Good afternoon, everyone. Just play your seats
if anyone wants
to sit down. So welcome to our second quarter results press conference. I'm Niles Garcia from Yashi Ferdinand to get up in a few minutes, minutes. But I just want to remind everyone, we'll have some brief remarks from our CEO, then we'll go to Q and A. Again, please keep your questions initially for free.
Move on to the next, and then we'll have time at the end to come back to additional questions. Questions. So with that, please take the stage, Raj.
And Sven and welcome everyone to TCSS Q2 results announcement. With a net profit of 8,042 crores, which represents 20.6% in net profitability terms. We have had strong cash conversion, converting 108% of our net profit into cash from operations, generating close to INR 8,700 crores in cash. Our disciplined capital allocation policy continues, and we are pleased to inform that the Board has decided to give a second interim special dividend of 40 rupees per share to our shareholders. Our growth was driven once again by outperformance in Europe and UK, with UK coming in at more than 13% year on year growth, and Europe continuing strongly at more than 16% growth, with growth fairly broad based across is there.
North America grew at 5.3% year on year, and we are now at close to $2,800,000,000 in North America revenue. From a vertical industry perspective, once again, our industry verticals like life sciences, health care, travel grew significantly. Life sciences and health care grew more than 16%. And we are happy to note that communications and media, which has been improving over the last couple of quarters, have broken into double digit growth trajectory this quarter, growing at 11.8%. BFSI continued to slow down, and we have had BFSI grow at 8% year on year, and retail volatility continues with growth at slightly more than four percent on a year on year basis.
But when we look at it from deal flow and the TCV perspective, we have had a fairly strong quarter once again. Our TCV this quarter is at $6,400,000,000 which is the highest in the last six quarters that we have been reporting over. The growth and the deal flow also shows up in our client metrics. Our largest customers, customers from only make more than 100,000,000 a year, The number grew from by three to 47 customers from whom we make 100,000,000 or more over the last twelve months. Digital revenues continues to be growing well ahead of opening average, growing at more than 28%, and now we make more than 33% of our revenue from digital.
We continue to add headcount in anticipation of the strong growth that we the strong order book that we see and the possibilities in the medium to long term and our strategy of relying on internal talent. Our net additions this quarter has been highest ever at more than 14,000 associates added during these three months. With that, we have crossed another big milestone in our talent journey with more than 450,000 employees now on board. The finally, I want to touch upon patents, which we had started talking about last quarter. And our actual patents granted is at 1,121, an increase of 339 on a year on year basis.
So overall, quite pleased with where it has finally ended up. It is definitely lower than what we had originally thought at the start of the year. But given the overall circumstances, we are quite happy with where we are. The strong deal flow and participation across both deal flow and deal closure in all geographies gives us confidence, you know, for participation in the emerging
And the BFSI, again, has tried to be a follow-up, so that is, again so the from a growth perspective, these are have been lower. Whereas if you look at additions of people,
And on the back of deals that we've won, we believe that it should break into double digit soon in the next couple of quarters or so. So there are various other verticals which are actually picking up the growth slack. But you are right that BFSI is the largest vertical, and the news flow is what all the news flow is. We are focused on trying to increase our participation in the opportunities that we see. And there are deals out there.
So the deal pipeline, if you BFSI deal closure this quarter actually has been higher than ever in the last year. So just like I said, overall, TCS TCV is the highest ever in the last six quarters. BFSI TCV is also the highest
half year had almost a revenue of about
2.6%
impact because of currency. So it has been an area where currency has not really helped. So that is one of the factors. With respect to your how this work, we'll definitely continue to optimize. It's not that we definitely we built in we hired we had given campus offers, etcetera, the
in across the board, across the whole spectrum of IT, you look at it. We laid out very detailed in our annual report. And a lot of that is where is this innovation portfolio coming. And patents is only one leg of it. Overall, our participation in the innovation ecosystem is significantly high.
We are seeing ourselves more and more as a source of valuable, replicable innovation capability to our customer set. It seems that your Has come around one and a half percent in cost of currency terms eventually. So, I Then across the regional market spectrum, there has been weakness across India's weak. Middle East is weak. Japan is weak.
APAC has had a soft couple of soft quarters. A long time. It has been steadily growing earlier. And we have spoken about our strategy that our strategy is to first participate and capture the demand, and then we will, over time, fix the fix the cost structure. So subcontractor getting that under control is one big component of it.
Direct hiring to replace it is another part of it. Hiring and we have spoken about acceleration of onboarding of fresh trainees to gear ourselves up from an internal talent development for the medium term growth that we see. So that's also on track. We have been able to onboard all the 30,000 that we spoke about last time. All 30,000 have been onboarded.
So We that. To have have have and investment in infrastructure to do for collaboration and for innovation. So we have been investing significantly into this space. It is just that equity is not our game. We participate in partnership and collaboration with customers.
BFS is weaker than what where it was in the beginning of the year. Retail has steadily weakened during the course of the year where we're expecting it to bounce back. But trend wise, these were not very different from where But actually, as I said, deal pipeline is still strong. And some of the deals that have got postponed, we will we hope to see whether that conversion comes soon. Overall, we are not too worried about the demand environment.
There is some amount of demand, but we are not too worried about the demand environment. On the margin front, the reverse continue to be the same. It is about cost base over time. And that is where so the the employee onboarding at the bottom of the pyramid, the investment in building of the talent side is all part of a cost structure rationalization program that will see us gain up our pyramid and rationalize it better. That will do come through on the margin part of it.
And we remain hopeful that the currency will And in some form, indicating whether the appetite for it exists or not. So I wouldn't characterize it very negatively. It is just that people are spending more time diligence in actually committing to those kind of trying to impact wise and look at the macro is not our problem here. Again, on a lighter note, I'm very enthused by the fact that analysts are very positive over the year,
Okay. We need to conclude the event. Thank you so much, everyone.