Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the TCS Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded.
I now hand the conference over to Mr. Kedar Shirali, Global Head, Investor Relations at TCS. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Margaret. Good evening, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for staying dialed in, and I apologize for the delay in starting of this call. Thanks for joining us today to discuss TCS' financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022 that ended June 30th, 2021. This call is being webcast through our website, and an archive, including the transcript, will be available on the site for the duration of this quarter. The financial statements, quarterly fact sheets, and press releases are also available on our website and have been mailed out to those who subscribe to our mailers. Our leadership call is present on this call to discuss our results.
We have with us today Mr. Rajesh Gopinathan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director.
Hello, everyone.
Mr. N.G. Subramaniam, Chief Operating Officer.
Good evening to you all.
Mr. Samir Seksaria, Chief Financial Officer.
Hello, everyone.
Mr. Milind Lakkad, Chief Human Resources Officer.
Yeah. Hi, everyone.
Rajesh and Samir will give a brief overview of the company's performance, followed by the Q&A session. As you are aware, we don't provide specific revenue or earnings guidance, and anything said on this call which reflects our outlook for the future or which could be construed as a forward-looking statement must be reviewed in conjunction with the risks that the company faces. We have outlined these risks in the second slide of the quarterly fact sheet available on our website and emailed out to those who subscribe to our mailing list.
With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Rajesh.
Thank you, Kedar. Once again, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you. As we come out of the second wave of the pandemic, which was once in a generation health crisis, our thoughts and prayers are with everyone who suffered the debilitating effects of COVID and the loss of loved ones. Before we move on to business, I want to talk about what has been a traumatic period for most of us. As the second wave overwhelmed the country's medical infrastructure, we provided hospitalization support, opened COVID care centers in our facilities in 13 cities to help affected associates and their families. Despite our best efforts, we lost a number of TCSers and their family members. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.
Recognizing that vaccination was our best bet to an early return to normalcy, we undertook a pan-India vaccination drive that began in May and which covered not only all TCS locations, but also smaller cities where our associates are currently remote working from. I'm happy to say that over 70% of our associates have been vaccinated till date, at least with one shot. Including their families, that amounts to over 500,000 individuals covered so far. We are on track to vaccinate all TCSers and their families by September. Even as we speak, the national vaccination program is also proceeding well, and we are hopeful that we will never again have to go through the experience that we had over the last 90 days.
Moving on to our performance in Q1, we saw continued strength in demand for core transformation services across all segments, the second wave disrupted technology initiatives in several of our emerging markets, especially in India. While our industry verticals collectively grew 4.1% sequentially in constant currency, headwinds in our regional market and other segments brought down overall revenue growth in constant currency to 2.4%. Sequential growth was 2.7% in dollar terms and 3.9% in rupee terms. On a year-on-year basis, we grew 16.4% in constant currency terms, 21.6% in dollar terms, and 18.5% in rupee terms. Our operating margin for the quarter was at 25.5%, a contraction of 1.3% sequentially, and an expansion of 1.9% year-on-year. Net margin in Q4 was at 19.8%.
I'll now ask Samir to go over all the headline numbers, financial, and segmental performance, and I'll step in later to talk about demand trends we're seeing and the emerging opportunities in growth and transformation. Over to you, Samir.
Thank you, Rajesh. Let me first talk you through the headline numbers. In the first quarter of FY 2022, our revenues grew 2.4% QoQ and 16.4% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Reported revenue in INR was INR 454 billion, a sequential growth of 3.9%, and a year-over-year growth of 18.5%. In dollar terms, revenue was $6.154 billion, a QoQ growth of 2.7%, and a year-over-year growth of 21.6%. Let me provide our segmental performance details for the quarter. All growth numbers are in constant currency terms. All our verticals showed good sequential as well as year growth. Growth continued to be led by life sciences and healthcare, which grew 7.3% sequentially and 25.4% year-over-year this quarter.
BFSI grew 3.1% sequentially and 19.3% YoY, powered by increasing investments in enhancing customer experience, product innovation, cloud transformation, and optimization of core operations. Retail and CPG bounced back to double-digit growth this quarter, growing 4.4% sequentially and 21.7% year-over-year. With discretionary retail as well as parts of travel and hospitality segments showing signs of recovery in major markets. Manufacturing grew 4.8% QoQ and 18.3% YoY. Technology and services grew 5% QoQ and 12.3% YoY. Communication and media grew 1.7% QoQ and 6.9% YoY. By geography, growth was led by our major markets. North America grew 4.1% QoQ and 15.8% YoY. U.K. grew 3.6% QoQ and 16.3% YoY. Continental Europe grew 1.5% QoQ, 19.7% YoY. Among our regional markets, Latin America grew 4% sequentially and 16.1% YoY, while the Middle East and Africa grew 4.2% QoQ, 25.3% YoY.
The pandemic second wave severely impacted sequential growth in India, which declined 14.1% QoQ but grew 25.3% year-over-year. Growth has been affected in Asia-Pacific, where revenue grew 2.4% QoQ and 9.3% YoY. Our portfolio of products and platforms performed well in Q4. ignio, our cognitive automation software, signed up 17 new customers and had eight go lives. TCS BaNCS, our flagship product suite for financial services domain, had five new wins and five go lives in Q1. Over half our deals are now for the SaaS version of the product. This quarter, we signed our largest SaaS deal for TCS BaNCS to date with one of the largest financial groups in Finland for their retail consumer lending business spanning origination, servicing of accounts, and deposits, corporate SME, and unsecured loans. Our Quartz blockchain platform had two new wins in Q1.
We also launched a new product, Quartz for Markets, which helps market infrastructure institutions offer next-generation services around tokenized securities. In Q1, TCS was selected by the largest commodity exchange in India to build their new commodity derivatives platform using TCS BaNCS for market infrastructure for clearing and custody and Quartz. The new platform will help them achieve their growth aspirations and meet international exchange standards with respect to business features, robustness, high performance, and security. In life sciences, our award-winning advanced drug development suite had one go live. We developed the TCS ADD Safety platform for a U.S.-based global top 15 pharma company for their safety case management automation program.
TCS ADD Safety will transform the pharma company's adverse event case intake and processing using AI, thus improving efficiency and accuracy in the pharmacovigilance processes. Our HOBS suite of solutions for communication service providers had one new win and one go live in Q1. TCS TwinX, our AI-based digital twinning solution, also had one win in this quarter and one go live. TCS iON, which celebrated its 10th year this year, is expanding its international footprint by winning its first country-level deal in Indonesia to provide a countrywide digital learning solution for 250,000 schools and also handle the recruitment process across ministries. It also won a customer in Malaysia for iON Digital Campus for 5,500 users. The TCS National Qualifier Test, which is now becoming a preferred assessment instrument for entry-level hiring by Corporate India, added 10 more logos in Q1, bringing the total number of corporate employers to 160.
Moving to our client metrics. As you are aware, these are important validations for TCS' customer-centric strategy for continually expanding and deepening our engagements by investing in newer capabilities and launching newer services and products relevant to our customers. In Q1, we had a robust addition in every revenue bucket compared to the year-ago. We added two more customers in INR 100 million band, bringing the total to 50. We added five more clients in INR 50 million band, bringing the total to 105. Added 11 more customers to INR 20 million-plus band, bringing the total to 241. 23 in INR 10 million-plus band, bringing the total to 405. 22 more clients in INR 5 million+ band, bringing the total to 586. Finally, 52 more clients in INR 1 million band, bringing the total to 1,118. Let me now go over the financials. Q1 is when our annual salary increase takes place.
This year, we had roughly 1.7% margin impact from the wage hike. With many parts of the world on their way back to normalcy, we saw some return of discretionary expenses, including travel, offset by currency gains. Our operating margin was at 25.5%, down 130 basis points sequentially and an expansion of 1.9% year-over-year. Net income margin was at 19.8%. Our effective tax rate was 25.75%. Our DSO was at 65 days in dollar terms, down three days compared to Q4. Net cash from operations was at INR 103 billion, which is 114% of net income. Free cash flows were at INR 97.5 billion. Invested funds as on 30th June stood at INR 543.6 billion. The board has recommended an interim dividend of INR 7 per share.
On the people front, we had an all-time high net addition of 20,409 employees during the quarter, bringing the total headcount to 509,058, 509,058. It continues to be a very diverse workforce, with 155 nationalities represented, and with women making up 36.2% of the base. We continue to invest in building the next generation G&T workforce. Our investments in organic talent development resulted in employees logging over 10 million learning hours in Q1. Over 407,000 employees are now trained on multiple new technologies, and we now have 19,000 contextual masters in the company. LTM attrition in IT services was at 8.6%. While this is still the lowest in the industry, it is inching up.
We will be monitoring this closely because we have the largest pool of the best-trained digital talent in the country, and there will be attempts to poach as hiring picks up across the industry. Over to Rajesh now for the demand drivers and [audio distortion]
Thank you, Samir. I've spoken earlier about how customers are starting off on multi-horizon cloud transformation journeys. These are fairly large programs and within which there are various transformation sub-themes such as customer, employee experience, supply chain management, sustainability, and M&A. I want to give a quick color on some of these. If you look at Horizon one examples, let me begin with some examples of core transformation, which includes cloud migration, application modernization, and data modernization. We were selected by an American investment management group to help them modernize their existing mainframe-based advisory wealth management platform. TCS will leverage its domain knowledge and experience to create a microservices architecture on a leading hyperscaler cloud platform to enhance the retail client experience. A leading provider of high-performance semiconductors and analog solutions has partnered with TCS to advise them on moving their enterprise applications to the cloud.
TCS helped analyze and identify the best cloud provider for their workload, build a business case, and a three-year roadmap for the transition to the cloud. Coming to Horizon 2 example, several of our customers are now moving on to Horizon 2 of the journey using native capabilities of the hyperscaler stack to innovate, transform customer experience, and differentiate themselves. For example, we have been engaged by Loblaw, a leading Canadian food and pharmacy retailer, as a partner for modernizing their core pharmacy dispensing platform, leveraging a leading hyperscaler platform. This program is expected to deliver better customer experience, making the pharmacy operations more patient-centric and one of the best in the business.
Similarly, the largest hotel franchisor in the world, based in the United States has selected TCS as a strategic partner to reimagine their customer interactions and loyalty and to modernize the front office and build a digital core to significantly upgrade their customer engagement. TCS will build smart mobility solutions to improve customers' digital journey enabled by native capabilities of the cloud. This will build incremental capabilities to transform franchisees' business functions and reestablish their brand value. A world leader and supplier of analytical instruments and reagents that are used in municipal, industrial, and other process applications to test water quality chose TCS to transform the business from a traditional instrument seller to providing everything-as-a-service model. That is, the instruments, the software, and services.
The transformation which is underway is comprehensive. It touches all major business functions and IT systems and involves developing a scalable elastic IoT platform hosted on a leading hyperscaler platform. This one is an especially great example of how when we talk about these technologies, it is not one alone that actually brings in that value, but the ability to weave together solutions across, as we said here, IoT, cloud, even their core enterprise applications are getting transformed on supply chain side, areas like bringing in newer areas like CPQ. Bringing all that together and being able to transform the customer's business model is the core of what we call this growth and transformation-led opportunity set that we are so focused on. The third aspect that I want to touch upon today is sustainability.
A lesser-known benefit of cloud adoption, which is increasingly moving center stage on the CEO and board agenda, is the reduction of IT carbon footprint that a migration to cloud provides. That is because hyperscaler providers are leveraging scale and technology to build more energy-efficient infrastructure and using renewable energy at scale to power their server farms. Consequently, enterprises who migrate workloads from their own data centers to a hyperscaler are achieving significant reductions in the carbon footprint associated with these workloads. When we help customers embrace the cloud stack, it is very fulfilling to know that we are also helping them get closer to their sustainability goals. We have articulated our own carbon reduction goals in our FY 2021 annual report, which we published in May.
We are looking to bring down our absolute carbon footprint by 70% by 2025 compared to a base year of 2016. To become net zero emitter by 2030. While we work towards mitigating our own environmental footprint, we are also using our expertise to build solutions that help our customers bring down theirs. This quarter, we had quite a few customers engaging us for their sustainability initiatives. For example, an American pharmacy major has selected TCS to deploy TCS Clever Energy for more than 8,300 stores and 31 warehouses, helping them save energy and potentially reduce CO2 emission by 70,000 tons.
This was a solution that was originally designed and deployed by TCS within its own facilities in India as one of the largest and earliest full-scale IoT deployments, which helped significantly reduce TCS' own energy consumption across over 100 buildings and 33 million sq ft of office space that we had. We have now been able to productize and package it and take it to multiple markets, including Middle East and North America. Japan's largest power generation company has engaged TCS to transform their power plants with autonomous operations and maintenance using the TCS IP2 solution framework and to help achieve sustainability goals through reduced emissions. Similarly, TCS has been selected by a U.S.-based leading electricity and gas company for a GIS-based wildfire applications development and support.
This program aims at significantly improving detection and emergency response to a wildfire event, hence ensuring environmental protection and public and employee safety. A leading Australian oil and gas company has started design work to build carbon capture and sequestration plants. As part of its energy mix portfolio, it has also started piloting hydrogen production with green energy sources and developing value chains to export hydrogen. TCS is partnering to develop pilots proving the efficiency of these technologies and to help them achieve their sustainability goals. While on the topic of emission reduction, one of the largest and most material shifts playing out globally is the automotive industry's switch to electric vehicles, and alongside that, autonomous and connected driving.
I want to share with you the broad spectrum of activities that we're engaged in in this industry as an example of how we are able to be relevant across multiple industry participants in a large industry structure like that. You are aware of our investment in taking over GM's technology center in India . For GM now, more than 20% of those workforce is involved in their electric vehicles and autonomous vehicle programs. Similarly, TCS is now partnering with over 15 startups in the EV and autonomous space, including companies like Stoneridge, Velodyne, Luminar Technologies, et cetera, working on areas including LIDAR, battery management systems, and a full spectrum of various activities in this stack. On the Tier 1 vendor side, we're working with leading providers like ZF in areas including ADAS 2.5 development, and even more importantly, working together with them to address the significant shortage in the chipsets.
That is one of the biggest impacts that the automotive industry is going through. Our teams work jointly with ZF to put together an analytics and a procurement solution that maximize the contextual knowledge and the data in the ZF systems and combine that with the ecosystem of partners that they have to identify both sources as well as to optimize choices of products and portfolios to maximize value and customer centricity across their ecosystem. The spread of technologies that we see and the unifying fabric of cloud is allowing us to be relevant, as I said, across various customer size levels when they're brought together under common themes at an across-industry level.
Moving on to another theme that we've spoken a lot about in the past is mergers and acquisitions. It's a recurring G&T theme, corporate restructuring leading to M&A or divestiture are areas where we are significantly participating. In the case of former, we are helping customers integrate and harmonize the merged entity or the acquired entity's processes and systems into the acquirers' landscape. With the latter, we help customers plan and implement the separation of assets and processes to ensure that the divested entity is fully operational from day one of its independent existence.
In addition to our deep contextual knowledge and technology expertise across the spectrum, customers have been selecting TCS for our differentiated ability to stitch together multiple services and offerings, such as M&A consulting, strategy, planning, digital value identification and harnessing, change management, TSA management, day-one readiness, supply chain ERP implementations, rollouts, et cetera. I want to take couple of examples that showcase some of this. A U.S.-based biopharmaceutical company selected TCS as a partner to design and implement integration of their acquisition of a medical aesthetics major recently. What we've been able to do is to leverage our deep contextual knowledge of the acquirer in designing the sequence of process integrations that need to be played out to maximize the realization of the $ 2 billion cost synergies that the acquisition is very strategically hinging on.
Similarly, for a global pharma leader, TCS worked very closely with them to identify an integration strategy for the newly created JV a few years back, where we put in place a slightly atypical solution involving integration of technology systems onto the parent entity, even though the acquired entity continued as their joint venture. Now we're working with them to help them spin off the technology systems to make the JV fully standalone and ready for an independent strategy of its own. Alongside these growth and transformation engagements, we are also seeing increased activity around outsourcing as customers look for pathways to fund the new initiatives. Here too, our innovative approach to deploying machine-first operating model powered by AI and machine learning to reimagine business and IT operations is helping us win such deals across industries.
Coming to our Q1 order book. We are seeing a strong demand for our services that I've spoken about. As you know, we have had strong deal wins every quarter in our fiscal. On the back of an all-time high TCV in Q4, we once again had a very strong set of deal wins in Q1 with a TCV of $8.1 billion. Once again, it's a very heterogeneous mix of deals for all sizes and distributed across industry verticals and geographies. By vertical, the BFSI had a TCV of $2.2 billion, while retail vertical again achieved its all-time high order book of $1.5 billion for the second consecutive quarter. The TCV of deals signed in North America stood at $4 billion.
With that, we can now open the line for questions.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question, may press star and one on the touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handset while asking a question. Anyone who would like to ask a question, you may press star and one at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Sandip Agarwal from Edelweiss. Please go ahead.
Hi. This is Sandip [audio distortion]
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Agarwal . We cannot hear you clearly.
Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me now?
Yes, we can hear you. It's not very clear. May I request you to come on the handset mode and then ask your question?
On the handset mode? Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. Can you hear me now, please? Hello, can you hear me now?
We can, sir, but it's not very clear. I would just request you to please check your phone line and join the queue again. In the meanwhile, we'll move to the next question. The next question is from the line of Sudheer Guntupalli from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Good evening, gentlemen. Thanks for giving me this opportunity. NGS, my first question is on the SBWS model. In the recent past, we have seen news flow about CEOs of different American banks expecting their employees back in offices by a certain timeline. We are seeing similar trends in India as well, as most of the employees are vaccinated at least once. In that context, when the clients are expecting their own employees to be back in offices soon, will they realistically allow the IT vendors to let their employees work in a borderless model? Any thoughts on this will be helpful.
Thank you, Sudheer. I think we are committed to SBWS as a model, and a number of our customers are happy with the way that it is working. Having said that, look, if customers are demanding that people will have to be working from, let's say, approved facilities, then we will have to discuss with them and align accordingly.
Okay, thanks. Rajesh, my second question. We understand that Indian business is a post-merger event, that even if we shift the focus away from India business for a minute and assume stable revenue run rate over there, probably we can add back 70, 80 basis points of growth to the reported 2.4% CC number. That takes it to roughly 3.1% sort of a sequential growth in CC terms in June quarter, which is perhaps seasonally the strongest. Historically, at the industry level, TCS would have average growth in the north of 3.5% in June quarter.
Now that we are anticipating structurally higher growth rates post-COVID, how do we reconcile this tepid growth in seasonally the strongest quarter? Once the base effect is over in FY 2022, probably this run rate and trajectory can translate into the same 8%-9% sort of a growth that we were doing even before COVID. Any thoughts on that will be helpful.
I think seasonality and many of the growth trends that you spoken about is better understood at a market level. At 4.1%, most of these core markets that you're seeing, I think the growth trajectory is fairly strong. Especially coming on the back of this being the fourth quarter of sequential 4% growth. I think the numbers are there. Even more importantly, the main growth themes that you spoken about, we have been seeing increasing traction on that, and our confidence in that is strong and in fact getting stronger as many of the examples that I've played out.
How the specific quarter or the next quarter develops is difficult for us to call. We are hopeful for a return to strong growth on a secular basis. Irrespective of that, the business model and the business strategy is made to ensure that we are aligned to the right trends. In that area, we are quite confident about our long-term bets on the cloud transformation, as well as our increasing focus on what we call the growth and transformation side. We are quite overall happy and confident about the trajectory.
Okay. Thanks. That's it from my side, and all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Diviya Nagarajan from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question. First question Rajesh, with on pricing. I think we are probably in the most conducive environment for pricing increases that we've been in a long time. Could you kind of throw some light on what you're seeing in terms of pricing overall for the company and what you're seeing for the digital side as well? That's question number one.
The second one is to Samir. We started with the 25.5% kind of margin. Should we expect normal seasonality of improving margin trajectory as the year goes on, travel costs not included? The corollary to that would also be that when and how do we expect travel costs to trend this year?
Diviya, I want to make sure I understood your first question. You're asking about the pricing environment in the overall cloud demand rate?
Overall, and specifically with digital as well, specifically, if I was to refine that further, are you able to push through price increases or cost of living increases given that you are in an increasing demand as well as tightening supply situation?
Yeah. That, Diviya, I think we've spoken about it in the past also. As I said, our pricing strategy is built on fairly long-term relationships with customers and is not very volatile to specific demand trends. The second part of your question is the more relevant one. Typically, in a positive environment like what we have, some of the contractual provisions like COLA increases and all go through much more easier. As also, we have a much more supportive environment in terms of distribution of skill sets across various price bands, et cetera. There is definitely a small long-term support coming out of the demand environment. Headline numbers and specific pricing is not very materially linked in our business model to short-term spot demand, as it were.
Yeah. Hi, Diviya. To your question on margins. As you have seen in the past, margins are usually lower in Q1, impacted by the normal increment cycles which we have. Also we have said that growth remains our biggest driver to margins. As we see growth kicking in back in, we should see the margins recovering from the Q1 impact, which we would usually have. Having said that, as you rightly asked, we are seeing uptick in many discretionary expenses. Travel this quarter also has a slight uptick, and we expect some of the discretionary expenses to get back to pre-pandemic level by the end of this year.
Sorry. What does that mean in terms of margin ranges as we go through the rest of the year and for the full year?
We'll have to wait and watch on that. We should be able to maintain margins or sustain margins.
Got it. Thanks. I'll come back for follow-up at a later time. Thanks. Wish you all the best for the rest of the year.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirus Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Congrats for a good execution outside India. Just the question in terms of the order book. Rajesh, can you share, last time we said that we had only one deal which was above $500 million. Is it possible to share the number of deals above $500 million? This time also the order book has been constituted by many small and medium-sized deals. Just a follow-up on that. For these smaller and medium-sized deals, how is the nature of the demand? Is it sticky deals where revenue can be annuity, or you have to replenish these smaller size deals each quarter, so the run on the ground could be higher, which may lead to high SG&A spend as a whole?
Sandeep, let me answer the second part of your question. The distribution of deals is fairly well-mixed between large and small ones. I would say that what you asked in terms of SG&A load, of course, that is higher on the smaller deals. But there is a fairly good distribution. Our overall SG&A load should not be any significantly different than what we have seen in the past. This is across markets, across all our major markets, and that's the kind of nature of deals that we're seeing. I didn't fully follow the first half of your question. Is that about the same mix of deals or?
Yeah. Rajesh, last time, I think we said out of $9 billion order book, there was only one deal above $500 million.
Right.
Share that number for this year?
It is a similar trend this time also. We don't even have a deal above $500 million in this. The largest is about $400 million. We have a fairly large set of deals in that category. Overall, it's well-distributed. There is no dependence on one single deal, which has been the case for the last few quarters, as you know.
Okay. Just a couple of more, if I can squeeze. Just a follow-up to Diviya's question. Rajesh, are you saying clients are receptive to consider a price increase because of the talent crunch even in the near to medium term, or it may happen over a longer period of time? Second, in terms of India business, what I understand, it's not a business which is lost, it's just the postponement. If it's a postponement, do you expect the full recovery by 2Q itself or maybe spread over 2Q to 4Q?
Yeah. Sandeep, the answer to the first question is that, as I said, in our business model, price volatility is fairly low on both sides. Typically, businesses are built on long-term MSA. There is some amount of tactical change that happens, and the incremental deals or incremental client acquisition reflects the price environment of that time. Bulk of the business comes from existing relationships. There, the pricing is quite stable. We are not much into, what I said earlier, the spot market, as it were. The incremental deal signings happen. Greater support comes from the fact that revenue leakages and pricing increase opportunities in contract renewals and all, they are much more easier to enforce in an environment like this compared to when the demand environment is more stretched. It gives long-term lift and support, but not a very meaningful short-term flow-through.
On the second question on India, we are very right that it is not business lost per se, rather than it's more of business postponed. If things continue the way they are in the last few weeks, we should see an equally strong bounce back in the India market as it comes back to normalcy. We will wait and watch and see how it develops. It is a one-off kind of event.
Okay. Thanks for all the details.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Apurva Prasad from HDFC Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good evening. Rajesh, how should we think about Continental Europe as that's been the growth driver earlier, and it appears that deal wins have been strong, but the region decelerated last quarter. I think you mentioned in your earlier comments that you'll probably consolidate for another one or two quarters. Is that just base impact, or should we read anything beyond that?
The current quarter has significantly impacted the sequential 1.6. On the year-on-year basis, it's some 19%. Sequential 1.6 is impacted by the fact that we grew 8.5% last quarter in Europe. There is definitely that, and that'll have another one or two quarters of impact, as we digest that and restructure that relationship. Overall demand environment in Europe continues to be very strong. We are seeing good traction in transmitted deals. Europe has also used this opportunity to embrace offshoring in a much larger way. It is very encouraging from a longer-term business model perspective. We are also seeing parts of manufacturing return significantly in Europe on the industrial side, not as much on the automotive side. Automotive U.S., we have seen very strong recovery, industrial manufacturing, we have seen good recovery, especially greater penetration into many segments that we were earlier not that present in.
We are also seeing retail, I think I mentioned earlier. Travel and transportation, once again, North America is leading the recovery, but we think that that will come through. We are again seeing penetration into newer segments like rail and other areas which traditionally we were not present. Overall, I'm very positive about Europe, both on the demand side as well as on the revenue side.
Okay. My second question is for Samir. You mentioned discretionary spend outside travel seeing an uptick and hitting pre-pandemic in three to four quarters. What do you think are offsets here in order to hold on to margins, especially as we see attrition looking to head towards double-digit?
We would expect the discretionary spend uptaking would definitely be there. We'll have to rely on other levers, including growth being one of the key levers, and also looking at probably differential pricing to offset that. We would look towards all the measures available to help us sustain margins.
Okay. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Gaurav Rateria from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. Two questions. Firstly, the book-to-bill ratio historically used to be 1x , 1.1x , and now it has been sustainably above 1.4x in the last few quarters. Should one read that as a better revenue visibility over the coming quarter versus the usual year? Should one read that as a change in the average tenure of the deal? That's my first question.
Look, some of the cloud and large-scale technology transformation deal, definitely tenure has increased in the recent past, in the last year or so. There is definitely some amount of that factor at play. Beyond that, it's early stages yet to say what this is, because as you know, we have been reporting this only for the last two years, and I think the ratios you're referring to come from other business models. We'll have to wait and see what the stable ratios for our business model are.
Okay. Secondly, just want to understand the growth and transformation deals in which we are winning our fair share, how the deals are originated. In the sense historically, one would expect the consulting companies to be advising on some of these deals, which can flow through either to the same consulting companies or to the outsourcing companies. Just trying to understand how the difference in the origination of deals have happened for these kind of opportunities, which probably we were not participating couple of years back?
Absolutely. I will go back to couple of examples that I actually touched upon in my opening comments. If you look at traditionally on the M&A side, we used to participate on the far end of the transformation side, the technology integration per se, though that used to be a significant part of the value driver. If you look at most M&A transactions, the most definite and called-out value is the synergy benefit. Bulk of the synergy benefit really comes from technology integration and rationalization of processes. We would participate at only the technology level. What we're doing is we are now proactively in scenarios like that, going to customers and putting out our point of view on what that strategy ought to be.
That is allowing us a seat at the table all the way up to actually the day-one planning and integration management office. An example is the one that we spoke about, where a biopharma company acquired a company in what is known as cosmetic healthcare or cosmetic drugs. The portfolios were quite different. There were parts of the portfolio that could be integrated, parts of the portfolio that requires a different supply chain and a different customer front end. Because of our deep contextual knowledge of what their systems were and what parts of their systems could be exposed to be able to support the new business models, we were able to put out a very proactive pitch to them saying that we can significantly accelerate this integration by following this strategy.
Accelerate the realization of the $2 billion synergy value that they had shared with the market. That allowed us a seat at the table in terms of designing that and thinking through the options of that integration and being part of what is known as the integration management office and designing what is called day-one operating strategy. It is in many ways us actually becoming more aware of the knowledge that we have, being able to package and articulate it better, and then being able to convert that into incremental services and opportunities up that chain or in the front end of that chain. That's a classic example of what we're trying to achieve here.
Building on our trusted relationships, building on the contextual knowledge that we have, and then reaching forward and investing in those incremental consulting capabilities and skill sets that are required so that we are putting out an integrated, seamless proposition which competes against an outside-in proposition that a traditional consulting model brings about. That's the nature of the change that we're seeking to engineer here. Early signs of success are very encouraging.
Great. Thank you for the elaborate answer. If I may just squeeze in last question for Samir, your comment on stable margin outlook is for the full year, right? Sustained margin at the last year level, is that correct understanding? Thank you.
Yes, absolutely. I'm talking about long-term structural margins to be sustained, and it's for the full year.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ruchi Burde from BOB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. My question is to Milind. Could you share your thoughts about the talent market situation at present and some qualitative colors regarding the talent induction which TCS is adding, maybe in terms of the mix between the fresher and experienced professionals, the locations? Are we doing more offshore, or we are committed to the on-site local hiring agenda even at the current moment?
I think our model is very strong, and we have been using this for many years now. That remains the same. Basically, we hired close to 40,000 trainees last year from the campus. We will do the same thing with more numbers this year. Job market is hot. Yes, there will be some impact on attrition. Like I said earlier, it is something which is part of our operating model, and we will manage that. I don't think it will have an impact in anything specifically on any business parameters materially. The fact that we are continuing to hire not only in India, but we actually strengthen our overall local hiring across the globe, and that continues.
For example, a very large number of trainees of the order of between 2,000 and 3,000 trainees we'll hire in U.S. again this year. Similar numbers are there in APAC, in LATAM, and we also are building now a training base in Europe and U.K. I think from a talent standpoint and our operating model standpoint, and most importantly, our own internal talent development machinery, which is industrious. All of these factors when they come together, we actually create an operating model which can deal with any of these external environment parameters in a very healthy manner.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is on the line of Girish Pai from Nirmal Bang. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Rajesh, I had a couple of questions on demand. You mentioned that last couple of quarters we've not clocked large deals. You had the largest deal was $1 million this quarter, or rather in Q1, the previous quarter it was $500 million. The question is, aren't there large deals in the market anymore, or are you walking away from large deals because they did not meet your profitability criteria?
No, we are not walking away from large deals. I think we continue to participate. We are quite disciplined in our approach. We are also tactically quite competitive. It is just the nature of deal closures that we have had and the kind of pipeline that we are focusing on. It's also impacted by our increasing focus on the G&T kind of engagements and traction that we're gaining. As a strategy, we are focused on the full spectrum, and we absolutely are very keen and participating in many such ones, whether it be the large one that you spoke about last quarter.
Last quarter, I said $500 million+, rather, which was the Deutsche Bank deal in Germany we've spoken about in the past, the quarter before, about Prudential deal in Ireland. Large transformative, even outsourcing-led deals. We are very focused on it. It's a sweet spot for us.
The second question had to do with pipeline. Your order inflow numbers have been growing in the teens, high teens last quarter. Is the pipeline also growing at that same rate, or is it growing faster, or your growth in the order inflow largely market share gain driven?
Our pipeline numbers are growing. We are not directly sharing that because also, as I said, we are stabilizing these metrics. Our typical target win rates are different, and we are taking a more liberal view on what we want to participate. We are seeking to participate more than what we were traditionally seeking, and that is driving a much higher pipeline growth. I wouldn't directly relate that to revenue. It's part of the overall transformation that we are going through.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, t hat was the last question for today. I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you, operator. Some of the growth and transformation themes we have been talking about are only strengthening as evidenced by the robust growth in our major markets and across industry verticals, as well as strong deal wins in Q1. With growth returning, we had robust client additions across all revenue buckets this quarter, which is an important measure of depth of our customer relationships. Our margins continue to be industry-leading, and we believe will sustain going ahead. It also gives us the wherewithal to continue investing in building the capabilities needed to expand our footprint in the growth and transformation opportunity.
On the people front, we had an all-time high net addition in Q1. Our attrition continues to be low at this point, but we're watching carefully, given the strong demand for high-quality digital talent in the market. Our pan-India vaccination drive has progressed well. Over 70% of our employees are now vaccinated, at least with the first shot. We expect to cover all TCSers and their families by September. Thank you all for joining us on this call today. Enjoy the rest of the evening or day. Do stay safe. Thank you.
Thank you, members of the management. On behalf of TCS, that concludes this conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your line.