Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Tata Communications Earnings Conference Call for Q2 FY 2023. We are joined today by our MD and CEO, Mr. A.S. Lakshminarayanan, our CFO, Mr. Kabir Ahmed Shakir, and our Head for Investor Relations, Mr. Rajiv Sharma. The results for the quarter ended 30th September 2022 have been announced yesterday, and the quarterly fact sheet is available on our website. I trust you would have had the chance to look through the key highlights. We will commence today's call with comments from Lakshmi, who will share his thoughts on the business and long-term outlook, followed by Kabir, who will share his views on the financial progress achieved. At the end of the management's remarks, you will have an opportunity to get your queries addressed.
Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements made or discussed on the conference call today may be forward-looking in nature and must be viewed in conjunction with the risks and uncertainties we face. A detailed statement and explanation of these risks are included in our annual filings, which you can locate on our website www.tatacommunications.com. The company does not undertake to update these forward-looking statements publicly. With that, I would like to invite Lakshminarayanan to share his views. Over to you, Lakshminarayanan.
Thanks, Chirag, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we commence today's call, I'm very pleased to welcome Rajiv Sharma, our Head of Investor Relations to the Tata Communications family. Rajiv has more than 20 years of experience across equity research, corporate strategy, and investor relations, and we are very pleased to have him with us. He will be reporting to Kabir and will be supported by Chirag. I wish the very best in their new roles and look forward to their continued support of our esteemed investor fraternity. With this, I welcome you all to Q2 FY23 earnings call. I'm happy to share that we have delivered even more meticulously on our reimagined strategy.
Our product-to-platform shift, increased investments in front-end sales, particularly in the International markets, and building new capabilities across the portfolio continue to help us deliver robust results with our data revenues growing by 11.2% year-on-year this quarter. We remain committed to building digital ecosystems for our customers by co-creating innovative solutions and delivering agile, connected, and secure solutions. Doubling down on customer centricity, we soft-launched Tata Communications TCX, our customer experience portal and our digital store for our Indian markets. This is enabling us to digitize customer touchpoints, simplify their process interactions with us. Having received encouraging feedback from our customers, we are planning to launch Tata Communications TCX covering additional products in India and also extend it to International markets.
Our vast investments in core infrastructure and digital capabilities, in line with emerging technology disruptions and evolutions, give us the confidence to efficiently cater to our customers' evolving digital transformation needs. We continue to be a leading player in India's large enterprise B2B segment and are strengthening our positions even more. We are witnessing a healthy growth in our International revenue trends, both on Q-on-Q and on a year-on-year basis, which is steadily progressing us towards our long-term ambition of improving the International revenue pie. Moving to our performance for the Q2 of FY23, we have delivered a strong year-on-year data revenue growth of 11.2% with healthy margins. Our data business remains instrumental to our overall revenue. It improved sequentially by 4.6%, coming in at INR 3,493 crores.
Our digital platforms and services revenues stood at INR 998 crore, registering a healthy growth of 16.5% year-on-year and 6.1% Q-on-Q. Our Q2 consolidated revenue was INR 4,431 crore, improving by 6.2% year-on-year and 2.8% Q-on-Q. EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 1,130 crore, increasing by 1.5% year-on-year and 4.9% Q-on-Q, while the EBITDA margin stood at 25.5%. The profit for the quarter was INR 532 crore, improving by 25.1% year-on-year. We witnessed a profitable data revenue growth despite ongoing supply chain headwinds mitigated by all the actions that we have spoken about earlier.
We don't see supply chain headwinds bottoming out yet, nor do we see it worsening any further from where we stand. Our funnel additions have also been healthy across the portfolio with a strong buildup in our digital platforms and services and incubation offerings. Let me give you some more details about our data portfolio. I want to start with and spend some time talking about our strongly growing incubation portfolio. We have a three-pronged strategy here, especially with relating to the Connected Solutions. One is on-campus, and the second is by leveraging the private networks, and lastly being off-campus. The on-campus opportunity is driven by our IoT solutions, where we cover enterprise segments as well as smart cities.
Some of the core enterprise and smart city solutions are deployed at scale, and our objective is to deliver high return on investment solutions for our customers, which drives our leadership in the industrial IoT space. To strengthen our offering in the private networks, we launched our private 5G Global Center of Excellence in Pune to accelerate Industry 4.0 applications and capabilities for enterprises. For our off-campus offerings, it is our MOVE platform which gives us the right to win across Connected Solutions. Our in-house capabilities are helping enterprise realize business workflows which have massive cost efficiency and also help generate new revenue streams through platforms like connected vehicles, connected crews, smart manufacturing, and MVNO in a box. The incubation portfolio progressed multi-fold, growing by 181.8% year-on-year and 36.1% Q-on-Q.
Our core connectivity services grew by 5.9% year-on-year and 2.7% Q-on-Q. This continues to be on the back of our strong underlay capabilities, which continue to deliver consistent performance. Our focus here is to continually invest in the core capabilities, thus transforming our networks to accelerate into new market needs. Now, coming to our digital platforms and services portfolio. It has grown at 16.5% year-on-year and 6.1% Q-on-Q. Our multitude of offerings in the digital platforms portfolio are intended to consistently deliver more holistic solutions, stitching multiple products together for our customers' ecosystems. This, as we are beginning to call, this is a digital fabric, which is helping to create robust moat around increasing customer stickiness and insulates us from structural pricing decline seen in the legacy business.
The portfolio grew broad-based across all offerings. Our collaboration portfolio grew by 1% year-on-year and 2.8% Q-on-Q. We continue to benefit from an increasing customer interest in our new offerings, namely GlobalRapide, InstaCC, and Tata Communications DIGO, a platform that we launched in May. We believe with the help of these new offerings, the portfolio will witness increased momentum as we progress. Tata Communications DIGO is an offering to enhance customer interactions and experience. Through this, we continue to partner with enterprise customers to deliver customized, converged, and contextual conversations for their end consumers on the go. Moving to our cloud hosting and security portfolio. This portfolio registered a growth of 21.9% year-on-year and 5.8% Q-on-Q.
Our cloud offerings are much broader today as we help our customers in their multi-cloud journey with a multi-tenant private cloud, an industry community cloud, a cloud platform for Kubernetes, and analytical solutions. Our ability to broaden this portfolio is one of the key catalysts helping us to drive growth in the medium term. IZO Multi-Tenant Private cloud is getting more visibility and acceptability across use cases involving predictable workloads. Broader focus is winning in the private cloud space, and the adoption is increasing across the board. On our security business, our Cloud SOC is driving our growth this quarter. In addition, we are investing in thematic solutions, thus propelling deeper engagement with customers. Our IZO FinCloud for India BFSI space, which has stringent data privacy and security guidelines, and our security offering delivered from the cloud, which is called Cloud SOC.
These are being embraced by key institutions in India. For instance, NPCI has adopted our Cloud SOC this quarter, and ReBIT, a unit created by RBI, embraced our security monitoring services across their IT infrastructure. In addition, we have leading private sector banks and International banks taking our cloud offerings to maximize employee efficiency and improving customer interface. We are providing banks with a fail-safe mechanism as per the guidelines of RBI. Our wins in the BFSI space are setting us well for the immense potential this segment offers. In addition, it is allowing us to align our biggest portfolio more towards recurring revenue streams. Coming to our next-gen connectivity offerings. This increased by 31.9% year-on-year and 15.3% Q-on-Q. We are witnessing healthy growth and are winning due to our recently launched IZO Internet WAN and SD-WAN variants.
We have further expanded our SD-WAN offerings, and our funnel and order book continues to be healthy in this segment. Moreover, we remain agile and continue to focus on adjacent opportunities, such as the multi-cloud connectivity. We already have three major International multi-cloud connect customers. Our media services revenue grew by 39.8% year-on-year and 5.7% Q-on-Q. Our media and entertainment business continues to see sustained growth underpinned by the transformation taking place in this industry globally. We are empowering global sports to reach billions of fans worldwide and our build for media and edge-based offerings. We supported 4,000+ events, reaching over 2.5 billion viewers globally this quarter. Our media ecosystem delivers live matches to viewers' devices, giving them lifelike experience, taking them into the action like never before.
At the same time, we are focusing on global edge opportunity with media and video native edge cloud deployed globally. This supports low-latency video streaming and other applications that need video processing closer to the edge. This has witnessed good growth directly in global media organizations and media service providers. To sum up, as a digital ecosystems enabler, we remain committed to building innovative and scalable platforms to empower enterprises. With that, I would like to invite Kabir to give an overview of our financial performance. Kabir?
Thank you, Lakshminarayanan. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me take this opportunity to take you all through our financial performance for the quarter. Q2 of FY23 witnessed healthy growth coupled with strong operational performance. Our consolidated revenue for the quarter stood at INR 4,431 crore, improving by 6.2% year-on-year and 2.8% on a sequential basis. Our EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 1,130 crore, reporting a margin of 25.5%. Our absolute EBITDA grew by 4.9% sequentially and 1.5% year-on-year. Our data revenue reported strong growth momentum both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year across all our offerings this quarter, despite the challenges around OEMs.
Our key performance indicators in terms of funnel, order book, and win rates continue to improve, giving us confidence to step up growth once we see some softness around the supply chain constraints, you know, wear off. Data revenue for the quarter stood at INR 3,493 crores, improving by 11.2% year-on-year and by 4.6% on a quarterly basis. Voice business continues to decline in line with market trends. However, we witnessed an improvement in our voice net revenue and EBITDA margins, primarily driven by India market shift, which has improved realizations. In our view, this is an industry-wide phenomenon and seems to be short-term in nature. Moving to subsidiaries, we see a steady improvement in TCTS.
TCTS revenue improved by 1.4% quarter-on-quarter, though it declined, you know, compared to last year, coming in at INR 322 crore. EBITDA for TCTS stood at INR 5 crore for Q2. Our payment business continues to make positive shifts as we expand our portfolio under the franchisee model. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 46 crore, improving by 4% quarter-on-quarter and 12% year-on-year. As on date, we have added close to 2,000 franchisee ATMs to our portfolio and are sharply focused on increasing this further. Economies across the globe continue to witness a series of rate, interest rate hikes, thus increasing the overall borrowing costs, and these are expected to rise further. These have impacted us as well, with our interest costs increasing sequentially by about INR 18 crore this quarter.
Our current cost of borrowing stands at 3.69%. We have a well-defined interest rate management policy in place to mitigate such impacts by establishing an optimum mix of floating and fixed-rate loans and taking other necessary steps as and when necessary. We will take a balanced view on capital spends to support our growth ambitions versus the need for debt reduction to better manage this volatility. PAT for the quarter came in at INR 532 crores as compared to INR 544 crores in Q1 of FY 2022. Our PAT margin stood at 12% for Q2 and improved by 180 basis points year-on-year. Our PAT for the quarter was positively impacted by better profitability and certain tax adjustments. In this quarter, we've recognized a deferred tax asset of INR 29 crores for a couple of our International subsidiaries.
Our efforts to simplify our operating model and increase investments to our customer success in International markets have started to yield positive results. Thus, our International business has started showing improvements in terms of operational profits, giving us the visibility on utilization of the NOLs in the near term. Hence, we have revised our policy to recognize deferred tax assets basis near-term profitability, and we'll be doing so on a rolling basis going forward. Cash CapEx for the quarter stood at INR 324 crores, though our approved CapEx is greater than INR 500 crores. Committed CapEx for the quarter was INR 421 crores. Much of this variance can be attributed to the ongoing supply chain issues and delayed deliveries, which have already been called out. ROCE for the quarter stood at 27.7%, well above our guidance.
Net debt as on the quarter end stands at around INR 6,400 crore. Net debt to EBITDA is now at 1.5x as compared to 1.4x last quarter. This increase is largely due to the high dividend payout, you know, of INR 591 crore to our shareholders this quarter. Our cash flow generation continues to be healthy, reporting a free cash flow of INR 617 crore this quarter. In line with our growth ambitions, we continue to augment our staffing capabilities and invest in internal and external engagements. You will see some of these costs further ramping up in a phased manner as we progress into the second half of FY 2023. Thus, we continue to maintain our margin guidance in the 23%-25% range.
We have received a revised demand of our AGR dues amounting to INR 4,981 crore this quarter from the Department of Telecommunications. This demand includes a levy of license fee for our non-telecom revenues, exceptional items, and other income, as well as interest, penalty, and interest and penalty around these line items. The entire matter is sub judice, and multiple appeals are pending before the Apex Court and the Madras High Court. We obtained legal opinion independently in this regard, and we believe we have sufficient ground to defend our position.
As such, we have recognized these as part of our continuing liabilities. Our strong operating performance will be a stepping stone to the company's future. We remain committed to delivering a superior customer experience through our best-in-class bespoke solutions, enabling them to digitally transform their business and equipping them with the ability to innovate, transform, and grow. This brings us to the end of the management commentary. I will now ask Chirag to open the forum for Q&A. Thank you for your attention.
Thanks, Kabir and Lakshminarayanan. We will wait for a minute for the queue to assemble. The first question is from the line of Ritesh Gandhi from Discovery Capital. Ritesh, you may go ahead and ask your question.
Oh, yes. Hi, to understand your digital platform and so, you know, as to how this is, we've sort of gone into a negative EBITDA again. You know, is it because of actual investments in actual projects, which we expect to recoup over the next few quarters or is it just a slowdown or how should we then look at that?
Ritesh, I mean, I've guided the market earlier as well. I mean, let's not get into each and every line items because there are peculiarities and specifics, you know, of that quarter to quarter. I think I would encourage you to look at the Data Services, you know, and the DPS portfolio as a whole. And also to look at the overall, you know, company portfolio, you know, as a whole. I think this quarter, although the guidance, you know, has been that we will probably be in the low to mid, you know, in our range for the year.
We've been helped by various things. We've been helped, you know, by positive Forex. We've been helped by the market shift that I mentioned of. We've been, you know, as a company, delivering profit, you know, EBITDA, at the higher end or even breaching the higher end of the range. There are very specific, you know, deal-related, non-deal-related, that sometimes go into, you know, into each of these things. That doesn't detract from the strategic, you know, direction that the company is taking.
Look, the only reason I'm asking is that because we, I mean, do break this up and historically this was the loss-making area which had then become profitable. Just wanting to understand if the profitability was driven by some, like, COVID revenues which are irreplaceable or effectively if it's sustainable, or, you know, or this is an exceptional, you know, like quarter in this area.
Yeah. I would say there is nothing structurally, you know, anything to worry about the profitability of that.
Okay, fine. The very next question is with regards to the supply chain issues on the chip side. You know, we had indicated that by Q3 of this year we'd expected some amount of a normalization to happen. Is that sort of on track or how long do we expect? Because I know that a lot of the execution of the order book and pipeline, et cetera, is going to be driven by that.
No, I think I mentioned in my commentary that supply chain as far as this quarter is concerned, I don't think it has sort of negatively affected us in revenue, because we had put some mitigation actions in the last two quarters, such as buying some of them, some of the equipment in advance, so we had done some advance ordering and so on. Those mitigating actions are helping us to deliver. Having said that, the supply chain issues are still causing delays. It has not got any worse from the last quarter, but it is not improving either, is what I mentioned.
There is a second dimension of the supply chain issues which is more relating to the core network of us investing in our network and increasing the capacity of networks, which is not directly and immediately attributable to any customer revenues, but this is something that we have to expand. In those areas, because of the delays, some of the projects are delayed. You are seeing that, you know, directly relating to our lower CapEx spend as well, because of that reason. You know, these are some things, you know, we think it is gonna continue for a while longer. It's very hard to predict as to when we will get out of this, but we are treating this as business as usual and managing the situation through advanced ordering and so on and so forth, yeah.
We'd expect to then again see a slight delay in ramp-up of the growth effectively until these issues are further resolved?
No, I think that's what I mentioned. This quarter we didn't have any impact because of the supply chain issues. I mean, even if that was there, it was very marginal than to call out anything. We are ordering equipment in advance to make sure that we can deliver. Clients are also reconciling to the fact that these delays are through OEMs. As long as we have enough in our pipeline and we keep winning, I don't think these delays would cause any substantial issues in terms of. I mean, of course, if the situation was very different, then we could accelerate some of the deliveries and they could get. We would treat this as business as usual for the next at least a couple of quarters is what we think.
Got it. No, that's absolutely. Just the last question is with regards to any update on the land actually monetization at all. Is there anything you can share on that?
This quarter we had a couple of very small items, two land parcels that we actually disposed.
Okay.
As I said earlier, I mean, we are of course guided by accounting policies. When any asset is held for sale, that will get reflected automatically in our results and you'll get to know about it. I've spoken at length in previous quarters in one-on-one, you know, meetings, in investor forums.
You know, as well, we have an articulated approved real estate strategy. We will try and align both the internal needs of the business as also the right market timing in order to look at the value maximization for us. The value maximization could either be through leasing that particular asset or, you know, selling that asset. We will look at the right, you know, economic value that we can realize for our shareholders, and for the benefit of the business. That's how I would like to keep it, you know, at that level, because then it gives us the flexibility to take the right call.
Okay, sir. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. I'll just get back.
Thanks, Riddhesh.
The next question is from the line of Sanjesh Jain from ICICI Securities. Sanjesh, you have now been unmuted. You may go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah, good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity. Good to see data revenue finally picking up, most expected. Lakshminarayanan, you made an initial comment that we have been seeing healthy order book. In the previous quarter, if I remember, you mentioned that the sales funnel was not catching up along with it because of attrition issue and all. I can see there is a lot many employee got added in this quarter. Can you help us give us more color on the order book? It's a double-digit growth, what we mentioned. Last quarter continues, and how is the sales funnel adding up to understand how will be the future order book growth?
Firstly, as you mentioned, and I mentioned in my commentary as well, adding and strengthening our International regions with sales, and we will continue doing that, and investing in marketing in those regions will help us to further accelerate our growth in those regions. As far as order book is concerned, I think we saw a good order book in the last two quarters. This quarter was also quite good. I don't want to comment on a quarter-on-quarter basis the order book because there will be, you know, pluses and minuses based on, you know, a deal getting pushed out by a week will color the numbers. Overall, you know, the order book is good.
As far as the funnel is concerned, our overall funnel value stands at a similar level as last quarter. Even if we are, you know, closing the deals, we are able to add opportunities into the funnel, and therefore our funnel remains healthy and stands at a similar levels as last year. One more thing about the funnel is also the color of the funnel in terms of the types of deals that are there. We are seeing a lot more of digital platforms and solutions deals in the funnel. We are also seeing a lot many larger deals in the funnel.
These are again in line with our strategy, where we have been saying that, you know, the digital platforms is what needs to accelerate our growth. The funnel shows that we are accelerating the funnel addition in the digital platforms. We also said that we will engage more deeper with customers in order to craft larger deals, and that is also reflected in the funnel as we see today. I think we are, you know, moving all these in the right direction.
Thanks, Lakshminarayanan, for that color. Just one question. If our sales funnel is same and we are adding more to order book, is it fair to assume that our order win rates or the conversion rate from sales funnel to order book has seen a material improvement? Will that be a fair assumption?
No, purely from a numbers point of view, it's staying the same. Again, depends on which portfolio we're talking about. Largely, the win rates are. You know, I had talked about improved win rates a few quarters ago, and I think it stands at that similar kind of levels. I wouldn't say that we have dramatically improved the win rates in the last couple of quarters, but it is quite healthy is what I would say.
I think the factors, you know, we wanted to add more into the funnel because as the larger deals comes into the funnel, you know, the time the customer takes to scrutinize and evaluate will take longer. That is the character of the larger deals anyway. You know, we are quite happy with, you know, the size of the funnel, the color of the funnel, and the time taken is not very material as long as we can keep adding good quality deals into our funnel.
Great. One follow-up question probably to Mr. Kabir . Order books look great, total revenue look great, but somehow the net revenue acceleration has not kept pace with the gross revenue. What are we missing there?
In this quarter, it's more a mix effect, you know, Sanjesh. As I said, we had a good contribution of the India market shift in the voice business, you know, that kind of came in. That's overall net revenue. If you actually look at that, you know, I would say the mix effect. Otherwise, sometimes, you know, you kind of play the portfolio well if there are very competitive, you know, deals when we look at, as we are improving our product penetration ratio and winning more, selling more to our, you know, to our customers.
If you know, there is a competitive price play that we need to do, and if that's a dilution of NR in that particular deal, but overall, you know, adds to the customer profitability better, we take those tactical calls. That's where I would leave it at that. Of course, the devil is more in the details, and if you go by product portfolio, it's a different story. At the uber level, that's the larger theme.
No, I was looking more from the DPS perspective. Sequential growth was 6.2%-
Mm-hmm.
-while it was a decline on the net NR basis. That's not really a value creation, right, in that sense. Was it more like a project execution, CPE cost, which was up-fronted and we are doing revenue recognition over a period of time, which we changed few quarters back? Is that playing a game in this as well?
Not really. I mean, I see only mix. You know, I see a little bit you know, a little bit one-offs that were there in the prior quarter, but it's a longer runway, you know, I would say. It's the foot in the door into larger accounts and you know, and a combination of those things. We had one-offs in Q1, which resulted into that. I would largely say it's a longer runway and you know, the large account play that we would like to really do it. There are a couple of deals in cloud, for example, where we took that strategic call.
So it's more strategic, you know, that way that we should be able to see, as we do, you know, migration and start the workloads, you may see lower margins, but as consumption picks up, then those margins will, you know, come through. When you look at the, even the lifetime of the deal per se, let alone, you know, us adding furthermore to it.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Lakshminarayanan, one on the collaboration side. Now that's still not picking up. I understand SIP trunking was declining.
Yeah.
If one was to see that portfolio ex of SIP trunking and DIGO being now commercialized, what is the ex of SIP kind of a growth this portfolio has the ability or a potential to deliver, say, over next 3-5 years? Can the ex of SIP trunking grow at 25-30% CAGR? Does that potential exist in that particular line item?
Yeah. I think as said, the overall collaboration portfolio is lifted up because of the GlobalRapide and the DIGO portfolios that we have. But this is a fairly large part of our DPS portfolio. Excluding that, yeah, I think our growth rates are, you know, quite good. It's about 25%. Excluding not just SIP trunk, excluding all of the collaboration.
No, I was asking more from the collaboration perspective, which is.
Only collaboration space?
Yeah, only collaboration. If I were to-
Yeah.
-remove SIP from it.
Yeah.
Is it growing in line with the remaining portfolio, in the DPS?
I think the GlobalRapide, InstaCC, and DIGO are all growing in line or better, I would say. The SIP trunking is a large part of collaboration today, so that colors the overall growth of the collaboration. If the question is excluding SIP trunk, if the other products in that portfolio is growing, it is growing. They are all growing at a very healthy rate. The GlobalRapide is growing very well. InstaCC is growing very well, and DIGO is growing very well as well.
Fair enough. Just last question from my side on the margin. Despite delivering a much, much better margin-
Just, Sanjesh, I just also want to add, you know, the reason why, you know, I, you know, we can't exclude the SIP trunk, I'm saying is, see the way we are seeing the collaboration space is that, you know, we would like to think of ourselves as a global voice cloud for enterprise. It is, you know, one of the largest coverages around the world with our voice and messaging infrastructure that we have. On top of it is what we are building our collaboration, which is the GlobalRapide, the InstaCC, the call center on the cloud, and so on and so forth.
Our ability then to provide all of these as a fully managed service for our customers, ensuring compliance across the world, ability to monitor this end-to-end and deliver the productivity that they seek. This holistic package is what is helping us to actually build the moats against even some of the other CPaaS players who will try to sell point solutions to the enterprises, or compared to other providers who might have certain capabilities but not the broad and wider capability that we are able to take to customer. I just want to make that point. Purely on the growth and the caliber of the growth, all my comments that I said before are quite valid. Yeah. Purely from a-
Lakshmi-
If you had to exclude SIP, then everything else would grow. We have to understand that underlying that platform is what is powering all of the other capabilities. Yeah.
No, that's the confusing part for me, you know. Because if I look at your peers, say, Indian listed peers, they are growing at upwards of 50%, and they have a healthy, fairly healthy, revenue there. They're still growing at 50%, while we have a disproportionate advantage of having completely an integrated solution, and yet we are barely able to grow.
Yeah.
What are we missing there then? Because the other peer numbers are fairly available in the market, no?
Yeah.
They are growing at 50%+ on an annualized basis, and you're still at a flattish.
I think so far, Sanjesh, our SIP solutions have not been sold domestically. We have been primarily helping major International players with that capability. Or Indian players who have an International footprint is what we have been doing. Now, with us getting into the VNO license, we will be able to start selling some of these. What you're comparing with an Indian peer to the International may not be a like-for-like comparison as far as the SIP and the collaboration portfolio is concerned. Purely from a DIGO point of view, again, we've just launched it. It has got a much wider capability. Other players are largely reporting a messaging A2P increase within India or in other markets outside of India. It's not a like-for-like comparison of the portfolio, I would say, Sanjesh, in terms of what we have to offer and where the products were focused on so far.
Fair enough. Just one last question on the margin side. We have been continuously being more than on the upper end of the margin, but our margin guidance still continue to remain at 23%-25%, and telecom is fairly a large operating leverage business. Are we being too conservative on the margin side?
Sanjesh, even this quarter, if I were to exclude the Forex and the one-off benefits that we've actually got from the market shift, our underlying margin is exactly in the middle of the range. You know, that's what I have guided the market before. That's where we continue to be there. So we've so far been positively, you know, impacted with things which have flown, you know, into the bottom line. I don't want to go quarter by quarter, you know, whether it's this quarter or next quarter. If I were to, in the medium term, look at what should be the shape of this business, we would like to operate in the 23%-25%.
Any benefit that we get, and we will continue to get, you know, whether it is operating leverage, whether it is waste reduction, whether it is efficiency improvement, whether it is mixed benefits, all of which, you know, our endeavor is to actually reinvest them back, you know, into the portfolio. Even within, I would say, our traditional networking business onto the nextGen connectivity. Also into the, you know, digital platforms and services, you know, portfolio as well. MOVE, IoT and the Incubation, you know, part. All of these need oxygen, and that will actually come. I see that as the sources of, you know, margin improvement for me, which then get repurposed and channelized to drive growth.
Once we get to a good absolute level of business in DPS, and then they continue to a stable, you know, growth trajectory, is probably the time for us to unpeel and then say, "Can we look at margin expansion?" But that is a few years away. At this stage, I think we should have the mindset of reinvesting, you know, all of these benefits back into the business. That's where we are focused at, Sanjesh.
No, fair. Fair, Kabir. We should be more optimistic on the revenue growth side. Will that be a fair assumption?
Well, let's meet our first marker that we have set of double-digit revenue growth. I mean, I think this is the Q1 where we've been going in the right trajectory. Once we have a sustainable repeated performance, you know, then you're absolutely right that we should be able to, you know, push for it. It's not. This is a B2B business with a long gestation and with all the supply chain challenges. When we put in those investments to reap and see the results of those investments also takes a few quarters. Thank you for the patience. You know, you guys have been listening to us, to our investment stories, all through, and this is the Q1 where we've actually seen results. We should not move away from that philosophy of how to run the business.
Great. Thanks, Lakshminarayanan. Thanks, Kabir, for patiently answering all my question, and best of luck for the future quarters.
Thanks, Sanjesh.
Thanks, Sanjesh.
You may kindly raise your Raise Hand option on the Webex portal to ask any more questions. The next question is from the line of Mr. Pratap Maliwal from Mount Intra Finance . Pratap, you have now been unmuted. You may go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you. Am I audible, please?
Yes, you are.
Thank you, and thanks for taking my question. I had a question around the next-gen connectivity vertical that we have. This quarter we've seen good growth in there. Now, previous quarter we had said that there were some maybe supply chain issues and some project deliveries were affected, which had delayed the revenue recognition. Have the revenues come back in this quarter itself, and has that given us the growth? Can we maybe take the number for this particular quarter and then as the base and then project for more growth after? Which has been the case?
No, I think. See, next-gen connectivity, we have a multiple set of products which combined together forms the next-gen connectivity. One is the IZO Internet WAN proposition, where we are helping our customers to replace MPLS with internet solutions. The other is, I mentioned about, you know, the IZO Multi Cloud Connect, which we are just doing a soft launch, and that's another set of one. We also have, you know, we've soft launched a Wi-Fi 6 and LAN capability. The last part is the SD-WAN. There are four parts to these areas.
Particularly when it comes to the SD-WAN, which is where I think we were hampered by some of the OEM issues, and similarly on the Wi-Fi 6 as well, there are OEM related issues that are there. It's likely to have some up and down based on the OEM's ability to deliver, and then therefore us to deliver to the clients. There will be some changes. Overall, if I have to comment on the next-gen connectivity, I had already mentioned we are quite encouraged by the sizes of the funnels that we have, both in India as well as in the International market, encompassing the full capability of our next-gen connectivity solutions. You know, we would look for continued execution on the funnel and continued execution on conversion of that to revenue.
Okay. I'll just try and maybe rephrase. This quarter the growth has come from maybe us getting some new business and some of that funnel has been converted into new orders. Is that?
Yeah, I think you might say so. Some of the, you know, the backlogs have been cleared, as well as the new funnel, new customers, have been gotten. I think that's the overall network transformation is a story that we have been talking about, the customers moving to the cloud, customers shifting to the internet. There will be a change. There will be customers wanting to do those transformations, and we are beginning to see that play out.
Okay, sure. Just one other question. A leading telecom provider in India, recently there was news that it had come out with an IoT-based connectivity solution based on eSIM, which has been adopted by telematics providers and vehicle tracking solution providers. What I'm trying to understand is that, is this in competition with our offering in the MOVE vertical? If we're in trials with such solution providers or any recent successes that we can call out, please.
Yeah. MOVE does that and more actually. You know, we have you know, our proposition is one of global as well as addressing the India market, and they are addressing multiple segments in the industrial IoT segment as far as MOVE is concerned. I think I had a fairly extensive commentary on it to say how we are doing and how the portfolio is growing as part of our incubation business. We believe you know, the product of MOVE is quite strong and addresses multiple segments in the markets in India as well as the International markets, and we have seen and shown fairly good momentum of growth with that product.
Okay, sir. Thank you.
Thank you, Pratap. No more. Thank you, everyone. This brings us to the end of the Q&A session. I would now request A.S. Lakshminarayanan to share his closing comments.
Thank you, everyone. As I said, you know, this quarter has been a very good quarter for us, hitting a double-digit growth on our data portfolio after a very long time. I think all the platforms that we have launched and the capabilities that we have added to these in the last few quarters are showing results. The color of engagements that we are having with the customers and the color of funnel is improving. With that, the teams are doing a tremendous job of ensuring that we execute this truly like a digital company. I think we would look for and hope for continued momentum and execution. I would also like to wish all of you a very happy Diwali in the coming festive seasons. Greetings to all.
Thank you so much, Lakshminarayanan. This brings us to the end of the call. The recording will be available on our website in the next 24 hours. You may please disconnect now. Thank you.