Welcome, Bienvenue! [Foreign language] I am Jamie Bracewell, Vice President of Marketing with Alithya since May 2020. We are so delighted to have you here with us today, whether you're in person in Montreal or online with us. Before we get started, a little bit of housekeeping. So today's presentations may contain forward-looking information and statements, including plans and expectations based on management's assumptions and estimates, as well as non-IFRS and other financial measures. These are qualified by the forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures disclaimer that appear on the screen, and we encourage that you do read these messages. Also, we would like to acknowledge that the lands we are located on are unceded Indigenous lands, and we respect the continued connections with the past, present, and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community. So let's take a look at today's agenda.
We'll kick it off with our President, Paul Raymond. He'll give you a deeper dive into our three-year plan. He will be followed by Debbie Di Gregorio, who is our interim CFO, and she'll take you through our financials. Then Bernard Dockrill, our COO, will tell you a little bit more how we plan to gather more clients with a focus on industry and IP. Wrapping up will be our Chief Human Capital Officer, Julia Cirillo, as she talks about something that we believe is key to our future growth, which is our people. The session is pretty tight today. We do not have a break planned. You may wonder about questions. There will be a question-and-answer period at the end of the presentation.
If you're in the room, you will be able to either scan the QR code or we will have a live mic at the end. If you're online, you'll be able to type your questions into the box at the bottom of the screen, and our team here will catch that question. So in addition to the information that is being presented here today, we also released 12 videos to our website within the last 24 hours. You will receive a link to these videos by email after this event. You will see some snippets from these videos later today, and we really encourage you, though, to take the time afterwards and watch these videos because we believe you will gain additional insights into our plans that you'll find of value.
So five of the videos that I mentioned are going to be about industry, and four of the others are about topics that we believe are a vital part of our process going forward. They include AI, strategic sourcing, strategic consulting, sorry, smart shoring, and then also business transformation. All of these videos are led by a practice manager or a management team member here at Alithya, and they give additional insights like the size of the market, the opportunities that we see, strengths we have so far, and our additional plans that we have in mind to do more good in these terms and areas. Finally, there's a video from Microsoft that talks about the power of our partnership, and also two videos from our clients, Beneva and Delta Dental of California. And now I'll turn the presentation over to Paul Raymond.
Can you hear me okay? We're good. All right, so very happy to be today. There's a room up front, Robert, you know, chairs up here. See, how to go unnoticed. Welcome, very happy to be with you here today to share some insights. I'm not alone. The leaders of the organization are here as well. We're gonna go into more depth into some of the parts of our strategic plan. As Jamie said, I do encourage you to go check out the videos. We couldn't get everybody here today, or else you'd be here for 24 hours. We tried to compress these videos into five to 10 minutes on each of these subjects that we're gonna cover today.
So if you wanna go one level further, deeper into what we're doing, encourage you to go take the time. So, we're gonna be sharing a lot of data today, a lot of insights from that data and where we're going. We've gone through significant growth in the past five years since going public. Of course, we're in a growing industry, and most of our clients are in the essential services area, so very happy where we're at. Yet, I think, there's the elephant in the room that I'd like to address right off the bat.
Even though we've been growing and doing really well, if you look at the surveys that are being done in our industry, one of those surveys is actually saying that 88% of the people who actually buy technology, so the decision-makers in organizations, don't think they're differentiators, right? They think that all these suppliers are pretty much the same. Today, one of our objective is explain to everybody how we differentiate, what we're doing different, and you should be leaving here today with a few of those, at least understand it better. Where are we going? Many years ago, after I graduated in computer engineering, I was on the client side of the business, and we were using consultants. I was not impressed.
We spent more time teaching the consultants what to do than the other way around. And then to me, the idea for Alithya was born that day, and that our vision is to become that trusted advisor for our clients who call when they need real answers on things that they need help with. Technology is very confusing. It's growing and changing at an ever-increasing speed, and we wanna make sure that we're there to help our clients navigate through that. So the vision, it drives everything that we do, right? So since going public five years ago, our revenues have increased 134%, right? Our gross margin dollars have increased 175%. Our EBITDA dollars have increased over 470%.
This is despite the global pandemic recession and fighting with global players. So we like to say we fight above our weight, and we like to win, so you can say that even though our valuation hasn't followed all that, that we should be thinking of something different. Our plan is to stay the course. We wanna focus on organic, profitable growth for the company and keep looking at potential acquisitions to accelerate that. I was quoting Jeff Bezos this morning on our AGM. For those of you who had a chance to participate, I'll repeat myself, but in 2000, the market valuation for Amazon took a serious dive, like many other tech companies, and he was quoting Benjamin Graham, and he was saying, "You know, the stock market, in the short term, is like a voting machine.
In the long term, it weighs... it's like a scale in a way." So we basically believe that by focusing on our plan, and I'll go through some numbers today with the rest of the team, that eventually we will be weighted. So, the results of this plan give us these high-level directions or the outlook that I'd like to share. So on the growth side, we tried to align with what we're seeing in the market right now, the 5%-10% of organic growth, of profitable organic growth. On the revenue side, we believe with our current balance sheet, we can do about CAD 150 million of additional revenue from acquisitions over the next three years.
And finally, we believe that combining those things and the added scale and focus on the higher value parts of the market, that we can bring our EBITDA into the 11%-13% range over three years. That's the plan, and that's what we're trying to do, that's what you're gonna hear about today, and how we're gonna get there. Right. So, being a trusted advisor, the success of our business depends on our reputation. This is what our clients look at, our existing clients. It's gonna be based on what we did last week and the day before. What we did last year doesn't count anymore. You have to deliver every day, and for the future clients who don't know us, they go back and check the references with our existing clients.
The satisfaction level of our clients is something we measure on a regular basis throughout the year. It's not a one-time thing at the end of the year, it's throughout the year, on every project, for every client. This is very important to us, and Bernard is gonna go into more detail in that as part of his presentation. That satisfaction is a direct result of the quality of the work that our people do, right? If you have high-quality people that are highly motivated, they deliver great results. We also measure that. That's the employee engagement, and Julia's gonna talk about that in more detail going forward, how we're gonna keep that up there and improve it. All right? We're gonna cover that as well.
You'll also get insights on the different industry verticals that we're in today. Like I mentioned, there's some videos on this out there. I encourage you to go watch them. You're gonna see some snippet on some of these today. If you look at the industries that we're at, these are the industries that spend the most on technology as a percentage of revenue. They also provide some good countercyclical protection for us. So as an example, in the past year, the rapid fluctuation in interest rates, you know, really impacted the financial sector, and if you, you know, by deduction, if you look at this, 33% of our revenue is from financial services. So yeah, we had an impact last year on our revenues tied to that, but the others performed really well.
So again, depending on how the economy is doing, we believe that we're in the right sectors. So again, encourage you to go see those videos. There's some really good stuff on there. In the past year, we've also adjusted our branding to make sure that our, our clients and our people meeting with the clients is very clear on what we do. Not just collection of acquisitions, but one Alithya. So we go to market by industry. When we talk to our clients, they wanna know what we're doing for the other similar company out there and how we can help them get better. To do that, on the new clients, we also use accelerators that help us open the doors. This is IP that we own or that we've built over time, that has success. And we also leverage our partners.
We have some industry-leading partners in key niche markets of what we do, and we go to market with them a lot. So again, there's gonna be more information on this later today, so I won't talk about the everything. We've also changed the way that we present our services to clients. This is to get to the business discussions before we get to the technology discussions, right? So this is not an all-encompassing list, but it gives you an idea of the subjects that our clients like to talk about and how we can get those conversations going. And again, you're gonna see some of the excerpts of those videos today, but I encourage you to go see it on the website. Right. So this one will be interesting.
So we know what the future looks like. There's a lot of case studies in our industry of how scale impacts businesses like ours. So I have two here that most of you probably know. So basically what we've seen, if you look in case number one, you can see a really quick progression between the 7%-15% range in terms of EBITDA, right? And this was tied to some very large transactions. And then a very slow progress from 15%-20%, right? One was five years, the other one was twenty years. If you look in case number two, the progress from 8%-14% was a bit faster because of...
It was a bit slower, sorry, because of the organic way of getting there, and then there were several very important transactions that got them to the 20% range within five years. There are many other cases like this. If you look at other companies in our industry, there seems to be a ceiling around 20% in our industry, but the big change seems to happen around 15% in terms of the scale. So we need to get to that level as fast as we can, and that's why if you look at where we're at today, we're kind of at that turning point between the 7-8% and the 15%, where we believe there's a lot of upside. Okay? So the plan.
The goal today, like I said, try to explain how we're gonna differentiate going forward, what we're keeping from what we've been doing well, and how do we, we expand on that. You'll hear from our industry experts and from our practice. You'll hear about the solution-based accelerators that I talked about. You're gonna hear about some of the market-leading solutions that we have, and you'll also hear about the automation smart shoring. So you're gonna hear about, like, four key items that are part of our strategy going forward. All right? So, I guess first comment, this plan wasn't done in a vacuum, right? We've consulted with all of our stakeholders, our own people. We do surveys using Officevibe on a regular basis.
We've also surveyed them on the strategic plan and their input for that. Some of the people in this room have been approached and brainstormed with. So our investors, our people, our leaders, our clients, our partners, our board members, everybody's been solicited in the process. We also do off-sites with our senior leadership team to make sure that feedback comes into our strategy and that we have alignment, so that's an annual meeting. We do these quarterly updates with the senior leadership team around this. We believe we've really turned every rock in terms of looking at the plan and what we're gonna do and how we go forward. So, a lot of detail, and we're just gonna cover the tip of the iceberg today, so...
Or else we'd be here for a while. All right. So the new plan is in three sections, and again, Bernard is gonna talk about the client side today, and Julia will talk about the employees. You'll hear some numbers, but basically, these are our three key stakeholders, right? So in order to become the trusted advisors to our clients, we need to get the critical mass. Why? Because if we wanna be able to do the most critical projects, the most strategic projects of our clients, well, you wanna make sure you're big enough to do all those things. So we know that critical mass is an ongoing thing that we need to keep working on. Luckily for us, our people are also looking for bigger and better opportunities.
So as we grow faster, we're also able to attract and retain the best in the industry who want to be part of that and work on bigger and better projects as we go, right? So, if we want to be able to execute that, we also need the support of our investors, right? So we realize that if we wanna get weighted, the investors also want a return on their investment, so we got to show that we can deliver on this gradually over the next three years if we want to see the investors support the plan. All right? So you'll hear about all of those. A lot of companies in our industry start as what we call staff augmentation. They get a call, they send somebody. It's very difficult to differentiate.
It's easy to get in, so a lot of competition, and you win on price. So whoever has the lowest price person or individual that meets the minimum requirement wins. The only way to really make money in that business is scale. So a lot of the companies who are successful in this are very large global companies that specialize in staffing. Very difficult to compete with that on a local basis or as a niche company. Then you kind of have the next level, which are the project-based providers, very often niche companies that are very specialized technically in a certain technology that'll do projects. Very often, these projects are actually managed by the client, so either you're providing specialists, or sometimes you'll take over the whole project.
But again, it's very technically driven, usually some kind of RFP. Price is still a big chunk of it, but you need to be one level above. Then you get into the kind of the solution base. This is where you basically sell ideas, and based on your track record of delivering similar solutions, where you can actually do the overall project with your own people. So very. You can control the asset or the resource that you're gonna be using.
So in the first two, there's a lot of subcontractors, a lot of freelance players, a lot of stuff you don't control, whereas when you get into the solution base business and up, it's your own people that you can invest in. You can leverage offshore, you can package your people to deliver something. You have a track record of delivering, and you can actually integrate IP in there that differentiates you, right? Then you kind of have the strategic partners, which are usually present in many different areas of the organization. Sometimes we have these master service agreements, or MSAs, that we call them, where you're doing multiple different projects for a client. You have a long-term relationship. You're there because we've delivered in the past, and they keep giving you projects.
Where we strive to be, aspire to be in all of our clients, is really at that trusted advisor level, where you're the first they think of when they pick up the phone because they have a problem with a certain technology issue. That's where we wanna be. That's where we're going towards. We're there in certain areas. We're not there everywhere, so we pick our battles in the areas where we know we can excel and differentiate. Right? When you get to there, price is not the only issue. People are looking for business outcomes. You're dealing with the C-suite, and they're much more concerned with your ability to deliver because you're gonna impact their business if you don't. It's not about a 10-dollar-an-hour difference, it's about: Can you keep my business running or make it more efficient and make it better?
That's where we're going. Today, if you look at our people footprint, you'll notice that it's very different than our revenue footprint, right? I'll take the example of the U.S. You see that 25% of our people are based in the U.S., but it's almost 40% of our revenue. Saying, "So what?" If you look at the industry that we're in, we're in the services, IT services industry. It's now the largest. Of all of the IT spend out there, the largest portion is now. It's the first time this year and going forward. It's gonna stay that way. It is the largest proportionally to the other type of spends in technology. 70% of that spend is between Western Europe and North America. Okay?
So you can imagine the next number is 44% of that is the U.S. Canada is 2.4%-ish. If you look in terms of opportunity for growth for us, based on what we do, the U.S. is the largest market, and we're already there, and it's 40% of our business. If you've seen the results in the last quarter, our growth in the U.S. is much faster than the rest of the organization, and it's normal. It's just the size of the market, the size of the opportunity, and our positioning in that market today, right? It's also where, as you can see from the differentials in the number, where we are leveraging the most smart shoring side of our business today, and where there's the greatest potential to do more, right?
Because of the differential in cost and availability of talent in the U.S. versus some of the other jurisdictions that we're in, there's a huge opportunity for us to do more offshore and nearshore from Canada for some of our U.S. clients, which we do today. So... and that means what? Less subcontractors, more permanent employees, more smart shoring, more and more and more of everything. Okay? So again, you're gonna see a lot more of that, and it also impacts our margin expansion, right? I mentioned the videos. Is this where I play one? No, Benjamin is saying no, he's gonna wait. Okay. Now let's talk about M&A a bit. I get a lot of questions on M&A. We haven't done an acquisition in almost two years, and we had a pretty good, pretty good sequence before that.
Pretty good pace. Acquisitions have been key to us getting where we're at today. They're gonna be key in our future plans as well, and maybe a little bit more insight on that is, if you look at our business today, we've converted all of these past acquisitions into market-leading or niche practices in the areas we're at. So we're number one in some key markets in ERP because of the acquisitions we've done. We're very present in AI and IP-driven solutions because of that, and digital adoption, and strategic consulting. In many of these areas, the practice that we have today came from a much smaller acquisition that we were able to expand by leveraging across many clients. So we're very good at that, and we plan on continuing to do it. Okay?
From a numbers perspective, so the objective is very clear. We figure CAD 150 million is doable with our current cash flow. We like the high-margin tuck-ins that we can bring on board, where the leadership team wants to stick around, and where we can deploy it into the other organizations, other clients, and make them accretive. We can complete those deals by focusing on the key criteria that we usually use in the past, you know, making sure that people want to stick around, focusing on the right ones with the right fit, that wanna join. There was a significant slowdown, not just for us, but in the whole industry, since 2022 on the M&A side.
It's picked up a bit in the last year, but the deal numbers have picked up a lot, but the deal sizes are still pretty low, from what we're looking. But there is an increase in the transaction. I'll talk about that, a bit more. And the other thing that we know, and Debbie's gonna go over some numbers, we know we can deleverage very fast by the cash generation that we have. So that's where these numbers and how we came up with them, we believe, are manageable for what we have today with the current condition of the stock price. So what are we looking for in terms of criteria? Well, industry first, right? So again, here we talk to our clients, and we say, basically, "What else do you need?" Right?
So we go see a large banking client and say, "Based on what we've done or what you've seen, what else do we need to add?" That drives what we need in terms of the capabilities that we look for, that you see on here. It also changes our outlook in terms of the client size. So we look for targets that are re-addressing larger clients with a very niche offering, or a target that has a niche offering that we know we can cross-sell to our existing clients, larger clients, right? So it's either/or. And of course, all the key things that are important to us, that if we get them thrown in, to us, it's kind of a cherry on the cake, right?
So if we can have additional global delivery that comes with the acquisition or additional IP, so all these things are things that we look at when we go through the criteria. Okay. On the valuation side, so I've talked about it a lot. You've heard me say we're trading at a discount. I think our valuation right now is around 7x EBITDA. The industry average is about double that. And I wanted to comment on these two recent acquisitions, because somebody could say, Well, Paul, there's no way you can do a deal if you're trading at seven, and these companies are going at 14x, 16x, 17x EBITDA. We actually see this as an opportunity, right? So we know we're undervalued.
When we do our transactions, leveraging our cash, there's always a stock component, right? So we wanna make sure that whoever's joining us is ready to put some skin in the game, and they wanna stick around and create value. So in the past few acquisition, it's been 75% in cash, 25% in stock. We want the people to stick around, we want them to build equity, and we want them to want to create value. So we actually see this as a potential upside for the sellers, and it's been positive so far in our discussions, especially at the price right now. All right?
We will come back at the end for questions if you wanna deep dive into this, but, I'll now pass it over to Debbie to come talk about some of the financial numbers. Debbie?
Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Debbie DiGregorio, and I am the Interim CFO at Alithya. I joined Alithya in 2018 , prior to the company going public in November of that year. Since then, I've seen a tremendous amount of growth, transformation, and change at Alithya. As such, I would like to share with you our financial evolution journey this afternoon. First, let's look at long-term revenue performance. As we can see from the chart, long-term revenue has been trailing upwards since fiscal 2021 . This is due to growth from our acquisitions, organic growth, and we have been helped by some favorable foreign exchange impacts.
As previously reported, on a quarterly basis in fiscal 2024, revenues from our existing clients, which we had in the previous year last year, generated more than 80% of our revenues. This demonstrates our strong customer relationships and satisfaction and supports our vision of being the trusted advisor to our clients. As we continue to focus on higher value services, the average deal size of our projects are trending upward. We have seen between fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2024, the number of clients with revenues above CAD 3 million has grown by 76%. This is despite some of the current market conditions. Now, let's take a look at our bookings evolution. Our bookings here on a quarterly basis generally trend upwards. However, as we know, bookings are cyclical. As project size increases, the approval cycle for the bookings do become longer.
Approval processes at larger clients are generally more formal, more structured, and contain more decision-makers. When looking at bookings and book-to-bill ratio on an annual basis from fiscal 2021 to 2024, excluding revenue from the two long-term contracts signed as part of the acquisition in Q1 2022, our book-to-bill ratios have been above one. In addition, in recent quarters, bookings have been affected by ongoing reduction in lower margin businesses in Canada, partially offset by our business in the U.S., in particular, our Oracle and Microsoft cloud businesses. So on that, let's look at our gross margin performance next. Our focus continues to be on gross margin improvement. As we can see from the blue line, gross margin as a percentage of revenues have been showing a steady trending upward.
On an annual basis, gross margins between fiscal 2022, 2023, and 2024 have gone from 26.5% to 29% to 30.4%, with a high point watermark of 32.1% in Q4 of our last fiscal year. The lower margin trending in fiscal 2022 was a result of an acquisition, where there was a higher proportion of revenue from billable consultants versus employees, who typically have lower margins and bring down the averages. As we integrated the business within Alithya's operations, we were able to transform the business and realize margin improvements, as can be seen by the upward trending of the curve thereafter. Even in periods of declining revenues, we continue to improve our gross margin performance, as demonstrated in the recent quarters. As we continue to focus on higher value services, higher utilization, and-...
improved project performance, decrease in the use of subcontractors, and leverage on our smart shoring, management believes we should continue to see long-term growth with some quarterly variations. Quarters are impacted by the number of working days, in addition to customer investment cycles and our acquisition activities. Let's look at some of our long-term performance indicators. If we look at the blue Adjusted EBITDA margin, we see a steady trending upwards of the margin. On an annual basis from fiscal 2022, 2023, and 2024, the averages were 5.2%, 6.7%, sorry, 6.9%, and 7.2% Adjusted EBITDA margin, showing a nice trending upwards. This can be attributable to our focus on the value-added services, our continued focus on long-term margin improvements, as previously discussed, and our focus on our cost structure.
As we've seen through the SG&A decreases of CAD 4.9 million, or 3.9%, in fiscal 2024, which brought us to CAD 121.6 million, versus fiscal 2023 at CAD 125.5 million. This demonstrates our commitment and our continued efforts towards operational performance. Adjusted EBITDA held steady in fiscal 2024 at CAD 35.4 million versus CAD 36.1 million, and this is despite a 6% in revenue reduction in fiscal 2024 compared to the fiscal 2023. Net loss and adjusted net earnings continue to trend positively with the gross margin improvements that we're working on and the cost structure efforts, which has helped offset some of the soft revenue growth in the last couple of quarters. This has resulted in a net adjust...
Sorry, this has resulted in adjusted net earnings per share of CAD 0.13 for fiscal 2024. Talking about liquidity and capital allocation, our goal is to continue deleveraging. Through diligent managing of our net cash from operating activities and focusing that cash on net debt reduction, we will continue to deleveraging. Our deleveraging will provide us a good positioning when the right acquisition opportunity presents itself. On the net debt curve, we see positive impacts from our cash management, but we also see impacts from acquisitions and from balance of sale payments. The spike in Q2 fiscal 2023 is from the closing payment related to the Datum acquisition. Balance of sale payments, which cover a period of usually two to three years from the closing date, along with another acquisition closing payment, are the reason for the fiscal 2022 upward curve.
The curve can also be negatively impacted by vacation and other time off, which historically tends to occur in our Q2 of our fiscal year. Looking at net debt to trailing twelve-month Adjusted EBITDA is trending downwards as we continue to deleverage. Q2 fiscal 2022 represented a high of 5.4 times, with Q1 fiscal 2024 at 2.7 times, bringing us back below the 3. In conclusion, I would like to share with you why we believe we are well positioned for the future. This is based on three factors: Our gross margin. So our focus remains on improving gross margins by leveraging previously outlined initiatives and prioritizing high-value offerings. Our cost structure. We are consistently and carefully optimizing our cost structure to ensure efficient and long-term performance within Alithya. Our deleveraging.
We maintain a strong commitment to cash management, enabling deleveraging and allowing for acquisitions through the strategic use of increased debt positions. These factors will position us well for sustainable growth, especially once revenue growth resumes through many of the initiatives presented here today, and when the corrective accretive M&A opportunities present themselves. We look forward to the future. Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Debbie, and good afternoon to everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our Investors Day. My name is Bernard Dockrill. I joined Alithya in January of 2023 as Chief Operating Officer, and today I'll dive into some details on our three-year strategic plan. Before we go into that, I did want to share with you some market statistics here on why we think we are in a great place to achieve our objectives. And this data is all from Gartner, but as we look at the worldwide enterprise IT spending across all industries, Gartner predicts the market will increase by 9.2% in the next year to $4.1 trillion, and over the next five years, on average, it will continue to increase at 9.2%.
As Paul mentioned before, as we look at the worldwide IT services market, it is forecast to grow by 7.1% in 2024, and will reach almost 2.4 trillion by 2028. Further looking at it in our core geographies in North America, Paul mentioned the 44.6% of the global IT services market is spent here in North America, and is forecasted to grow by 8% over the next five years. If we add the European markets where we operate, in France and the U.K., it adds another close to 11%. A very strong market for us to offer our services. Looking at the industries, our core industries account for over 67% of the global IT services spend across all core Alithya industries, those being financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, and energy.
Taking a further deep dive into kind of some of the services we deliver, a large concentration of our services are around application implementations and managed services, and that market reached $444 billion in the last year and is expected to continue to grow. So with all that said, I think Paul summarizes this best: There will be more technology in our lives 10 years from now than there is today. So we're very optimistic, being in this market, that there is a market for us to thrive. So how will we capitalize on this market? Well, it starts with the strong foundation that we have today. Our offerings go across the full spectrum of IT services that our clients demand. Our strategic consulting helps our clients build those roadmaps on how they can leverage technology to achieve their mission.
Our enterprise transformation are all the offerings we have that help them implement that roadmap and to achieve those goals. That includes legacy application modernization, migration to the cloud, implementation of new software solutions such as ERP, supply chain, human capital, enterprise performance management. As well, we have offerings to harness the value of our customers' data through artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as many other offerings to implement their strategies. Finally, our business enablement services ensure that this technology that we adopt or implement for our clients is well adopted and generates the results they expect. We also focus on the industries where we have core expertise. In today's world, our industry expertise differentiates us. We've also invested in a lot of accelerators.
Paul mentioned our IP earlier, and these are solutions that we've invested in that help us differentiate, and many of these solutions are built on AI, such as our products of RapidSuite and AI-FI, and we continue to look at how we can leverage AI further in our offerings. Finally, we've committed to our partner ecosystem and have very strong relationships with our core partners, Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS, as well as several other niche vendors that offer us great services. Finally, the core to our foundation is our people. We have a very strong global and diverse team of talent, where we're able to provide our clients the right talent at the right location to provide the maximum value.
As Paul mentioned earlier, we spent this year and we updated our branding and our messaging, and we've updated the collateral on all of our core offerings on our website, so you can dig in deeper into each of these offerings. As well, as we talked about earlier, we've published several videos today which outline these services. So how are we going to achieve our strategic plan? We put together a plan today that will help us achieve the objectives that Paul laid out: 5%-10% annual growth, CAD 150 million worth of acquisitions over the next three years, and to return 11%-13% adjusted EBITDA margin. To do so, we have identified four priorities, or building blocks, if you will.
The first is leading with our industry knowledge and our expertise that has made us a trusted advisor today for so many of our clients. The second, we'll accelerate time to value with continued investment in our IP to have asset-based solutions. Third, continued commitment with our client or partners to collaborate on market-leading opportunities, as well as seek to add new partners to our ecosystem. And finally, to drive efficiencies, we'll continue to leverage our investments in smart shoring and automation to continue down this path. Throughout the rest of my presentation today, I will dive deeper into each one of these items. Starting with the first building block on our industry subject matter expertise. Our industry-first strategy differentiates us in the market. In today's world, technology is core to every industry.
To succeed, we can't only be experts in technology. We have to be experts in our clients' industries. Our subject matter expertise is deep in all of our target client industries. We have experts with decades of experience. Many have worked in industry prior to joining Alithya. For example, in the healthcare space, we focus on the provider space, where we are known for our ERP, supply chain finance, and human capital implementations. Also in healthcare, we focus on claims processing in the U.S. payer space, where we're well known for our efficiencies. In manufacturing, we have many expertise in multiple different sub verticals, specifically in process manufacturing around food and beverage and pharmaceuticals to highly regulated industries. Our professionals are well known and sought by our clients.
Also, in the energy space, our capabilities in the nuclear space around operational technology differentiate us in that market, especially here in Canada. So as we look at this and with our industry expertise, we have developed many solutions specific for industry in collaboration with our partners and clients.... Our thought leaders, our experts, are often sought out by our clients to help them with their perspectives and their thought leadership in developing their strategies to leverage technology within their organizations. And finally, as we do have deep knowledge in our industries, we're able to look at our offerings in one industry and find ways of taking those same offerings to other industries that have common processes. This allows us to create new revenue streams for our core offerings. So as Jamie mentioned at the beginning of our presentation, we put out five videos with our industry strategies.
So we have one for financial services, and insurance, energy, healthcare, and manufacturing. At this time, I'd like to play a short snippet from our healthcare strategy. This strategy is presented by Mark Hite. Mark Hite is a senior director in our healthcare practice. Can we play the video?
Alithya leverages asset-backed accelerators designed to deliver value to the healthcare sector by streamlining processes, enhancing data management, and reducing costs. These accelerators, which are pre-built tools and frameworks, can be tailored to specific healthcare needs, enabling faster deployment of digital solutions with reduced risk and cost. Along the way, our healthcare clients are facing unprecedented challenges, including recruitment and retention, and Alithya is committed to helping them navigate through turbulent times. Analytics, our clients can proactively monitor turnover to enable faster trend analysis and more effective talent strategies. Well, we see untapped growth potential in the healthcare market, and we have a clear vision to increase our market share to support the industry's increasing technology needs. Our growth strategy is based upon four pillars. First, enterprise analytics.
With the proliferation of data growing every day in healthcare, a focused strategy on how an organization will use that data clinically, operationally, and financially to manage and grow in the right way is more important than ever. Alithya is well positioned to leverage relationships and internal capabilities across our business pillars to present an agnostic approach to data warehousing and actionable analytics that will be driven through our incorporated analytic assessments. Second, Alithya is embracing and integrating generative AI into our service offerings, developing tools that our clients can use to generate actionable insights from vast datasets, ultimately transforming the way healthcare decisions are made. By leveraging the advanced AI capabilities embedded in Oracle and Microsoft platforms, Alithya is well positioned to help organizations achieve their objectives.
Combined with our proprietary robotic process automation solutions, we enable clients to shift their focus away from time-consuming manual tasks and to reinvest their human resources in patient care and expanding services. Third, Alithya's cybersecurity expertise can be adapted for the healthcare market to help clients navigate compliance issues, secure their data and operations, and build a cyber risk-aware culture, and fourth, from a payer perspective, growing demand for rehosting, replatforming, and rearchitecting legacy mainframe applications is a pivotal growth driver that Alithya addresses within the healthcare sector.
So Mark highlighted in that video one of our offerings around cybersecurity, and when I talked about taking one offering from one industry to another, we're currently taking that offering from our nuclear and our public sector into our healthcare space, and that's what he was referencing there. So our second building block is our IP and our partners' IP. And this IP allows us to accelerate the time to value for our clients by coming to the table with asset-based solutions that are pre-developed. This allows us to fuel a growth in a competitive market with differentiated pre-existing assets. These assets run the gamut from accelerators to add-ons to our partners' IP, as well as pre-existing assets that we have.
With that, you know, if I take a look at our Rapid Suite and our AI-FI, very much heavily leveraging AI, artificial intelligence, and this continues to be an investment for us as we continue to adopt the new technologies into our existing portfolio of solutions, as well as bring new solutions to the market based on this technology. Having these asset-based solutions, it improves our gross margin from these accelerators. As we've made the investments up front, we have higher value to our customers. Our customers see more value, and they're willing to pay more, so it becomes a win-win for both Alithya and our clients. As well, we get increased client retention and recurring revenue, as much of these services are sold on a subscription or a licensing basis or through a managed services agreement with a long-term contract.
As well, we get repeat project-based revenues as we're deploying the same solution over and over from client to client. And as you can imagine, as we do this deployments over and over, we become more efficient, and we're able to drive higher margins through these repeat deployments. At the bottom of the screen here, you can see several of the samples of our solutions that we have built and continue to invest in. And again, these are on our website, and you can find more details on the solutions and the business challenges that they do solve. When it comes to our assets, I would wanna take a couple minutes here... Oh, sorry, before I jump into that.
Going back to the last three years and looking at our revenues that we've generated from our software, and this is through acquisitions as well as investments we've made, our revenue from IP has grown from 2.8% to 12.1%, or 930 basis points over that time. And again, continuing to invest in these assets, they typically drive higher margins and a lot more repeat business, so we continue to find solutions. As Paul mentioned, part of our M&A strategy before is looking for companies that do have these asset-based solutions that are in demand by our clients and help differentiate us in the market. I did want to take some time right now again, to play a short excerpt from another one of our videos.
We're going to play an excerpt from our artificial intelligence video. Amar Bukkasagaram, who runs our industry solutions team that manages all of our products, as well as our chief strategist on artificial intelligence. Can we play the video?
Now, as Alithya navigates the rapidly evolving AI landscape, we are seeing several mega trends emerge that are reshaping how businesses operate and compete. Many clients operate in highly regulated industries, and they must increase their operational efficiencies to remain competitive. Clients that achieve higher operational efficiencies can offer competitive pricing, invest in innovation, and ultimately achieve higher profitability. That is where Alithya leverages its AI accelerators. For example, our Alithya Rapid Suite is a powerful combination of proprietary solutions that we have developed to help solve complex challenges. Alithya Rapid Suite is being leveraged by many of our clients in verticals such as healthcare, government, manufacturing, and financial services. Rapid Suite's capabilities enable the processing of more than 100+ million healthcare documents per year.
For capital markets, Alithya developed and implemented a suite of AI-embedded products that include trade surveillance, enabling compliance officers to mine and filter through alerts and efficiently run complex queries for ad hoc and standard reporting. Additionally, robotic process automation, or RPA, is a game changer for clients seeking to drive operational efficiencies and leverage technology to improve quality. Recently, Alithya launched a new solution that enables organizations to more easily transition RPA workflows and actions between other RPA tools and Microsoft Power Automate with minimal disruption and at reduced cost. This is another demonstration of how we leverage our partnerships to bring increased value to our clients.
Our third building block is all around our partners. We have had a lot of success over the years working with our partners, and they've helped us grow to where we are today, and this is going to continue to be a big part of our strategy as we go forward. We're able to drive growth with higher value offerings from our collaborative sales efforts with our partners. A lot of times, because of the relationships we've invested in and our expertise that we've developed in these solutions, we're brought into a lot of deals with our partners that we would not have otherwise seen without those relationships. In addition to that, with our you know joint partnerships, we get good insights into the future development of the product roadmaps of our key partners.
This allows us to align our investments into their investments and really get a jump start on building our competitive proposition for the market when they roll out future technology. In addition to that, having a, the partner ecosystem that we have, it gives us access to a larger portfolio of services and solutions to better address our clients' priorities. In today's industry, many of our clients are looking to reduce the number of suppliers they work with. They're looking to get the complexity out of their procurement environments, and for us to have a bigger breadth of a portfolio to offer them keeps us relevant in their ecosystems. Additionally, our partners look to Alithya for our industry expertise to bring additional value to their solutions.
For them, making sure that solution is implemented correctly, and is appropriate for the industry that is being implemented and, the technology is adopted, is very important to them, and they rely on us for our industry expertise. So, for example, in the healthcare space with Oracle Cloud, we've implemented over ninety healthcare systems in this, and Oracle looks to us for our expertise in this area. In addition, because of our investments in Oracle, we pride ourselves with having a significant amount of ACE consultants on our staff. ACE consultants are those consultants that are recognized by Oracle as being technical experts and contributing to the community. There's very few of them, and we're, we pride ourselves with the, the team that we have.
Similarly, in Microsoft, our focus on manufacturing, we're seen by Microsoft as a, as an expert in the process manufacturing. We've been nominated and awarded 19 times to the Inner Circle. The Inner Circle from Microsoft is essentially the top 1% of their partners in this area, and we've been there 19 times. So again, a very small circle of strong partners that we've been included in because of our expertise. And more recently, with our partnership with AWS, we've expanded in the financial services area, where we're helping clients with legacy application modernization on the AWS platform. And finally, because we have these strong partnerships and our focus on industry and our knowledge around creating assets, we've been able to identify some of the gaps in our partner solutions and bring augmentation to their products.
Sometimes this is an accelerator that helps on the implementation, reduces or de-risks the implementation effort. Sometimes it's technologies such as chatbots, where we can provide more effective support services through our managed services offering using AI and chatbots, and other times, it's where we have built solutions that address a certain gap in their product offering, and then oftentimes, we've either licensed or sold that IP back to our partners, that it eventually gets included into their baseline product, so part of our solution, we're going to continue our commitment with Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS, as well as we have a number of other partners that are at a different evolution that we continue to invest in and look to bring to the same level....
You know, the partnership goes both ways, and we've got a very strong, as I mentioned 19 times, Inner Circle with Microsoft. I would like to share one of the videos we've recorded, a short excerpt from this, between John Scandar, who leads our Microsoft practice, and Cecilia Flombaum, who's a Senior Director at Microsoft and our executive sponsor. Can we play this video?
Look, it's no surprise that the future is around artificial intelligence in all its different forms. Artificial intelligence in how we reason over data, artificial intelligence in how the applications themselves are gonna be transformed. The truth is that in customers' future adoption of this AI-led transformation will live in industry scenarios. A hospital will adopt AI in a very unique way. A manufacturing company, a food and beverage company will adopt AI and will have to change processes and change the way people interact with the application that they buy in ways that only partners like Alithya will be able to explain. Industry expertise in that context will be critical. Early on, Alithya understood the customers, when they're buying, for example, an ERP solution, they're actually making a bet on a bigger platform.
And that made Alithya invest beyond what used to be just an ERP solution and be able to offer customers a whole range of technologies from Microsoft that complement and surround the good old business applications that we know. And now, adding automation, data services, adoption services, application development services, make Alithya a very unique partner of choice for not just an ERP or CRM solution, but for the Microsoft platform or the Microsoft Cloud overall.
Just another great example of one of those partners that we have, where we have insights into where the product is going, so that we can get ahead of that and align our investments. And some of the recent things that you've seen with Copilot, it's an area you've heard about, our Copilot Academy that we launched, that is working with Microsoft around the adoption of their, you know, their new products that they're bringing to the market. The fourth and last building block to our strategy is all around our cost-effective smart shoring strategy, and we've talked about this a number of times on our quarterly results. Over the last four years, we established a center in Morocco to provide access to talent that could help us through a talent crunch with our French-speaking countries.
And we've also had an acquisition that brought us delivery capabilities in Eastern Europe, Spain, and India. And now we have that access to a larger, diverse, cost-effective talent pool that we're leveraging across the board. In the last couple of years, we've seen our Oracle practice extend into Eastern Europe and into India. Our Microsoft practice is in India and in Morocco. We service a number of clients here in Canada from Morocco. And with our partnership with AWS, it's really rooted in Morocco, and we're extending that to India right now. So, very much tied with our industry strategy and our practice and partner strategy to leverage our smart shoring capabilities.
As I look at most of the offerings we're putting out today, most of our propositions, there's always an optimal mix of on-site, nearshore, offshore resources, really looking to deliver maximum value for our clients, but as we look at this, it's not just the smart shoring. Most of our solutions today are coupled with our assets and other automation so that we can drive more efficiencies, but also free up our talent to work on that higher value task, and finally, smart shoring is not only for our clients. The majority of our product development is all done in our smart shore locations, and as well, we look at our internal services, and we're continually seeking new ways of moving more of our work into our smart shore locations to reduce our cost basis, as Debbie highlighted a little earlier.
So as we take a look, you know, it's our intent to continue to grow our smart shoring presence. Looking at some data here that was provided by National Bank of a sampling of our peers, with a correlation between the amount of their operations that are delivered from an offshore center to their EBITDA margin. You can see, on average, about 47% of operations are offshored, and those companies are achieving in between 15% and 20% EBITDA margin. So our management team reasonably expects that we should be able to increase our EBITDA margins as we continue to increase our operations that are delivered from offshore. As I went through this, though, I think it all comes, and Paul highlighted this a little earlier, we're in the services business.
It's all about our people, and it's all about quality delivery. Our clients have high expectations of us, and we continue to meet those expectations. Over the last four years, through our client satisfaction assessment tool, we've surveyed the majority of our clients, and we've received over nine point oh on average from those scores, and really, that's core to us and foundational to becoming a trusted advisor. It takes a long time to recover from a bad project, and we pride ourselves on our ability to deliver quality first time. With that said, we have two great testimonials online, and I'll play a short snippet of two of these. One of them will be from Delta Dental of California and Dominic Titcombe.
Dominic's the CIO at Delta Dental, and a client of ours that we went through three phases now of their Oracle ERP implementation. For those of you that don't know Delta Dental, they're a large health plan, dental health plan in the U.S., a large network. And then, Beneva, Eric Marcoux from Beneva, who is responsible for their property and casualty services, as well as their internal IT services. And Beneva's been a long-time client of ours. Well, I shouldn't say a long time, a very important and strategic client of ours since 2021 , when we publicly there was an announcement on that, that transaction back then.
So with that, if we could play these last two testimonials, and after that, I'll turn it over to Julia to dig into our talent management and our ESG report. Thank you.
... effort by the team. I think the partnership that we built with you, moving EPM across to the cloud previous, gave us that confidence in you as a partner. The collaboration, the relationships that we'd formed, both- in both directions, you were able to kind of challenge us. We were able to challenge you, and I think that gave us a lot of confidence as we moved on to the larger financial services aspect of Oracle, the last few phases that we've been working on for the last couple of years. That initial relationship, again, that, that confidence that we built through that, that's what gave me the confidence that this next effort was gonna be successful, too. Well, props to you and the team.
I mean, I will give you, you know, in fact, me being part of this kind of the effort we're doing here, I give you all, you and the team a lot of props for turning up and spending time with us in the office. You know, as we had. As we kicked off the effort, and we worked through some of those challenges, and again, there was, you know, some heated discussions in both directions. You were able to kind of rise to the challenge. You listened to our feedback, we listened to your feedback, and I think that's what really made the team successful, and it really was that collaboration.
The fact that you came and spent time in our office with us on multiple occasions, built those relationships, had those challenging conversations, that we were able to land such a complicated effort first time. So again, hats off, I think, to your team and to our team on sort of building that relationship and getting this effort done.
You are key to us because the first key differentiator I see following our partnership is on the strategic side of it. You are helping us in our strategies, in our delivering strategies, in our delivering plans. You are helping us when we have challenges. I would say it this way, in some areas with some systems like COBOL, like the cloud, like the BI, and I can name a lot more because we have a lot of infrastructure and IT systems at Beneva. You are definitely a key differentiators for us from a strategic point of view.
From a tactical point of view, when we need to see which way we should deliver that kind of project or that program of projects. What would be the sequence to go to the cloud, from Google to AWS, and even from property and casualty for Guidewire, we should go to the cloud in which steps? I call that a tactical area. That's a key differentiator for us because sometimes, especially at my level, we need to have that in mind to see how we will do our project, what will be the size of the project, how many teams we will have on board, external and internal, and so on. You're definitely a key differentiator for us for that.
And of course, on the delivery part, that's where you are very strong, and in all of the areas we have security, again, BI, again, contact center, also all of our IT systems we have, even on the corporate services side of it. So you can not only help us in our strategies and then to see how we should deploy all of these projects or deliver all of these projects, but also you can provide help to our teams, and also to make sure we deliver on time, on budget, on target, and then counter our business objectives. So that are the three key differentiators that come into my mind when I think about Alithya, and that's why I call you guys partners.
That's it.
Good afternoon. Right. Do you all hear me well? Good. Are we still full of energy? Yes, great. My name is Julia Cirillo. I started with Alithya back in April 2023. It's been a nice year, full of great activities and great initiatives, of, many of which you have heard about and certainly some that I will share with you. I'm delighted and privileged as well, to basically share with you. Oh, I need to go to our. That, Alithya has actually published this morning our third, ESG report, and I want to call out our leader, who actually coordinated all of this, Nathalie Robichaud, and we want to thank you for an excellent report. Of course, but lots of teamwork.
Again, as it relates to our ESG, we are very focused on our goals, and we are proud, again, of the great accomplishments that we have made up to now, including, in particular, the advancement of women. The advancement and representation of women at all levels in the organization, certainly at the board level, and definitely at the manager plus level. The importance around here is really the talent management activities that we have for women, where we actually give them a spot at the table and actually hear their voice, and make sure that they integrate their ideas and that they feel included with their diversity of perspectives. So we're very, very proud of that. We're also very proud of supporting the Indigenous relations.
I'm gonna have to be very careful here with what I pronounce in terms of these acronyms, 'cause I do wanna make sure that we get this right. Alithya is supporting the Indigenous relations activities since 2019 , and we are a proud member of the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business, so the CCIB. Again, this is an organization that fosters both Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations with businesses. As well, in January 2024 , we actually submitted our application or our documentation, if you will, to partner with PAIR. So PAIR is Partnership Accreditation in Indigenous Relations, and our company is well on track to deliver that primarily for the new year. So more to come on that. Okay.
As well, reducing our carbon footprint is certainly important for us as stakeholders in all regards in terms of our investors and definitely our employees, and we all care deeply about the environment and the role that we play with our customers in this regard. That is why we're very pleased to announce this morning that for the first time in our history, Alithya has obtained a carbon responsibility certification, which reinforces again our commitment in supporting our communities. In concrete terms, we have reduced our carbon emissions by 23% year- over year, which is simply exceptional. By operating responsibly again and being recognized with these contributions, this will also allow us to deliver our products beyond and the services beyond to our customers, who also have the same beliefs and the same ambitions for our communities.
So I invite you to please go to our website and read up the ESG strategy report, and we'd love to hear your comments. Okay. So now let's talk about the people pillar. So you've heard Bernard and Paul earlier talk about all the great initiatives that we have, and let's be honest, it's a people business. So if we don't have the right people at the right time, at the right place, it's very difficult for us to deliver. And so in order for us to support our three-year strategic plan, we came up with our three-year priorities, our critical priorities. The first and foremost is enhancing the employee experience and what we call the One Alithya Global Playbook, and I'll come back to that in a little while.
The second one is reinventing our talent management strategy, which is about getting to know our people. So that sounds kinda simple, but it's actually really hard to do in practical terms. And then finally, it's really about talking about the future of work. The world is evolving, the workplace is evolving. We have a lot of opinions out there. So we wanna make sure that we are ready for all of those, evolving situations with our customers, but also with our own employees. So how do we tell our story? What is our story? And how we will shape our story going forward. So before we go into that, I'd like to have you look at this chart, and I know we have a Gartner representative in the room, so thank you for being here.
Again, this is very important information, and what you see here is on the y-axis, you see the level of satisfaction that employees give to EVP attributes. On the x-axis is the level of importance. So I'd like for you to take a look at that, because I'll come back to that a little bit later after we go through the elements of our three priorities, and I will call out in terms of what initiatives we're doing to make sure that we leverage that high level of satisfaction and that high level of importance. Okay. So let's come to the employee experience and the One Global People Playbook. So what is it? It's really a tool that we need to provide for our people. We have grown through acquisitions, we are growing organically, and we have a lot of ambitions going forward.
As we acquire and integrate different companies and businesses, and also how we align ourselves and work at the highest denominator, it is important for us to understand what we align on, what we integrate, what we harmonize, and certainly what we standardize in terms of global end-to-end people processes. This has been a big, I would say, lift for the organization in the last little while, and we started all of that by actually harmonizing our one compensation framework this year, as of April first. Which means that, in North America, our employees are all on the same compensation structure with the same positioning and leveling, and also are all eligible to one of three bonus plans.
So again, unifying employees, making sure they have a sense of purpose, and aligning them to the mission and the goals of the organization is key. We look forward to doing more of that as we leverage our international businesses and rest of world. What this also does is it helps us measure what are we doing well, what are we not doing well, and so that helps us, you know, keep on continuous improvement mindset. And certainly, as we heard Amar speak to, automation, we'd like to also, think about how do we automate these, menial, repetitive, if you will, tasks, and/or other, interesting work where we can be consistent across, our global footprint. So more to come on these three different dimensions of the employee experience. The next one is reinventing our talent management strategy.
So we're all part of organizations, and we're all part of talent management processes, and so on and so forth. At Alithya, we like to do it a little bit different. We have an agile approach, where we like to bring our leaders together and actually break the silos and get to know each other's talent and ensure that we leverage the talent and make sure that we know where the talent wants to grow, who the talent is, and this will help us develop our pipeline for our future emerging leaders, and certainly for reskilling and upskilling and basically making sure that we are up to speed with our customers' needs and demands going forward. So what we'd like to continue to do is also scan the global marketplace. We are growing as a global business.
We're very focused in certain parts of the world, and we need to leverage more other parts of the world. So by having this talent management process, it'll be very clear to us where we should be focusing, so we don't chase all the rabbits out there. Right? And then again, last but not least, it's our story. What is it? I really like to listen to these types of presentations because I'm learning every day, so it's been almost sixteen months, and every day I learn something new, and it's always about the story, and there's always pieces to that story that we just don't know enough about.
So what is important for our people is to know that story, is to know where we came from, where we are, where we want to go, and how they will contribute to where we want to go. The future of work is not just about where you work or how you work. It's also your sense of purpose, your sense of belonging, and feeling attached to a mission that is very compelling. What we're looking for here is we want to definitely craft a narrative that resonates with Alithya's diverse workforce, our client base, and the communities where we operate. Bringing our story to life, having different people tell our story, having our employees do some storytelling, is actually very exciting as we evolve.
The main thing that we would like to also think about is: What do we own as our culture, and I'm very proud to say that Alithya endorses and fosters an inclusive culture, where voices are heard, where we learn from each other, where we collaborate, where there is huge advocacy for teamwork. Sometimes it's hard. We like to kinda do it in our little silos, but teamwork obviously gives us more at the end, and then, of course, connecting our people from one part of the world to another, from one part of the business to another, so those are not things that happen on their own. There has to be very overt, you know, direction and intent to do that, so that's the exciting work ahead of us, so again, culture and connection. Good? All right.
So on the next slide, I told you I'll bring you back to the Gartner slide, and here, what we've done is. You know, we definitely have to be in all the areas and all the attributes of an EVP. So we just need to make sure that we respect our people, that people understand what the give and take is, what is the deal between the employer and the employee in all aspects of EVP. However, we're very, very proud to say that we've been operationalizing our people strategy in the last few years, and at which we are very focused on high level of satisfaction.
So if you look at, for example, ethics and integrity, people management, development opportunity, and future career opportunity, we have invested and will continue to invest a great deal of budgets, of efforts, of energy and time, for our people to definitely be on board with all the mandatory training, but also think about how they can take on training that will reskill them and help them grow and develop in their endeavors, and also for us to identify our future leaders of a global organization. So some of the programs that we are delighted to talk about are the Alithya Leadership Academy. That has been going on for a few years and really focuses more on directors and above.
Our new program that will be ending actually in December this year and just started in early January is the Alithya People's Manager program for all manager-level employees, and basically, this is to help our people managers have the tools, the techniques, the toolkit, if I can put it that way, to manage people and to be delighted to manage people. Management of people is not for everyone, right? So it's important to help our managers grow. We also have the associate academies for Microsoft and Oracle. As well, we have an online learning platform that we embarked on last November, and I'm very happy to say that more than 70% of our employees are actually taking programs or online training on their own time, and that is the Udemy platform.
Then, of course, we have the ad hoc development, so through our talent management reviews, we recognize that some people may need to untap their potential, and we'd like to help them grow and develop, so there's coaching and mentoring and other different types of initiatives for them. As I mentioned earlier regarding the total rewards, so you see the rewards here is very important. Compensation I spoke to in terms of what we did for North America, and certainly we will leverage that in the rest of world. One item I'd like to talk about, which is in the top quadrant, is vacation.
Vacation is something that, again, proud to announce that we leveraged a pilot program that was initiated in the U.S. in 2023, on unlimited vacation, and we actually implemented that policy for all our North American employees, effective April first this year. And basically, what this does is it empowers managers and employees to talk about what their needs are, when they could take vacation, which is always, again, relative to customers' needs and timing. But there's a dialogue that happens there, and we hope that dialogue will continue to enrich. And so this is actually in place right now. So we'll give you more of the outcomes, when we meet next time.
So overall, here's a picture of our mosaic, if you will, and we are just simply proud how our people make the difference for Alithya. We are humbled and grateful for their commitment and their loyalty as ambassadors of the company. What's amazing about this picture is that most of these activities are organized by our employees, for our employees. This is not something they're mandated to do. It's something they wanna do, and that really creates that ecosystem of community and culture. We love this because if you see the smiles and et cetera, this is what creates the energy. Paul talked earlier about Officevibe, and we call that the voice of the employees. Again, here, extremely proud to talk about our score, which is eight.
So in Officevibe, we were actually given an award this year. We are part of 3,000 companies on this platform, and we were one of 60 that were recognized for actually endorsing the employee experience and maintaining certain scores of engagement, of people management relationships, of loyalty, et cetera above certain levels. And so we're very proud for that, and we thank our employees. Our eNPS is basically the Net Promoter Score. It is 23. It is good, and we hope to get it to very good, if not excellent. So again, more news to come in months ahead. Last but not least, we heard about our people initiatives. We heard about our great workforce, our diverse workforce, and this is really about our strong leadership to support our strategic plan.
It goes without saying that to deliver what we are aiming and, striving to deliver, we will need strong leadership in all our different businesses and enterprise services, and I'm so happy to say that individually, each one of these senior leaders have at least 20-plus years of work experience, if not more, and, an average of 11.5 average tenure with Alithya, and that's including some of the acquisitions, so I can guarantee you, our leaders are energized. They're all in athletic position, to basically be ready and lead, our business into, delivering our three-year strategy, so with that, I thank you, and I now pass it on, to our CEO, Paul Raymond.
So hopefully we gave you the full picture. I'll ask Jamie, Bernard, Julia, they can stick around, and Debbie to come back up. We're gonna go to questions, and there's a microphone. I'll ask if you have questions here, we'll start, let's start here. So if you have questions, use the microphone so the people who are online can hear you. We have a lot of people online today, so very important. Anybody here? Yeah, yeah, I see that. So these are the ones that... So I already have some questions coming in, but if any... Can't believe.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, so we will start with some questions we have received online. The first one, Paul, is: How much will the impact of generative AI productivity tools impact the economics of your programming activities over the next twelve months?
A great question. I can't give a specific number, but I already know that past year or so, our people are telling us they're doing twice the work that they used to do by leveraging the tools that they had before. So one of the advantage, I think, of where we're at in our growth curve, if you look at our smart shoring capabilities, I think we can grow it faster leveraging the tools than just adding people. So I think it's actually an advantage being where we're at today in terms of headcount, because if we can grow that faster without adding people, it's kind of a double whammy. So I can't predict where it's gonna be in the next twelve years. It's moving very fast, but it's been very good so far.
I don't know, Bernard, if you want to add to that or-
No.
What do you think?
Just, in our product development teams already, we have been using GenAI for code generation with some success, some good success, actually, which some of the things that Paul mentioned, too, where we've been able to cut out some of the headcount there because of that-
Mm-hmm
... or redeploy that headcount into other activities of higher value, so we're seeing that in our product development teams, and we'll continue to push the envelope on that, to get the efficiencies that we think we can get.
Sure. I think the next one's for you.
Let's try the room again. Does anyone have something in the room? Here's one.
Yeah. Yeah, Divya.
Yes.
Can you use the microphone just for the folks online so they can hear you? Thank you.
That's even better. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah.
I actually have an interest. I was actually quite intrigued, and I have been in the past, when you've compared Alithya with Perficient and Thoughtworks today.
Yeah.
Help us understand why do you think should Alithya be compared to the digital engineering players, given it's an application services company?
We actually do a lot of digital engineering. So, for example, if you look at our team in Ontario, that's all we do. So for the bank, most of our people there are computer engineers. You know, we often joke about rocket scientists. We actually have rocket scientists on staff. We do a lot of engineering work for the nuclear industry. So these are control systems where we actually go in and build systems. Anything that goes into a nuclear plant, we actually do the quality assurance on the software that goes in. That's some of the stuff that we do. So we actually do a lot of digital engineering. It's just that if you look at the scale that we're at, right, about half of our business is around enterprise transformation. So it's one of the things that we do. So yeah, we...
And we're, you know, half a billion Canadian. They're just over a billion US, so we still have room to grow. But that's gonna be a key part of what we do going forward. Yeah. Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right. Thank you.
Any other questions in the room? Front row.
Yeah, Jerome.
Okay.
Thank you. Classic M&A analyst question. You have in your guidance CAD 150 million target in terms of additional revenue you might add. Are the multiples you are seeing in the market right now acceptable for you to reach that, or do you need the multiples to go down in order to maybe pull the trigger on that CAD 150 million?
Yeah, great question. We're still seeing. So historically, we've paid between 5x and 7x EBITDA for the acquisitions we've done. We're still seeing that. So some are a bit closer to the higher end of that, but it's really tied to the margins that they have, and we'd rather pay a bit more for a very high-quality company than pay less for a fixer-upper. Right? So 5x-7x , we're still seeing it. We still have a healthy pipeline and still working on some deals. So yeah, it's doable.
Okay.
It's doable.
Great. Another one I have is, you know, you're working on improving your margin profile. One strategy some of your peers have been using in the past is increasing the percentage of your revenue that's from IP. You've discussed this in your, in Bernard's presentation. Do you partner sometimes with clients in order to develop IP and sell again, maybe with partnering with the ownership of IP? Is this something you have on your roadmap?
You want to comment on that, Bernard?
Yes, definitely a tool we have in our kit when we're looking at putting together propositions for our clients. It's something we look at as being able to, if it's not a differentiator for them, would they be willing to share the rights to that IP that allows us to take it to market? And going back to what I mentioned before, we invest once and deploy multiple times. It does lead to higher gross margins in the long run. So it definitely is part of our strategy.
A lot of the work we do is related to our partners as well, and as I mentioned when I spoke earlier, we look to work with our clients in some of these industries where we have expertise to fill the gaps in our partners' solution set, and we have had success before in either licensing or that or reselling that back to our partners, that then they incorporate that into their baseline products. So it's definitely something that we look for in our opportunities.
Yeah, just to add to that, so for example, we mentioned Microsoft earlier. We have built IP in the past that we've sold to Microsoft. Right? These were add-ons to the industry solutions they had. There was a piece missing, and we built it for a client. They saw the opportunity, and, you know, IP is just a question of time, right? So whenever we build something, you're always looking at how fast can somebody else reproduce this? And in this case, it made a lot of sense to sell it to Microsoft because they were gonna do it for all of their clients, and we become one of the integrators for that solution for them. So it made a lot more sense for them to sell it than for us to sell it. So we look at that as well.
Thanks.
I think maybe just add to that, the percentage of revenue from IP. It's tough to say how much it's gonna grow because every time we sell IP, we sell six, seven times the services, right? So yes, we want to grow our IP revenue from IP, but as a percentage of revenue, I'm not sure what the long-term impact will be because we sell a lot of services around that every time, higher margin services. So-
Sounds like AI.
Yeah. Yeah.
Let's take another one from online. So in terms of offshoring, what capabilities do you need to add to your smart shore centers in order to achieve a higher mix of your labor?
That's one of yours. Yeah, interesting question, and I kind of go back 20 years when a lot of companies were moving a lot of work offshore. You had the big offshore pure-play staffing up. That type of work is not what we do. High volume, you know, that's the type of stuff that we look to automate and stuff. So that kind of very significant increases in offshore, I don't see us getting there. The work that we're looking for and the type of resources that we're attracting in these regions are very much higher-end resources. I'll talk to our Eastern European operations. They're data scientists. They're core to our product development. We talk about our practices around Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle Cloud and AWS. These are higher-end architects that we're bringing on board there.
So it's not that mass outsourcing of a lot of headcount. It really is more of our strategic work. So the type of resources we're attracting over these, I would say, are more in the architects, very specialized data scientists. Looking at some of our AI and investments in AI around our products are all the type of people that we're seeking in those areas. So it's a little different than what you may have seen 20 years ago, where companies were going offshore, and they were growing by thousands. Our strategy is a little different than that.
And it also means lower turnover rate, right? So when we hire higher value skill sets, they tend to stick around a lot longer and work on higher value projects. So anybody else?
Are there any additional questions from the room? Okay, two more.
Thank you. Hey, guys, had a quick question. Could you give a little bit more color into how the Oracle ERP contract could expand within the awarded region and the potential to add regions? As well, you know, are additional RFPs required to add regions, or is it a case where you are approved across regions, and, you know, what the potential for growth within that CAD 400 million, 18-year contract is, and could it serve as a model, you know, for other provinces?
You want to go? Sure. You got it. Yeah, great question, and, again, very, very-
Maybe remind people what-
Yeah, I was going to start with that. Very, very proud of our win that we announced, I think it was in the January timeframe, with a health agency here in Quebec to implement, as part of a partnership with another large consulting firm, a supply chain management system based on Oracle Cloud, a roughly CAD 400 million deal, and our portion of that is just over CAD 20 million. Now, that project is being delivered over the next five to six years. So there's two hospital systems that we are implementing first, which are kind of setting up the recipe, if you will, to be taken to other regions. It will take a while before those come to market.
Again, being a government agency, it will go through an RFP, an RFP process. With that said, you know, the project is going very well. We're working very well with our partner, and I do see that we'll be well positioned to maximize the opportunity when it comes. Again, it will be a long period of time, and there's several other regions, as you know, that are in line for this. But I do expect that they will go live with these first two regions first, before many decisions are made on what's next.
Great, thanks for the color. And I just had one more question here. When do you expect Canadian financial institutions to increase their budgets? And how strong, you know, of a recovery do you anticipate? Is the current spending level sustainable, or are there any vulnerabilities?
No. Thank you. Yeah. So no, it's a good question, and as you notice in our results in the last couple quarters and actually through fiscal 2024, we have some softness in the revenue from predominantly in the Quebec financial services industry. We continue to build a pipeline with our clients here, and I'll even expand it to the Canadian financial industry. We have been having more activity. The pipeline is growing. You know, we haven't been losing opportunities. It's just taken longer to close. So you know, I do expect by the end of the year, we should be turning the corner, and we'll see some budgets moving, and interest rates are coming down. So I do expect the banks will start investing.
You know, at the end of the day, they can't sit on the sidelines for too long with technology. There's a lot of things to stay up to date. I think we went through the market numbers before earlier. It's a large market. Financial services firms are expected to continue to invest in technology, so I do expect it will pick up later this year.
I think the big trends you're going to see there over the next few years is the modernization of the legacy systems. For the past 10 years, financial industry, banks, insurance, they've been adding, right? Adding a front end to this and adding a that, so adding this and adding that. But if you look behind the scenes, the mainframes are still all out there. They're going to go away eventually, and so there's going to be a huge push. We've done many pilot projects. We were talking about the IP that we have earlier. We have one IP that actually helps the acceleration of the migration from legacy to cloud. We're doing a lot of pilots right now with our clients.
We expect those to convert to projects eventually when the spending starts picking up, but it's going to be a huge trend in the next two, three, four, five years, I believe.
There's another question in the room.
Yeah.
Yep.
Thanks again. I wanted to actually dive a little bit more in the margin expansion that we talked about today. So going from, say, 8% to 11% to 13%, that's 300-500 basis points of expansion, right? So there are two things that come to mind, obviously, M&A, as you mentioned, and outsourcing to a certain extent. Outsourcing is picking up across the board. If you go and acquire or hire data scientists, for that matter, they are not cheap labor, simply put, right? So that side and M&A, like you've had an example where you ended up hiring a lot of subcontractors, and that caused margin pressure. So how do you anticipate expanding these margins with... across these two elements? Is what I would like to know.
I think there are four things, and the first one is really, you know, maybe I'll backtrack actually, one of the comments. Debbie showed a chart earlier of where our gross margins dropped when we did a large transaction in 2022 . We knew that was going to happen. We talked about it, we mentioned it, that the company we acquired, 80% of what they did was with subcontractors, so we knew we were going to take a hit. The reason why we did that transaction is because it came with a very large contract and long-term relationship with two strategic clients. And part of that agreement, there was a two-year transition period to replace all the subcontractors with permanent employees. We did that in under two years.
So if you go and look at the curve that Debbie was showing, it took us about seven quarters to get back to where we were before. We still had some of that stuff, and it comes back to the type of work. So going up the value chain, which is kind of our number one, number one thing in the industries that we're in, so the industry focus is to work on the higher value work. So this happened in financial services, and you can talk to anybody in our industry, our competitors, they all went through the same thing. Why? Because the first thing the financial institutions cut when they started cutting was the staffing, right? Anything to do with subcontractors, the daily stuff, they cut, and that stuff you can stop overnight. Stuff we don't want to be in, right?
So as we build back up, and the new business comes in, we're very selective on the new stuff we're bringing in to avoid picking up the old business that we had traditionally from past acquisitions around the staffing. So that's the first item, is that industry focus. The second one is the type of business that we go after in that, and you're seeing it still in our business today. You see our headcount going down and our revenues going up, right? So again, there's a mix of the type of work that we do, higher value, leveraging the IP. You saw over the last three years, we went from 2% to 12% plus of IP. That makes a huge difference 'cause it's pretty much all margin, right? And it generates higher margin services.
And the fourth item is really leveraging our smart shoring. We do very little today. That's why we're showing that chart. If you look at the average in the industries, around 47% of the people are in an offshore or smart shore type. We're at 9%. So we're at the infancy stage on that. I think it could change very fast and then have an impact. At least we believe that those four levers alone are gonna have a big impact on the gross margins there going forward. So stole my closing remarks, didn't I? Thank you. Anybody else in the room? No, anything else.
We have several online. I think you've already addressed the gross margins.
The IP and the AI and the gross margin.
How about the last one?
Smart shoring?
Yeah. So-
Percentage, any-
Do we have a target for the growth of smart shoring as a portion of delivery?
Over the next three years.
So we want to grow it. The challenge, I was saying earlier to Jerome's question, is it's not clear to me yet how much is gonna come from automation and how much is gonna come from additional people. It's just moving so fast, and the stuff that we're seeing our people do with the tools that are out there is quite impressive. So it will be more as a percentage of our business or our headcount, I don't know.
You know, as we look at it, and the target we give ourselves internally, is 100% of what can be smart shored, we want to smart shore. But before we smart shore, we want to automate. If we can automate it, there's no need to smart shore it. So that's kind of the way we look at it. So in some of the service offerings that we've had in the past, some of the service offerings through acquisition, traditionally, they were never delivered in a smart shore model. So now we're reinventing the wheel with them. We're challenging behaviors and moving that work to smart shore, and that's what's driving the growth of our smart shore. So it will increase.
I wouldn't set a target to it, but the internal mindset is 100% of what can be smart shored will be smart shored.
That's it. Thank you very much for attending today. Thanks for the questions, and this is being recorded, right, Sophie? So it's, if you need to access it later, and really go check out the videos, they're really good.