28 million, as against INR 154.58 million, mainly on account of improved cash flow and higher interest rates. As you know, we paid final dividend of INR 22 per share during the quarter, amounting to INR 1,703 million. This was paid in July 2023.
The Forex gain amounted to INR 83.7 million, as against Forex loss of INR 64.1 million in the previous quarter. Profit before tax for the quarter was INR 3,557.6 million at 14.8%, as against 13.2% in the previous quarter. This is essentially because of one-time expense we had in the previous quarter towards $1 billion celebration expense. ETR for the quarter was at 26%, as against 25.5% in the previous quarter. PAT for the quarter was INR 2,632.7 million at 10.9%. For H1, the PAT came in at 4,920.4 million at 10.4%.
Excluding one-time expense in Q1 on $1 billion milestone celebration, the PAT for H1 was 11.2%, vis-à-vis 11% in H1 of last year. EPS for the quarter was INR 35, as against INR 30.5 in the previous quarter. ROC for the quarter was 30.2%, as against 30.4% in the previous quarter. The operational CapEx for the quarter was INR 355.63 million. We continue to invest in facilities as more employees are coming back, as well as we also invested in IT systems for the company. Cash conversion for the quarter was strong at 119% of EBITDA, and for H1, OCF to EBITDA stands at 0.55, vis-à-vis 0.54 in H1 of the last year.
We are working towards OCF to EBITDA of 0.7 for the whole year. Total cash and investments were INR 1,568.3 million as at thirtieth September, as compared to INR 1,409.3 million at the end of June. DSO came in at 66 days, one day reduction, as against 67 days in the previous quarter. Forward contracts outstanding at the end of the quarter were $240 million at an average rate of 83.92 per dollar. Thank you, all. I wish you a happy festive Navratri, and I now hand over to Saurabh, who will take you through key deal wins and awards and recognitions for the quarter.
Thank you, Sunil. Let me begin with software, high tech, and emerging industries, our largest vertical. Persistent was selected by one of the largest communications technology conglomerates to undertake product engineering and customer support for a cloud-based security platform that limits access to all applications based on endpoint device as well as user risk profile. Persistent has been rewarded with engineering work on this core platform based on its excellent performance in other tracks. Persistent was selected by a leading media technology company as a strategic product engineering partner for its order management platform, which is used by clients of this media company for outcome-based advertising. Persistent is also an exclusive partner for the data strategy and migration of customers' applications to Google Cloud.
Persistent was selected by a leading provider of engineering data and technology solutions company to establish a greenfield IT setup and provide managed services over a five-year period. This entity is a newly formed organization as part of a carve-out done by a leading private equity firm from a leading global provider of business and financial information services company. This deal also involves Persistent leveraging its intelligent IT operations framework alongside components from hyperscalers and leading technology vendors. Coming to banking, financial services, and insurance. Persistent was selected by a U.S.-based multinational financial services and wealth management company to provide platform engineering and support services for its data stack, including big data, business intelligence reporting, and data governance.
Persistent was selected by a leading U.S.-based insurance underwriter to build its insured tech platform and be a strategic partner across technology initiatives such as data analytics, application development and support, business intelligence, and DevOps. Persistent was selected by a leading U.S.-based financial software company to modernize and manage its identity management platform, which will be used as a horizontal platform across all software products of the company to manage authentication, authorization, life cycle of users, and their personal and contact information. And finally, within our healthcare and life sciences vertical, Persistent was selected by a leading Fortune 500 company in the healthcare domain to undertake modernization of its data roadmap across consumer applications in domains such as clinical solutions, medical networks, enterprise and pharmacy, customer support, claims and payment integrity, and revenue cycle management.
Persistent was selected by a leading company in the precision oncology domain to build laboratory information management system, as well as provide other product engineering services to enhance its existing cancer detection platform. Persistent was selected for its demonstrated experience in genomics, laboratory information systems, and deep capabilities in data analytics domain. Persistent was selected by a leading player in the radiology imaging services domain to build a cloud-based picture archiving and communications platform, including a call center management system, to transform patient engagement. Persistent was selected on account of its intelligent digital engineering platform for code evaluation, Extensure, as well as rich pedigree in product engineering, data, cloud, and compliance-related expertise. Moving on to the awards and recognitions for the quarter. Q2 saw us get continued recognition from industry-leading analyst firms and associations.
To mention a few, Persistent won the Golden Peacock Award for excellence in corporate governance for the year 2023. Persistent was named as a challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for public cloud IT transformation services, ahead of a number of large peers... larger peers. During the quarter, Persistent also achieved Premier Tier Services partner status in the AWS partner network. In the low-code and automation domain, Persistent was recognized as the top partner of the year 2022 by OutSystems, and also honored by UiPath with the 2023 Americas Partner Award in the innovation category. Persistent also won two awards from Constellation, including, first, listing on the 2023 Constellation shortlist for public cloud transformation services, and second, listing on the 2023 Constellation shortlist for AI services.
Persistent was recognized in the Everest Group's 2023 Engineering Services Peak Matrix Provider of the Year awards. And finally, Persistent was listed as a Breakthrough Fifteen provider in the 2Q 2023 ISG Global Index for the second consecutive quarter. This completes the section on key events and awards and recognitions for this quarter. Thank you, and back to you, Sandeep.
Thanks, Saurabh. In summary, we have continued to deliver top-quartile revenue growth and robust deal events in Q2, despite a difficult macro environment. We are proactively staying closer to our clients, helping them in prioritizing their technology spend towards cost optimization and transformation. I'd like to thank each one of our team members globally, who have persevered through the uncertain macro conditions and delivered yet another good quarter for us. Our decision to continue with our normal wage increase cycle and pay out more than 100% in our corporate performance bonus across board in this environment, is a testament to our gratitude to our employees for this effort. With this, I would like to conclude the prepared comments, and would like to request the operator to open the floor for questions. Operator?
Thank you, sir. We will now open the call for Q&A session. We will wait for a few minutes until the queue assembles. We request participants to restrict to two questions, and then return to the queue for more questions. Please raise your hand from the participant tab on the screen to ask questions. The first question is from Sandeep Shah.
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes, Sandeep, go ahead, please.
Yeah, yeah. Congratulations on a good quarter and very strong bookings, and good execution. Just wanted to understand on BFSI, I do agree, the flattish growth is on a base of a good quarters earlier. But anything to read in terms of any further caution by any of your large clients or other clients within the BFSI? And Sandeep, recent conversation with any of your client indicates any amount of green shoots? Because, the kind of order book you have reported, it looks like the deal closures, especially outside the larger deals, are happening, better in Q2 versus what it used to be earlier.
I'll, I'll take the things in the reverse order. So if you look at our deal wins for the Q1, that was a tad bit lower than the earlier quarters, and we have very clearly said some of the deal wins had moved or shifted over to the next quarter. They have come in along with a very healthy Q2 as well. That is what contributed to the order wins, and some of these deals are longer term deals, and that is what is the healthy part of it. The TCV to ACV ratio has improved significantly. That is as far as the deal wins for Q2 are concerned. Now, in terms of green shoots, our pipeline is healthy. This again, October, November, December quarter is typically a smaller quarter because come December fifteenth, things will start shutting down in our primary market, which is the U.S.
We'll, we'll let the quarter pan out. The pipeline is pretty healthy, and this pipeline, I can say with pride, is because of the proactive efforts of the Persistent team, not because of reactive RFP responses and so on. We'll, we'll let the quarter pan out. The demand that we have generated for ourselves is reasonably good.
Okay. Okay. And just a few things, we were earlier indicating 2%-4% Q-o-P growth looks in sight despite macro issues. Do you stand by even for the second half for that number? And, also, we were earlier indicating a flattish EBITDA margin for the full year of FY 2024. How do you see that statement in the post-Q2 result?
Sure. So, the guidance part is a very interesting part. We always said we don't give forward-looking guidance, and then we were boxed into 3-5, 4-6, whatever it is. Now, from our perspective, we give among the richest data points in the industry. If you look at our data points, we are announcing the TCV wins, ACV wins, TCV new, so you can pretty much see what is the inward. ACV new, you can see what the renewal is. So if you do the mathematics, I don't think you should be asking us for any guidance. You can pretty much make the guidance based on that.
If you were to analyze the headcount trends as well, you can fairly figure out and at a utilization of 80.6%, we have enough dry powder in our kitty to be able to execute to the order books and all. So from here on, I would restrain ourselves from, you know, getting to the trap of giving any kind of a guidance. We never used to, and then we were got into this whole thing by media and others. A number of you, yourselves, have guided us not to give any kind of guidance. So we will refrain from giving guidance.
All we'll say is this is the 14th sequential quarter of strong growth, and if you look at our order wins, they're pretty good, and they should give you a good analysis if you were to analyze the ACV versus our revenue outflow, and I'll pause there. As far as EBITDA, EBIT, et cetera, is concerned, look, our first order of business is to make sure that we come in at the same levels as the last year. Obviously, quarter-to-quarter, there are puts and takes. There are quarters where we give wage hikes, and when we give wage hikes, the margin comes down. Then we again work through operational efficiencies and revenue growth to bring it back, and that is a historic track record. We have been able to do that, and we are reasonably confident we should be in that direction.
Balance will let the performance pan out, whether it is our revenue, whether it is our profitability, and you should look at our historic last 14 quarters plus. So that's where we are at.
Okay. Okay, just last thing, on furloughs, do you expect higher than normal furloughs? Because some of your peers have called out that.
Yeah, we are expecting furloughs to be in line with every other year. Every other year, there are a few companies, especially the larger ones on the banking side. There are a few others in BFSI, and then there are a few in tech segment, which are known for these furlough trends. That is the trend that we are seeing this year. Even if it is a little bit here or there, you know, that should not necessarily be beyond the seasonality, whatever it is. But we'll again let the quarter pan out.
Okay. Thanks, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Vibhu Singhal.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on a great set of numbers. I hope I'm audible. So, Sandeep, great performance again. I just wanted to get some points from you on the high tech vertical. I think the high tech vertical overall, I mean, for our competitors, I think... I know our business is different from the competitors, but it has not been doing that great, maybe apart from one who's seen green shoots in the last two quarters. How are we seeing the high tech vertical? Of course, it's been growing very steadily. How are we seeing the high tech vertical play out, let's say, in the next two to three quarters?
Also, many of the hyperscalers and the high tech companies, do you believe the layoffs at them, at their end, could be coming to an end for that, and they themselves could be more confident of their overall business environment so as to be able to give us more business?
Sure. So there are multiple things there. So as far as the high tech vertical is concerned, a number of our competitors are predominantly players in the IT segment. We have the biggest strength in our industry. I would tend to believe we are among the strongest in engineering in the high tech segment, which is the heart of that engine. And then we have developed good capabilities on the IT side as well. So our growth, if you look at it, is a combination of furthering our inroads on the engineering side in our customers, as well as winning a number of deals, especially in the high tech segment, in terms of carve-outs, where we are becoming specialists in doing, you know, the stand-up of new carve-outs by large to mid-size private equity from larger firms.
So a combination of our progress and including the new tooling that we are doing on GenAI, we are much ahead of our competition in this segment. So I would tend to believe high tech will continue to be a good growth engine for Persistent for times to come, compared to the competition. Now, in terms of the hyperscaler side of it, look, I can't tell who is gonna do what layoffs, when and when they are gonna stop.
Right.
All we can say is the market overall, the hyperscalers are also trying to bring their own set of growth engines, whether it is their GenAI forays. And GenAI, look, while people look at GenAI and think of, you know, OpenAI or, you know, Bedrock or Titan. These are pinnacle, you know, activities. These are tip of the spear, but they drive a lot of pull-through in getting an enterprise ready from a data perspective. That also provides a lot of pull-through from a cloud perspective. So overall, these hyperscalers, they are on that journey, and I'm pretty sure there is spin off a good amount of work for people like us who are riding that wave with them and are ahead of the others. So there is good amount of work that can come over the next several quarters and years on that.
Got it. Got it. Thanks a lot for that detailed explanation. Just my second question on the top line. I think, this quarter, the top line again grew, but I think that the contribution that we saw from the top line towards our overall growth was, to a good surprise, were much lower than what the high contribution that we had in the last two quarters. And prior to that, of course, we had been talking about, gradually the top line ramping down. So I, is the—this quarter's performance in line with the roadmap that we have planned for the top line in terms of how they will grow and how will they become and, where will they end up being as part of our overall business?
We are very pleased with the way our relationship with the top client has panned out over the last many, many years, and even in the last several quarters. We went through a small hiccup, and we are back on it. But look, the top client is a top client by the virtue of the amount of business that we do with them, right? So at that clip, obviously the growth rates can be different. It is like a portfolio of stocks that any of our, you know, buy side guys hold. Not everything will grow at the same clip. So we are very happy having them where they are and the way they have grown, and the company at times may grow much faster than the top client may grow.
At this point in time, we are very happy with the way the relationship has panned out, and it has contributed very well to our growth.
Thank you, Vibhor. The next question is from Mohit Jain.
I have, sir, two questions. One is a follow-up of the previous one. So, what is our outlook in top line, given that we have some fluctuations in the third quarter? So should we expect now that we are on a steady path, or do we expect that fluctuation in the coming quarters, specifically from top client, client perspective? And second is related to margins. So there's this sharp jump increase in S&M expenses over the last few quarters, and therefore our margin expansion, possibly is not happening in FY 2024 versus 2023. So what is your view from here on? Like, should we assume steady convergence to industry margins, or do you think for a few years you can invest little more in S&M and therefore we may resume margin expansion after a gap of few quarters?
Let me start with the margin part, and Sunil can give more color commentary later. See, as far as we are concerned, look, we've always said we want to be having a steady revenue growth. That comes first. Margin expansion, you know, we can always try and cut costs here, cut costs there, and improve your margins. That is not where we are playing right now. We are seeing good demand for our services. We have added to our capabilities. Look at the recognitions we are getting from the partners of this world for our cloud services. Look at the kind of management bandwidth we are expanding by bringing the best-in-class talent to aid us continue our growth journey. We have over the last 14 quarters, whether it was COVID times, post-COVID times, weak macro or whatever it is, we have been in the journey of delivering industry-leading growth.
That is our first forte. Margin expansion can come later. Having said that, we are still committed. In the next 2-3 years, we'll expand our EBIT margins by 2%-3%, and that should flow down. Now, as far as your other question about our client is concerned, there used to be a seasonality in certain quarters in the top client. Now, we have gone away from our dependence on revenue sharing engagements in the top client. So that should partly, you know, answer your question. And second, look, I would look at Persistent as a whole, as a portfolio of customers, big and small, top two, you know, top 10, top 50, top 100, and so on and so forth.
If you look at the disclosures we give, our growth is pretty good across all segments, whether it is our top one, top five, top 10, top 30, 50, and so on and so forth. I don't think anybody should worry. It is like if you are investing in a portfolio, the portfolio is doing very well. Sometimes one customer may do better than the other. That's okay. Not every customer will fire every quarter at the same time. Overall, that's my commentary.
Right. So, sir, just for my understanding, so, you are saying Q3 seasonality that we have seen in the past may not happen, given that we have moved to a linear relationship with them?
That's the right understanding.
Perfect. Thank you, sir, and all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from Dipesh Mehta.
Thanks for the opportunity. Two questions. First, just want to understand if you can provide some demand trend, what we are witnessing in BFS and healthcare, which obviously help us to get some business outlook also for those two segments, verticals. And any sub-segment, if you see area of strength and area of weakness in those two buckets, that would be helpful. Second question is about deal win. Now the, we have a good, deal win quarter. We partly benefited from some of the slippage which we have seen in Q1. But if you can provide some quantification in terms of quality of deal and other things, that would be helpful. Thanks.
That's a lot of questions in that, but let's try. So, so if you look at the segments like healthcare, so where we are seeing more traction over the last several quarters is the payer segment, and in the last quarter, we also saw a pretty good conversion in the scientific instruments and medical devices segment. There are four segments that we deal with as Persistent: payer, provider, pharma, and scientific instruments, medical devices. Now, the payers are the large insurance companies and so on and so forth. So that's where we have had very good deal wins, and these are against the who's who, tier ones, Indian origin, you know, US origin and so on and so forth.
We are actually being seen as a good disruptor with good capabilities, good agility, good, you know, solutioning, and so on, so forth, and that's what is behind the quality of wins that we are seeing in this set of segments. Now, in terms of BFSI, again, there are customers that we have in the tier one banks, the tier two banks, and then there are the regional banks. Then we have financial services organizations, we have insurance companies, InsurTech and other Fintech. Where we have seen a good amount of traction also is where people are looking a little fatigued with the tier one providers. Wherever there are renewals coming up and they are doing a rebid, we are being brought in as a disruptor. And I'm proud to say the small team, Persistent, a billion-dollar company, is winning against 10 billion, 20 billion, 30 billion dollar companies.
That's where we are gaining market share in newer customers and even in some of our existing customers. I hope that gives you a clear commentary. I would want to keep confidentiality of customers. That is where the wins are, and our pipeline again, continues to be good across these segments. Rakesh, hopefully that answers.
Yeah, and the second question about deal win, if you can give some qualitative comment about?
Yeah. So I was talking about deal wins as well. So overall, the deal wins, if you look at it, the spillover that happened was not necessarily the reason for the TCV being bigger. TCV is bigger because the number of these deals, let's say for example, the payer segment deal win that I talked about, this is nearly in the range of $75-$100 million TCV. The deal wins that we talked about in terms of carve-outs, these are carve-outs where we are standing up greenfield IT. There are multiple of these deal wins we have had, and these are the marquee logos that we have won against, you know, the who's who in terms of, you know, the co-potential competition. The competition here was, in one of the cases, multiple tier one of our, you know, competitors.
These are deal wins where we are setting up the greenfield IT for organization and then doing managed services for five years. And these are sometimes even run by the partners of this world and so on. Hopefully that gives you enough color.
Great, thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from Rishi Jhunjhunwala.
Yeah, hi. Can you hear me?
Yeah, Rishi.
Great. Thank you for the opportunity. You know, two, three questions. Firstly, you know, over the past 12 months, as you've seen demand slowing down across the industry, I just wanted to understand what has been your experience in terms of, the ACV getting converted into revenues. Has that been complete 100%, or have we seen, you know, delays in that? And the reason we are asking that is, you know, while you rightly mentioned that your disclosures on ACV, TCV are, you know, among the best, it would just help us in understanding how the deviation could potentially be if the macro remains the way it is.
You want to ask the others as well?
I can... No, I'll, I'll do one by one.
Okay. So, Rishi, see, you're right. There is a certain amount of delay that you would have noticed from even our other peers as well, and everyone has a different dynamic, so I will not comment on their dynamic. In our case, we are seeing if the earlier leakage was less than, less than 10%, in terms of the full year conversion, today it is much more. It can be in the range of, in some deals, even 10%-15%, and in rare cases, a little more than that. So there is definitely more leakage because there is a delay in terms of what is signed and what is actually getting, you know, delivered because of the customer own delays and so on so. So the ramp-up that you would see is a little bit more protracted as compared to the earlier years.
But it is, it's, it's only a matter of time and not, you know, the quantum getting reduced, right?
Yeah. So I want to be respectful of the time on this call, but when you talk of ACV, at least in Persistent, we talk of the revenue conversion for the next 12 months. So if the ACV is $100 for the next 12 months, and we are able to convert, let's say, 85, in our terms, 15% is leakage. You know, it can shift whatever it is, but usually, you know, that is the way we are looking at it, at least the way we are in ACV.
Understood. The second question is just on, you know, capacity or supply, right? I mean, our hiring has clearly slowed down. We are focused on improving utilization. So what level of utilization do you think, from which we will start hiring back again in line with how our revenues are growing?
So look, we are not going to be throttling hiring just to bring the utilization down. But in terms of an aspirational utilization, our aspirational utilization is in the range of 83%-84%, and we have done that in the past. For every percentage of utilization, it creates an impact of 30 basis points to our PAT. That is the equation right.
Understood. Just quickly, on, you know, just capital payout, right? Capital return in terms of dividends and all. Historically, our numbers or payout ratios have been lower or in the bottom half of where the industry has been. But, we saw some increase in FY 2023. With the kind of cash buildup that we are seeing and potentially large part of the acquisitions behind us, is there any intention to increase the payout ratios in this year and going forward?
Yeah. So, so Rishi, look at it this way, we are focused on the total shareholder return. The total shareholder return can come through the capital appreciation and the dividend payout and everything else. So, our, if we grow at the top clip, that, that provides another way of, you know, value for our investors. So if we are not able to do further acquisitions over a period of time, we'll revisit this. But for now, our dividend policy remains what it is. We gave a one-time, you know, special dividend because of the $1 billion. We are committed to making sure we use the capital prudently towards enabling growth in areas where we need to build capabilities inorganically. That is where we'll use the excess cash, and if we are not, as I said earlier, we'll return it.
Okay. Thank you. All the best.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from Kawaljeet Saluja.
Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot, and congratulations on a reasonably good quarter. A couple of questions. First is that what directionally gives you comfort on, improvement in profitability, let's say, over the medium term? Given the fact that, let's say, in FY24, you struggled to expand your margins and, you know, the labor market and this year has been as benign as it can, get, and you have also consumed a fair bit of, the so-called perceived levers. So directionally, what gives you that comfort on profitability improvements? That's the first question.
Sure. So directionally, if you look at it, this has been a year which is not a normal year. This has been a year where if we had to close $100 in bookings, we had to generate maybe $200 or more in pipeline. In a normal year, for $100 in bookings, maybe $150 in pipeline, qualified pipeline, would have been good enough. So the amount of sales and effort, the amount of sales and marketing effort that we have put in is far more. The choice was, don't put that sales and marketing effort, let it degrow. And that was not a choice as far as we are concerned at Persistent.
We have worked very hard to bring a discipline to the growth engine, and that's where we have invested in the right places, whether it is our SG&A, whether it is anything related to our employee hikes. We can easily do the profitability improvement some of our peers have done it by deferring the employee increases, not paying corporate performance bonuses. We paid 107% corporate performance bonus at least across the company. We paid 7% increase in India, 3%-4% increase globally. Cut any of these, we can improve profitability, and that, that would take away your question of the challenge of profitability improvement in this year. We could have happily... It doesn't take too much to cut cost. It takes a lot to provide growth. So hopefully, Kanwaljit, that gives you the answer.
As we keep growing, and as the market stabilizes, maybe the SG&A level will come down. Maybe as the revenue goes up, there is certain amount of cost that gets defrayed over a much bigger, you know, revenue base. There are other levers. Still at utilization, we are at 80.6. If we are at 83.6, the 3% yields 1% right there, 90 basis points. I just said 30 basis points for every 1 basis point of utilization. So we are not done yet, and we are very inefficient as a company. We still have a lot of things to do. So rest assured, when we say something-
It does, yeah, just indulge me a little bit, Sandeep, over here. You know, let's say you never get a perfect year. In every year, there'll be some challenge or the other, right? You never get a perfect year. I mean, so, you know, I mean, yeah, there is a sales and marketing leverage. I take your point, but in your view, is that enough?
So I want to be respectful of the time. We have eight minutes on this call, and I'll be happy to have an offline discussion with you. But I can tell you with confidence, if we correct our inefficiencies, and if we keep growing the way we are growing, there's enough to be done to improve the profitability, and we can, and we will try and achieve the things that we have said.
Fair enough. The second question is that, you know, next year, none of us know what's gonna happen on the macro, but let's assume that was a recessionary environment. You know, how do you think, let's say if you are a CIO of a, if you're a, you know, large organization, how would you go about prioritizing your spends? And, you know, what type of vendors would you prioritize and deprioritize? But more, you know, how would you prioritize your spends? So what goes through the funnel, what gets canned? Assuming it's a recession next year.
Yeah. So, look, assuming it's a low year next year, obviously everyone would first try to see which are the most critical projects that you need to do. The good-to-have projects will definitely be delayed or put on the back burner and so on. Second, on the keep the lights on, how much can you squeeze? How much can you get from there into the, you know, buffer of doing the projects that you wanted to do? And the vendors that you want to have are the people who can bring the next-generation technologies to be able to squeeze out wherever you want to squeeze, and to be able to accelerate where you want to accelerate faster, better, cheaper than some of the vendors that you are fatigued with.
That's where you will possibly have more opportunities for a Persistent of this world to rise and shine as well.
Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much, and all the best.
Thank you. I can see the skepticism in your voice, but we'll let the time pass.
Thank you. Keeping in mind the time frame, we'll refrain to one question at a time. The next question is from Gaurav Patel.
Hi, am I audible?
Yes, Gaurav.
Hey, my question is regarding the generative AI. You kind of provided very unique use cases. Just want to understand that, you know, how do these engagements really play out in terms of becoming larger project sizes? Because these are pretty small projects that you talked about. Secondly, related question is that some of the platforms that you talked about internally using, what we can do to our own software development efforts to kind of really drive productivity there, and would it, would it not be sort of cannibalizing our own revenues, or how do you kind of foresee that playing out? Thank you.
Sure. So there's a bunch of good questions there. So let me start with the projects versus bigger engagements. Now, if you were to look at it, the way we are looking at GenAI is this: right now, we are engaging our customers in as many discussions as we can, because that's also a learning ground for us in different use cases, in different industries. And not just us, even our customers are experimenting with it. While we are doing that, we are also experimenting in-house with building tools. We're building things that are rinse and repeat at scale. These may be things like, for example, doing a Teradata to a, you know, Snowflake migration, or taking something from a Tableau to another one, or taking consolidating reporting tools to a Power BI and so on, using GenAI, which will be not necessarily people-based projects.
But these are because we are building IP, because we are using some of these models to speed up the things. There's a secret sauce that we are building as Persistent secret sauce using GenAI. We'll be able to monetize it at scale, make it rinse and repeat. And the other part would be where there are customer-specific, segment-specific things that we will create IP on, and there are then custom projects that we will do. So all of this is going to flow through, but there's a good think tank of 150 engineers in Persistent, which are working on Persistent-specific secret sauce that will enable us to differentiate in GenAI and not become commoditized, even in GenAI. Now, on the software developer productivity.
Look, we have tie-ups with AWS big time, where we are working with their engineering team on even evaluating things before they are released to the market. We are embracing those technologies in our landscape, taking it to our customer. Same for Microsoft GitHub Copilot. We are working with them as well. And it's not just about these tools. It is about modern application development, modern product development, and the entire tool chain. So these are just a few. And then there's a full pipeline-related tool chain that we are experimenting. And if we can provide productivity benefits to our customers, we'll absolutely do that, because if we do that, we'll again be seen as disruptors. If Persistent today has 23,000 employees, I'm pretty sure our biggest, you know, U.S.-based competitors, India-based competitors, are 20, 30 times our size.
If we can disrupt our sales, the market for us is huge. So we are not worried about disrupting our sales. We are worried about providing the right value to our customers and bringing them the latest and greatest. If we do that, I'm pretty sure for a small company that we are, we'll keep growing and we'll healthily outwit our nearest competition to the farthest competition. Hopefully, that gives you enough answer.
Thank you for the detailed answer.
Thank you. The next question... The next question is from Abhishek.
Yes. Hi, am I audible?
Yeah, we hear you.
Hi. Hi, Sandeep. So I just want to probe a little bit more on BFS and high tech. So, you know, our advantage in our high tech offerings is clear. But for BFS, too, you know, it is a vertical which is currently extremely shy of, you know, spending on technology. I mean, in this light, you know, what is our right to win versus, let's say, a bigger peer with, let's say, a better offering in terms of cost optimization, if at all? So any clarity on that will be helpful. Yeah. Thanks.
Right. So, Abhishek, inbuilt in that question is an assumption that a bigger peer, by the size of being bigger, can provide a better service to a customer. This market is huge, and, you know, there's a lot of fatigue with the bigger peers of ours and many, many of our customers and prospects. The refreshing change for them is when we are able to bring automation, when we are able to bring the latest tools, the approach that we bring to them is refreshing, and it is not just bring in more people to solve the problem. So there is enough avenues, and a number of our deal wins are where we are replacing the so-called bigger, you know, peers of ours or competitors of ours. I don't think the size matters beyond a point in time.
Today, at $1 billion, we are at a critical mass, where we are clearly large enough to scale, but at the same time, you know, the kind of management attention, the technology solutions that we are bringing are good enough for people to give us the bids that we need. We are increasingly in competitive landscape with the bigger vendors. So I'll keep it short. We are out of time on the call, but happy to have an offline discussion if needed.
Thanks. Thanks, Sandeep.
Thank you. The last question will be from Bhavik.
Am I audible?
Bhavik, loud and clear.
Yeah. So just one question. You know, you talked about the delays in deal convergence in terms of revenues, but are there, is there also a delay in conversion of the deals itself, in terms of decision making by clients, which could have, you know, pushed out deals to further quarters as well, or what do you saw in 1Q?
Yeah. So, so that is exactly what happened, and even in your note, you have mentioned that. So if you look at it, that is exactly what is happening. When I said in response to Kawaljeet also, if we needed a $100 conversion, earlier, if we needed 150, 116 pipeline, today we need 200. That's because the deals are taking more time. Sometimes they are getting delayed even at the last minute. So yes, in short, that is happening, but that's where we have to double down more and keep our head straight and work.
Moderator, I think we should.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
So-
Thank you very much, Sandeep.
Yeah, just a last comment from my side, and then you can close the call. So from our perspective, look, the quarter gone by was a fairly strong quarter. We are optimistic about our prospects, even in this uncertain environment. As we watch the uncertain environment, we are staying close to our customers. We aspire to maintain the industry-leading revenue growth, and with Navratri and Diwali around the corner, we would like to wish everyone on this call and their families a safe and happy festival season ahead. We look forward to connecting with you again in three months' time. Thank you.
Thank you very much to the Persistent management. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Persistent Systems Limited, that concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines and exit the webinar.