All right. Perfect. Welcome, everybody. Excited to be here. I'm going to read some brief disclosures first. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website, at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I'm Meta Marshall. I cover kind of the networking and communication software space here at Morgan Stanley. We're delighted to have Amdocs here with us today, Tamar Rapaport-Dagim, CFO and COO of Amdocs. Thanks so much for being here today.
Nice to be here.
Great. For investors that might be a little less familiar with the Amdocs story, can you just kind of describe the company and your competitive positioning in the market?
Sure. So we are providing software and services to help our customer base, which is primarily telecom and media companies, to provide better monetization opportunities for them and customer experience. And we're doing that through a very rich software portfolio that we deploy ourselves in the customer environment. And we also offer them, beyond that, ongoing support and actually full-blown managed services under multi-year contracts to help them actually run effectively those software activities. We are running globally with about two-thirds of our business coming from North America and a third internationally, supporting close to 400 leading service providers around the world. So big names from T-Mobile, AT&T, Charter, Comcast here in the States, all the way to the different big groups around the world, like Singtel, Telefónica, Vodafone, et cetera.
Great. So, I mean, how does that business or your growth drivers change with AI?
I think AI is a great opportunity, again, to see how technology is driving opportunities that were not there before, so when you think about the progress of technology, whether it's cloud that we are seeing deployed in a much faster way through the industry, and now with AI moving into generative AI, we see great opportunity to have faster conversion of ideas to reality, and the way we are looking on the monetization opportunity from our point of view, thinking about generative AI, it's, first of all, embedding copilot opportunities within our software stack and across our product set, and this is something we started launching to the market already, and we're seeing the benefits of that.
The second aspect would be providing our customers, given we understand so well their business processes, their systems, and data structure, is providing them with the readiness that they need around the data capabilities. And then, on top of that, we are coming with a unique framework we called amAIz that is helping you actually connect the dots in the best way to launch Gen AI use cases. We're running many proof of concepts, already signed a few deals around that, where we are providing our customers the ability to take that complexity and try to simplify it in a way that will create reliable, accurate use cases with the lowest cost to achieve. And this is something that we've already sold to customers and running a dozen of proof of concepts with very successful outcomes to show the benefits for that.
Okay. Sticking at a higher level, you've noted roughly doubling your TAM from $30 billion to $60 billion as you expanded kind of domains and products. Just how were you so successful in kind of expanding that portfolio, and how did you adapt kind of the product and software stack for that larger opportunity?
When you think of Amdocs, let's say six, seven years ago, we were dealing mainly with what we call digital transformation. And the focus was, for our customers back in the days, to digitize and automate their interactions with the consumers. That was roughly $30 billion serviceable addressable market. And then we've expanded from a strategic growth opportunity to several areas. First of all, it's supporting the telecom industry move to the cloud. So everything they bring out of our R&D shop is cloud-native applications, the cloud migration, designing the journey to the cloud, moving post the cloud migration, and operating for them the stack on the cloud environment. So that's a big piece of the opportunity we see.
While the industry just started to move to the cloud, and the estimation is that roughly 10% of the workloads in our domains have moved to the cloud by now, it's already comprising 25% of our revenue, growing double digits for the last two years, expecting to continue to grow double digits this year. So that's definitely a big piece of the growth of the addressable opportunity we're seeing. On top of that, it's the fact that our customers are focusing beyond the consumer segment to see how to automate and digitize their interaction with the business segment, the enterprises that they serve. And this is also a big opportunity we're seeing evolving all over the world, where we are coming with a unique opportunity to help them do that.
On top of that, the fact that network is becoming much more software-defined, we are coming with the years of pedigree and understanding of what's called operations support systems, the systems that enable the inventory management of the network, how you launch and design new services, and how you actually activate that and fulfill that in the network. And we're coming with a lot of software capabilities to help the customers do that. And I would say that the last very important point is, of course, what you mentioned before, generative AI kind of overarching all of that and enabling a bigger opportunity to move faster and better in terms of automation for our service providers.
When you think about a new TAM, is it often one customer has asked you to do something in this market, and then you then go offer it to other customers? Or how do you kind of figure out what new markets kind of make sense for you?
It's based on a lot of research and dialogue with many customers. The fact we serve hundreds of customers around the world enables us to understand, from an innovation point of view, where things are heading. And it's about being proactive. So rather than waiting for, of course, we can learn from a certain customer coming with an innovative idea, and it kind of triggered thoughts about other things. But it's more about understanding in a broad-based where they're heading, where are they seeing their growth opportunity, and how we can support them do that. And that's how we are thinking about our strategy and our investment domains. And sometimes it's about understanding, for example, when the connectivity moved into the 5G and fixed wireless and fiber, OK, that provides different opportunities of how they can package their offering of go-to-market.
So we realized that we better bring them much more flexible monetization opportunities. And we want to open up. They want to have much more of a partnership ecosystem. So we want to provide the engines to do that. So it's something that is evolving. And definitely, by the fact that we understand internationally what's going on, we can bring knowledge and innovation also from one region to the other.
Got it. OK. Maybe double-clicking into your AI stack or just Gen AI capabilities, what is the kind of specific opportunity in this domain? And maybe what are some of the examples of customers that you've started to acquire in this area?
When you think about the different products that we provide, the software products we provide our customers, there are many examples how, by providing Copilot capabilities within those software products, we can actually accelerate the ability of customers to go to market. I'll give you an example. One of the key products we have in the portfolio is called Catalog, is where you actually define the new service offerings and their pricing. Historically, in order to move a marketing idea into the go-to-market from their point of view, it had to go from a marketing idea to the technology people to configure that, test that, et cetera. The more you rely on Copilot capabilities, a non-technical marketer theoretically can move faster in defining that, what's the new offer to the market and how we want. This is just one example.
It's one product within a very rich portfolio. The other things that we are seeing is that there is a lot of focus naturally on how to improve the response time and the effectiveness of responses to customers calling about a problem. A very common problem, for example, many customers are calling our service providers about, why my bill is higher than last month, just as an example. Our understanding of the data structure of the application of billing is providing a much better capability to address that question very quickly and very accurately. And more than that, understand what is the upsell opportunity beyond that, which is obviously an ideal situation for our customer. If they can turn a problem coming into the call center into an upsell and a revenue generation, that's a great thing. So there are many aspects like that.
And everybody's talking about the fact we started by thinking how we support the agent in this example, making the response much faster, much more accurate. Now moving to an adjacent world where maybe the agent is not required anymore, and it all can be done automatically with the self-fulfilling capability. So we are seeing many of these examples. It's around the network. What's the next best investment? It's about many aspects around the ecosystem of the service provider that can be handled much better. At the one, providing also many of our customers in managed services, supporting their IT operations under those multi-year agreements, we have an amazing opportunity also to take the generative AI capabilities and improve how we are doing things. Because we understand both the software stack itself, the deployment capabilities that are needed, and how to run the systems later on.
And we can take generative AI and improve how we are doing things. Think, for example, about incident experience that we have over so many years, accumulating the knowledge of what are the problems, how the root cause has been analyzed, and what has been the fix, taking now generative AI and leveraging that on top of that. Or how to create better specifications for the design of the software, given the experience we have all over the world. So there are many, many aspects that we are looking into generative AI, not just in terms of how to enhance the revenue by selling more capabilities to our customers, but also how we are leveraging that to continue the margin expansion story that we've seen happening based on technology.
I mean, maybe that's kind of one of the concerns that investors have sometimes, is just you're using Gen AI to reduce costs, both for your customers and for yourself, and kind of providing those services, and so there's a question of, is it, one, they're more likely to kind of, this is finally the trigger to use you guys more for services, but two, kind of how do you get the margin upside from that versus having to pass it on to customers?
So I think very importantly, what we sell our customers is what I call an outcome-based model. Whether we're selling a modernization project and enabling them to use our technology, the software, and deploy it in their environment, or whether it's selling them a multi-year managed services agreement, we are pricing the outcome, the value we are providing them based on an agreed cost, cost they pay us. If we can do it better, if we can get better over time in doing it with less resources, leveraging more technology in how we are delivering this outcome, it's something that we should see as a benefit into our margin. Of course, over time, they will expect some benefit as well from that. And that is natural. That's kind of how things are going on. But it's not that we are passing this to them.
We are not in a rate card model. We are not just selling them resources. And the way that we're thinking about it is what we provide them in terms of the value. It's not just helping them reduce cost. It's helping them also sell better, how to gain better customer experience. So it's a lot of things that will enable them to improve revenue, as well as see a better cost structure. So I think that eventually it should be a win-win situation. And look, the idea did not start with generative AI. As a technology company, we've been leveraging our capabilities to do things better for many years.
It's about how we sell them a managed services, for example, that is based on the value proposition that we can deliver them a provided service level that they expect under a predefined price they will pay us. And the fact that we could do it better over the years and improve by that the margin, that's the model, right? So I think generative AI is just accelerating the opportunity to do it better. But it's not a new concept in the sense that the technology and automation can provide us a better way to do things.
Yeah. OK. OK, that's a helpful answer. Maybe back to kind of how you can help your customers with kind of monetization of their own businesses. Just where do you see service provider customers on their journey to kind of monetize either 5G or fixed wireless access or fiber? Just what has been kind of the gating items, and how does Amdocs kind of accelerate that monetization?
I think what's happening is that as customers understand that they can provide different connectivity modes to their end customers, there is a bigger opportunity of how to monetize that and also how to create different use cases of how they want to sell their end customers. I'll give you an example. You think about consumers. Are they selling maybe teenagers that are gamers? Maybe that's an opportunity to sell a different kind of package, which is not just about connectivity, but more of a, hey, take this package, including gaming company, including the devices that are needed, including the connectivity and package it all together, just as an example. Or if they're selling, let's say, an enterprise, and the CEO has an all-hands meeting with dozens of thousands of employees worldwide, maybe for this hour, a better quality of service, better capacity is needed versus maybe tomorrow.
Having that kind of flexibility of how to take the connectivity with the quality of service that is needed, with understanding the type of services that they want to sell, requires different kind of flexibility of what kind of monetization models they want to provide. Our job is to give them an amazing engine that will enable them to provide all of this kind of flexibility. We are not defining for them what is the kind of go-to-market approach they want to take. We want to provide them the best flexible engine to monetize these opportunities. From our point of view, we are agnostic whether underneath that they're using fixed wireless, or they're using fiber, or maybe tomorrow a satellite. It's about providing this monetization flexibility that will enable them to benefit as much as possible from these different connectivity measures.
OK. I mean, maybe just more specifically on 5G, just how do you view the investment cycle and where they are on either kind of continuing to invest or developing some of these monetization efforts?
I think it really depends where you are in the world, but in general, I believe that we are seeing much more the focus today on moving and benefiting from things like fixed wireless, from fiber. Yes, 5G is definitely a very important aspect of their network investment. When we're talking about 5G and connecting it to monetization, it's about the association with quality of service.
For the first time, actually, 5G enables the carriers to really measure and define a committed quality of service with the network slicing, so how you connect that to different monetization models, I think this is what they're focusing on. I would say that generally speaking, the big promise of 5G creating a great monetization opportunity is yet to be fulfilled. We are seeing more dialogue around that recently by some of the CEOs of the industry. Definitely, we believe the tools are there. From our point of view, the application definitely supports that and something that we are pushing forward.
OK. Fiber deployment specifically should be a kind of a key tailwind for Amdocs, as you kind of mentioned. Just how are you seeing deployments change as fiber continues to increasingly maybe re-accelerating some of that propagation? And then what inorganic investments have you made to kind of better position you to take advantage of that opportunity?
I think what we're seeing is that fiber, again, is something that is creating an investment cycle. Fiber is really important also in the context of different business segment opportunities that we see the service providers creating. And it has been something that has been a phenomenon, definitely very strongly here in the States, but also in other places in the world. When we're looking into the non-organic investments, it's not necessarily just in the context of fiber, although we've done some small deals also in that aspect. Our M&A approach has been to support the strategy through one, typically of three things. One, to buy technology capabilities that is augmenting our portfolio. For example, we talked about quality of service. So part of the addition we had to our portfolio around the operating support systems has been around quality assurance, service assurance, by buying a certain asset from TEOCO.
When we think about competencies, how do we expand our competencies? The recent deal we've done in Q1 was a company that has amazing data scientists that is boosting our capabilities around data and Gen AI, and the third part would be consolidation, which we do less frequently. Of course, when we do it, it needs to be highly synergistic in the capabilities it's bringing us. M&A has been part of our capital allocation, but I would say the majority of our capital allocation has been returning cash to shareholders. Over the years, we've introduced a dividend and grown double-digit the dividend, and the share buyback is very consistent, balancing that alongside with some M&A, small, medium-sized deals along the years.
And overall, I think that the business model that we have with 75% recurring revenue, very healthy conversion of earnings to cash, which is roughly on par, this year specifically over 90%. Some years has been over 100%. So over time, it's on par. That lends itself to a consistent ability to continue and return cash to shareholders while continuing to invest in growth, R&D, non-organically in M&A. And that has been a very good formula for us.
OK. That's helpful. Maybe moving to more near-term dynamics. Last quarter, you saw some 12-month backlog acceleration and pipeline pickup with a few kind of large mature deals you're working on closing, but still kind of called out a challenging and mostly unchanged operating environment versus the last few quarters. Can you just outline how you're seeing kind of the demand trend in the near term and kind of how you expect it to develop across the year?
So one of the things we've seen is that on the one hand, we expanded our addressable market 2x, from $30 billion-$60 billion. We came with those growth opportunities, and we've seen very successful win rates. And then we've seen slower decision cycle happening in the industry, where the conversion from pipeline to deals has been slowing down last year. And what we've done, on top of continuing to push forward the innovation and consistently showing value to our customers, is also provided them much more flexibility in how they move about modernization by providing, on the one hand, a very modular software stack. Yes, it's very rich, but they can decide how they want to move about the modernization by selecting certain products of the software stack, modernizing them, and maybe later on decide how they're moving with the rest of that, or maybe never.
And at the same time, also in the journey to the cloud, providing the optionality to not necessarily just go full-blown with the new cloud-native stack and then eventually ripping out the legacy one, but also doing a modular and more gradual path by taking existing versions of products that they have of Amdocs and allowing them to move to a cloud-enabled version. And that will start the move to workloads to the cloud. So these are just examples of the flexibility and modularity we've given our customers as they decide to modernize. And we've seen that's very helpful in the appetite of customers to make investment decisions with us and kind of start the journey to move ahead into modernization. And definitely, we've seen a very nice acceleration in the 12-month backlog we reported for the first quarter.
Sequentially, if I'm carving out the negative effects headwind, it's been over $100 million sequentially, which is a very big number we haven't seen for two years. And also, if you look on our guidance for our fiscal second quarter, revenue growth year over year is already over 3% versus 1 point something % in Q1. So we definitely have that kind of signals that the acceleration is there. The pipeline looks good with quite mature deals, broad-based in terms of the regions that we are seeing. So things are looking on the improvement path in terms of the ability to move ahead.
OK. Just talked about encouraging trends that you're seeing. Just do those vary by kind of geography?
We are seeing a very strong movement in APAC. Probably from growth point of view, that's the strongest region we have. We are a market leader in the region there. We are seeing good appetite for investments. We've managed to convert more customers in APAC into managed services. So the recurring revenue base that we have in APAC is also building itself very nicely. But at the same time, we are seeing growth also in Europe and in North America. Probably the slower part, which for us is a small region in terms of revenue contribution, is Latin America. But other than that, Europe, North America are growing nicely. And we've managed to expand the customer base that we have that is generating significant revenues, which is important. While we are growing in our largest customers, we managed to expand to many more meaningful relationships with big international groups.
Talking about Hutchison, Singtel, Telefónica, those are big and meaningful international groups that we penetrated in the last decade. And we continue to see expansion of relationship internationally, which creates a broader base of customers that is actually generating the revenue of Amdocs.
OK. That's helpful. Again, to kind of fiscal 2025 guidance, you have a relatively wide range of 1%-4.5% growth. Just what are the levers that we should be thinking of kind of what causes you to come in at the lower versus higher end of that spectrum?
I think that what we've seen is that, first of all, in terms of the execution of the existing book of business that we have, sometimes it has to do with the customer appetite on how to move ahead in execution of some of those transformation projects. Because again, it's a business transformation. It depends also on many aspects that they have. So having the deal side is one thing. And then it's about what's the plan of execution. And we're trying to factor into the guidance the different permutations that are possible based on what we see. The other thing is continuing to sign deals.
So while we're very happy about the backlog that was secured during Q1, it's about the pace of continuing to convert this pipeline into deal and exactly when during the year those deals will be signed in order to start generating the revenue that we can see from them. So within that range, what we see is that the most likely scenario is the midpoint. But as I said, given the fact we had the slower start to the year, now we will start seeing the acceleration. So while the year-over-year midpoint is 2.7, through the quarters, we are actually seeing better performance.
OK. On the profitability side of the equation, always a highlight for you guys. You exited Q4, having some kind of efficiency gains, guiding to nearly 300 basis point increase in operating margins across fiscal 2026. Can you just kind of give a context around the strategic decisions you've made and kind of where you see the most opportunity for leverage in the model?
So when we look on our margin expansion story, we've definitely leveraged a lot of the technological capabilities of Amdocs and the fact that we have the unique model of developing the software, deploying it, and running it under managed services in order to continue and improve the margin. And that's the part we talked about before. We've already gained 60-70 basis points of margin expansion in 2024. And looking into 2025, as you noted, we're guiding for a 300 basis points expansion, of which 230 relates to kind of a one-time reset of some activities we decided to phase out from. But more importantly is, again, 60-70 basis points coming from this automation and AI capabilities that we are deploying internally to improve efficiencies.
On top of that, of course, there's always focus on operational excellence, how to do things in a better way, which every company is doing, and I think that the muscle of how to really leverage technology and how to deploy it internally in a way that we can improve over time is definitely working. Now, the question is, can we continue in that pace? So we cannot commit exactly necessarily to a number of 60-70 basis points, but directionally, we do see the benefit of continuing to do that, and we just started to scratch the surface with Gen AI capabilities contributing to that, so looking forward, we feel this is definitely something that should enable us to continue and push forward and see the margin expansion story continuing.
Very good, thanks. I think I saved myself. All right. So you've had some partnerships most recently with Microsoft around CRM. Just how do you view partnerships as a part of the go-to-market or kind of growth opportunity? And just what's the latest on that Microsoft partnership?
I think that in a fast-moving technology market, you definitely have to choose your partners right. We've been very focused on selecting the strongest companies and for them to see a win-win situation working with us, whether it's Nvidia in the Gen AI era, whether it's Microsoft. You mentioned the relationship we have there, which is very important. Hyperscalers like AWS. We work with all of them. We make sure that we leverage their capabilities and their strengths that are complementary to our offering in terms of how we come to the telecommunication market and the go-to-market in an optimized way. The partnerships that work, unsurprisingly, are the ones that are complementary rather than competitive. I feel that names like Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, Microsoft are very strong names that are enabling us to really go together and strengthen the offering to the market.
From their point of view, we are the market leader providing the applications for the telecommunications market. So defining how they're leveraging that in terms of going to, let's take the hyperscalers, for example, to move the telecom industry workloads to the cloud, the more Amdocs cloud-native applications or cloud-enabled applications are being deployed out there. That's beneficial for them, of course. From Nvidia's point of view, the more we move the Gen AI capabilities into telecommunications, they can benefit from selling their GPUs. So I think we definitely see a win-win opportunity in this partnership ecosystem. And we mentioned now the big names. At the same time, we have a lot of startups that we are working with to bring more innovative ideas into our customers.
OK. That's great. Maybe last question for you. We have kind of been asking this to everybody of just how you're using Gen AI internally. And I know you guys are more at the forefront of using it just in terms of kind of the services that you're offering, but just anywhere within the organization that you're kind of using it more.
So we talked so far a lot about how we're using that to improve the way we're executing to our customers or how we're doing the software development lifecycle as a whole. But I can say that even in things like corporate services, how you're doing hiring of employees and matching in a very effective way the skills that are needed in order to perform the jobs to be done internally to the talent that we're bringing over, how you understand very quickly how to take that into the gap analysis and create the right learning opportunities for these people. Things like how you do legal, how you do due diligence, how you actually create a better understanding. I just watched a couple of days ago an amazing Gen AI-based video explaining the payroll slip to employees, which is amazing.
Because think about it, it's all of kind of a big launch that we've done internally of a Gen AI-based capability for all of kind of corporate services-related questions. So when an employee historically had to waste its time to go and find the right representative to explain to them, how do I do an expense reimbursement report, or where do I find the answer to my recent benefits that I'm getting from you, Amdocs? Now it's all a prompt, like internal ChatGPT, that they can get the answer to.
That is an amazing and very different employee experience and productivity gains at the same time, and I think there are many, many opportunities like that that we can do, which go much more beyond the, let's call it the basic thing the company is doing, which is software development lifecycle. Everything around that has obviously been analyzed and mapped to see how we can leverage generative AI to do it better.
All right. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for being here today and sharing the Amdocs story with us.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Meta. Thank you, everybody.