Hello, and welcome to Concentrix Investor Day. My name is David Stein, Vice President of Investor Relations. We appreciate your joining our virtual event today. If you haven't already done so, please turn on your video. Also, set your view to speaker view by clicking the view icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Zoom page. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements, including future financial results, operating projections, and cost estimates, which involve risks and uncertainty. Actual results could differ materially. Please refer to our most recent filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for additional information regarding uncertainties that could affect our future financial results. The company has no intention to revise or update any forward-looking statements made during the event today. We will also reference non-GAAP financial information, including adjusted constant currency revenue growth, non-GAAP operating income, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow.
A reconciliation of these measures is included in the appendix to the presentation. These materials, and this call are the property of Concentrix and may not be recorded, rebroadcast, or republished without the permission of Concentrix. We have an exciting event prepared for you this morning. Several members of the Concentrix leadership team will be discussing our vision, strategy, and the future. After the presentations, we will close out the day with a question and answer session. During this time, we will be using the raise hand feature that can be found under the reactions button on your Zoom screen. Now, to get things started, I'm pleased to introduce our President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Caldwell.
What we do, where we are going.
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Insights into what the future might hold in the CX space. Finally, Andre will round up the formal part of the day with covering our financials. Now, I have never been more optimistic about where Concentrix is with our capabilities and our place within the customer experience market. Over the years, our vision has always been to be the greatest customer engagement company in the world, rich in talent and diversity. Now we believe we are perfectly positioned. We have the right client base that is helping to shape what CX can be. We have the right services and technologies to support those visions, backed by an incredible worldwide team. From a revenue and margin perspective, total shareholder returns. Let's talk a little bit about customer experience.
Thinking back to simpler times, people saw customer service as sort of picking up the phone, walking in the door, maybe sending a letter off. I might date myself by saying even sending a fax. Essentially, what customers wanted was to be known, to be treated well and treated efficiently, whether they were buying something or had a problem with something. Scale happened, and what ultimately happened was that everyone started being treated the same. The industry had to change. With the advent of digital and smartphones, brands now had better ways to identify you, track you, and ultimately serve you. The customer relationship management market at about $90 billion today. For a customer, it gave you more ways to interact with the company, sometimes though with the same frustrating experience. Think of it this way. Sorry.
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We had to change. With the advent of digital and smartphones, brands now had better ways to identify you and track you. The customer relationship industry was born, and we see that market at about $90 billion today. For a customer, it gave you way more ways to interact with that company, whether it be through your mobile device, chatting, web, maybe even social media. It sometimes led to the same frustrating experience because you might chat with somebody, then call in and have to re-identify who you are and go over the exact same problem again. The reality is that much of the industry still operates like this today. The next evolution, though, is really taking that data from the smartphones, the webs, and other ways of tracking, and developing a deeper understanding of the clients, leading to a much more personalized experience.
Many companies have tried to bolt on these capabilities to try and get a full view of their customer and drive a better experience for their customer. It might be getting more feedback and changing the journey better. It might be driving more insights into prompting offers to a customer that they might not necessarily understand that they want or need, but at the right time. At the end of the day, it started to develop that personalization, but what was really missing was bringing the IT digital services component to it. With IT services, you can really unleash what is possible with CX and drive a better customer experience. You can start to tie together disparate parts of the customer journey and drive a better connected omnichannel journey by the front and back office coming together. This means connecting experiences over devices.
When I use my phone and I use my web, I get the same experience. When I call in or use social media, they know who I am, and it ties it all together. These touch points bringing together drive a better customer experience and better loyalty to brands. Together, we believe this market is about $550 billion. One thing that is important to note is that you'll notice a customer is always at the center of the journey. As we look at this $550 billion market, I wanted to break it down a bit by competitors and growth rates and look at it in two separate competitive sets. Now, there is some overlap between markets. If the 320 and the 90 and the 270, you're a little high.
Well, for Concentrix, we look at it as that $550 billion number. The first competitive CRM or CX market. We compete against very good companies that focus on one to a few of the services mentioned. Think about content moderation, content safety, maybe voice, not voice, maybe gig work, maybe custom work, some consulting, and even some digital work fall into these categories. Although the digital work tends to be more off-the-shelf customization and implementation work. Few competitors can tie these pieces together while delivering at scale across multiple types of services for clients. This market is also very fragmented with thousands of competitors, but few of size. When we flip to the digital IT services competitor set, we compete with companies that have deep engineering talent but lack the understanding of the customer journey and sometimes the deep domain expertise of the vertical they work in.
A lot of this business is also driven by massive overhaul of legacy systems as well as digital-first solutions. Now, when you bring them together again, even fewer competitors can bring these two worlds together at scale and deliver a reimagined CX experience that takes the best of the back office, front office, putting it together for effortless experiences for customers. The reason that this is so important is because this is now how clients are wanting to buy. They want the solution. They do not wanna buy fragmented parts, and they do not wanna act like a general contractor, and so they're looking for high-value partners like Concentrix to lead the way. This is where we specialize and come in.
At the heart of what we do, we bring together amazing people with a very deep understanding of the customer journey and our clients' business in their vertical and help develop the strategy. Once the strategy is developed, we really develop the solution and deliver amazing customer experiences that build these lifelong relationships with their customers. Simply put, we deliver personal experiences at scale that are high value for our clients by driving long-term relationships with their customers. Now, what does this really look like in real life? Some of you might not be connected as much as our friend here, but make no mistake, this idea of personalized experiences is something you all want and expect from your preferred brands. Every day, Concentrix is powering just this small sample of personalized CX experiences for their clients to their customers.
Maybe it starts out in the morning with us measuring your blood sugar and giving you a warning on your smart device while updating your medical records that you might want a doctor's appointment. A little later on in the morning, after you figure out that your blood sugar is up, you might wanna go for that Bahamas vacation, and we know that by where you've been surfing on the web. A little later, you relax by looking at social media, and what we do is make sure that the content aligns to the social standards as well as what the company is looking to represent to you who's surfing on the web. Later on, you might check in on that elective surgery and figure out that it's been approved that your health insurer is now gonna pay it.
Now that you're in good health, you figure it's time to invest in that house. We help you fill out that mortgage for your financial institution, credit score you, and then put the package of documentation together to help underwrite and fund your mortgage for the lender. It's been a busy day already, but by dinner, you're completely wiped out. You wanna sit back on the couch and order your food. We enable that service of delivering from restaurants to your house. While you're eating, you're surfing the metaverse and catching up on NFTs, and you see an NFT that you wanna buy to add to your collection. We help you do that as well. Now, enough with the virtual world. You're thinking about going on that car trip, but you need to buy that car.
We help you configure your new car and understand when from the factory it's gonna be delivered. With that new car, going out on the town, you need those new shoes. We also help you customize the new shoes that you want. If you're a sneakerhead, customize them to the exact specifications, track when they're gonna get to you, and also sign you up for a loyalty program to make sure that you're hip all year round. Later, you've had a long day, you sit back and listen to the music. We help that subscription service manage, bill you, and also support you as you listen to your music over multiple devices.
Then lastly, when you're asleep, we're making sure that no fraud is happening on many of our clients' systems and proactively alert you if you think your account has been compromised, or they think your account has been compromised. 24 by 7 by 365, we are there powering these solutions each day with our talented team and powerful technology. Again, this is just a small sampling. With all that we have done, we still believe we are just getting started. While we have always believed an amazing customer experience is a key ingredient to any client's business, more so than ever, research is showing that businesses see this as well. A top priority for executives is to drive a unique customer and better customer experience. A top 3 priority is customer trust and loyalty and customer experience around the digital initiatives.
Some of this certainly was brought on by the changes in the world as seen with COVID. Also, new economy companies have built better customer experiences and are driving share, and this is driving the point home of investing in customer experience. We believe we are the right company to take advantage of this new focus on customer experience, and a lot of it comes down to how we build our business and our guiding principles. It all starts with how we select clients to work with. We are not after thousands of clients, but fewer clients with deeper engagements where they believe CX is a strategic imperative to their business. That relationship with these clients has to be focused on long-term. We want to make sure that we're investing with clients who wanna be with us for decades.
We also believe if we wanna make sure that our clients are successful, they will reward us with more business as we make them successful. We are happy to disrupt our own business on a continual basis for the benefits of our client. This requires investing in deep domain expertise, a global footprint, and selling solutions based on how the client consumes services, not how we wanna sell them. This will earn our loyal client base, and as the industry consolidates, as we have seen, and we believe it will continue to consolidate, it allows us to be taking more share and become indispensable for our clients. All along this journey, we believe in doing right by the communities we operate in and being diverse within our business and giving back. That begins at the top.
We are incredibly thrilled to have a diverse board that are passionate, driven, and engaged in our business. They bring a level of expertise, guidance, and governance that completely complement our executive team. From an executive team perspective, we have always believed in having our management team operate around the world and being close to our business and clients, not in a head office that loses touch with both. This proved an unintended strength as we went through the early days of COVID impact. We had to move over 65% of our staff members to being remote within a few weeks, but our governance and management principles were the same as before. As I mentioned, equally important in operating a business is supporting clients around the world. With that, we give back with our ESG initiatives around the world.
I would encourage you to go to our website and download our newly updated ESG report that details our initiatives and commitments over the next few years. We are very passionate about it and believe it also resonates with our clients as a key differentiator and our staff as a place that they wanna work. We see ourselves in this huge market that is growing with the right capabilities and the right guiding principles. We thought it would be helpful to share how we look at the market a bit closer so you understand how we invest and take advantage of it. In our market, we believe there are things of super cycles of growth. This happens as new offerings or new delivery mechanisms become either quickly adopted or required.
An example of new technology being adopted might be chatbots, for instance, where clients are looking for a more cost-effective way and easier way of dealing with chats coming in. Rather, it might be more like content moderation, where social standards or government regulation requires social media companies to manage what they are presenting on their platforms. Sometimes these super cycles will launch a new competitive relevance. Sometimes it also allows for share shift to happen between competitors who are leading edge. What we see time and time again is that the spend always comes back to scale players who are able to offer more than just specific functions or service. This is really important, as investing at the right time to take advantage of these super cycles is critical to us. Now, these are some of the super cycles we have seen and grown through.
We have never solely depended on these super cycles for growth, nor for longevity, but they are incredibly important to us. When offshoring started, we helped build a global footprint to help our clients have attractive labor alternatives. As the e-commerce boom happened, we were one of the first companies to develop an online ability to process credit cards without having a brand ambassador listen to the credit card number. As digital transformation came in, we're one of the first CRM and CX companies to invest in this capabilities with our Tigerspike investment driving UX, UI enterprise mobility. Finally, we've been in content moderation for longer than most of the industry, solely focused on a better experience for our ambassadors, as well as the output for our clients. As an example of what we do, coming up and making investments, we're also looking further ahead.
The metaverse is one of those areas. We're starting to understand how to support people and customers in this new world. We also have clients who are now looking at how to embrace Web3 with cryptocurrency, and we also have clients who are now starting to sell and market NFTs in this space. Lastly, in our content services space, we're doing a lot of work on ethical AI and helping clients train their models to be less discriminatory or biased. It's important to note that these super cycles do not drive a significant portion of our revenue as we look forward and are in the early stages, but it gives you an idea of where we're investing and where we're looking. Vijay is gonna go even further ahead with where we see the evolution of CX later in the presentation.
That focus on looking ahead has allowed us to grow to be a market leader. We really look at our growth in three steps. CX platform. It was important to understand which verticals we went into, what the global footprint needed to look like, and why technology needed to be so critical to our growth. The next phase we went into was really transforming our platform to drive scale and enter even new higher margin verticals. It started with our IBM acquisition, with other acquisitions, and finally with our Convergys acquisition a few years ago. Now with our PK acquisition, we're even further positioned to grow.
While we have done a number of acquisitions, one thing we are very, very focused on is our one Concentrix philosophy, which integrates our acquisitions immediately upon purchase, allowing to leverage our purchases very quickly to the benefit of our clients and non-disruptive for our staff. You can see that as clients have also responded well to how we think about the marketplace by giving us opportunities to grow. While our top line has grown, what is key is also our non-GAAP operating income has grown over 630 basis points, showing the value we're delivering to our clients. This is something that we believe we have the ability to continue to grow for both revenue and margin. Now, this brings us to today.
We deliver CX solutions to over 750 clients, of which over 125 are new economy clients and over 100 are Fortune 500. This is a very unique client set that will be able to continue to allow us to grow for many years. Monica will talk to you about why our client strategy is important to our growth and our philosophy of running a business. We have invested in technology and now have over 340 IP assets, including patents and over 50 technology platforms that are proprietary to us. That focus on the right clients and the right solution offering has allowed us to build an amazing client portfolio across our verticals. It has allowed us having a very diverse revenue base, both from a geographical standpoint, but also a vertical standpoint and a client standpoint.
In fact, our top five clients represent 25% of our revenue last year. Our clients are also marquee brands or companies that are soon to be marquee brands, but are all recognizable. In fact, eight of the top 10 consumer global electronics companies are our clients. Four of the top five worldwide. Seven o f the top 10 new fintech clients to companies are our clients. Five of the top five U .S. banks are our clients. Three of the top five global e-commerce companies are our clients. Four of the top U.S. health insurance companies. Three of the top five global IPOs in 2021 are our clients. Finally, Four of the top five s ocial brands are our clients. What an amazing client base, and it shows you the diversity and resilience within our revenue.
We deliver for these clients at scale across the world. In fact, 48 of our top 50 clients we deliver for in multiple geographies. Also with 65% of our staff working from home, we have been able to enter new markets faster and more cost effectively for our clients over the last two years. Our passion for CX and pushing to drive where the limits can be has really allowed us to innovate and change the industry. This is being recognized by industry experts and analysts. More importantly, our company is recognized for our diversity, culture, happiness, and engagement. When you have happy staff, that leads to happy clients as well. Now, as we became a public company on December 1st, 2020.
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We said to the market, we're going to accomplish a number of things in our first year. It's a good time to look back at how we did against our commitments. We talked about driving growth, that we were gonna grow faster than the market. We in fact are growing at 35% with our strategic brand key clients and over 18% with our integrated partner clients, which Monica will explain a little later. We talked about relentlessly innovating and developing new digital assets. In fact, we became an Amazon Connect reseller, as well as launched our VOC Essentials platform that has over 15,000 daily users now within the first year. We talked about further investing in emerging markets, and our emerging market growth was over 20% last year.
Then finally, we selectively talked about acquisitions, and we believe that our final acquisition of PK is a real game changer for us in the fiscal year. This will allow us to deliver more world-class technical solutions at scale. I am incredibly pleased that the CEO of PK, Dinesh, has now come to be the President of Concentrix Catalyst. With that, I'd like to welcome Dinesh and have him present PK. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone. First of all, I wanted to say I am delighted to be here today as part of the Concentrix family. As Chris mentioned earlier, the PK acquisition, we believe, is highly complementary and truly enhances our end-to-end technology capabilities. There are four key factors why we believe this acquisition is very much in line with the Concentrix vision and accelerates our strategy. First, PK brings a strong portfolio, advanced digital experience technology, and intellectual assets. Secondly, it actually enhances the digital transformation capabilities at scale. PK has significant experience working with Fortune 250 customers. Third, it operates in the high-growth digital IT services market. The pandemic, as you all know, has truly accelerated that spend in this sector. Finally, this acquisition is both accretive and to both EPS and top-line revenue growth for us.
Let me give you a quick preview into PK. PK was a leading customer experience design and engineering firm, and we partnered with the world's best brands to create pioneering experiences that accelerate digital outcomes for our customers. Our clients will tell you that we bring together great design and strong technology to deliver moments that matter to their customers. This coming year, we expect to grow about 20% to deliver $530 million of revenue at $85 million adjusted EBITDA. With over 5,000 people across 11 locations in four countries, PK has been recognized and awarded worldwide for designing and engineering digital experiences at scale. As head of the customer experience team, the number that we are most proud of at PK is the NPS as measured by a third party.
As we come together as Concentrix Catalyst, the combination of Tigerspike and PK presents us with a new palette of opportunities. Tigerspike brings in additional design and digital engineering expertise and also an international presence. Together, we believe that applying a CX-first approach along with deep technology expertise to any business challenge will ensure improved outcomes in our joint customer base. As a combined entity, we expect to grow at 20% and deliver $630 million of revenue this year. Needless to say, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We think the best way to describe the opportunity in front of us is to talk about how the services that we deliver have a transformational impact on our industry-leading customer base. Let's look at it from three lenses.
First, we're gonna talk about the power of the Catalyst and Concentrix teams coming together. We will talk to you about a joint customer where we believe we have tremendous impact. Next, we will talk about how our outcome-focused approach is driving technology-enabled digital-first transformation of our customers. We'll also talk about how technology is accelerating transformation for clients and operations. Finally, we will showcase how strategic brand partnerships are driving innovation and organic growth in our customers. Let me walk you through an example of the one Concentrix approach that Chris talked about for a large client that we have in common. This is a Fortune 50 customer in the high-tech industry that is driving tremendous digital transformation for enterprises across the board. Today, this is a strong client for both Catalyst and Concentrix.
It's a top client and award-winning for both of us. We have a rich set of services that we are delivering very successfully to this client. Concentrix has a strong presence with customer engagement services for sales, support, as well as running programs. Catalyst, on the other hand, has a strong presence on the business side, delivering CX strategy and tech-enabled digital sales services. As you can see, these are very complementary with little or no direct overlap today. To make this opportunity real, let me walk you through an illustrative opportunity. You can see here our technology client is considering a new offering for customers, a market that is traditionally penetrated through digital channels. In the past, Catalyst would drive the strategy and design, and Concentrix would then operationalize the global support. As you can imagine, this tends to result in a disjointed customer experience.
As we know today, customers expect a seamless delivery. What we are now able to do is to help our client reimagine the entire customer experience from the first brand interaction through to how they purchase and engage with the brand. As a combined entity, we are able to deliver on those customer touch points with the global scale that Concentrix really excels at today. I'm very excited. I'm really excited about the path that we are on today, and that's because this is the power of Catalyst and Concentrix coming together. Next up, I'm delighted to introduce Rick Rosso, who's Executive VP and heads Sales and Account Management for us. He's gonna talk about a few case studies, starting with the power of Catalyst and Concentrix coming together. Over to you, Rick.
Thank you, Dinesh, and good morning, everyone. This better together case demonstrates how generally unique Concentrix is as it relates to our ability to reimagine everything CX for an amazing global brand. Our client in this case is a global footwear and athletic brand known for industry-leading customer experiences and passionate and loyal customers. This is a client who's had independent but highly valued relationships with both Concentrix and with PK going back many years. Concentrix had operated the customer support and progressed to designing, optimizing, and providing critical insights to deliver outstanding services to this brand's avid consumers as the brand accelerated into direct consumer. The focus on outstanding service, flexibility and agility and innovation helped Concentrix build a very trusted relationship and become the primary strategic partner for customer support across all channels and across high-value consumers.
Similarly, PK had worked with the same client to design and build, and later enhance, the brand's membership program, creating a world-class membership experience, resulting in attracting a significant number of new members and driving up the commerce engagement with the brand. Now, the power of Concentrix plus Catalyst helps us uniquely be able to make design and technology changes that can further improve consumer and member experiences by leveraging an end-to-end flow through design and insight process, which will help deliver improved outcomes to the client in terms of expanded member enrollment, higher spend per member, and reduced member effort, in addition to improved net performance, net promoter score and customer effort for all consumers, including the loyalty members. This client has demonstrated a strategic interest to also engage in established commerce in Metaverse.
Once again, the power of Concentrix plus Catalyst will be able to help support the strategy and then to design, build, and operate the metaverse commerce and membership activities in an accelerated way to help them gain early entrant advantage. This next case really fits into the category of digital transformation and strategic brand partnerships and demonstrates how Concentrix acts as a trusted partner to help new economy brands move from initial stages of growth and initial customer support designs to be able to scale at the speed of their hypergrowth while upping their game in terms of customer engagement execution. Our client in this case is a large global fintech brand providing mobile banking and related services.
This brand has been growing their customer base at unprecedented levels and felt that their customer support processes and capabilities were limiting their ability to introduce new products or to deliver the customer experience their added customer base deserved. Our clients shared that they needed a partner that could help them optimize across all service channels, help them support a growing number of disparate and complex functions supporting their customers, bring in best practices in servicing critical financial interactions, and then help them better meet the needs of a 10 million and growing base of customers.
Concentrix worked with our client to design and optimize a number of the key non-standard processes, set up and helped launch support for several critical new products, provided subject matter experts to build out key functions to support the brand, and leveraged our customer journey experts and data scientists to redesign a number of customer journeys. We also helped test and deploy digital and automation technologies which drove huge impacts in social media data ingestion. Our team worked closely with our client to help them meet their compliance activities in an accelerated timeframe. Our client recognized that at this point in their business, they needed a deeper and more impactful partner, valuing customer experience execution, financial services expertise, digital and automation leadership, and a culture that would allow them to do what they do best, which is create a one-of-a-kind product experience and culture for their customers.
We are proud to be the customer experience strategic partner for this client. This next case is also one that demonstrates digital transformation and strategic brand partnerships, and shows how Concentrix uniquely partners with new economy brands looking to navigate hypergrowth, high impact changes, while looking for expertise to establish best practices at scale. Our client in this case is a leading global brand providing cryptocurrency exchange services in over 100 countries. Excuse me. This brand is experiencing tremendous growth in customers, and at the same time is adding significant function and capability to support the global members to meet compliance expectations. Our client came to Concentrix looking for a partner who could provide insights, best practices, and relevant fintech and transaction security expertise to help the brand deliver the improved customer experience at scale and with high velocity.
Working with our client, we were able to establish the global operational framework for each of these customer channels, with focus on the most critical customer experience journeys. We rapidly built out initial interaction centers in key markets, leveraging the Concentrix Work Anywhere design to ensure we were able to build the team of brand ambassadors with the unique skills required to deliver to this global standard. As we established these teams around the globe, our data scientists began to analyze the opportunities to improve the operational efficiency of each channel and identify opportunities to further reimagine the customer experience journeys. While by no means is this program at completion, the initial contributions from the work we've completed with our clients are significant.
Already, the teams have delivered improved customer experience journeys, supporting the clients' more than 56 million customers in record time while implementing a broad set of customer experience support activities across the new interactive channels. All the while, we've been collaborating to deliver against a dynamic set of regulatory expectations and preparing for the customer experience changes to support a high-growth future. Now, this last case I'm going to talk about falls into the category of digital transformation and really helps demonstrate Concentrix's ability to help our clients reimagine, then design, build, and operate a transformed way of supporting their customers. It's about a unique ability to harness in one company the consultants, the experience design, the process design, the customer experience infrastructure, and the customer experience operational expertise to help our clients bring a transformed journey to life.
Our client in this case was a government entity who provides public service to their citizens to assist those with hearing or speech challenges to be able to communicate via relay service. This critical service had become quite outdated and was not meeting the needs of the constituency and was costly. Concentrix provided the client with a unique approach and proposition. Rather than just find a way to do more of the same for less, we started with an agile design and build project to visualize a reimagined way to leverage technology and user design to modernize the experience. Concentrix then designed, built, and went live with a new customer experience infrastructure, including a mobile app, SMS messaging, and video.
Today, this new customer experience solution has driven significant adoption of relay users to the new mobile app, helped significantly reduce the cost to support the constituents, and driven a much improved user experience. In short, more users have a richer and more timely communication experience for a fraction of the old model cost. Now I'd like to turn it over to Denise McCutchen-Grace to discuss our next case. Denise leads our customer interaction technology team and partners with clients to help them realize their digital transformation goals. Denise, over to you.
Thank you so much, Rick. This client is an iconic U.S.-based home goods retailer with more than 37 million customers. They entered the pandemic with 100% brick-and-mortar advisors and limited digital capabilities, and they needed a strategic partner who had the scale, agility, and offerings to meet their bold vision to provide an Amazon-like experience for their customers. Ultimately, this means digital-first. We deployed 10 different technologies for this client. Several are customer-facing and enhance their experience, such as self-service channels to give them more ways to get answers using voice and chat bots with AI and machine learning, and to enable the shift to more digital interactions as a channel of choice. We also deployed solutions that give our ambassadors more information about the customer and their journey so they can service them personally and with empathy.
We've achieved some amazing outcomes together just one year into our partnership. I'll share more on them later. First, let me explain how we did this together. Concentrix is unique in that we engage with clients in a very consultative way, digging deep to learn what they want to achieve and collaborating with them on the right solutions to achieve the outcomes. We brought our ongoing investment in the latest CX technology, data science, analytics, and best practices to bear, which allowed this client to focus on their changing retail environment, brand growth, and development. We kicked off the relationship with a customer experience analysis. Our data scientists captured and documented customer journeys to help us understand the consumer's happy path and the moments along that path that cause them pain. This post-purchase CX journey is one output of this initiative.
Now, I'd like to show you a short demonstration that is representative of the experience we created.
Our focus from day one has been to quickly help this client bring their customer experience vision to life. Within the first few months, we implemented both a natural language IVR and chat bots. In just a few words, customers can say or type exactly what they need, which means that most customer issues are resolved faster without ever having to speak to a brand ambassador. We automated resolution for common requests like order cancellations, delivery status, and refund requests. This saves customers time, saves them from having to make a phone call, saves them from waiting in phone queues, gives them back valuable time, and makes them happy. Happy customers are more brand loyal. They buy more, all of which are important to our client. Customer feedback is an important part of the client's customer experience vision.
By implementing a Voice of the Customer feedback loop, we learn where things are going well and identify areas for improvement. This kind of feedback is critical to a successful partnership and helps keep us on a path of rapid innovation.
Our focus from day one has been to quickly help this client bring their customer experience vision to life. Within the first few months, we've implemented both a conversational IVR and a messaging solution, including bots that resulted in about 41% of chat and messaging conversations being either deflected or resolved by self-service. At the same time, we were able to reduce the handle time of conversations by 27% for voice and 12% for messaging. This is valuable time that the customer gets back. Going forward, we continue to innovate with this client, and the nature of rapid innovation is that we will hit speed bumps in the road. The great news is that we, the one team of Concentrix and the client, continue to take chances and fail fast and succeed together.
It takes that kind of partnership to fly with a project like this one. It was great to walk you through this success story. Now I'm gonna turn it over to Kathy Juve, the Executive Vice President of Customer Experience, Technology Insights, who leads a team that provide deep insights and technology to clients on those CX journeys. Kathy.
Thank you, Denise. This next case study is about digital transformation for a regional healthcare provider. This provider has 220 clinicians across 65 locations, and as they grew, they struggled to respond to patient requests, dropping over 40% of patient inquiries because they did not have the modern digital capabilities, and they were forcing patients to call into busy doctor's offices for everything. I think we've all been in this situation before when we've been put on hold when trying to reach our doctor's office or been in the office waiting for the front desk while they answer calls from others. This is a very frustrating experience for patients and staff, but it's also very inefficient.
The root cause of this was that they had grown rapidly through M&A, and they found themselves with multiple legacy and siloed digital CX systems and undesired technology debt. What they wanted was to create a modern experience and simplify their technology and their operating structure. What I'm gonna show you now is how we reimagined an entirely new experience through digital transformation.
Happy patients are critical to the well-being of any healthcare organization. A negative experience with the provider affects patient satisfaction and revenue. Patients of this regional healthcare company were so frustrated by their inability to reach the provider that 40% of incoming calls were being abandoned. As part of the complete transformation roadmap developed for this provider, we began by migrating their multiple legacy systems that didn't communicate to one integrated and cloud-based environment. We added self-service options that enable patients to connect with a provider using the channels they love. Patients' calls are now answered immediately. They can say in their own words, exactly what they need and provide details to better route their calls, like their name, date of birth, and the name of their doctor.
Because data is seamlessly shared between channels, patients receive more personalized service, whether they're speaking to an advisor or interacting with a chatbot. Moving to the cloud helped this provider reimagine the customer experience, resulting in happier, loyal patients who receive faster, more personalized service.
Great. What you saw there was a completely new experience, and there are a few key elements to the solution that I'd like to highlight. First of all, we evaluated their existing technology and processes, and we created a plan to migrate and integrate into one digital CX solution, leveraging the cloud. Our analytics team provided ongoing insights into the customer journey to guide the strategy. We built our solution, including Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex, to centralize the digital CX technology into one platform, which we also managed for them. We also integrated into their back office system, Allscripts, which is a patient electronic health record system. As you saw in the video, this technology enables patients to interact with natural language virtual agents and other digital means.
On the advisor side, the new technology enables them to centralize their patient assistance center, creating significant efficiencies for patient interactions and also improving the experience. In this solution, we also provide advisors to support the live patient request as well. The results were really great. Through our partnership, we achieved a 40% cost savings for digital CX. They save $500,000 per integration per clinic in integration costs, which was a substantial cost for them. It also only takes now two to six w eeks to onboard a clinic, and that's from months, sometimes up to six months. They also achieved their objective to eliminate tech debt and move to an OpEx model with us and also provide, obviously, a much better patient experience and responsiveness to patient care.
This next case study is another example of digital transformation, and I'm gonna demonstrate here how we used our technology and services to drive digital transformation for a top 10 bank who wanted to improve their net promoter score. This bank wanted to make CX the cornerstone of their strategy to help them drive growth and differentiate their brand in a very crowded and disruptive marketplace. They had legacy platforms for collecting customer feedback that actually still used Excel files. They also needed help to decipher the data, to turn it into insights, and then devise action plans that they could deploy to really drive the business changes that they needed to do.
What they really liked about us is that they wanted to work with a single partner who could integrate and handle all the capabilities that they needed, which included experience design, strategy, technology, professional services, and to do this for them on an ongoing basis. They did not wanna coordinate with multiple vendors and become a project management team, but instead, they really wanted to focus their efforts on the CX strategy and on implementing those changes inside the bank that would really drive the change that they needed. In our solution, we reimagined a new enterprise management ecosystem for them that would incorporate 16 company divisions and functions where the bank was engaging with consumers. This included their mortgage banking group, their retail banking group, digital properties, just to name a few.
What we did is we installed our enterprise platform, Concentrix CX, which is a voice of the customer platform to measure and analyze feedback across the organization. Our software enables them and us to analyze survey data across all channels to capture the voice of the customer for the bank in real time. We use natural language processing and AI in our text mining engine to identify the common themes and pain points across the bank, and our CX professionals work hand in hand with the bank to identify the business changes that will drive the best ROI for CCAN improvement on an ongoing basis. The bank staff have visibility into their own voice of the customer and satisfaction levels so they can see how they're doing. They also receive automated recommendations for improvement. Bank executives, including the CEO, have visibility into customer sentiment and satisfaction.
Our insights are also used to improve a variety of processes across the bank, that include things like bank staffing, outbound communications, promotions, and other ways to improve their mobile app or digital assets. The results is really exciting. As you can see, the outcome was that we were able to improve their NPS by 20 points in a year because of their top-down enterprise mandate and support from their executive team, combined with our VoC technology and our talented consultants working daily together to achieve these results. Now I'm gonna turn it back over to Rick Rosso. Rick.
Thank you, Kathy. Great story. I'd like to just offer one final example of our deep strategic brand partnerships. Our client in this example is a high-growth, large social business who also sells a set of high technology consumer products. Our client's key challenge was how to scale their business model with speed around the social and advertising business while also transforming their approach to consumer products. Their business requirements were fast-changing and had very high expectations for care, support, and moderation. The client had demonstrated that they needed a high-value partner ecosystem which could support their multi-geo demands, be very agile, an ability to ramp up at scale, but also be efficient and collaborative. A change was needed from their broad set of vendors serving a patchwork of transactional services to something which could be accomplished only with a deeper relationship and more strategic capabilities and commitments.
Concentrix, which had initially had a limited role in sales and support on the core business and a more significant role in the niche consumer space, was provided with the opportunity to play a much more significant role as a direct result of the outstanding performance in those areas and a proven track record of strategic partnering. As we worked with our client, it became clear that their business model and partner expectations were unique and substantial, and it would require a specialized approach to help meet and exceed their needs.
Over the next two years, Concentrix focused on several key investment areas to build the right strategic model, including dedicated teams to support multiple business lines, developed a custom rapid deployment model to support simultaneous launches, invested in dedicated analytics and insight resources, and identified and built multiple custom assets and tools to create better execution. In addition, we were put to test to demonstrate that our ease of working, true agility and flexibility, and investing for the long term were aligned with the client's expectations. I'm proud to say, as a result, Concentrix has become the top-rated partner in the most recent rankings while expanding and supporting the client's initiatives simultaneously and serving their customers from a sales support, global operations, and consumer products care and moderation.
The performance by our team has provided significant confidence in our client to leverage Concentrix to scale on all critical business areas, to deploy new approaches and pilot new processes exclusively with Concentrix to learn and adapt, and to jointly look for paths to innovation. The client has been able to grow at unprecedented scale and quality across many critical business areas and is accelerating their presence into metaverse products and services. What this has meant for Concentrix is that we have been rewarded with significant and sustained growth, over 86% CAGR over the past four years. As a trusted deep strategic partner, is positioned to grow substantially as our client continues to expand and as they create new market spaces.
This strategic partnership creates tremendous stickiness between Concentrix and our client based on our ability and willingness to solve more and impact more of what creates the most value for our client.
Now I'd like to hand it over to Bahar Ozkan, our Global Leader of Staff Wellness. Bahar is a leading subject matter expert in occupational wellness and is a licensed clinical psychologist with over nine years of experience in psychotherapy and corporate wellness. She focuses on executing corporate psychological health and safety programming through research and innovation. Bahar, over to you.
Thanks, Rick, for the introduction. Hello, everybody. I'm really delighted to lead our global wellbeing practice at Concentrix. It is a very intentional practice which may not be what you see typically in this business space that we operate in. However, this approach reflects how we understand the nuances of wellbeing needs for both our industry and demographic profile of our workforce. Our practice is differentiating us in the marketplace. It is also serving as a benchmark and a voice of authority for our clients as we are assisting them with guidance on wellbeing strategies. Let me share a little bit about what I mean by that. Firstly, I have the privilege of leading a team of almost 40 clinical professionals. Combined, we tally up 190 years of clinical expertise in psychology, psychotherapy, occupational health and public health.
The clinical team is interwoven into our delivery structures, so they work hand in glove to provide counseling service to our staff, as well as educating our leadership to comfortably live a culture of wellness-first environment from their morning debriefing with the teams through managing staff's cognitive load and spotting the sign of stress. That expertise is fused with clinical research and personalized wellbeing plans. When you look at the demographic of our workforce, this is strategically important. Generational readiness of wellness means accessible anytime with hybrid choices of remote and in-person support. Also, global pandemic has affected mental health of 45% workforces. It is business critical to have flexible and accessible wellbeing support that answers all kind of needs. For us, that starts with pre-hire process. With clinical-led psychometric assessments, we match resilience suitability to the roles.
It continues into wellness and resilience training and coaching to our staff. That extends to our easy-to-use wellbeing tooling, dynamic design of our work environment, and work at home balance activity plans that offer diverse options for all kind of personalities. We continue that support post-exit process as well, where our counseling service continue to be available to staff if they decide to leave. How does that add value in our business? Our staff retention levels are really strong. Indeed, we have seen some of our lowest attrition in our most complex programs such as trust and safety. The reason is our relentless commitment to support our staff. Before I wrap up today, I will take a quick moment to speak about our cognitive innovation research hub. Like every great clinical mind, we want to get the job right and keep getting better.
Our innovation hub makes that possible. Clinical research, academic partnerships, and leveraging best-in-class medical technology are all allowing us to learn what is new and better in wellbeing space. Let me quickly share an example of what that means with Wellness Comprehend. Comprehend is a cognitive and neuroscientific research project to accurately understand resiliency and engagement in the workplace by correlating AI data on blood oxytocin with individual heart rate to give us an understanding and reading on psychological safety via dependable data, not anecdotal staff surveys. That research is allowing us to predict work and stress saturation levels, explore optimal shift timing and duration, optimum break structure for our staff, task rotation options, and further improve personalized wellness interventions. Other inside wellness strategies include global digital health tools.
Also in line with many references, you heard today. On early metaverse adoption, we research on what wellness means for VR and AR world. All our investment in mental health leads to reduced stress, increased resilience, and more effective feedback. Now I'm going to hand you over to my colleague, Cormac Twomey, who is going to talk about how we scale the use of technology in our CX digital operations today.
Thank you, Bahar, and good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Bahar has just given a great example with Wellness Comprehend of how technology can enhance and optimize experiences to deliver significantly better outcomes. The adoption of technology like this is accelerating the re-imagining of the experience across all aspects of the customer journey. The brands we support are looking for us to deploy technology solutions to accelerate better outcomes for their fans and the ambassadors that support them. Now, rather than talk about what we're doing in that space, we thought we'd bring that to life by playing a short video which shows how we are using technology to create these great experiences for our brands, fans, and the ambassadors.
At Concentrix, blending talent and technology is at the heart of the customer experiences we deliver for our clients. We'll show you how our brand ambassadors are immersed in using technology from day one, elevating their experience and a tech-first mindset to create those moments that matter for our clients' customers and deliver value for the brands we serve. Starting with the way we hire our amazing ambassadors, at Concentrix, we invest in technology to create seamless end-to-end integrated candidate experiences. From automated interactions to AI-enabled screening and best fit talent analytics. We are engaging with candidates virtually at their convenience, utilizing different technologies to make the candidate experience easy, effective, and efficient. During onboarding, we use augmented reality technology to make that home office setup fast and easy.
Our security solutions use AI-enabled biometric technology to ensure our people are the ones caring for our clients, protecting personal and confidential data. The Concentrix virtual hubs use 3D interactive environments to facilitate team connections and engagement, while our community hubs ensure support is consistent no matter where our people work. Trainer bot, augmented reality, virtual reality, and gamified learning solutions ensure the learning experience is fun and immersive, keeping trainees engaged while improving retention and throughput. As a result, our new brand ambassadors are confident and empowered to start delighting our customers. Since day one of their journey, you have seen how our brand ambassadors have used technology to make it easier for them. Now let's look at an example of how our brand ambassadors leverage technology to create these amazing customer experience stories. Async messaging allows customers to contact us at the time of their convenience.
Our cognitive bots help resolve the customer query in no time and help connect with a live brand ambassador on demand. Our brand ambassadors have access to efficient automation solutions to handle the redundant tasks while they focus on the true customer experience. To make the whole experience effortless, ambassadors leverage multiple technologies, including visual assist technology, to securely show the customer what they are looking at or to see what the customer sees. Concentrix combines the best technology and talent to create seamless end-to-end experiences for ambassadors and exceptional customer experiences for the world's best brands.
Great. The technologies that you saw in that video are deployed at scale across Concentrix's digital customer experience operations. In 2021, we hired 89% of our ambassadors virtually and used digital technologies to train over 100,000 of them. We used digitally and AI-enabled facial recognition technology to screen over 160 million images a week to ensure we're creating a safe, secure environment for our brands. We have deployed smart assist technology to over 114,000 of our ambassadors. This deep immersion in tech has created a culture where over 2,000 of our frontline ambassadors have had over 4,500 innovations implemented which have contributed to us automating over 1.1 billion transactions in 2021. What does this mean for our brands and for CNX?
61% of our clients rated innovation 100% or better year-over-year. Of those clients, those that rated us 93% + grew 29%, significantly above the enterprise growth rate. For the new economy client subset of those, that growth rate rises to 37%. This technology focus has led to 65% more clients buying talent and tech year-over-year. When we look at the new economy subset of that rises to 71%. Those new economy clients buying talent and tech are growing at 45% year-over-year. This data clearly demonstrates that a digital-first mindset is pervasive, culturally and operationally across the Concentrix digital CX operations and illustrates why that matters to the brands we support and ultimately underpins our ability to maximize the market growth opportunity in front of us.
On that note, I'm gonna hand you over to my colleague and great friend, Monica Egger, who's gonna take you through how all of this comes together.
Thank you, Cormac, and hello, everyone. Now that you've heard about who we are, the work we're doing to leverage our strategy, tech, and talent to drive key outcomes for our clients, how we're leveraging tech to support our teams and brand ambassadors every day, and a small bit about the exciting future of CX, I'd like to talk to you about our growth strategies for 2022 and beyond. Our strategy continues to be around the four key areas that drove such nice progression in 2021. We believe those will continue to provide both short and long-term benefits for our business. We also take you through one layer down on these strategies for 2022, so you have an understanding on why we believe them to be the winning formula. First, we'll start with clients.
We'll continue to execute on our strategy to expand wallet share through deeper client relationships. As we talk about clients, as Chris referenced earlier, it isn't about the number of clients that we have, the types of relationships we have with those clients, and are they aligned in investing in their brand from a CX perspective. One way we think about our clients is in two categories: enterprise clients and new economy clients. Enterprise clients leverage Concentrix to support scale, efficiency and predictability in their CX operation. New economy clients look to Concentrix to be agile, support hyper-growth, and provide a fresh perspective as they're beginning their journey. Over time, we believe the needs of our new economy clients and our enterprise clients will converge. Today, we successfully service both of these client bases at scale across the world, which positions us well to capitalize on opportunities.
As an example, over time, the efficiency, predictability, and depth of experience that's valued by our enterprise clients will be valuable to new economy clients as they grow. Similarly, the traits that are valued by our new economy clients and our agility and new ideas, fresh perspective will be sought by our enterprise clients as they respond to strong market disruptions and changes to their business models. In the end, both will look to Concentrix to be nimble, provide scale, and adapt as we service their changing needs. As you can see, both of these segments are growing healthy year- over- year. We believe we will benefit during their evolution as well as at an end state. When you think of our new economy clients, don't instinctively assume they're small.
As said earlier, they number 125, and they have $7.5 trillion in market cap. Another way we think about our client set is in terms of the depth and type of relationship that we have with them and the level at which we're embedded in their operation and critical to their brand strategy. Not surprisingly, we classify the vast majority of our relationships at a high level of integration and criticality to our customer operations and their brand strategy. The more essential we are to these clients, the faster they grow by consuming more of our services at scale. Our second strategy is about relentlessly innovating and adding digital solutions to how we serve our clients. This may change the way that we serve them, how we have traditionally served them, but it does build a deeper and stronger relationship.
In fact, we often get asked, "How much of your revenue is digital?" That's a really difficult question to answer, because digital permeates our business. As you've heard through the case discussions today, digital offerings are integrated across the business. They're integrated into the way in which we service our clients for end-to-end solutions, we independently sell them to clients, and they are also embedded in our operations to help support our brand ambassadors as they support our clients. Here's an example of some of our digital solutions, many of which have been talked about today during the case study reviews. In addition to the Concentrix capabilities, we have partnered with industry-leading technology companies in order to provide end-to-end solutions to our clients. Cloud infrastructure providers, natural language providers, RPA providers.
These partnerships, and combined with our capabilities, position us very uniquely to deliver end-to-end solutions to our clients. Our third growth strategy involves continuing to grow in emerging markets. This is an important source of revenue diversification for us, as well as a strategy for incubating new technologies and finding new global new economy clients. As Chris stated earlier, this market continues. We see this market continuing to grow for us at a 20%+ clip. Emerging markets are key for both global brands and new emerging brands. In fact, 27% of our new economy clients start in these markets and could grow to be the next big global brand. Focusing on these markets also allows us to support the existing global brands who are looking to leverage the market opportunity in these countries.
As a fun fact, the market cap of the new economy clients in the emerging markets is $1.3 trillion. Lastly, we will continue to look for ways to add to our business through M&A, looking to expand our capabilities in key growth areas by adding deep domain expertise, accretive client portfolios, and technological capabilities. As stated, our focus for M&A will include those targets that provide deep domain expertise. Think sales gen, analytics, specific vertical expertise we may be looking for. Attractive client portfolios that allow us to take advantage of new economy clients, and new technologies that enhance our overall business. As we have been in the past, we will be disciplined in our approach to M&A. M&A will be accretive to the overall business, and we will only transact if there's a cultural alignment with the target.
We have a strong balance sheet and an ability to pay higher multiples, but only when we perceive long-term value for the business and our shareholders. As you can see, we have a very successful track record of accretive M&A, from IBM to PK. All have added incremental capabilities, client portfolios, capabilities, and enhancement to our brand. Now for a brief glimpse into the future, I'd like to turn it over to Vijay Ijju, Co-Founder of our latest acquisition, PK. Vijay.
Thank you, Monica, and good morning, everyone from Denver, Colorado. You heard some compelling stories about what we have done for our clients in delivering on the brand promise of everything CX. At Concentrix, we continuously innovate CX. As I look through the crystal ball and peek into the future of CX, three years from today, this Investor Day event will be hosted in the metaverse. In a virtual Nasdaq world with the backdrop of Times Square and an immersive investor session with speakers and attendees. Each of us will have our digital avatars, which will engage in smaller breakout spaces, which are highly immersive, real-time in nature, and persistent. This is the metaverse experience, or MX as I call it, which will come in the two to three year timeframe.
Working our way backwards from there, in the next 12-24 month timeframe, there's going to be a significant shift of the experience towards the edge, which is all around connected vehicles, smart cities, smart factories, and in general, smart everything. The edge is the last mile of the connected experiences which will allow us to deliver immersive experiences with semantic and rich content, intelligence and data being deployed on the edge. This is the path to ICX or Immersive Connected Experiences. Now, the building blocks for delivering the immersive experiences over the edge and into the metaverse are already here. With AI, machine learning, automation, which are driving interactive and intelligent experiences or IX, and finally tying what's on-the-glass experience to the middle and back of an enterprise ecosystem or the business of experience, BX, to deliver a holistic customer experience. Let us unpack these, starting with IX.
Intelligent experience is about the next evolution of CX, and infused with AI one-to-one personalization of the next best action in a customer journey, driving a highly personalized experiences based on customer insights and context. This is where moments and micro moments are personalized with AI that is modeled upon individual preferences, contextual data, and external data sources. An ambient experience is a natural way to engage with a conversational interface. With advanced NLP and NLU, these intelligent interactive bots have the ability to be sensitive and understand the customer intent and take the appropriate actions. Catalyst created an experience like this using Amazon's Alexa for voice-activated ordering for a large quick serve restaurant. When it comes to voice ambassadors, AI-driven agents can work side by side with digital operations ambassadors and drive a better call experience.
They can be trained to sense tone, sentiment, and respond accordingly, and automatically pull together contextual and personalized responses. Several use cases are possible here, and this is very relevant within the CRM and CX business lines within Concentrix. Over to the business of experience or what I call as BX. The experience on the glass is definitely paramount, and what's more important is what happens behind the glass. That's from the business side of experience. This is all about delivering a compelling experience in the middle platform provided by hyperautomation. This is a high growth market, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on this space. It's fueled by the labor shortage that is driving a lot of the hyperautomation.
The proliferation of data across the organizational silos, cloud, on-premise versus the edge, it presents a new problem for delivering compelling experiences. The middle platform is a fabric that pulls together all of the APIs, events, and data to deliver on the experiences. The business of experience or BX is very critical where our clients are gonna be spending a lot of money in the next 12 months. Next, about immersive experiences. Reimagining the drive-thru ordering experience by using computer vision-based detection of a license plate, matching that to prior orders, and personalizing the drive-thru ordering experience, and more importantly, saving seconds in the drive-thru lane. The edge is where 5G IoT, rich content, and AI and machine learning come together to deliver a compelling experience.
The investments that are done by the hyperscalers today, like, in the edge, is creating the building blocks for delivering immersive experiences in the future. Connected vehicles and the experience that is inside the vehicle where the vehicle is the next smartphone with apps and infotainment in the vehicle that's consumed by people in the car. Now, the pandemic accelerated the move to the edge, and we're gonna see this evolve over the next 12-24 months. Now into the metaverse. Just what exactly is the metaverse, and why is it becoming the main topic of discussion across all settings? The metaverse is the next evolution of the Internet, which in a sense is the Internet in real-time 3D, which is community driven with different virtual worlds that are networked together.
This evolution of the Internet will allow for immersive experiences, open exchange of value that is trustless and permissionless. Now, trustless is a good thing. It means there is no single intermediary, and trust is distributed and verified on the blockchain. Permissionless means you don't have to be credentialed to access the metaverse. From a CX standpoint, the metaverse will create tremendous opportunities for brands to engage with their customers. I mean, we are familiar with brand engagement, which is direct to consumer and personalized to the customer actions. In the metaverse, you as a person will have complete privacy with respect to your digital identity and however, your digital avatar is gonna interact in a virtual world and engage with the brands. Brands will be thinking about moving from D2C to D2A or direct to avatar.
One-to-one personalization will move towards one-to-many hyper-personalization across different virtual worlds. The evolution of retail will happen in the metaverse, which will give the ability for retail brands to display digital goods that look like the real goods and allow the avatars to try on these digital goods and buy them. This will lead to commerce and value exchange of both digital and real goods. Now, the forcing function for all of this has been the pandemic, and the lack of social interaction has fueled the need for a different way to collaborate and socialize in an immersive world rather than on Zoom and Teams. This is what has opened up the opportunities in the metaverse. A lot of use cases open up in this new world.
Virtual offices, virtual events, even in the enterprise, we are seeing simulation and training as examples. Let us look at Web 3.0, and Chris touched upon this a little bit. I'm gonna unpack that a little bit more for you, and the underlying technology that drives the metaverse. If you go as far back as the mid- to late 1990s, where the first generation of the web came about, it was mostly around email exchange and you can see a very little rich content. Almost everything was consumed over low bandwidth connections. Web 2.0 arrived in 2007, with the launch of the iPhone and the app ecosystem. This is the era of mobile with user-generated content, social media, wearables, and other omni-channel devices. Web 3.0 is all about real-time 3D and the consumption of content which is semantic in nature.
It comprises of metadata about an entire representation of the real world in 3D, enabled through the edge infrastructure and 5G and content hubs that drive a highly immersive experience. At the foundation are the protocols like blockchain and virtual platforms like Unity 3D, Roblox, Minecraft, which enable the creation of these virtual worlds with avatars being able to consume content and also deal in commerce and other activities of value exchange. The building blocks for Web 3.0 are already here. Now, the one thing we have to be careful about, especially with the metaverse, is around security, bias, and the possibility of cyberbullying. This is something we must be cognizant about when we design that customer experience. Here's a quick showcase of some of the work that we are exploring within the Web 3.0 space around 3D simulation.
In closing, if you don't believe in the reality of the metaverse coming in the next two years, I would say talk to your kids, especially those who are between eight and 17. For them, the metaverse experience is very natural, and that is how they interact and socialize with their friends. Our intent at Concentrix is to invest more into all of these capabilities and drive a better end-to-end customer experience. I'm going to now hand off to a very happy Bengals fan, our CFO, Andre, to talk about our financial objectives for FY 2022.
Thank you, Vijay. I'm very excited about the role that we're gonna play in shaping the industry as we move to the future. Thanks for the shout-out about the Bengals. We're very excited. In this section, I wanna talk a little bit about our strong financial profile, our recent financial results, our guidance for 2022, and some longer term financial objectives that we have for the business. First, though, I wanna talk a little bit about some other cuts of our revenue to highlight the diversification of our revenue across verticals and geographies served. At the time that we were getting ready to spin-off, just a little bit over a year ago, we talked about the 9% CAGR in our strategic verticals that was masked by the purposeful reduction in our communications vertical exposure.
We did talk about the fact that exposure was coming to an end. In 2021, we grew at over 20% across each of our strategic verticals and saw stability and even a little growth in communications. It's also important to note the diverse sources of revenue from a geography served perspective and the strong growth we've seen across each of these markets in 2021. The Americas, Europe and Asia Pac all growing quite strongly. We have seen an acceleration coming out of COVID of our revenue growth, margin expansion and cash flow generation, and we believe that will continue into 2022.
Yes, we saw a bit of a pause in the second quarter of 2020 as the pandemic started, but our strong performance during the pandemic led to accelerating growth that started to show up in Q4 of 2020 and has continued as we've moved forward. With that, we've moved our non-GAAP operating income up meaningfully to 13.1% in 2021, up from 11.5% in 2019 pre-pandemic. You see a similar trajectory in our EBITDA margin reaching 15.6% in 2021. Across all these cycles, even the year that the pandemic had an impact on revenues, we saw strong free cash flow generation, even with the meaningful working cap investment we saw in 2021. Looking to 2022, we believe we are poised for revenue growth, further margin expansion and increased free cash flow.
Last week we announced our earnings and we provided guidance for Q1 and the full year 2022. In Q1, we expect our revenue to be between $1.51 billion and $1.54 billion, and non-GAAP OI to be between $190 million and $205 million. This includes two months of PK, given that the transaction closed in early February. For the full year of 2022, we expect revenue to be between $6.45 billion and $6.6 billion. This equates to adjusted pro forma constant currency revenue growth of 9%-12%. Our non-GAAP OI we expect to be between $890 million and $930 million.
That at the midpoint of our guidance, that equates to meaningful margin expansion from 13.1% in 2021 to 13.9% in 2022. Today we are very pleased to share some longer term financial objectives for the business. By 2025, we expect our revenue to be $10 billion or more, with $8.5 billion of that coming from organic growth of today's business, and about $1.5 billion from future accretive M&A, which will continue to be an important part of our growth strategy. This equates to a 9% CAGR from 2023 through 2025. On today's business that's $8.5 billion.
Not everybody is on the ice yet.
We also expect to grow our margin to approximately 14.5% by 2025, with nearly all of our revenue being tech infused and a large digital component in our revenue as well. The drivers of our growth are many. We are a leader in a $550 billion market that is growing quickly. We're poised to grow with new economy and enterprise clients across our strategic verticals. We're driving deeper strategic relationships with clients leading to wallet share gains. We're winning new logos. All this growth will have a meaningful technology and digital component. Clients are looking for our winning combination of CX strategy, tech and delivery talent. The last driver of revenue growth, as I said, will be a continuation of our role as an industry consolidator, adding capabilities, domain expertise, technology and client portfolios that we can grow.
Our M&A will be accretive and will drive long-term financial returns. From a margin expansion perspective, we're again very pleased with the progress we've made in getting to 13.1% margin in 2021. We're very confident in our guidance that we've rolled out for 2022. We see an opportunity for continued long-term margin expansion. Those will come from growth in more complex, high value services, operational efficiencies and internal technology automation, as Cormac has talked about, control of more end-to-end processes, and outcomes-based pricing models. Let me drill down a little bit on that last one. We see an evolving, mutually beneficial trend towards a different financial model, a different contracting construct with our clients around outcomes rather than inputs. Today, our revenue is largely transaction based.
Revenue is driven by some unit of input or output, and the result is a pretty linear relationship between revenue and labor. In the future, we're seeing this already in our pipeline, we're gonna see transactions that are and relationships that are more based on the CX solutions with an outcomes-based pricing model. This will align our goals between ourselves and our client. Revenue growth will no longer be linear with labor growth. This could take the form of gain sharing, fixed price contracts, or situations where we get a percentage of sales that we drive or percentage of cost savings that we help the client accomplish. Our investment in capabilities to drive client outcomes and drive efficiencies position us for margin expansion as the client model evolves in this way.
This next slide is a graphical depiction of our revenue growth at over $10 billion in 2025. It starts with the midpoint of our guidance range for 2022, and then adds the 9% CAGR in revenue growth, driven by growth with new economy clients and enterprise clients to get to that $8.5 billion in revenue. To that, we add the $1.5 billion that we think that can come from an inorganic growth to get to at least $10 billion in revenue by 2025. It's important to note the role Catalyst will play in these numbers. As Dinesh mentioned, in 2022, we expect Catalyst to be $630 million of revenue.
We believe that over this time period, it will have a 20% revenue growth CAGR, which means that Catalyst itself will be roughly $1.1 billion in revenue entirely organically by 2025. Moving to a graphical depiction of our margin drivers. Here we see our margin moving from the approximately 13% in 2021 through our profit guidance in 2022, and then the drivers towards that approximately 14.5% by 2025. Again, growth in more complex technology-infused services will take our margins up. We'll drive operational efficiencies and automation, and we'll control more end-to-end processes and move to more outcomes-based models. Those are the things that have frankly helped us get our margins to where they are, and they'll continue to expand our margins to 2025.
I'd like to now go a little over our capital structure pro forma for the close of the PK acquisition. It's basically our 11/30/2021 capital structure updated to show the debt that we issued to fund the PK transaction as we amended our credit facility. We have ample liquidity of over $1.2 billion, consisting of our $1 billion revolver, some cash on hand, and a little room on our $350 million AR securitization. After the close of the PK transaction, total debt is $2.4 billion. That consists of a five-year $2.1 billion term loan and $300 million or so that was borrowed on our AR facility. Gross leverage pro forma for PK was about 2.6x. Net leverage, about 2.4x.
We have a strong balance sheet and a strong financial position. We have ample liquidity, and we believe a strong free cash flow generation will drive debt reduction to under 2x by the end of 2022, while supporting our dividend, assuming no further M&A this year. Our capital allocation principles remain largely unchanged from the time of our spin. We're gonna invest to grow the business. We're gonna invest in organic growth, including enhanced capabilities. That will require CapEx at something like 3% of revenue each year. We have financial flexibilities I've described for accretive M&A. Our strong free cash flow supports our view that we can carry up to 3x leverage and maybe a little bit more with the ability to de-lever very quickly if we ever get above 3x.
We're committed to our quarterly dividend and modest share repurchases under our $475 million remaining authorization, although our near-term priority will be debt reduction. We are very, very proud of the return that we've driven since our spin just over a year ago. We've outpaced our CX BPO peers and the other indices you see on this slide. Despite that, we're not satisfied. Despite the execution, we trade, we believe, at a significant discount to where we should be and to our peers. We're convinced that with continued execution towards our 2025 objectives, we can cut into and then eliminate that discount. In summary, we believe we are a very attractive investment.
We are a market leader in a growing market at a time where CX has never been a more strategic priority for businesses, whether they are new economy or enterprise clients. We're executing our strategy to grow, and we're winning with that strategy. You can see it in our results. With that, strong margin expansion. We have unmatched CX capabilities, bringing together strategy, talent, and technology. As Vijay mentioned, we're looking to the future. We're not just focused on where the industry is today, but we will lead it as it continues to evolve. We have great brand relationships across enterprise and new economy brands, and we're getting more embedded with our clients in growing wallet share every day. Lastly, we believe we have a compelling valuation versus our peers.
As we think about the math here, we think that we can grow at that 9% CAGR over a prolonged period of time. With that, we can generate strong margin expansion. From that, strong free cash flow to support some level of capital return as well as participation in accretive M&A. All of that, wrapping around all of that, the opportunity to bring our valuation multiple up over time. We think that math makes us an attractive investment now and into the future. That wraps up the prepared remarks from this session today. I hope you found them enjoyable. At this point, we'd like to move to the Q&A. I'd like to invite Chris, Dinesh, and Monica to join me to take your questions, and David Stein will be our moderator. Guys?
Thank you, Andre. For our Q&A session, now we'll use the Raise Hand feature that can be found under the Reactions button on your Zoom screen. We will announce you and unmute you so that you can ask your question. If possible, we ask that you turn your video on when you're asking your question. Our first question is from Ruplu Bhattacharya from Bank of America. Go ahead.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. The first question is for Chris. You're guiding for organic revenue growth of 9% year-on-year. In that respect, can you talk about new win rates, average contract size and renewal rates, so that we have an idea of where that's trending today and how you see that progressing over time? My second question relates to margins. You're guiding for 60 basis points of improvement from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2025. Can you help us segment how much of that improvement will be from each of those three buckets you mentioned? You know, the outcomes-based pricing models, the operational efficiency, and the more complex services that you're providing. Any details there would be appreciated. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Ruplu. A couple things. Let's talk about your first number of questions. From a win rate perspective, you know, generally, we're very focused on the types of clients that we're going after and the type of engagements that we work with. You know, I would say we're well within the industry standards of win rates. It's not quite 50%, but it's quite reasonable from that perspective. We don't see necessarily any large changes within our Concentrix business. In our Catalyst business, because it's a lot more customization, it normally starts off with strategy. The win rates we expect to continue to move up from that perspective.
From a renewal perspective, we're generally all high and have been for, Andre, a number of years, you know, 96%-98% bouncing around. Normally the disengagement happens because either the client is looking for a price point or less services that we're not prepared to support and/or directionally is challenged from you know what we want to implement. Lastly, you know, we do have M&A within our marketplace that will happen where if we're a smaller partner within that new organization, we might not necessarily win the ongoing business. Renewal rates very steady from that perspective. From a pricing environment, I think we've talked about this a few times. You know, we see pricing relatively stable.
Where we see a game changer is from the Catalyst perspective of coming in and providing that solution. It's much harder to compare the pricing, when it's an outcomes-based contract where we're really about driving value for that client. It becomes a much different conversation than someone saying, "Hey, how much is it to transact or take this chat or this social media content moderation?" Whatever the case may be. We do see some ability to increase sort of the value we drive from our pricing, not necessarily from increasing the end price, as we go forward. You know, I think we've been executing well on that, and we continue to see those trends going forward.
The second question around really margin, value add, it goes back to Monica's point that it's somewhat hard to talk about because we really are driving margin across three pillars of technology. One is certainly from our own operations, as Cormac talked about embedding it, where we become more efficient. That we don't wanna say we don't put a price tag on that to the customer, so it doesn't attract revenue, but it certainly makes us more operationally efficient. The second one is really where we're designing sort of bespoke applications, and the client might want to pay and maintain those as a separate billable item. That really falls into our Catalyst business, and you'll see obviously our margin accretion as that goes forward.
We've talked about that we see Catalyst improving over the next little while, similar to our Concentrix business. Lastly, and probably the least margin that's gonna grow is our core services business. We still believe that we can add higher margin business into it as we get more and more higher value stickier business in that segment, but it will be at a slightly lower rate than I think from a Catalyst perspective. Andre, anything you'd like to add?
No, I think that's about right. I think, as you think about, the first margin driver that I talked about was, you know, growth in more complex service. Certainly growing faster in Catalyst and frankly, getting the benefit from some of the investments that we've made there, that PK had made and that Concentrix is making now together, will give us some leverage on those investments and that'll certainly be a driver.
Okay. Thanks for all the detail. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Ruplu.
Okay, I'll remind you for our Q&A session, Raise Hand feature under the Reactions button on your Zoom screen.
Don't be shy. Okay, our next question comes from Vince Colicchio from Barrington.
Yeah, Chris, I'm curious, as far as some of the case studies you provided, how long does it typically take from, you know, building a new relationship to getting that deep with your client set?
That's a great question, Vince. I mean, the reality is that two or three years ago, it would take actually probably about two or three years to get to those types of conversations because you have to earn that trust and development. I think now what we're seeing with the pandemic and how we've performed within the pandemic of being a true trusted partner, the relationships actually get sold at that transformational level day one. A number of the case studies that we actually talked about were net new clients within the last two years that we actually developed and from a consulting perspective, designed the solution and developed the solution and implemented that solution all as one.
Now that we have them running at this sort of a much higher hybrid state of customer engagement, the conversations get even more exciting because then we start talking about where can we take it further. That goes into some of the new areas of growth that we see, whether it be in sort of metaverse or whether it be in some of the other areas that we're investing in. It's really changed, frankly, over the last two years around how clients are engaging and how quickly they're engaging in transformational deals. There's very few people who are looking for sort of typical old relationship outsourcing that was more in vogue probably three to four years ago.
The second question is, in terms of super cycles, how do you think about the timing of investing in those areas? Do you try to get ahead of the curve, or do you wait till you know those cycles start kicking in?
Vince, that is a great question. We spend a lot of time talking about that internally. Being too far ahead of the curve, which we have done a few times, we actually never get the yield on our investment because we're not quite sure where things will go. Some super cycles or that appear to be super cycles fizzle out very quickly or get commoditized very quickly. Then too late, that share has already moved and/or those new opportunities have already gone. Really, what the only way to kind of get back into it is by possibly buying someone who is in the super cycle phase. The reality is we've been really good hitting it where it's starting to come up the maturity curve.
It's starting to get to that place where it needs to have scale, global operations, really operational rigor, and then invest heavily from there. We look at these super cycles much earlier. Good example would be metaverse. We have been supporting AR and VR for probably, Andre, gosh, 1.5 year -
Yeah.
Actually almost closer to 2.5 y ears. Pandemic kind of compresses time. Looking around how people can support and engage and do commerce within that place. Very low volume, as we mentioned. Now all of a sudden, we're starting a big uptick in the opportunities that are coming forward. Because we have the domain knowledge and the expertise and able to support it, we're really prime and front and center when we're having those client conversations around who they wanna partner with to take them into the new areas of growth.
Thank you for answering my questions.
Thanks, Vince.
All right. Our next question is from Ashley Ellis from Cross Research.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple, if I may. My first question is for Andre, and I'm sorry if you kind of touched on this, but it was difficult to follow you on that first slide for the long-term targets. Could you maybe discuss the four growth strategy pillars that Monica laid out, how you would kind of rank those in driving the 9% growth rate? And then is there any assumption of benefit from the super cycle? I know, Chris, you said that you're not super dependent on it, but are you putting in some sort of growth contribution from that?
Yeah. I'll cover that last one first, Ashley. Not much of a contribution expected there from that 9% CAGR from any kind of super cycle event. Then as I go back to the pillars that Monica went through, first of all, the first three are the organic pillars, and those get us to that 9% CAGR that gets us to the $8.5 billion in revenue. I would say, you know, the most impactful one will continue to be the first one, which is, you know, deeper, more strategic client relationships. We always talk about the fact that 75% of our growth comes from existing clients. I think that just continues.
It's a little hard then to parse out the next one, which is, you know, relentless innovation, because it really supports that stickier relationship, that more embedded relationship with those strategic partners, our strategic clients. You know, emerging markets, we're growing quite nicely there. We grew 20% in most recent year, but it's, you know, still a relatively small portion of our revenue. I think it's roughly 10% or so. If I was stack ranking the three, hard to differentiate between one and two, because two is so supportive of one, and frankly, of three. But those first two would come first.
Okay, got it. Then for margin expansion with the 14.5% by 2025, should we think about that as maybe being more back-end loaded? I see. I think you're still kind of investing in platforms and technology, so do you expect that to ramp, or should it be pretty linear?
I would actually think of it as being pretty linear. As we think about our longer-term plan, that's certainly how it shows up there. I don't see a real step function there from our 2022 guidance to the 14.5%. I would think of it, again, being pretty linear.
Okay, thank you. Then my last question is for Chris. You mentioned 65% of employees are working from home, and during that time, you were able to enter new markets faster and more cost effectively. I'm just wondering why is that? If it's so beneficial, are you still targeting to get back to kind of 30% at home, or do you think that might change?
A couple of reasons. First of all, I think the clients are much more receptive to work at home going into a new market than historically they've been. They've generally wanted to say, "Hey, do you have a operation there? How long have you been in the country? What else are you doing within that country?" But now, for the search of talent, they're saying, "Hey, if you've got the domain expertise," which we do, "and you have the operational rigor to support work at home," which we do, then they really see it as an extension of programs that we're already running for them within their business. That's what makes it sort of an easier conversation to have and able to get into it. Now, I preface that with the type of work that we're doing.
We still do a lot of work that is very, you know, has a very large requirement for security, which needs to be on-premises. We also operate in countries where just culturally, it's more desirable to be on-premises besides being work at home. While we see 65% of the business now, and we see sort of with some types of services being able to enter new markets in a much more aggressive and cost-effective manner, the reality is we still have a large chunk of business that requires security and culturally will need to be on-premises.
Why we think it'll actually come down is because we have seen where countries have had a prolonged work at home exposure, where there is a group of the population, a group of our staff who go, "Hey, I want a sense of community. I wanna come into a building. I wanna you know, partake in a lot of things that help drive the culture of Concentrix and drive of what we do." As an organization, we're not ruling out that we're gonna have this very hybrid function where we might have some people come in a few days a week, maybe a week a month, might be in all the time or some staff who will completely be working home for the entire time.
As long as it's good for our clients, as long as it's good for our staff, we will support it in a modern work environment.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, our next question comes from. Well, hello, Oscar. From Oscar Val Mas from J.P. Morgan in London.
Yes, hello, everyone. Good morning. It's Oscar from J.P. Morgan in London. I had, I guess, two questions. The first one is a follow-up on the previous one. Could you talk about, I guess, the benefits of work from home on the OpEx side and whether they are included in the guidance to get to $14.5? That's the first question. The second question is around, I guess, onshore versus offshore, and how do you see that changing over the next five years to 2025? Maybe related to that as the third question is, employee scarcity or price inflation in the U.S., is that a significant issue that you're facing? And if so, how do you mitigate that? Apologies, three questions. Thank you.
No problem, Oscar. Hopefully I can hit them all, and certainly Andre and Monica jump in. I think the first question is, you know, from a guidance perspective, it is included in terms of how we see our workforce and where they work from, in the marketplace. To be quite honest, we have not seen a material difference in work at home, you know, from bricks and mortar.
While there is the savings of the brick and mortar, there are other expenses such as, you know, broadband internet, such as more security processes, such as virtual learning platforms, you know, a host of other investments we've made to make sure that our staff at home still enjoy the same culture, operational rigor, and security as much as we can as they would be within with on-prem. We haven't seen sort of this huge bountiful margin expansion. Quite frankly, if there was any margin expansion just driven by work at home, the reality is that that generally gets worked out with the client and goes into sort of the pricing model as you look at when you renew deals and everything else.
Long response back, but you know, how we look at where our staff work is built into our guidance. Now I forgot the second question. That's terrible, Oscar. What was the second question? I apologize.
offshore, onshore.
Offshore, onshore.
Yeah.
That kind of ties into the labor mix. The reality is that what we're most focused on with clients is it doesn't matter where people are it's do you have the skill set, scale, and domain expertise to deliver? Some client strategy is to drive as much as they can offshore. Some client strategy is to have sort of this hybrid of onshore and offshore, depending on their client segmentation. They might say, "Hey, some customers we want handled here, some customers we want handled there." The benefit of working with us is that we can really, you know, have staff onshore, nearshore, offshore, doesn't really matter. Now, to your third question about labor scarcity and shortage in the U.S., we have made comments that the reality is that labor is getting more expensive in the U.S.
We have, you know, continued to be competitive in the marketplace by increasing our wages. That necessarily hasn't always been reflected in pricing. What it's really driven is more conversations with our clients about how do we automate more? What else can we optimize? While the price per unit might go up, the actual billing doesn't necessarily go up because, you know, it's working within the budget. We see that happening, you know, frankly, for the foreseeable future of where we have that balance and discussions. Now, if they don't have a budget, then clearly it goes to nearshore and offshore. We continue to see sort of good growth from those regions.
Again, it's really what the client wants is what we're able to deploy across our delivery infrastructure.
Great. Thank you very much.
All right, our next question comes from Dan Marino from [inaudible].
Hi, guys. Good to see you again. Thanks for the presentation and for taking my questions. I guess just two from me. One, if you could unpack this year's guidance for PK, I guess a 20% revenue growth, maybe just like some of the drivers of the portfolio, which areas are growing faster or slower, et cetera. Then maybe as well the phasing throughout the year, maybe Q1 like the first half, we don't necessarily have the performance, so that'd be helpful. Then on the M&A side, on your 2025 guidance, it'd be helpful to kind of understand the kind of targets you think about. That'd be helpful.
For sure. Dinesh, why don't you take the PK drivers of the growth?
Sure. I think from a demand perspective, we are seeing demand across the board, across all of our service lines and all of our verticals as well. I think our clients are spending and spending big on digital technologies. From a growth perspective, we see the strategy and design piece of it, which is how we usually go into a customer, start laying out what the experience should look like, and then as you go through the service line, we get into digital, we get into automation and analytics. We're seeing growth across the board from a PK perspective, right?
As we merge Tigerspike and PK together to form the Catalyst unit, we're seeing a lot more demand on the design side as well, because Tigerspike comes with some really good design capabilities as well. I think it's a broad-based growth that we're seeing for this year.
Yeah. What gives us confidence around the numbers is really around how they book their projects. When we look at the client set and due diligence, and we looked at how they look at their spend within the PK business, frankly, the year is fairly much baked at sort of almost sort of the first quarter of the year, and sort of that go-get amount is a very reasonable and identifiable number. When we look at, you know, where they were last year and where we look at this year, they're actually in better position from a positioning perspective as well as frankly what is already booked in the case.
A large degree of confidence in where PK is gonna perform and certainly where Catalyst is going to perform.
I would say not a whole lot of seasonality in the business.
That's right.
That 20% growth rate that we've projected is pretty ratable across the quarter. Pretty linear growth rate from Q1 through Q4.
Correct. Now, from an M&A perspective, you know, what a lot of the questions we got from investors is when you think of M&A, what do you think of a size perspective? You know, what's big, what's small, what are the capabilities you're looking for? Really, when we look at building our business, our M&A strategy goes back to driving new domain deep domain expertise into our client base that will allow us to increase our share of wallet, continue to look at technology that's gonna help us to transform the industry. That is clearly something we're interested in. The client set.
We're looking for, you know, opportunities where we can buy a business that has clients that we can then layer in our services and technology and grow, as we've been very successful doing that for a number of different acquisitions. From a size perspective, you know, we expect that we will buy $1.5 billion of revenue. We don't expect it to be all one transaction, although it could. The reality is it's probably gonna be two or three that are gonna be pieced together around the different areas that we were looking at buying, investing in. It should give the investors a fairly good idea of some of the size and thought pattern we're going into from an M&A perspective.
You know, Chris, timing matters, right? If we had been sitting here literally three months ago, that would have been a $2.5 billion M&A target. We went out, we bought PK, and with the growth that we expect to see there, pretty much retired a $1 billion of revenue as we look out to 2025. No pressure there, buddy.
No, absolutely. One of the things that we wanted to share with the investor day was really kind of giving this long-term picture, because while we have known about sort of the number we wanna get to, that $10 billion number, and known about what amount we want from an M&A perspective, we haven't publicly gone out and said it. I think this gives us sort of, or gives the investors clear, you know, clarity on what we see as the art of the possible from an M&A perspective.
That's helpful. Thank you.
As a reminder, we're using the raise hand feature that can be found under the reactions button on the Zoom screen, down at the bottom. All right, our next question comes from Jeff Mo at Mawer.
Hey, Jeff.
Good morning, everyone. Good to see you again. Thanks for taking my questions.
Morning.
I had a couple. First one is, looking traditionally at your M&A, there's been at least a couple I would call bulk-up acquisitions like the IBM, the Convergys deals. Obviously now, with $1.5 billion over four years, that seems to exclude that type of acquisition, even though traditionally you have created quite a bit of financial value from that. Just wondering if my interpretation is correct and why you might be shying away from doing that type of acquisition. Second, I remember in the presentation, there was a chart showing the three levels of partnership and how, as you deepen your partnership, the growth rates increase. I was actually also wondering if you could share roughly the percentage of revenue from each of these partnerships today and how that's been changing compared to, say, three years ago.
For sure. The first question, you know, I'll answer by saying, when we went out originally, and it goes into those three phases of growth from a how we think of our company history perspective and looked at transformation, we're very focused on building out sort of a global footprint, and we're very focused on building out capabilities. We believe we've got that through the IBM acquisition, Minacs acquisition, and the Convergys acquisition, and then certainly from a PK perspective, from a technology perspective, the PK acquisition. That's not to say that we wouldn't look at another large scale play, but the reality is that the capabilities and market that is out there isn't necessarily the most attractive to us right at this time.
I mean, there'd be a few things that we'd be very interested in, but the reality is that, you know, timing has to be right. Right now we just don't see anything in the near horizon that makes us sort of think that we can do it. Also, when we look at those, we see a lot more duplication if it's like for like North American-based type of opportunities where you know, we'd just be sort of doubling down on things that we already have. That's never been our strategy. It's always about adding incremental value to what we can do and offer to our clients and offer to new potential clients who are coming into our business. That's really how we think about it.
Again, never say never, but the reality is we believe that there's other areas that we can invest in the new client base, new capabilities, and new technologies for our business. In terms of the three kind of categories of clients, our philosophy is really about kind of moving clients up the ladder, so to speak. If a client comes in as a partner, we're just not interested in a partner. It's about, okay, how do we get them to be an integrated partner? How do we get them to use more technology? How do we get them to use more of our services? How do we get, you know, multi-geographic delivery? That goes back to sort of 48 of our top 50 clients use us in multiple geographies.
The vast amount of majority of the 50 clients also use a technology that we have developed or that we have installed and implemented and maintained for them. Then obviously from the integrated partner, it's about becoming that strategic brand partner because we know that drives growth. Now, while we don't say sort of the size of each of those areas, the reality is that the biggest part of our business is really that middle part as we're moving people to the strategic brand strategic integrated brand partners. The smaller part of our business is really sort of the partners, which is really the first feeder of our sort of entry point, I guess is the best way of putting it.
Yeah. I think actually, if you look at the slides, Chris, it is the percentage of revenue is broken out there, Jeff, and a quick quiz for the CFO, and I'm gonna fail it now, but I think it's roughly 20% in that strategic brand partner. The vast majority, right around two-thirds in that kind of middle category and about only 13% in that lowest category. Where would that have been maybe three or four years ago? Much higher in that lower grouping. You know, I talked about the very purposeful reduction we made in the telecoms vertical. Some of that work that we're no longer doing certainly would have been classified there. It would have been a larger percentage for sure.
Yeah. One thing that we talked about on our last earnings call that got us very excited is really about the new economy companies starting with us and starting with technology, where I think 71% of our new economy companies now have technology as part of the solution. Historically, those new economy companies would have come in at a partner level, and it would have taken a while to get into the integrated partner level. Now we're seeing them jump in right to the integrated partner level and actually some migrating into that strategic integrated brand partner. Really excited about the trends that we're seeing.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, our next question comes from Tom Maher at Hilton.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for the questions. I had a couple of questions. Some of them are short term, and one's a little bit longer term. First of all, in the very short term, you know, and we're a little bit past the sort of panic stage of the pandemic, but I suspect that there was somewhat of a scramble to be able to work remotely and to address all the client needs. Just curious, in the early stages of what you're looking at in terms of operational margin improvement, were there some things that have to be sort of optimized that were done for, you know, expedience versus how you would actually want them longer term? Maybe I'll start with that, and then I have a couple follow-ons.
Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, absolutely. We saw at the beginning of the pandemic back in sort of March, April, 2020, where we spent over what we needed to do in not the most efficient way, primarily to focus on supporting our clients' businesses and supporting our staff. That's all we cared about, right? It was simply kind of getting through what we need to get through. As time has gone on, we've operationally and become more efficient in all of those things that go along around asset shipping and asset retrieval, around training, around managing our connectivity with, you know, close to 150,000 remote individuals around the world.
All those things we're becoming better and better at, and believe we still have some room to grow, so there's no doubt about it. At the same time, as we've been kind of making those operational efficiencies, we have been investing much more around security and around other capabilities to make the work at home environment as similar as we can to the bricks and mortar environment. So there's been some trade-off, but we continually are looking for ways to be significantly more efficient in our operations. As well as by the way, in our bricks and mortar operations, as we go. There's some things we've learned from a work at home perspective that we've now been able to deliver in a bricks and mortar perspective as well. Your follow-up question?
Yeah, sorry about that. I went to mute. Sorry about that. Yeah, so one of the earlier questions was discussing the cost of labor in the United States, and I was kinda curious about it from a couple different dimensions. One is more on the availability side, in terms of how much that's driving customer demand to you. Then I thought a little bit more about it, and I'm kinda curious if that workforce is gonna be more sort of changing over time. Do you have clients that say, you know, regardless of whether we can get the labor, we're concerned about the continuity of that care, if you will. In other words, it would drive to your more automated/standardized performance metrics, et cetera. Just wondering how much that's sort of a demand enhancement for Concentrix.
That's a good question. You know, frankly, that's not really the conversation that it starts with with the client. The client starts off with capabilities and, you know, do you have the right footprint and the right domain expertise. Then it gets to, okay, where do you think we should deliver these services from and the solution from? Then when we talk about North America, you know, clearly there's a price and a time to ramp metric that goes in that might be different than if we were doing it near shore and offshore. From a hiring and ramping perspective, we can generally do things offshore, near shore, faster than we can do it on shore, just because from a labor perspective of who we're going after.
I think from a continuity perspective, you know, that's kind of at the beginning of the conversation around what's that customer experience gonna be and how are we gonna deliver it. What clients are really, really focused on is how to differentiate it. They don't want to replicate generally what they have, either internally or with another partner, when we start talking to them. They really wanna figure out, hey, can we do something different? Can we sort of drive a much more frictionless, effortless, type of engagement with our clients? Or our customers, can we treat them in a sort of much more higher level of intimacy way and deliver long-term relationships with them? That's tending to be the conversation before labor.
As we sort of pointed out in our earnings call a few times, labor is tight in North America as well as in some parts of Europe, and we have to be competitive in order to make sure that we get the talent that we need, and we've taken steps to make sure that we do that. On the catalyst side of the business, we've also made the comment that high-tech labor, there is a generally high level of demand globally. Frankly, we have to be very, very focused on our environment for our people, making sure that we're a premium employer to drive the right type of retention, and we've been very, very successful.
That's one of the things that we actually were super thrilled about with the PK acquisition is because the 5,000 individuals, very deep domain talent, a lot of expertise, and frankly, well below attrition rates that we've seen in other companies in that segment. Super excited about bringing them into part of the team.
I just one last one, if I could. It's interesting, you were talking about some of your new economy clients starting at that sort of partner phase and then trying to move them up. This is more from my understanding of that client base, if you will. I would think some of them are closer to sort of virtual companies, meaning they don't have an internal function, they're just launching. I'm just curious if that happens, where you're sort of their, you know, completely outsourced customer, you know, care versus, some sort of, you know, you're coming in once it's already established. 'Cause I would think some of those, at least the smaller, newer ones, never had an internal function, if you will, so it would go right to you.
Just curious if some of them kind of evolve that way.
Yeah. Absolutely. That's exactly what we see more and more of. I mean, the two models that new economy companies go to is they might, you know, because of rapid growth, go to a small boutique player who say, "Hey, we're gonna start off with 5, 10, 15 people," maybe doing very basic level of service. But they quickly realize they need something that's got scale, operational excellence, and can support their business on a global footprint perspective. We step in, and to your point, they generally outsource everything because they're solely focused on what their application is or what their service is or what their brand identity is.
They love outsourcing, and it's a very robust growth area for us, as you've seen, as now we're on a run rate of, you know, $1.3 billion annually in that new economy companies, and so really exciting. Companies that we start with very small do sometimes take a little bit to incubate. To your point, we're starting by, you know, helping them figure out their global strategy, helping them to segment their customer base, helping them to figure out what that great customer experience is and benchmarking it to other industries and other competitors in that space. Provide really a high level of high touch and high value when we first talk to them.
Those relationships are very rewarding because they drive for a significant period of time and also power a significant amount of our growth.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Okay, our next question comes from Alex Waldorf at Silvercrest.
Hi, how are you? Thank you all for the time today. I had a question about the sort of technology delivery inside the call center as well as with some of the more digital capabilities. I mean, we've just seen. And the question is sort of around how Concentrix thinks about, you know, delivering, you know, a best of breed experience using the technology building blocks that are out there. I mean, we've seen, you know, some consolidation or attempted consolidation at kind of the routing layer. We've seen other companies focus a lot on, you know, workforce optimization software.
I'm just wondering to what degree the company, as Concentrix, has maybe like a federation strategy where you have, you know, you're utilizing different tools in different places, or do you have preferred vendors that you're standardizing on based on, you know, maybe the ability to, you know, to serve your needs better in some of the more digital forward areas? Or do you have bespoke solutions that you prefer? Just, you know, it seems to be an evolving landscape, and I would be interested in how the company thinks about, you know, staying ahead of the curve from that standpoint.
That's a great question, and I hate to say all of it. But we really do tackle it across the board to kind of give you some philosophies around how we think about things. From a technology standpoint, we really look at can we develop something internally that's differentiated, that we don't see off the shelf, that we can continue to maintain and invest in for the long term. That's really the 50 platforms or it's actually more than 50 platforms that we've developed.
That helps everything from how to manage a floor of staff doing all sorts of different types of services, how to automate you know perhaps their workforce schedule so that they can do split shifts and half shifts and on-demand peak shifts, and a whole lot of unique ways of managing sort of a workforce. That might also be in terms of how we do customized reporting where we build a data lake and bring all the data in and then do on-demand re-reporting. Where we think we can be very very differentiated, we develop ourselves. The acquisition of PK has given us a lot of extra technology and talent that they've developed similar philosophies that we can now kind of put across our enterprise.
When we look at partners to work with, if we believe, to your point, you know, future forward, they're really cutting edge, they're doing things that we would never catch up with or is not something that we believe will be a differentiated service specific to our clients, then we'll partner. We'll partner in really two ways. One might be on a client-by-client basis that they might have some domain expertise, they might be a standardization for a client. If that client has no preferences, then we always have these sort of key partners that we work with to kind of implement the technology off the shelf and deliver what we need to from that perspective. In terms of the solution that we offer for the clients is very broad spectrum.
We look at everything from how to do the workforce, how to kind of deliver the work product, whether it be voice, non-voice, social media, how do we handle that product? How do we turn it around? How do we deliver? How do we measure quality of that product? How do we, when we look at a brand ambassador's workday, when they're sitting on a terminal, how do we shrink multiple screens from multiple different client systems down to one pane of glass? How do we automate as much as possible on that pane of glass so that it's easier and faster and more efficient?
How do we use machine learning to kind of learn what that person's doing to kind of create better knowledge bases so that new brand ambassadors are coming onto the program can reach speeds to proficiency faster. That kind of continues all the way along the way as we deliver services for our clients. To your point, they can be very bespoke. They can also be very standard, where we have the sort of a clear path of saying, "Okay, you're after this. Boom, boom.
Here are the building blocks, and let's implement what we do. The exciting part about bringing Catalyst in the conversation is not only can we do that, but with the expertise that Catalyst brings around API management, around data lakes, around AI, around a lot of the stuff that is in the back end, writing to systems of record. We're actually creating the systems of record and then driving the data back and forth. It really provides a lot more intimacy to that type of customer journey that we can deliver and that customer experience that we can deliver holistically versus a lot of very disparate systems. Again, feel like it's a real game changer of what we can do to drive a better customer experience.
Okay. Well, I want to encourage you, this day is for you to get your questions addressed. Again, use the Raise Hand feature that can be found under the Reactions button on your Zoom screen, and we'll announce you. We have a follow-up I see from Ruplu. Go ahead.
Hi. I just wanted to ask a couple of follow-on questions. The first one on CapEx and free cash flow. Coming back to the fact that you still have 65% of your employees working from home, I realize that that number probably will come down as more people get back to the call centers. You know, if we look pre-pandemic, I think you only have, like, 5% of your staff working from home. Presuming that, you know, a significant portion of that staff remains working from home, you know, as the COVID spacing requirements get relaxed, do you think you'll have any underutilized capacity? And how would that impact your CapEx requirements going forward? And if you can touch on free cash flow expectations as well.
Why don't I touch the
First one. I'll take the
First one, you take the second one.
Yeah. Yeah.
Ruplu, the reality is that we have and we continue to always look at our footprint from delivery and pare space down where we don't need it and invest in new space where we need it. In fact, the last two years, we have taken out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of seats within our enterprise, in some places, primarily, you know, North America and other places where work at home is very, very mature. Then we've also added thousands of seats in some of the new emerging countries, as well as some of the new countries that we've gone on into for the last year. It does somewhat balance it out.
This is something that literally we look at continually to make sure that we've got the right footprint for our business, not only for now and later. We also tend to overspend in our facilities to make sure that the right environment for our team members, so that they're vibrant, they're alive, they have lots of social spaces and gathering spaces. Really they're inviting for our team members to come into and work within the environment. I'll turn the second part of the question over to you.
Yeah. The result of all of that, Chris, is we do still see Ruplu free cash flow at roughly 3% of revenue. That's probably is lower than where we saw it three years ago when we were so much in brick and mortar. We see that coming down to roughly the 3%. We're really confident in our ability to generate strong free cash flow in 2022 and beyond.
We think that free cash flow will be elevated from the pro forma for PK, roughly $380 million in free cash flow we saw in 2021, you know, towards, you know, not all the way back to a metric I used to use in the business where free cash flow would equal 100% of non-GAAP net income. We'll move in that direction. The reason we might not get all the way there is we're seeing really strong revenue growth, which comes with some investment needs in working capital. That has a little bit of an impact there. We'll get closer to that metric in 2022, and probably even closer beyond 2022 as we move forward.
Got it. Thanks for the details there on that. Just on the last one, I wanna ask you about, you know, the disruptor clients. You've mentioned that several times, and that's one part of your growth strategy for that 9%-10% organic growth. You know, I got a question yesterday, which was pretty interesting and, you know, what I'd like to do is to drill into that a little bit if we can. I mean, do you have disruptor clients both in developed markets as well as developing markets? You know, I mean, some of your competitors have tried to create a business going after developing market, you know, disruptor clients. And typically, those customers are more demanding and more cost sensitive. How are you able to make a profitable business out of that?
Then is there any risk to, you know, depending on these, you know, high growth but, you know, disruptor type clients? Because essentially, you know, you're kinda depending on them to grow, to get their funding. These are probably venture capital funded clients. So do you see any risk in that, in that portion of the business?
Good question, Ruplu. Frankly, a lot of things there. From the new economy perspective, we actually see these clients similarly globally. I mean, we don't have clients who wanna pay us more than they have to, and we don't have clients who don't want us doing more than we did yesterday today. It's a demanding business and they expect the best, and that's what we're focused at delivering. New economy clients are no different. What we like about the emerging markets and new economy clients, and the emerging markets as a whole, is that there is no labor arbitrage. They are looking for new technology. They're looking for higher automation. They're looking for you know, better strategies around thinking.
That helps us kind of globally take those best practices and roll it out everywhere. Also the new economy clients in those that we are focused on getting, and as Monica talked about, is 27% of our new economy clients, they're not insignificant. I mean, when they've got a market cap of over $1 trillion, these are well-funded startups. Some of them have gone public in the last year and a half to great fanfare and done quite well. They're quite established and certainly demanding. Frankly, that's okay, 'cause that makes us as a better organization to support them, and we like that.
If you also look at one of Monica's slides that she went through where we talk about the future of the business, and this is not a year or two years from now, but over the next sort of five years, we really do see sort of the new economy clients and sort of these enterprise clients kind of evolving into sort of this evolved converged enterprise, where, you know, the types of demands, the types of services, the types of how they engage customers will be very, very similar. Because there's no bank right now, or most banks are not sitting back right now letting fintechs kind of take their customers without a fight. And there's no sort of, you know, software companies who are letting sort of new economy disruptor SaaS companies come up, kind of sit back and take their share.
They're fighting equally as hard. From our perspective, if we're supporting both of these client bases, then that growth rate at some point, and again, not in the next year or two or three years, will converge, we believe, and helps drive us continuing forward. It's really, really important to pick clients, and we do believe you need to support both the enterprise clients and the new economy clients to have longevity in this business. In terms of clients not getting funding, in terms of clients who you know are going to be challenged in terms of their growth, you know, we spend a lot of diligence with these clients to try and make sure that we're picking the ones who are gonna be the real leaders in the space.
So far that's worked out. Although we have had clients who have lost funding in that space and unfortunately they go away. Unfortunately, we've also had clients in our enterprise space have challenges and either be bought or go out of business over a period of time as well. Really that health of the client and that picking the right client is so critical for our growth strategy, and we think we're executing very, very well on that right now.
Okay. Thanks for all the details. I appreciate it.
All right, we have a follow-up from Jeff Mo.
Thanks. A couple more questions from me then. First is around go-to-market. With all the acquisitions, with the spin-out, I'm just wondering, today what does your go-to-market look like? How large is the team, and what are the different ways you're trying to use to capture, net new logos?
Great question. I mean, first of all, our team across Concentrix and Concentrix Catalyst is probably close to about 200, give or take. We have a very focused list of clients that we want from a new economy perspective and an enterprise perspective. It goes to clients who want to invest in the brand, they're looking for a differentiated offering, they like to buy in solutions, and they also truly believe in long-term partnerships. We have a very defined list of clients that we want.
That's also, by the way, how it helps us from an M&A perspective, 'cause when we see a target such as PK that had a number of clients that we're very, very interested in, as well as existing clients, it makes it so much easier to know that's the right acquisition to do. We have this very defined list. Then we really kind of go through a very set process of kind of qualifying, starting discussions, having a relationship. To Dinesh's point, there might be some early consulting or design work that we do to kind of get them engaged. Then slowly, you build that relationship and start to kind of look at some of the meatier work that they might have to do.
That sales process, and I'll comment on the Concentrix side and get Dinesh to comment on the Catalyst side. On the Concentrix side, pre-COVID, that could be anywhere from 12 to 24 months. Long process. Lots of checks, lots of engagement prior to even writing that first contract. Now, with COVID, it's actually sped up a little bit. We're seeing those decisions made, and I'll defer to Monica because she looks after all the pricing. Generally in three to six months, we're seeing that kind of speed up from a decision-making process. We expect it to get a little longer as things get more stable and steady as we come out of the pandemic. Dinesh, from a Catalyst side?
I think if you really look at it, I think Chris touched upon this in the beginning, which is the fact that we are very selective about the customers we want and what we go after. After careful planning, we select the customer that we wanna go after, and it's a combination of new economy clients, a combination of large enterprises that need a look at what spend, additional spend's happening. The way Catalyst is being able to capitalize on the opportunity is by focusing on large digital transformation programs within these customers. Even though we are project-based, once you enter into a large digital transformation program, that's a multiyear program that keeps on giving. We work with them.
As long as the delivery is good, as long as we continue to service them well, those opportunities start, you know, becoming bigger, larger, and over a period of time you're able to build a meaningful large customer. The second piece of this is we're very, very excited about the Concentrix list of customers, and we just started the joint go-to-market discussion. I think there's a huge opportunity for us to combine forces, look at end-to-end. We talked about one of the case studies where, you know, we lead with strategy and design, we build out the ecosystem, and then working with Concentrix, kind of have the entire global operational piece fit in as well. I think this is a tremendous opportunity in front of us. The cycles, we are in a super cycle.
We need to be able to capitalize it.
Thank you. That's really helpful. My second question was around at least the perception in the marketplace that you, your company perhaps is, maybe less strong on new economy type ability to deliver work. Certainly there's companies focused only on that. For example, TaskUs or TDCX that's come to the market recently. They obviously have a higher multiple than you. Even some traditional companies like TELUS International or Teleperformance also having higher multiples seem to have at least better marketing around that. Maybe I just wanna hear your perspective. Do you feel there's still gaps in your ability to deliver? Or maybe when, you know, you we TaskUs presentation, your Glassdoor score is just way lower, so, you know, a DoorDash doesn't wanna come to you.
Could you like speak to that dynamic as to whether or not Concentrix truly is behind the other players in terms of capturing new economy revenues?
Yeah. All I will say is that we're probably pretty poor on the marketing side. You know, we have great competitor set in the new economy side and they've done a great job. The reality is that when you look at our new economy clients, we're on a run rate of $1.3 billion, which is bigger than the vast majority of those people you mentioned, even combined, when you look at some of the competitors. We think we're doing very well. We think the market demand for our services in the new economy space is very, very strong. We continue to add new economy clients every single quarter across a broad spectrum of you know verticals, geographies, and services that we offer.
I wouldn't say that. I would say we're actually leading the way in a lot of these different areas and have been leading the way for some time. We just have not necessarily done the best job of telling investors about what we're doing and how we're doing it and why we're growing in this segment and why it's important to us. In fact, if you look at our growth rate in our last quarter, I don't wanna misquote, so I'll look to Andre, it's about 48%.
48%.
48% year-on-year growth in our new economy clients at that higher run rate to get to the $1.3 billion annualized run rate. We're very excited about this space. We think it resonates really, really well. We think our clients appreciate the services that we do, and we continue to win time and time again from some of the smaller players where the client is looking for global scale, much more operational rigor, much more understanding of regulations in a lot of different countries we operate. In the fintech sector specifically, sort of the maturity levels that we have to do for our large enterprise banks as they grow into that and are under more regulatory scrutiny. Honestly, we think we're doing very, very well in that new economy space.
Makes sense. I just wanted to follow up on something Dinesh said earlier. You said you feel like you're on a super cycle right now. I assume you mean for outsource CX. Maybe just speak a little bit more to that point about what maybe is different. Is it because of COVID? Is it because of Web 3.0? Kind of what are the things that point you towards saying this industry growth rate is now different than it was five years ago?
That's a great question. I think first of all, you know, clients through COVID have changed some of their buying thoughts and buying habits and also kind of reflected on their own delivery mechanisms. Some clients, you know, had challenges getting their own infrastructure up and going during COVID when it was going to work at home. Some of the clients had capacity challenges where they had sort of concentration in a few different areas around the world and weren't able to necessarily deliver services. They really looked at their partner relationships somewhat differently. The partners who did well, you know, they said, "Wow, we wanna move more business to you and maybe even business that we've never outsourced to you." Partners who did poorly sort of were slowly kind of wound down over a period of time.
When we took a poll of our clients back in July 2020 about how we performed during COVID, 96% said that they would grow more with us based on how we delivered and drove their business during the shutdown when they had challenges within their infrastructure. Th at's kind of changed the mindset of how clients, I think, are looking at partners in general and the benefit of outsourcing. Now, the other factor that also came in is a number of clients were trying to figure out how to make their cost structure more variable of work that was historically done internally. That has also driven a lot of conversations where clients are saying, "Okay, you know what? We've got these fixed costs. What can you do?
What can you make more variable?" And doing it. The supercycle that Dinesh kind of talked about and really we've seen as well, and one of the reasons why we went out and made a fairly large acquisition in the IT digital services space is that the scarcity of labor and scarcity of capacity during COVID and the need to service customers at a much higher rate and remote rate really got clients to think about how to reinvent their digital infrastructure. How to think about servicing clients, sorry, customers differently, and needing to speed up those types of implementations as quickly as possible.
A good example that I used almost a year ago was we had a tech client who we had literally talked to about chatbots and conversational IVR for probably a year. They said, "Well, we're thinking about it, and we're not sure, and we're not sure how to get our IT systems working the right way to support what you need." Then as COVID hit, they suddenly lost so much capacity of just staff of their own teams that they said, "How quickly can you get this done?" We literally had it up and running in a few weeks, and we had a number of clients to do that. Similarly, PK saw the same thing.
Over the last sort of two years, they've seen sort of much larger growth rates than 20%, driven by this need to very quickly deploy digital solutions. Now we're seeing sort of the big heavy lift changes that are happening to really change you know how companies function with their data internally that I think we can also take advantage of going forward.
Makes sense. Thank you. I'll go back in the queue now.
Thank you.
Okay, our next question is from Ketul Nathwani from Fidelity International.
Thanks, and hi, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for the presentation. I just had a couple of questions, if I may. Firstly, on the M&A, just specifically wanted to dig into kind of how you get to a $1.5 billion number. I mean, presumably it's a little bit more thought than just, you know, it gets you to a nice round 10 by 25 sales. So maybe you can discuss, I guess, kind of, you know, on one side, kind of the underlying assumptions, you know, how much, you know, knowledge of likely available executable targets, went into it. Then, on the other hand, how you thought about kind of what the balance sheet capacity side of the equation would have looked like in order to add $1.5 billion sales.
Because, you know, if you just look at the PK multiple, then it would stretch your balance sheet to do another $1.5 billion of those sales with just debt. Just kind of wondering how you think about it and whether you consider issuing equity as well to kind of, you know, execute on some of the things you're looking at.
Great question. Again, you know, when we looked at where we are growing and we look at sort of three to five-year cycles, and we started, you know, a couple of years ago, when we did the Convergys acquisition, thinking about what sort of the next five, six, seven, eight years look like. What we kind of modeled was, as an industry, how is it growing? Which competitors do we see are gonna grow? How big are they gonna grow? How big do we need to be to be relevant at that size and at that time? What kind of capabilities do we need? If we build those capabilities, what kind of revenue growth would they see and help us grow?
A lot of the thought went into kind of getting to you know what the size of relevance would be and to be the market leader by 2025. It so happens that it's around $10 billion. There was some marketing put in place to say, "Hey, let's pick $10 billion." It was what it was, slightly a little bit over than $10 billion was when we did our math kind of calculations around it. As Andre said, when we bought PK, that certainly retired a portion of it, and now we have about $1.5 billion left to sort of either grow faster organically or do from an M&A perspective. When we looked at the targets around what we looked for, clearly there's a timing element, right?
Both from a multiples play perspective, as well as what's available, as well as who would like to do something, as well as what you're capable of doing. We look a lot across the areas that we're interested in, both from size, client base, capabilities, technology, and have sort of a fairly kind of high-level view that's clear around where we think we're gonna add in. To your point, is it all gonna be IT digital services? It's not. From a multiple perspective, that would stretch our balance sheet. Would we be interested in doing something with equity? We've never said no, but is that some of the first thing that we'd go to? Probably not. It'll be a combination of different types of services, client bases, and capabilities.
It will be sort of a blended multiple is the best way of thinking about it. Depending on the opportunity, if it was really transformative for us and we really thought it was worth it, would we look at a cash and equity combination? Possibly, but again, we believe that we have an ability to grow our multiple and think that we are gonna concentrate with that and cash as we go forward.
an ability to carry a decent amount of leverage given that we have such strong free cash flow. I mean, a great example is, and although it was a little bit hidden, as we were part of SYNNEX, is we levered up pretty significantly in the Convergys transaction.
Right.
Paid that debt down and brought leverage down pretty quickly through a combination of debt reduction and then, of course, increasing the earnings. We got our leverage down, you know, at the spin, it was, you know, 1.1x something like that. Our preference, I think, will always be to use cash in transactions up until that 3x leverage, maybe a little bit higher with the thought that we can delever quickly. We'll look at other strategic options if they drive the right returns.
Right.
Thanks. That's really helpful. I just had a quick second question, if I may, on just kind of what you're assuming in terms of the kind of margin evolution. You know, clearly the last couple of years has been a pretty big meaningful step up. Then just kinda with the trajectory moderating, I'm just wondering kind of what the headwinds are because, you know, if I think about kind of strategically where you're going, bundling more technology and then growing revenue effectively greater than adding headcounts in delivery centers, and growing kind of more complex, higher margin work like what PK do, surely those should be all accretive to sort of margin evolution over time. Just kind of wondering where the offsets are.
The offsets, I mean, clearly, you know, labor is our biggest cost and will be for some time. We look at what the labor markets are and have kind of that factored into where we need to be to be competitive. I think also we tend to invest heavily in technology, and some of those platforms will take a while to mature. Some of them will mature very quickly. If you look at all the initiatives that we have and all sort of the type of technology we're bringing to bear, that is a continued amount of investment that we're sort of unapologetic for because frankly, it drives the right stickiness with our clients, and I guess gives us new opportunities to grow.
Other headwinds that we deal with from time to time, we're still kind of figuring out when COVID will get to a normalized state. We call out what we're spending on COVID on sort of a quarterly basis. While we don't exclude those from our numbers, it's not insignificant. We continue to see those sort of expenses kind of come through our business. Hopefully, they'll go soon. We have those types of headwinds as well within our business. Lastly, you know, just overall cost of business. I mean, just in terms of the other insurances and other types of expenses are not insignificant.
We see those kind of continuing to increase as we do our best to kind of offset that with other leverage in our business. Those are the type of headwinds we look at and build into our models.
You're right to conclude, yeah, we're really proud of where we've taken our margin to, the steps we've taken to get it to where it is. And those are the things that give us the confidence that we can get to that 14.5%.
Correct.
Thanks very much.
Okay. It appears that there are no more questions. This is your last chance to use that raise hand feature found under the reactions button on your Zoom screen. I see Jeff has a follow-up.
Jeff, I love it. What's your question?
I love to chat with you guys. Chris, Rajiv, Ganesh, it's been a pleasure. I'm curious then, on the spin out from SYNNEX. So kind of two related questions here. One is in the whatever it's been 12, 18 months that you've been alone out, what are some things that you feel you're more able to do now than before, if anything has changed? Then second, has the team and the kind of decision-making structure or the pace of decision-making changed, as an independent company versus under SYNNEX?
Yeah, that's a great question. I'll start with the second part. I mean, the pace of decision-making is faster. I mean, clearly, you know, we have one less layer of management over us. We were effectively operating autonomously as part of SYNNEX, and so we had our own sort of finance, tax, treasury, you know, so forth and so on. But we still reported to the CEO of SYNNEX and then obviously the SYNNEX board. Taking out some of that one level definitely kind of speeds them up. We also have a very engaged board of directors who are just absolutely fantastic to work with. A lot of experience on scale and growing and in this type of industry.
When we're talking to them, they understand the business, and they're able to kind of give feedback very, very quickly. Unlike our past board, which was an amazing board, but their core focus was on the distribution business. When we talked about going into new countries or talked about new services, a bit of a different conversation and some more education that had to go into it. We found some benefit from that. In terms of running our business, I mean, the reality is that we're able to be more aggressive from an M&A perspective, and clearly we've demonstrated that with the PK acquisition.
We're able to be more aligned to what we need to do for our staff base around ESG and around things that resonate with our staff base, which was a slightly different than our parent company's staff base. I think those things have allowed us to be a little more independent and different in the last 12 months. The general operational rigor, reporting, and sort of the day-to-day management of the business fundamentally though has not changed. We were running it like this well before we separated and became our own public company.
All right. That makes sense. I wanna go back to a part of a question I asked earlier, so specifically around employee reviews and the culture of the firm. So the two of the new disruptors out of IPO recently, TDCX and TaskUs, have made a really big deal about how strong their employee reviews are on various forums like Glassdoor, Indeed. And then when I look at your scores, a little bit lower on that front. To what extent do you think employee ratings like that do reflect culture, and how important is it in your industry?
I think culture is incredibly important in our industry, although I would look at slightly different metrics, to be quite candid. I mean, what we look at is we look at our own internal CSAT from our staff. Our goal is that 85% of our staff or above have a high promoter score within our business, and they are enjoying and engaging in what we do, and they believe they understand how they add value to the organization, and they continue to plan to be with us. Then we look at our attrition scores. What I can tell you is that from our attrition scores across sort of like-for-like businesses and like-for-like type of operations, like-for-like countries, we're best in class and almost right across the board.
What I can tell you from our staff engagement scores, we generally teeter between 85%-84%, 83% from an engagement score perspective. We're very happy, and we're very focused around what we do. I think that gets recognized when you look at third-party platforms that survey and actually go out and proactively done versus places that actually solicit scores or that people are incented to kind of score. The reality is that we won for diversity, we've won for culture, we've won for innovation, we've won for team building, we've won Great Place to Work in many jurisdictions that we operate in.
To us, culture is something that's very deeply embedded, and we think we do a very good job at driving the right culture for our team members. Can we do better? Absolutely. Always can do better. Very proud of what we've accomplished. That's really the metrics we look at when we think of our corporate culture and engagement scores.
Specifically on culture, can you speak to the Convergys integration then? Because they perhaps had some lower scores. Obviously you brought on a lot of staff from that acquisition.
I mentioned that in our M&A slide about Concentrix. The reality is we have a very clean and clear methodology around how we bring people into our organization, and it started with our IBM acquisition. If you think about it, we were sort of a scrappy young decade-old company with about 11,000 people, and we went out and bought IBM, which had about 30,000 people that came across as part of the IBM transaction. Very different culture. We really developed this methodology to bring people into our culture, where we do road shows, we talk about what our beliefs are, we talk about what's important to us, we talk about how we treat each other and how we treat our clients.
We're very non-apologetic about it, of saying, "Hey, if this isn't for you, raise your hand, and no worries, we'll take care of you. And frankly, we'll exit the business and you'll find something that matches you. You're not a bad person, just not a fit." But what this drives is cohesion to what our goals are around as an organization and from a culture perspective. Every time we've bought a company, what we've seen is an increase in CSAT, we've seen an increase in ESAT, we've seen better communication around the enterprise, and we see sort of that alignment around our culture as being a key driving factor of what we do. We've been very successful with our acquisitions about bringing that in.
Now, Convergys and IBM might be examples of cultures that were slightly different. PK was one of the cultures that we believe is incredibly aligned. When we started talking through due diligence, it was like talking to a mirror. That was really powerful for us. As we look at acquisitions, you know, if we're paying a premium, a multiple, we want that closer to our culture. If it's something that we're going to change and you know, move some things around, then we go through our culture process to align people to our set culture. Very kind of clear and driven methodology around how we do that and the benefits we get from it.
Thanks, Chris. Maybe my final question here is, so as the CEO, obviously you have a very strong team and I presume a lot of things are delegated out. Looking over the next one, three, five y ears, what are the maybe key three or four things that you are trying to drive and spending your time on to make sure the organization gets right?
That's a great question. Number one is culture. We just talked about it. We believe culture differentiates us in how we think. For those of you who don't know our culture statements, our culture statements are all about being bold, having contrarian views to running a business, being disruptive in the marketplace, valuing knowledge, openness and transparency, having high integrity, right? All contributing and being one Concentrix and being fanatic about our clients and staff. So from my perspective, you know, one of my key initiatives is driving that culture. We have incredibly bright people in our business who come up with amazing ideas on a daily basis. We have incredibly bright people in our business who really are helping drive the transformation that we talk about and are leading the key studies.
There's no help needed from me on that. Amazing team, right? My job is helping drive the culture, being the ambassador for the business as we integrate and talk to clients, looking from that M&A perspective with a team of individuals that help as we look at targets for that. Really making sure that we've got the right succession planning in place up and down our organization, which we've done extremely well at over many years. You are right, incredible team. I think world-class, and look forward to kinda continuing to grow the business with them.
Sorry, just to summarize, you said culture number one, and you expanded upon that a lot.
No, no.
The other ones are the things that you focus on.
Culture is number 1. Looking at where the industry is going is really number 2, which ties into capabilities and from an M&A perspective. Number 3 is really working with our clients on where do they wanna take their businesses and helping them.
Makes sense. All right. Thank you. I better jump in the queue in case someone else has any last questions.
Well, actually, I think we're coming up to time. I did wanna thank everybody for their interest in Concentrix today. It has been hopefully very useful for you to understand, you know, a lot more about who we are and what we do, and hopefully a really deep understanding of where we're going. We believe, you know, how you create the future is really investing early, and we've been doing that for many, many years, and hopefully you see some insight to how we wanna continue to be a leader in this industry by where we're going to invest in the future. We look forward to spending more time with you at our quarterly analyst calls and investor calls after that.
Certainly, if you have any questions after this, please feel free to direct them to David Stein, our head of investor relations. Thank you again. It's been a real pleasure, and I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you all.