Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Alithya's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Alithya's management. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you once again for joining us for Alithya's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2023 Results Conference Call. The press release and MD&A with complete financial statements and related notes, as well as annual regulatory documents, were issued this morning and are now posted on our website. The webcast presentation can also be found on our website in the Investors section. Please be advised that this call will contain statements that are forward-looking and which are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in these statements.
These statements include, without limitation, our estimates, plans, expectations, and other statements regarding the future growth, results of operations, performance, and business prospects of Alithya that do not exclusively relate to historical facts, or which refer to the characterization of future events, including statements regarding our expectation of our clients' demand for our services and our ability to take advantage of business opportunities and meet our goals set in our three-year strategic plan. For more information, please refer to the cautionary note in our presentation and to the Forward-Looking Statements and Risk & Uncertainties section of our MD&A, available on our website. All figures discussed in today's call are in CAD , unless otherwise stated, and we may refer to certain indicators that are Non-IFRS measures. Please refer to the cautionary note in our presentation and to the Non-IFRS Measures section of our MD&A for more details.
Presenting this morning are Paul Raymond, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Claude Thibault, Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Paul Raymond. Paul?
Merci, Benjamin. Bonjour, tout le monde. Thank you all for joining us on the call this morning to discuss Alithya's robust fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 financial performance. First off, I would just like to take a moment to mention our new recently launched brand platform. As part of our ongoing integration efforts, the new platform consolidates our vast competencies and collective intelligence behind a powerful, singular voice that will better resonate with our clients, employees, and shareholders. Years of sustained growth have led to a proliferation of knowledge and expertise. Our redesigned website now offers a more concise picture of who we are and what we can do for our clients as they navigate through a rapidly evolving digital world.
The robust performance that we will be highlighting this morning demonstrates how the collective intelligence of our teams contributes to the continued health of relationships with our clients, which ultimately creates greater long-term value for our shareholders. That noted, let's start by highlighting a few milestones for this quarter that we are particularly proud of. First off, we passed the half billion CAD milestone in terms of annual revenues, which brings us closer to our strategic plan target and provides us with the scale we need to better accompany our clients and their largest, most critical initiatives. Secondly, our pipeline and bookings continue to grow, with Q4 bookings reaching CAD 124 million. Our clients have demonstrated unwavering loyalty and trust in our people. In fact, over 80% of our revenues we're generating from existing clients we had at this time last year.
We started working with 32 new clients in the fourth quarter. Those additions brings our fiscal 2023 total to 144 new clients. Thirdly, we continue to improve our year-over-year gross margins as a percentage of revenue, which stands at 29.9%. This represents a 400 basis points increase over last year. Finally, our adjusted EBITDA grew from Q3 to end Q4 at CAD 10.5 million. This represents a 73% increase compared to the same quarter last year. Let's look at these achievements in some greater detail. Our fourth quarter revenues increased by 13.5% over Q4 fiscal 2022, and sequentially by 4.2% over Q3, raising our revenues to CAD 136.2 million for the quarter.
That achievement was largely driven by growth in all areas of our operations. Our Canadian Q4 revenues experienced a year-over-year increase of 7.5% or CAD 5.7 million in Q4. As predicted in previous meetings, we are starting to see pressure, especially in the banking sector, to focus on efficiency-driven projects and longer decision-making on larger projects. Based on conversation with senior leadership of those clients, we remain confident in their long-term technology investment commitments. In the United States, our enterprise solutions implementation business unit had a great quarter. This, despite recent quarterly results from top cloud infrastructure providers indicating that businesses are looking for ways to trim cloud costs. April and May are also showing strong bookings as those are the year-ends for both Microsoft and Oracle.
It should also be noted that we are seeing some software providers getting out of the services business to focus on higher-margin product sales. We see this as a very positive development for us. In the U.S., our clients across the board continue to grow their projects beyond enterprise cloud implementations, with strong new demand for additional strategy and post-implementation services. Our Oracle practice had a strong finish in terms of revenue, with Q4 being the highest grossing quarter of the fiscal year. Many of the clients requesting our help in implementing the Oracle suite of apps are in the healthcare sector, where Gartner is forecasting a 9.5% increase in spending in the coming year. That positions us very nicely for further growth.
As for our Microsoft practice, our strong Q4 revenue performance includes fresh revenue generated by the integration of our two most recent acquisitions, both completed during the 2022 calendar year. That said, we are also seeing growing demand for hyperautomation services, which is a disciplined approach that clients use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Thanks to our Datum acquisition in July 2022, we are well-positioned in Robotic Process Automation, modern BI platforms, and intelligent document processing, which incorporates the latest AI developments. According to Gartner, the process-agnostic technologies enabling hyperautomation will experience a 15%-30% increase in terms of worldwide revenues between 2021 and 2026. It should also be noted that the last two acquisitions contributed CAD 45.9 million to our fiscal 2023 year, or approximately 50% of our growth.
The U.S. now represents over 36% of our overall business. Our performance continues to advance towards the realization of the milestone established by our strategic plan. In fiscal 2023, our revenues increased by an industry-leading 19.5% to CAD 522.7 million, compared to CAD 437.9 million last year. Looking at gross margins, we experienced a 31% year-over-year increase in Q4. Gross margin as a percentage of revenue increased to 29.9%. Those achievements were driven by continued increases in revenues from permanent employees versus subcontractors and an ongoing focus on higher value business. This has also resulted in higher average revenue per employee. Another contributor to gross margin improvement is our push to increase sales of subscription-based services.
Subscription, software, and other revenues now represent 12% of our total revenues, compared to 6.7% a year ago for the same period. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we are proud to report a 73% increase over our Q4 2022 performance, or CAD 10.5 million for the three months ended March 31st, 2023. Once again, contributions from our latest acquisitions were also incremental. Our business continues to be fueled by strong bookings in all of our geographies. During the last quarter of our fiscal year, we continued to fill our healthy pipeline with projects for the quarters to come.
Fiscal 2023 bookings reached $525.4 million, which translate into a book-to-bill ratio of 1.15x when we exclude the two large 10-year contracts signed in April 2021, and we now have a backlog which represents over 16 months of revenue. We also took great strides towards the fulfillment of objectives outlined in our long-term strategic plan. As we continue to implement measures designed to move us up the value chain and to improve efficiencies, we see continued opportunities ahead to increase our profitability profile. We continue to closely monitor global economic factors, and as I said, potential shortages variations across our markets, and we remain focused on a disciplined approach to our long-term plan of building a trusted global digital transformation advisory firm.
With 32 new clients added in the fourth quarter and 144 added this past fiscal year, we believe that our mission, vision, and business approach are conducive to achieving that long-term goal. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Claude Thibault, our Alithya Chief Financial Officer, who will expand on the financial highlights that I have outlined. Claude?
Thank you, Paul. Good morning. Revenues for the quarter amounted to CAD 136.2 million, an increase of 13.5% or CAD 6.2 million, compared to revenues of CAD 120 million for the fourth quarter of last year. Our last two acquisitions, completed respectively on February 1st and July 1st, 2022, contributed revenues of CAD 11.9 million during this fourth quarter. Excluding the impact of the two acquisitions, organic growth in Q4 was 8.1%. For the full fiscal year, revenues amounted to CAD 522.7 million, including CAD 45.9 million from the two latest acquisitions, representing an increase of 19.4% year-over-year and passing the half billion dollar mark for the first time.
Back to the fourth quarter, in Canada, revenues increased organically by 7.5% to CAD 81.2 million, due to growth in all areas. In the U.S., revenues increased 22% to CAD 49.3 million, due primarily to increased revenues from the acquisition of Vitalyst, which contributed one additional month of revenues in the fourth quarter compared to the prior year. Revenues from Datum's U.S. business, organic growth in all areas, and a favorable U.S. dollar exchange rate impact of CAD 3.1 million between the two periods. As for our international operations, they also reported a strong quarter in terms of growth, increasing 41.2%, due to good organic growth in activity levels and revenues from the acquisition of Datum's international businesses.
Let's look at our Q4 gross margin, which overall increased by 31% or by CAD 9.6 million to CAD 40.7 million, up from CAD 31.1 million last year. As a percentage of revenues, our fourth quarter consolidated gross margin increased to 29.9% from 25.9% for the same period last year. The increase in gross margin percentage in Canada is derived from increased revenues from permanent employees relative to subcontractors and from higher margin offerings. In the U.S., gross margin as a percentage of revenues increased as a result of positive margin impact from the acquisition of Datum's U.S. business, higher average revenue per employee, and improved project performance in other areas of the business.
Gross margin as a percentage of revenues also increased on a sequential basis compared to the third quarter, mainly due to improved project performance in certain areas of the business. Our consolidated gross margin percentage on a sequential basis remains very close to the third quarter, despite the fact that employer benefits reset on January 1st, which always weighs notably on margins in Q4, and which means we had compensating improvements at different other levels. Looking at SG&A. Total gross SG&A expenses in the fourth quarter totaled CAD 36 million, an increase of CAD 9.8 million or 37.3%, compared to CAD 26.2 million in the same quarter last year.
The increase is mainly explained by our latest acquisitions for CAD 1.5 million, the special non-cash impairment charge of CAD 2.8 million stemming from our reduced real estate footprint, an increase in share-based compensation of CAD 2 million, and an unfavorable U.S. dollar impact of $0.9 million. We also had increases in certain discretionary elements, partially offset by ongoing reductions to our cost structures. Overall, as a result of increased revenues and gross margin, partially offset by increased SG&A expenses, our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA amounted to CAD 10.5 million, an increase of 73% or CAD 4.5 million, compared to an adjusted EBITDA of CAD 6 million during the same quarter last year. We are introducing a new financial metric with our Q4 reporting.
In recent years, mainly due to our strategy of growth by acquisitions, Alithya has been reporting net losses on an accounting basis. This accounting net loss is mainly created by amortization of intangibles, by acquisition, integration, and reorganization costs, and by share-based compensation, most of which are non-cash and non-recurring expenses directly attributable to past individual acquisitions. In addition, we had in this fourth quarter, two notable specific P&L charges, which are also non-cash and non-recurring, namely the write-down in right-of-use assets and the recording of an earn-out consideration payable related to the Datum acquisition, totaling CAD 13 million.
Adjusting our accounting net loss for the above, we are reporting in Q4 of fiscal 2023 an adjusted net earnings of +CAD 4.1 million, or CAD 0.04 per share, compared to an adjusted net earnings of CAD 2.2 million or CAD 0.02 per share for Q4 last year. The quarter-over-quarter increase in adjusted net earnings represents CAD 1.8 million or 81.3%. For the whole fiscal year, Alithya is reporting an adjusted net earnings per share of CAD 0.16, up from CAD 0.12 per share last year. We will be, going forward, reporting this number, which we believe provides a better appreciation of Alithya's ongoing performance. Looking at long-term trends on slide 9, we can see the impact of our acquisitions and more importantly, of our sustained organic growth achieved over the past several quarters.
We can also see an even stronger progression in terms of gross margin dollars. Our long-term adjusted EBITDA trend also reflects our growth and gross margin improvements. With sustained organic and acquisition growth, our continuing long-term initiatives to generate higher gross margins and a steady focus on SG&A, we believe that we remain on target to achieving our three-year financial objectives. Now, turning to liquidity and financial position on page 11. Net cash generated from operating activities was CAD 4.4 million, a CAD 8.1 million improvement from CAD 3.7 million used during the same period last year. Also cash flow for operations before working capital variations amounted in Q4 to CAD 8 million. Out of CAD 10.5 million of adjusted EBITDA, which represents a notable cash flow conversion percent.
With the corresponding overall debt reduction and considering our improved trailing 12-month EBITDA performance, Q4 marks another quarter with declining leverage ratios. Now back to you, Paul.
Yeah, sticks out. Q4 takeaways: continued revenue growth, margins growing faster than revenues, solid bookings and backlog, improving revenue per employee, strong DSO and cash flow. We have a solid client base with over 80% repeat business, and we are adding important strategic clients every quarter. We are very happy with our long-term perspective, but also always keeping an eye on possible temporary slowdowns and late projects we are seeing in the banking sector. We are entering the new fiscal year with many efficiency opportunities ourselves and with a strong cash generation profile that positions us well to be patient.
More importantly, we are maintaining our focus and efforts on gradually improving gross margin and SG&A performance, which should lead to an improved bottom line, even in the current economic context we are all witnessing. As you can see by our rapid deleveraging, we are very well positioned to execute on the last year of our strategic plan and to continue our disciplined approach to quality acquisitions. We will now take questions. Lara?
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. First question comes from Gavin Fairweather at Cormark Securities. Please go ahead.
Oh, hey, good morning. Congrats on your progress. Just maybe to start out on the macro, it sounds like kind of on balance, the demand picture remains pretty positive and the backlog is certainly quite healthy. Just given the evolving environment, maybe we can just touch on any kind of segments of the business where you're starting to see, you know, a bit more sluggishness. You touched on the financial sector. I'm kind of curious how big of a vertical that is for you and any other areas that maybe you would call out.
Yeah, good morning, Gavin. Thanks for the question. It's an ongoing concern of mine every day. I read the newspapers like everybody, keep asking our team what they're seeing, where our bookings keep getting solid. I think we expect to see some slowdowns in banking just because of everything that we're seeing in the U.S. I think the banking crisis in the U.S. is not over. You saw with another increase in Canada yesterday. To me, it's kind of inevitable that we'll see some slowdown in banking at some point. Again, it's a small portion of our business today. It's more in Canada than the U.S. for us. We don't have banking clients in the U.S. today. We have a few in Canada.
But everybody that we talk to, and I talk to clients and senior executives there on a regular basis at these institutions, and they're all committed to their long-term plans. I think they're all kinda figuring out what they're gonna do short term and how to focus on more efficiency initiatives like RPA, Robotic Process Automation, and things like that. So far, so good, but definitely keeping an eye on it.
Okay, great to hear. Maybe just on your new kinda backlog calculation, so that's 16 months. Is that just kind of the aggregate value of the backlog compared to kinda your current production? Can you maybe just help us about how to think about that metric? Is some of that backlog kinda longer term as part of the R3D contracts? Maybe a bit of context there.
Yeah. This is what I would qualify as hard backlog. These are signed contracts with confirmed commitments. It does not include what I would call an MSA or a blanket contract, where we renew every year, very large engagements. This is really committed hard backlog that we have contracts with committed revenue for. We believe it's a bit understated. This is the first time we do it, so we tried to be on the conservative side. As we integrate the new acquisitions and get a better handle on it, we think it's conservative for now.
Okay, that's great. Maybe just on smart shoring, can you just provide an update on your proportion of resources which were kind of offshore, exiting fiscal 2023, kind of your hiring efforts year-to-date, and maybe if you have a target you could share for the next fiscal year on where you can move that to?
Yeah, it's just over 6% today. Our objective is to be at 10% by the end of the fiscal year.
Great. Maybe just, before I pass the line, Claude, you mentioned the health and benefit and payroll taxes that reset in the first calendar quarter, which provides a headwind to sequential gross margins. Can you just quantify that impact so we can get a sense of kind of the underlying margin trend?
Sorry, I missed the beginning of the question.
Just the reset of the health and benefit taxes, maybe for Claude. Can you quantify that? When we look at the sequential gross margin, the underlying trend.
My calculations are Q3 to Q4 of Alithya, which is calendar Q4 to calendar Q1, the reset occurs on January 1st. We're easily talking a couple percentage points on gross margin, you know, anywhere, you know, 1.5%-2.5%, depending on mix of revenues and geographies, but it's in that ballpark. Yeah. It eases off. We have new employees being hired all the time, those are not affected, it's a partial impact. As you go into the year, it depends on the salary of the employees. Higher-paid employees hit the ceiling before, and vice versa. There's probably not much relief occurring from Q4 to Q1. A little bit, not much. It's mainly into Q2 and Q3.
You can see. Yeah.
Thank you. Next question comes from Deepak Kaushal at BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Just, Paul, you know, you mentioned you still feel comfortable about your strategic targets. I think you, in the past, you have mentioned CAD 600 million target for fiscal 2024. Can you give us a sense of how much you're expecting that to come from organic M&A, and maybe just a bit of an update on the M&A environment as you see it?
Sure. Thanks for the question, Deepak . Historically, we've been 50/50, so that's kind of the ballpark we look at. It varies because some year we've done more acquisitions, and right now, we haven't done any in the past, 12 months. We usually target 50/50. We, we've been very patient. As you can see, we're generating a lot of cash. We're deleveraging fast. There's some nice targets out there, and the environment right now, we find, is getting extremely favorable to us because the... In the past, there were a lot of private equities, very aggressive in our industry in acquiring some targets that we might have looked at in the past, that we passed because the multiples were kinda crazy. We're actually seeing that kind of reverse and come around.
We're seeing a lot of funds deleveraging, and then a little bit like what you're seeing in the commercial real estate market right now. We're seeing some interesting opportunities coming to the table that people wanna move fast on. I think we're in a great position. We've demonstrated, and Claude showed the chart, that we can do very accretive acquisitions and deleverage very fast. We're very disciplined, so I kinda like the environment out there right now for us to find some interesting targets. We know we have the balance sheet to be patient, so I kinda like where we are right now.
Okay, fantastic. That's helpful. Then just on the margin targets, I think your target was 9%-13% EBITDA margin. You still have a ways to go there, but it sounds like you have some improvements in gross margin and your target to get to 10% of, I think target to go from 6%-10%. That's of versus contract employee. Is that right?
Yeah. We're close to 8% right now, so we think we're within striking distance to getting there, Deepak .
Okay. Where is the other improvement coming from? Is there any coming from SG&A, or is it all on the permanent versus employee?
It's Yeah, the three main things, the SG&A portion, there's a lot of one-time stuff in this past quarter that kinda creates a little bit of disturbance, but we see some significant upside there. You know, we've said our target is to get to 20% and lower of SG&A, so you have a few points, a couple of points right there. We think that we have a big, a big upside on gross margins by moving more of our work to smart shoring. We're at 6% right now. The objective is get to 10% by the end of the fiscal year. Also in the change of the business mix.
Like you've seen, we're doing more and more of the higher value stuff as we reduce, again, the subcontractors, focus on our people and high-value projects. Those things combined, we think that, we think we can get there. I mean, if you look at the cash generation that we have right now, even if revenues were flat, I mean, if let's say the whole industry melted down for everybody, revenues were flat, we would still be generating CAD 30 million of cash, which means we'd be deleveraging really fast. At some point, you know, if I look at the stock of our company, we're probably the best deal out there. I think we have all the tools to get to where we want to be on the strat plan. We're, we're still looking at a 50/50 M&A and organic growth.
We still have some, we see some very interesting improvement opportunities from an efficiency perspective, given our scale that we have today. We, we like the position we're in right now.
Okay, that's fantastic. If I may ask one last question, pretty strong growth in Europe. Maybe you can unpack that a bit. What's organic, what's inorganic, and what are the segments in Europe you're seeing and the opportunities there going forward?
Yeah, maybe, Claude, just, the what's organic versus M&A in Europe?
In Europe?
Yeah.
Oh, it's very small, the acquisition part. Datum's revenue base was largely in the U.S., so they had a few customers in the U.K. and a few customers in Australia. It's really minimal. The bulk of the increase is really our French operation, really turning the corner and doing well. It's probably four to one or something like that, if you split up the increase.
Okay, how do you see opportunities to expand in Europe? I guess this is all, a lot of it's aviation industry. Are you looking at more verticals or geographies beyond France? How should we think of that?
I think we, you know, we have a good foothold in Europe. I think that our opportunity is to expand that significantly. We would look to expand Europe if it could come with an expansion of our smart shoring operations at the same time, right? We see significant opportunities for growth in Europe and in North America. Each time we grow that, we have the opportunity to grow our smart shoring capability at the same time. We're looking. The sweet spot would be acquisitions that do both, right? That complete our offering at high margin, that add to both our on-site and the smart shoring capabilities. There are some of those in Europe as well.
They're going through the exact same economic cycle we're seeing in North America, so we're seeing some nice opportunities there as well.
Okay. Okay, fantastic. Well, thanks for taking my questions. I'll leave it at that.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question comes from Jérome Dubreuil at Desjardins. Please go ahead.
Hello, [Matte], thanks for taking my questions. Yeah, thanks for the color on backlog. You know, we're asking on this in these macro with this macro uncertainty at this time, good to hear that backlog is rather firm. Just checking another point, how easy is it for clients to defer the orders that are in the backlog at this time?
Thanks, Jérome, for the question. It's not as much the orders in the backlog that are easy to defer, 'cause most of those are already booked, or projects undergo and things that are already on the go. It's the new bookings. We had one client that we signed recently. They committed to a multimillion-dollar ERP project. It's signed, but they wanna start in September. Right, so it's that type of. It's the newer contracts that we're signing, we're seeing some of them saying, "You know, I'm ready to book right now and sign, but I wanna start in a couple of months." I think it's gonna be more on newer bookings of large projects that you're gonna see those types of things, you know? Unless it's a.
I didn't go to list one project, but still.
Yeah, interesting. Thanks. A bit of a cleanup item here. Were there particular costs related to the rebranding in the in the quarter, and is it material at all?
It was not material. It was all done internally by our own people.
Okay, thank you. Just to clarify your point on the pressure in banking. You point out pressure is mostly in the U.S., but then?
Yes
you're mostly exposed to Canada. I just want to clarify, how exposed do you think you are to this trend?
That's what I'm saying. I'm kinda cautiously optimistic because right now we have little exposure in the U.S., but as you all saw, the quarterly reporting from the Canadian banks, they're all taking massive write-downs, and they're all being very cautious. You know, I'm being very cautious as well. I'm following this, so I think there is some collateral damage in Canada from what we're seeing in the U.S. Interest rates are still rising in Canada, so at some point, I think there's gonna be some impact on the real estate industry in Canada, which, and that's gonna have an impact on the banks. We're keeping a really close eye on it. I think everybody's being very cautious right now in the Canadian banking side.
Yeah. Great. Thanks for the clarification, and thanks for answering the questions.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question comes from Vincent Colicchio at Barrington Research. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, Paul. A few for me. What higher margin areas in Canada? Hello?
Yeah, yeah, we hear you, Vincent.
Yeah, yeah. What higher margin areas in Canada had the strongest growth in the quarter? Can you give us some color there?
Good question. We had growth kind of across the board in the last quarter in Canada. I'd say that the highest growth was probably in our government business, which from a gross margin perspective, isn't the highest, but from a net margin perspective, is actually very good. That was a strong area of growth. Another strong area of growth was our very large multi-year contract that we signed a year and a half ago, that's still growing. Both those clients are going through some significant integration. QMI recently announced the acquisition of Freedom Mobile, there's gonna be some significant integration projects coming from that and starting. Beneva is still going through the integration of the insurance companies, the merger there.
That's also generating some interesting projects. It's really a combination of many things, and it's tough to single out one thing.
Regarding Datum and Vitalyst, are your cross-selling synergies meeting your expectations?
On the Datum side, absolutely. On the Vitalyst side, it's a bit slower, just because that's, and I mentioned this in the past, one of the areas where clients are reducing spend is on training right now. We did a lot of that. However, we have two, there are two parts of the business in that acquisition. One is the e-learning, and the other one is where we're gonna be integrating. I mean, you're hearing a lot about generative AI right now. One of the big tools that Microsoft is gonna be launching is called Copilot.
That's an area that we see significant growth for us with all of our clients in the rollout and leveraging of Copilot in the Microsoft environment, that uses generative AI for everything from Word to PowerPoint, to coding, to anything to do with the Dynamics and Office Suite. We see a lot of potential upside in that.
Now, Claude, one for you. You did mention the organic growth in the quarter. Curious if you have that in constant currency?
Yes, it's around a couple percentage points of positive impact from currency in Q4. Q4- over- Q4.
Okay, thank you. Nice quarter, guys.
Thank you very much, Vince.
Thank you. Next question comes from John Shao at National Bank. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I understand that the macro environment looks tough, and a lot of enterprise today are talking about new cost reduction and efficiency improvement. I'm just curious if Alithya could actually monetize on this opportunity, given there's such a rush?
Thanks for the question, John. Like I was saying earlier, we do a lot of that in the Robotic P rocess Automation portion. You know, we kinda have a convergence right now that we see as very positive, in that there's a shortage of qualified labor, and there's a need for efficiency. A lot of these automation projects, which in the past weren't a very high priority, are now becoming a very high priority. That's something that we see as very positive for us, everything to do with hyperautomation. The other piece, of course, is outsourcing more stuff, right? Outsourcing projects, reducing costs, transforming some CapEx into OpEx.
There's this all these things that we're that we can offer our clients that we see as we see as very positive for us.
Thank you, Paul. I think you also mentioned the labor. My question is actually on the labor market and whether it has any impact on your hire activity so far? It seems like it's been a while since people talk about this topic.
You know, I think there's a lot of noise around many things right now out there. It's still, for qualified technology people, it's still a high-demand environment. I don't think people realize that. Now, we have the advantage now that we can leverage our smart shoring, so that's taking a bit of the pressure off, so we can hire people remotely now that, to fill some of the gaps. The other piece that's also helping us right now is, as I was saying, we're reducing the subcontractors and moving that more to permanent employees. The other thing that we're doing, which comes back to how we're improving gross margins, is we're being very selective on profitable growth.
We're being very selective on the projects that we bid on, which puts less pressure on the hiring and on the people side, and brings us more benefit in terms of the type of projects we do and the value they generate. We're trying to combine all those things to make the situation more manageable.
That's great color. Thank you so much. I'll pass it along.
Thanks, John.
Thank you. Next question comes from Divya Goyal at Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I wanted to get some color on some of the industries where you think Alithya is currently not servicing and untapped from that side. Are these certain industries where you're looking to grow and expand? You did provide quite a lot of color in some of the previous questions, if you could elaborate on that.
Yeah. Thanks for that, Divya. There's a few sectors right now that we see where we're already there, but we see tremendous opportunity for growth. One is Healthcare and Health Insurance, right? Canada and the U.S., a little bit different, but we see significant opportunity for growth in the healthcare industry, both on the provider side and the payer side. It's a industry that's going through a tremendous transformation right now. We're very well positioned. As you know, we're the top player in healthcare at Oracle on that side. We also are involved on the Microsoft side with some of these hospitals.
With the Datum acquisition that we did, we're very involved on the payer side and the modernization side, this is an area where we actually use artificial intelligence to accelerate the modernization of the transformation, where we provide it as a subscription-based service. Again, we see a big upside for that, as you saw from the growth in our subscription-based revenue, it's also a very high margin, repeatable solution that we like. So healthcare is definitely, healthcare, both payer and provider, is an area that we see tremendous growth for us going forward. This might sound counterintuitive, I think there's gonna be some growth opportunities in banking as well.
I think the RPA offering that we have is gonna become extremely popular in the next 12-24 months in the banking industry. We're staying very close to that one. The telecom industry is also not finished with its consolidation. You're seeing some significant projects happening there. I think that's an area that we can do a lot more. Finally, manufacturing. Our Microsoft business just had a stellar few months of bookings. We think the whole process manufacturing side of the house is also another area we can, even though we're number one in Microsoft in that area, in North America, we think we can do better there as well.
Yeah, that's definitely good color and definitely good growth improvement there. You briefly mentioned, Paul, about the Québecor Freedom Mobile acquisition and, like, you know, the potential projects that could come out of that. Are those potentially baked into your bookings numbers right now? Could you quantify them at all, or would that come later as they start to integrate?
Some are in already, Divya. But some we're still. We wanna make sure before we put them into the backlog that it follows our definition of hard backlog, right? I think we're conservative right now. It's not gonna differ materially.
No, that's helpful. One last one here on the integration. For the Datum and the Vitalyst, have those acquisitions or any of the other, or all the other previous acquisitions, have they all now been integrated, or are you still in the process of completing the integration?
We track integrations on multiple different levels. The administrative stuff, the benefits, the email infrastructure, the tools, the financials, the sales operations. There's a lot of different levels of integration. All of the operational stuff, so how do we go to clients and integrate it into the management team, the email, the access to the tools, that's done. There's always some stuff to do, especially around our financial systems, because you wanna make sure that the employees who are coming on board aren't penalized in the change, in the transition. As you know, depending on which time of the year you transition into the systems, the resets with the IRS and the Canadian equivalent can mess up somebody's paycheck pretty bad.
We try to avoid that. Typically, we do those on January 1st or April 1st when we have our systems at the end of the fiscal year. We usually do those once a year based on the calendar. No, the integrations are going according to plan.
That's perfect. Thanks a lot for taking my questions, I'll pass the line.
Thanks, Divya.
Thank you. There are no further questions. I will now turn the call back over to Paul Raymond for closing remarks.
Thank you, Lara. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. Merci beaucoup, and looking forward to talking to you as soon.