Tata Consultancy Services Limited has informed the Exchange about Transcript of Analysts/Institutional Investor Meet/Con. Call
TCS/SE/135/2022-23
October 14, 2022
National Stock Exchange of India Limited Exchange Plaza, C-1, Block G, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra (East) Mumbai - 400051 Symbol - TCS
Mumbai - 400001 Scrip Code No. 532540
BSE Limited P. J. Towers, Dalal Street,
Dear Sirs,
Sub: Transcript of the earnings conference call for the quarter ended September 30, 2022
Pursuant to Regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, please find enclosed the transcript of the earnings conference call for the quarter ended September 30, 2022 conducted after the meeting of Board of Directors held on October 10, 2022, for your information and records.
The above information is also available on the website of the Company: www.tcs.com
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully,
For Tata Consultancy Services Limited
Pradeep Manohar Gaitonde Company Secretary
Encl: As above
TATA Consultancy Services Limited 9th Floor Nirmal Building Nariman Point Mumbai 400 021 Tel. 91 22 6778 9595 Fax 91 22 6778 9660 e-mail corporate.office@tcs.com website www.tcs.com Registered Office 9th Floor Nirmal Building Nariman Point Mumbai 400 021. Corporate identification No. (CIN): L22210MH1995PLC084781
Tata Consultancy Services Limited
Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call. October 10, 2022 , 19:00 hrs IST (09:30 hrs ET)
Moderator:
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the TCS Earnings Conference Call. As
a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode and there will be an
opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need
assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing ‘*’ then ‘0’
on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand
the conference over to Mr. Kedar Shirali – Global Head, Investor Relations at TCS. Thank
you, and over to you, sir.
Kedar Shirali:
Thank you, operator. Good evening and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us
today to discuss TCS' financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2023 that
ended September 30, 2022. This call is being webcast through our website and an
archive, including the transcript, will be available on the site for the duration of this
quarter. The Financial Statements, Quarterly Fact Sheet and Press Releases are also
available on our website.
Our leadership team is present on this call to discuss our results; we have with us today,
Mr. Rajesh Gopinathan -- Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director; Mr. N G
Subramaniam -- Chief Operating Officer; Mr. Samir Seksaria -- Chief Financial Officer;
and Mr. Milind Lakkad, Chief HR Officer.
Our management team will give a brief overview of the company’s performance, followed
by a Q&A Session. As you are aware, we do not provide specific revenue or earnings
guidance. And anything said on this call, which reflects our outlook for the future or which
could be construed as a forward-looking statement, must be reviewed in conjunction with
the risks that the company faces. We have outlined these risks in the second slide of the
quarterly fact sheet available on our website and e-mailed out to those who have
subscribed to our mailing lists.
With that, I would like to turn the call over to Rajesh.
Rajesh Gopinathan: Thank you, Kedar. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to all of you. We
are very pleased with our performance in Q2. Our revenue grew 18% in rupee terms and
15.4% in constant currency terms and 8.6% in dollar terms, reflecting the continued
strength of demand for our services.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
Our operating margin for the quarter was 24%, an expansion of 0.9% sequentially and a
contraction of 1.6% on a year-on-year basis. Our net profit crossed the `10,000 crore
mark this quarter and our net margin was at 18.9%.
I will now invite Samir, Milind and NGS to go over different aspects of our performance
during the quarter. I will step in again later to provide some more color on the demand
trends we are seeing. Over to you, Samir.
Samir Seksaria:
Thank you, Rajesh. Let me first walk youthrough the headline numbers. In the second
quarter of FY 23, our revenues grew 15.4% YoY on a constant currency basis. Reported
revenue in INR was `553.09 billion, a year-on-year growth of 18%.
In USD terms, the sharp fall of all currencies in our basket versus the dollar in Q2,
resulted in a deflated reported revenue of $6.88 billion, a YoY growth of 8.6%. While the
rupee depreciated by 3.4% against the dollar sequentially, it appreciated 4.4% against
GBP and 3% against euro, eroding the benefit at the operating margin level.
This currency benefit along with a flatter workforce pyramid and improved productivity of
fresh hires helped mitigate the impact of normalizing travel and facility expenses and
continued headwind from backfilling and retention expenses.
Overall, our operating margin expanded by 0.9% sequentially and was at 24%. Looking
ahead, we believe the supply side issues have peaked and should start easing in the
second half of the year.
Net margins were at 18.9%. Effective tax rate for the quarter was 25.7%. Our accounts
receivable was at 62 days’ sales outstanding in dollar term, down 1 day compared to Q1.
Net cash from operations was at `106.75 billion which is 102.3% of net income. Free
cash flow was `100.62 billion.
Invested funds as on 30th September stood at `592.9 billion.
The Board has recommended an interim dividend of `8 per share.
Over to you, Milind.
Milind Lakkad:
Thank you, Samir. On the people front, our investments in capacity building and organic
talent development allowed us to achieve our strong business growth with relatively
modest net headcount addition.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
In Q2, we added 9,840 employees on a net basis, bringing our workforce strength to
616,171 as on September 30th. It continues to be a very diverse workforce with 157
nationalities represented and with women making 35.7% of its base.
On the learning front, TCS clocked 11.7 million learning hours in Q2, resulting in the
acquisition of 1.5 million competencies.
Our FY 23 fresher onboarding is proceeding as per plan. In keeping with our culture of
being committed to our employees, we have honored all offers we had made and have
onboarded 35,000 freshers in H1 and with 20,000 brought onboard in Q2 alone.
The TCS employer brand continues to shine strongly helping us attract the best talent
across the world. We launched the TCS National Qualifier Test for FY 24 on August 15th
and received an overwhelming response with half a million registrants, an all-time high.
Industry-wide churn continue to be high in Q2. Our LTM attrition in IT services inched up
further to 21.5%. That said, the technology job market which had overheated in the last
few quarters has begun to cool off, and compensation expectations of new hires are also
becoming more realistic. With supply catching up across the industry, the pressure to
poach experienced talent is easing. So, we should start seeing the churn settle in the
coming months. Based on the monthly trends, we believe our quarterly annualized
attrition figure has peaked in Q2 and should start moderating in the second half.
Lastly, we continue to be benchmarked with the best employers globally for our
workplace practices, and policies. In Q2, we won more than 50 awards globally across
various aspects of HR value chain, including our work towards gender equity.
Over to you, NGS for some color on our segments and products and platforms.
N G Subramaniam:
Thank you, Milind. Let me walk you through our segments and performance details for
the quarter. All growth numbers are on year-on-year basis and constant currency terms.
All our industry verticals grew strongly in Q2. Growth was led by Retail and CPG which
grew 22.9% after a similar strong double digit growth last quarter. Growth is being driven
by ongoing spending by retailers towards making their supply chains more agile and
resilient, and improving the shopping experience for their customers. We've also seen
an uptick in the travel, transportation and hospitality sector, driven by increased
investment in resilient operations.
Communications and Media grew 18.7% driven by investments around 5G and delivering
personalized offerings to consumers.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
Technology and Services vertical grew 15.9% while Manufacturing as well as Life
Sciences and Healthcare both grew 14.5%.
BFSI, our largest vertical grew 13.1%, powered by strong spending on cloud, data
analytics and customer experience.
Let me now walk you through the growth figures by geography.
Among major markets, North America led with 17.6% growth, UK grew 14.8% while
Continental Europe grew 14.1%.
In emerging markets, India grew 16.7%, Middle East & Africa grew 8.2% and Asia Pacific
grew 7%.
It is befitting that Latin America led with 19% growth in Q2. During the quarter, we
celebrated the completion of 20 years of TCS’ presence in the region. In these two
decades, our business across the region has grown significantly, catering to the local
market, as well as serving as a near shore center for North American clients.
Moving on to our Products and Platforms, they did really well in Q2.
Ignio™, our cognitive automation software suite signed up four new customers and three
clients went live during the quarter. TCS filed two patents around ignio during the quarter
and was granted one. The market demand for ignio-trained professionals continue to
grow. The number of ignio trained professionals now stands at 16,398. The number of
ignio certified professionals is at 6,984 to-date.
A large American technology company specializing in consumer electronics, software,
online services, and mobile phone manufacturing extended ignio AIOps’ event
management capabilities to their supply chain. This eliminated duplicate alerts and
processed genuine alerts, giving SMEs more time to focus on real issues, thereby
reducing overall resolution time. The tool has handled over 25,000 alerts since
implementation. 33% of these were suppressed and 66% were triaged to operations as
legitimate alerts.
TCS BaNCS™, our flagship product suite in the financial services domain had four new
wins during the quarter. One of the world's largest investment management companies
based in the US, offering a broad selection of investment advice, retirement services and
insights to individual investors, institutions and financial professionals, has selected TCS
BaNCS Wealth Management for their retail business.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
One of the UK’s leading insurance organizations went live with the TCS Insurance
platform, migrating 2.3 million policies onto TCS BaNCS this quarter. This is the largest
ever policy migration in the UK life and pensions industry, and a major milestone in the
customer’s simplification journey towards eliminating aging legacy systems.
Our Quartz™ blockchain platform had two new wins and one go live in Q2. Quartz has
been selected by a large electricity provider in North America to establish a private
permission blockchain to track and manage energy consumption and renewable energy
certificates allocation among multiple smaller entities. The initial pilot will demonstrate
the ability of blockchain to bring different entities together on a shared ledger and track
the actual energy consumption vis-à-vis the contracted quantity, automate the issuance
of renewable energy certificates using smart contracts and enable real-time tracking of
the certificates issued.
In life sciences, our award winning Advanced Drug Development suite had one new win.
We onboarded a top five pharma major on our Supply Management Platform, part of the
CCT suite, to deliver real-time insights into patient medication adherence.
TCS TwinX™, our AI-based digital twin solution, continue to gain ground in various
industries, helping clients carry out complex what-if analysis and take informed business
decisions. In Q2, we had two wins and three go lives for the TwinX platform.
TCS Optumera™, our AI-powered retail merchandising suite went live with two of our
clients.
TCS iON™ had eight wins in this quarter and is seeing increasing demand and familiarity
among educators for the ability to author question papers and auto or manually mark
responses. In Q2, we served 150 assessment customers and administered 300 exams
to around 6.6 million candidates.
Over 1,170 corporates now leverage the TCS National Qualifier Test as their entry level
recruitment platform and over 3,150 candidates have gotten placed till date.
TCS' MasterCraft had 23 new wins this quarter, including 10 new clients and 13
renewals.
In terms of client metrics, these metrics are an important validation of our customer-
centric business model. The customary practice has been to report these figures based
on US dollar translated revenues.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
With sharp currency volatility of the kind we saw in Q2, the print numbers of clients in
non-US dollar markets may get underreported due to currency deflation. Despite that
headwind, we have good additions in every revenue bucket in Q2 compared to the year
ago.
We added five more clients in the $100 million plus band, bringing the total to 59. We
added 10 more clients in the $50 million band, bringing the total to 124. We added 36
more clients in the $20 million plus band, bringing the total to 283. We added 38 more
clients in the $10 million plus band, bringing the total to 455. 41 more clients were added
in the $5 million band, bringing the total to 650 and 72 more clients in the $1 million plus
band, bringing the total to 1,210.
Overall, it has been a very satisfying quarter from an operations perspective.
Let me now request Rajesh to speak on the demand drivers during the quarter.
Rajesh Gopinathan: Thank you, NGS. Before I get into the demand drivers, let me spend a minute talking
about the demand environment and mood among clients.
Despite growing news flow around a possible economic slowdown across the world and
client concerns over how that might affect their businesses, we haven't seen any change
in their spending on us so far. As you could see from the growth figures, demand for our
services continues to be strong in Q2 across all verticals and all markets even in
Continental Europe and UK, where the pessimism levels are at the highest.
Project ramp-ups proceeded as scheduled, and we're not seeing any delays or
cancellations. Deal closures also remained strong in Q2.
That is not to say that the deteriorating macro had no impact at all. Clients have become
more cautious when committing to longer-term investments. Some of the larger
transformation programs are seeing prioritization of projects that offer quicker wins
versus those with longer term paybacks. Many of our clients are also working on plans
for various economic scenarios for next year. We have also seen some sporadic
instances of delayed decision-making on new deals. Those apart, clients have been
telling us that even if their business outlook changes over the next few months for the
worst, technology will be one of the last areas to be impacted.
The big driver of demand in this quarter was the continued investment by our clients on
cloud transformation. The scale, breadth and depth of our cloud expertise, deep domain
knowledge, strong partnership credentials with the hyperscalers and our portfolio of
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
intellectual property on the cloud, make us one of the largest beneficiaries of this
opportunity.
We are now seeing client focus shift to execution of the transformation agendas
announced earlier, and this plays to our strengths. We have seen instances where clients
are unable to leverage the flex capacity of the cloud until they shift a larger portion of the
workload and they are seeking our help in accelerating that move.
Further, many organizations which rushed to move their workloads to the cloud without
sufficient planning and controls in place, are now discovering that they are not only losing
out on the economic benefits of the hyperscaler clouds, but are actually incurring higher
costs than they did with their own data centers.
Such clients are very open to our proactive proposals with our FinOps advisory offerings
to help optimize their spends on the cloud, and our cloud orchestration services powered
by TCS Cloud Exponence™, our multi-tenant cloud delivery platform to help them
seamlessly and optimally manage multiple environments spanning public, private and
hybrid clouds.
We won several cloud transformation deals in Q2. For example, we were selected by a
leading American biopharmaceutical company as a transformation partner to modernize
their technology estate. We will build for them a next-gen operating model leveraging
cloud, agile, DevSecOps, and cloud-native technologies that will help them enhance
enterprise resilience, accelerate the pace of innovation and improve the customer
experience.
In addition to the migration of workloads to the cloud, several clients engaged us in Q2
to architect advanced analytics, leveraging cloud native capabilities to help them launch
new products, understand the customers better, and deliver a richer customer
experience.
For example, for a large UK bank, we proposed a transformation solution entailing the
design of an enterprise data fabric architecture that enables advanced analytics at scale,
leveraging our deep contextual knowledge, portfolio of tools and accelerators and
hyperscaler cloud expertise. This will help the bank drive more personalized products
and services, understanding the customers financial needs at various life stages and
deepening relationships with customers thereby propelling growth for the bank.
Similarly, a leading American hotel and motel operator, engaged us to develop an
advanced cloud analytics solution to help transform customer and agent experience by
consolidating and harmonizing data from across their enterprise.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
The economic uncertainty is also resulting in greater interest from clients in our Machine
First™ approach to transform their IT and business operating models.
You might recall from my earlier commentary on this topic, that this approach basically
entails embedding AI and machine learning deep within an enterprise to create leaner,
more agile and resilient operations, which can flex up or down depending on the business
environment, and whose efficiency gains can fund some of their front office
transformation initiatives.
We had several such wins this quarter of which I will mention only two.
We were engaged by Xerox for their enterprise-wide business transformation journey to
enhance their competitiveness and power their growth. TCS’ Cognitive Business
Operations, and Xerox’ Centers of Excellence embarked on multiple transformation
initiatives across the various business functions, including finance and accounting.
The digital transformation program powered by TCS Cognix has automated the
processing, improving speed, accuracy and throughput. Its AI-powered dashboards and
various analytical models equip the finance function with intelligent and real-time insights
for decision-making. This has resulted in a positive impact on the cash flow, and
significantly improved operational efficiency.
A European industrial tools manufacturer chose us to transform their service desk
operations. We will leverage cognitive technologies and implement a leading employee
experience platform for auto-healing of user issues and improve user experience.
Coming to the third driver of demand, it is what we broadly classify as growth and
transformation. What stands out in these engagements is the value of our deep
contextual knowledge of our clients’ business and technology landscapes and our highly
collaborative
inside-out approach
to
transformation. This results
in
impactful
transformation solutions that don't face traditional organizational resistance to change
and get us much appreciation from the management teams.
Let me illustrate this with three examples:
We have been working closely for over a decade with a leading bank in North America
that services the startup and innovation industry. Our deep contextual knowledge of the
business gained over these years has made TCS a trusted advisor to their growth
journey towards becoming a large financial institution.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
To support the business expansion and to effectively prepare them for a transition from
a category-IV to a category-II bank, which was as required by regulators given their
significantly fast growth, TCS helped them conduct a detail risk and regulatory
assessment and prepare a roadmap to meet the regulatory requirements related to
liquidity, market and credit risk. This entailed reimagination of the overall business
framework for the treasury and capital markets swap dealer business for the bank.
TCS led the discussions with the bank to define the target state business architecture,
solution architecture and implementation roadmap. We brought in actionable points of
view, best practices recommendation, and presented a tactical as well as a strategic
approach to the solution implementation.
As a business outcome, the real-time liquidity monitoring and management is expected
to reduce the nostro buffer for the bank by more than 40% and ensure compliance to
enhanced regulatory requirements. The target reference architecture is expected to bring
down the time-to-market by 10% to 15%.
Similarly, we're working with a large pharma and medtech company to reimagine
discovery and development of therapies by blending science, data science, and
emerging technologies. We have developed an advanced AI and model-based adaptive
risk monitoring solution with a predictive engine to predict risk mitigation insights for
clinical risk management. The solution was co-created with the client and is now part of
the TCS ADD platform.
We are also a strategic partner supporting the digital surgical platform for their medtech
segment. The platform is in an early stage of evolution and has foundational capabilities
of edge connectivity, analytics and AI suite with an objective to provide capabilities to
launch specific use cases for connected digital surgeries.
A third instance is where TCS led the transformation of the space, range and display
capabilities for Marks & Spencer, enabling it to improve customer choice while optimizing
the range of products based on local consumer demand. This is achieved through
automated data-driven range decisions, and by producing over 12,000 live store-specific
planograms.
By enhancing the accuracy of floor plans and equipment into the planogram fixtures, our
solution ensured that the optimized display plan could be faithfully implemented in the
stores. This transformation helped M&S meet local demand, improve availability, reduce
waste and improve profitability and align future business goals and the food retail
strategies.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
Our deep domain knowledge is placing us at the heart of industry-level transformations
across multiple industry verticals. One such industry that is going through a tremendous
amount of technology-led transformation is the utility sector, at an industry level, as well
as at the level of individual enterprises. Almost every quarter, I've shared examples of
transformation work we're doing in this sector.
In Q2 last year, I'd spoken about five-minute settlement solution that we built for the
Australian Energy Market Operator, that is helping spur innovation in that market and
lower costs for consumers. This time I want to highlight a transformation in the UK gas
market.
The UK energy regulator introduced a program for faster and more reliable supplier
switching option for energy consumers with a new centralized switching service, to
facilitate competition and deliver better outcome for consumers.
TCS worked with Xoserve, the central data service provider for the UK gas market to
design and deliver a complex solution that transforms core business processes like
switching and contract creation, settlement, device update and maintenance, meter
reading, billing, delivery and others, leveraging a leading hyperscaler ERP solution.
TCS’ deep domain expertise and technology expertise were critical in delivering the
solution capable of processing 150,000 switches in under 30 minutes. The solution
allowed the transition and migration of 24 million UK gas meters’ data to enable CSS
switching activity. The solution went live in Q2. With the new solution, the 14-days that it
took to switch a supplier has now been reduced to just one day.
Similarly, last quarter I'd spoken about a Fortune 500 electric and gas utility that
partnered with us to launch a new business model to generate new revenue streams
based on home energy services. Let me share one more example along similar lines.
Engie France, the leading utility retailer is transforming its business model by expanding
from a commodity-based business of gas and electricity to a new service-oriented model
of smart home solutions, offering to drive energy efficiency for consumers and ensuring
sustainability.
TCS partnered with Engie right from the conceptualization, design and proofs of concept.
Leveraging our deep domain knowledge and expertise in core ERP, we developed a
solution for subscription in CRM with incentive and promotion management, and
integrated billing for service and energy-commodity charges in a consolidated invoice.
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This offering has been launched in the market and has received a very positive response,
improving customer satisfaction and growing market share for Engie.
I'd mentioned in earlier calls that many of our G&T engagements are business model
innovations. Let me share three such examples of business transformation solutions that
went live in Q2.
An American multinational conglomerate engaged us to build a comprehensive asset
performance management solution that they will market to their industrial and warehouse
customers.
The cloud-based IoT platform we built for them ingests real-time data from various assets
and enables new value-added services around improved asset visibility, monitoring
capabilities, and predictive insights, leading to improved asset performance, optimized
operations, increased plant availability and higher throughput for their end-customers,
and new revenue streams for our client.
Ingram Micro, one of the largest technology distributors in the US, engaged us as a
partner to power their pivot into e-commerce and achieve their mission to transform from
a traditional distributor to a platform company that does distribution.
We built them a new digital experience ecosystem platform connecting their customers,
vendors and associates. It reimagines the customer journey, making it frictionless and
highly personalized, with conversational experiences, and an AI-powered
recommendation engine that enables intelligent bundled offers.
Similarly, Tapestry Inc. – a leading New York-based house of iconic accessories and
lifestyle brands, consisting of Coach, Kate Spade, & Stuart Weitzman – partnered with
TCS to drive their omnichannel modernization, implementing order management for its
brands to help increase net incremental growth and improve customer satisfaction. This
partnership created a flawless omnichannel order fulfillment and improved customer
journey experience.
So, overall, these examples give you a flavor for the kind of services and the kind of
opportunities that we're able to address across our customer and market landscape.
Coming to our order book, we again had a strong set of deal wins in Q2, amounting to a
TCV of $8.1 billion. By vertical, BFSI had a TCV of $2.3 billion, while retail order book
stood at $1.6 billion. The TCV of deals signed in North America stood at $4.3 billion.
Interestingly, while the pessimism around the macro is possibly highest in UK and
Europe, our order book there is stronger in Q2 than in Q1.
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While the strength of our order book as well as the pipeline for Q3 is somewhat
comforting, given the volatility, we remain very vigilant and are staying very close to our
clients.
With that, we can open the line for questions.
Moderator:
We will now begin with the question-and-answer session. First question is from the line
of Kumar Rakesh from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Kumar Rakesh:
My first question was specifically around European geography and UK. In this quarter on
a CC YoY basis also, we saw a pretty robust growth of 14% to 15%, which is a higher
growth compared to how we reported last quarter. One of our larger peers who recently
reported also saw pretty strong growth in Europe and talked about double-digit growth in
their November quarter as well. Given the fear around macro economy being pretty
severe in that geography, what is driving this much stronger growth in Europe despite
those fears? Is there some structural growth drivers which we are now seeing in the
European geography or the impact could potentially come with a lag?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Rakesh, we have always maintained, and it has been borne out through the pandemic,
that technology is at the core of solutions both on the growth side as well as on the
consolidation and optimization side. So, technologies remains very core to business
agendas for our clients across the full spectrum, across all markets. And we are
benefiting from participating in that cycle.
It’s very difficult for us to zoom out and comment on the macro situation. We can only tell
you what is going on with the specific clients that we have. We are in no better position
than you... you are, in fact, in a much better position than us to be able to take a call on
the macro. This is what we see and we are running with it.
In individual customer conversations, opportunities exist, but caution also exists. I called
that out last time also that in executive conversations, people are talking about caution.
We need to remain vigilant to see whether that will translate into the budgeting and
planning cycle for next year, and what that implies for overall demand. We'll have to play
it by the ear as it comes.
Kumar Rakesh:
My second question was around heading into December quarter, which is usually
seasonally weak, are we getting any sense how the seasonality this time around? Could
there be higher than usual seasonality or could it be the usual seasonality? In interacting
with clients, how are they looking at their next year budget? Any sense on that could be
very helpful.
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
Rajesh Gopinathan: Leaving aside the fact that Europe is in a fairly volatile situation, and this winter is going
to be critical in Europe, our conversations with clients indicate regular seasonality. We
have had extensive client interactions – we hosted our North American clients at our
annual TCS Summit, and also had a series of client events across Europe. So, overall, I
don't think there is any change to the seasonality patterns that we are picking up.
However, this does not address the possibility of some severe shifts in Europe during
the winter.
Kumar Rakesh:
And client interactions on next year's budget planning?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Too early to take a call. We don't know. I mean, we get to hear of it only in the second or
third month of the year, as it starts actually translating into projects. At this stage, we
don't have visibility. As I said in the last call also, there is a cautionary stance that
customers are talking about. They're talking about scenario planning. And the scenarios
are more weighted on the downside than on the upside.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Sandip Agarwal from Edelweiss. Please go ahead.
Sandip Agarwal:
Although, you know it is very hard to comment on how things will pan out, but, Rajesh,
is there any kind of caution which you're seeing in your discussions with the client,
particularly from the US geography, because individuals in UK and Europe, traditionally
we have seen the economic pressure generally results into some help for outsourcing
because it is more cost effective in the past, but that correlation doesn't show up
immediately in the US. So, what are you seeing, is there any kind of caution which clients
are highlighting on the fears of recession or you're seeing any action into the direction
when they are ordering? Have you seen any kinds of delays or anything which makes us
more vigilant?
Rajesh Gopinathan:
In US we've not picked up any threats in terms of caution, I mean extra caution than what
is normally expected. So, US is not showing anything particularly concerning. People are
overall continuing to invest and normal seasonality should apply. Otherwise, we are
seeing a fairly strong environment in US.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirus Securities. Please go
ahead.
Sandeep Shah:
Rajesh, last time in this 1Q conference call, you said that the trend of multi-tower
outsourcing deals or multi-service transformational deals are going up, and you started
signing more number of such deals. Is that trend continuing in this quarter as well? And
also, with macro being concerning, do you witness this trend being higher in Europe as
a geography, versus that of US?
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Rajesh Gopinathan:
I'm sorry, I don't specifically remember exactly what I had said, but let me abstract and
answer this. Operating model transformation as a demand driver has very strong trend
and we are seeing multiple opportunities across all markets on operating model
transformation.
Operating model transformation is being characterized by a few very distinct points. One
is the shift to what we call a vertical operating model, or a product-centric operating
model, where tech and ops is being aligned very closely to business units and to
business outcomes.
The other big one is, of course, the adoption of agile and lean into everything in
operations, even more importantly, significant leverage of our Cognix platform, which is
powered by MFDM™. The embedding of automation at a granular level across
enterprise’s operation suite, both on the tech side as well as on the operations side, is
also core to the operating model transformation that we see.
So, this kind of enterprise-wide operating model transformations continue to be a big
driver of demand. The couple of examples that I had shared, Xerox and one of the others
are examples of that. And that demand trend I think is quite strong and will continue to
remain strong into the foreseeable future.
Sandeep Shah:
Is it fair to say in terms of what you said in an earlier question, in the second half
seasonality could be normal especially in the US, but there could be some issues in the
Europe and there could be significant shifts if the macro issues goes more concerning
versus what you anticipate now?
Rajesh Gopinathan:
It's a prudent assumption. But from our side, we will remain focused on the opportunity
on the ground, and we will deal with it one opportunity at a time. But at an overall level,
it would be prudent to assume so.
Sandeep Shah:
And a last question to CFO as well. In this quarter, is there 100% variable pay being paid
or there is some adjustment looking at the macro issues and could be an impending
showdown, especially in the Europe?
Milind Lakkad:
We are going to pay 100% of variable pay for 70% of our employees. The remaining 30%
will get paid based on the business rate performance.
Sandeep Shah:
This is for 2Q or this is for the rest of the FY'23?
Milind Lakkad:
No, no, this is for Q2.
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Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Ravi Menon from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Ravi Menon:
Wanted to check about the strong additions in the 1 million and 5 million. I know we did
make organizational change, but I guess it's too soon to see the impact of that. So, should
we think of this as change in your go-to-market and trying to close a lot more of the
smaller deals and is there more demand for digital transformation from the smaller firms
because there might be laggards in this transformation?
Rajesh Gopinathan: No, Ravi, this is just a bit of the impact of the currency volatility that you are seeing. Our
client metric in non-US markets, APAC, LATAM, parts of Europe, etc., are more weighed
towards smaller sized customers. And when we report those revenues in US dollar terms,
they are getting significantly impacted by the strength of the US currency vis-à-vis the
local currencies in these markets.
So, although our business response is not going down, in the translation of revenues into
US dollar terms, it is showing up that way. At the bottom of the pyramid, the impact is a
lot more, because the non-US market is more concentrated at the bottom of the pyramid.
So, it's a bit of a mathematics.
We're also internally debating what is the best way to communicate this metric. But we
also don't want to react immediately to this extreme cross currency volatility that we saw
in Q2. But we'll put our heads together as to how to communicate this better in the future
if required.
Ravi Menon:
And how should we think about the lateral hiring, being a little lower than the revenue
growth, is just a reflection of expectation that the worst of the supply side challenges are
behind us, and we can now improve utilization or should we think of this as linked to
slightly softer demand visibility, or maybe a combination of both?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Ravi, your question was about the headcount growth, right?
Ravi Menon:
Yes, that's a little lower than the revenue growth, I mean, we have seen that –
Rajesh Gopinathan: Ravi, we have been significantly investing into headcount addition through last year. As
you know, our headcount growth was close to 20% against revenue growth of about
15%, and that we have built up a fair amount of headroom. So, you should expect that
we will be using that lever a bit more as we go into this year, and try to balance our overall
headcount to our overall revenue from a longer-term perspective. So, it's in line with our
plan, and into that environment, we've significantly invested, and we are now reaping the
benefits of that investment, as many of those early hires become productive into this
cycle.
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Moderator:
Next question is from the line of Gaurav Rateria from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Gaurav Rateria:
Two questions. Firstly, is it fair to assume that the book-to-bill in Europe would have
improved on a quarter-on-quarter basis, basis the commentary that you made and how
the pipeline replenishment has happened in Europe after the deal wins concluded?
Rajesh Gopinathan: We typically desist from giving you incremental metrics, because that sets a precedent.
But when you take Europe and UK together, yes, the book-to-bill has improved. But the
actual growth of the pipeline is more than the growth of our qualified pipeline. So, you
are seeing some amount of elongation of the deal pipeline between total pipeline and the
qualified pipeline. Now, these numbers are volatile because it can change depending on
how the environment changes, but that's where we are.
Gaurav Rateria:
Secondly, in last quarter, you talked about revenue productivity getting impacted as you
created capacity. So, has that got sort of sorted out and you saw some improvement in
revenue productivity, which also had margins and should this be seen as one of the
levers for second half in terms of margin performance on revenue productivity side?
Rajesh Gopinathan: The way to think about is it is not in terms of a short-term margin lever, but as a strategic
call we have taken to significantly expand our employee onboarding, especially on the
entry-level employees. We had hired close to 120,000 freshers last year and invested
into that pool given the longer-term visibility that we have on demand. We will tweak our
employee model on an ongoing basis looking at the demand. So, that is a reasonable
expectation, but our overall hiring model is predicated on much longer cycles rather than
on short term, quarter-on-quarter adjustments.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Manik Taneja:
Just wanted to pick your brains about the aspect that historically what we've seen is that
we've improved our margins through periods of slow growth. Do you envisage something
similar playing out going forward as well? And if you could also help us with the margin
levers that you think will play out in the near-term given the fact that you've suggested
that pricing increases is not universal and is still happening only in certain parts of the
book.
Rajesh Gopinathan:
If we have strong visibility of low revenue growth, and we become much more careful
and optimize it, but I think at this stage, I don't think we are at that point for us to be able
to make a comment on that. So, margin optimization comes in more when there is good
visibility on stable demand environments, and we use those periods to clean up on the
margin side. Right now, whether we are at an inflection point or not, we'll know only in a
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few quarters’ time. Otherwise, we'll continue to stay in the growth and investment mode.
But short-term margin levers, I will hand it to Samir to talk about.
Samir Seksaria:
In the short-term between the quarters, we would expect to focus on our operating
metrics. Utilization will continue to provide opportunity for optimization. Realization has
improved this quarter and we’ll expect to leverage further on that. We will also enhance
our rigor on execution. And as the headwinds start trending down, we should expect that
to also support margins.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Apurva Prasad from HDFC Securities. Please go
ahead.
Apurva Prasad:
Rajesh, while H1 bookings has held up above the 7 billion to 9 billion midpoint, how
should we be thinking bookings trajectory for H2, more around the replenishment of the
funnel of the qualified deal pipeline, any progression around that?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Apurva, difficult to say. We are running at 1.2 times book-to-bill which is a fairly healthy
rate to run at. And we can take a bit of volatility on that on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
So, to take a near-term call on what will happen next quarter or the quarter after that,
difficult for us to do. And more importantly, it does not have a significant impact on our
business model, neither in our planning cycles or in our execution cycle. So, our focus,
of course, will be to maximize and capture as much as we can. But it's not really a big
factor that changes any of our planning scenarios.
Apurva Prasad:
Just to follow up on that, Rajesh, so this 1.2 book-to-bill from a medium-term perspective,
is that the number to build?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Apurva, I don't want to get drawn out on that.
Apurva Prasad:
On the supply side, Rajesh, any comments on the learning hours which had a decline
YoY for Q2? And if you could also help us with the hyperscaler certification numbers, the
number that was 71,000 last quarter?
Rajesh Gopinathan: Learning hours to some extent is impacted by the volume of freshers coming in. As you
know, we had a very large volume of freshers coming in over the last couple of quarters
which has moderated over the last two quarters. So, that will have a flow through impact
on the learning hours. As we went in through the reorganization, that also had some
impact. But at an aggregate level, our focus on reskilling and training and investing into
people continues at scale and there is absolutely no change in it.
Apurva Prasad:
And hyperscaler certification number?
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Rajesh Gopinathan:
I don't know whether we give that out. It is available in whatever forum it is given, and
you'll find it there.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Bharat Sheth from Quest Investment Advisors.
Please go ahead.
Bharat Sheth:
Rajesh, can you give a little bit more color on products and platforms, which I understand
is contributing around mid-teen kind of total revenue and since we are moving towards
more on migrating to SaaS business, is the revenue recognition a bit slow and when do
we expect that to catch up, and what could be the margin lever in this business?
N G Subramaniam: Overall, the products and platforms business is quite stable. The number of opportunities
that come our way across verticals and across the solutions that we have is looking good.
The business model has certainly transformed itself into a pure play SaaS-based
operating environment. Without any exceptions, every opportunity that we bid for, is for
a SaaS-based offering. So, if you really look at it, we have also transitioned, I should say
beautifully, from a license-based, on-prem, AMC kind of a model to a pay-per-use SaaS
model in the last two years.
All our products and platforms are now available on a cloud platform. It's either installed
in our own cloud environment, or with some of the platforms, we've also chosen to
operate in a hyperscaler cloud. In either of these cases, the key thing is that the SaaS
model is prevailing.
The way that we monitor it now is with the ARR or the annual recurring revenue that is
contracted. That is the metric we are monitoring and with which we are measuring our
own performance, as opposed to the earlier way of what is the license fee, what is the
AMC, what is the services element to it and so on and so on. So, it is maturing.
And our products and platforms business itself has matured with the whole environment
of onboarding the clients on a single instance SaaS. Some of the things that we are
seeing developed is the data privacy element, the data localization element. For
example, in Europe, the data residency increasingly is becoming a necessity to be
located in Europe. These are the things that are getting sharpened as I speak. But
overall, it's a good growing business and the ARR metric is going to become increasingly
relevant. At some stage, we hope we'll be able to start reporting separately on ARR basis
as we mature our model.
Bharat Sheth:
And what are the margin levers you have in this business?
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Tata Consultancy Services Q2 FY23 Earnings Conference Call October 10, 2022, 19:00 pm IST (09:30 hrs US ET)
N G Subramaniam: Margins essentially depend on the business volume of transactions that they are going
to put in. It varies. Efficiency is going to come from the fact that we're not going to be
doing too much customization. People are going to be using the products and platforms
more as a COTS model. So, you don't have to maintain too many customer-specific
customizations at any point in time. That is going to be run efficiently.
Secondly, our own support model is going to be heavily optimized, and it's going to be a
lot more standardized.
Thirdly, the product release cycles are going to be a lot more standard, and we will be
able to define it rather than defined by customers at every instance. These are the things
that I see at an operating level.
And as we add more optionality to the offerings, in the sense that, look, I can give you
the standard platform, but there are certain additional services that I can bring in, for
example, client reporting. Either customer can take data and then do it themselves, or
for example, as a value added service we can provide client reporting separately. Or a
certain amount of analytics they can do themselves or they can come and leverage our
value-added services for that. So, it’s a standard service, value added service,
efficiencies that come through a standard way of product management, product releases
and upgrades, all this will contribute to the margins.
Moderator:
The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Rahul Jain:
Just on the subcon side and on the global hiring side, subcon cost has been going up, of
course, for the supply side factors. But given the expectation of a relatively better supply
environment in the global market, is that going to change the subcon cost as well as
direct hiring outside India?
Samir Seksaria:
I'll answer first on the subcontractor cost. So, as you would have seen, subcontractor
cost has started trending downwards. Most of the subcontractor cost increase was on
account of two factors. With borders opening up and visa availability in most countries
improving, we would expect subcontractor costs to start trending down. Also, as the
headwinds from attrition eases, we would expect the use of subcontractors also to trend
downwards.
Rahul Jain:
Will we be incrementally using it as a metric given the macro remains uncertain?
Moderator:
Mr. Jain, please use the handset mode the audio is not coming clear from your line.
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Rahul Jain:
So, is it safe to assume that subcon cost may not go down substantially in near future
even if supply side eases out, because it may be a good margin lever to have in case
the macro weakens? This could be a good alternative to manage the demand and supply
situation better, or it should ease out irrespective of it?
Samir Seksaria:
We will try to balance it and it would be a dynamic thing. If demand continues to be
strong, we would try to capture the demand first, rather than optimizing the subcontractor
cost. That's the lever which we know how to use and will optimize as and when need
arises.
Moderator:
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I now hand the conference
over to the management for closing comments.
Rajesh Gopinathan: Thank you, operator. We had a very good second quarter growing 18% in INR terms and
15.4% in constant currency. Our growth was strong across all our industry verticals and
all our markets.
Importantly, we had a good order book once again. While clients continue to worry about
the uncertain economic environment and are planning for different scenarios, we are not
seeing any material change in client spending behavior.
There are some sporadic instances of delayed decision making. But those happen at
normal times too, so it's hard to pin this down specifically to the economic environment.
Our operating margin expanded sequentially to 24% and our net margin expanded to
18.9%. On the people front, the capacity we built up over the last few quarters and our
investment in organic talent development is helping us meet this demand.
Our attrition inched up to 21.5% in IT services on LTM basis. However, we believe the
situation is easing, and that our quarterly annualized attrition has peaked this quarter,
and will start tapering off going forward.
With that, we wrap up our call. Thank you all for joining us on this call today. Enjoy the
rest of your evening or day and stay safe.
Moderator:
Thank you members of the management. On behalf of TCS, that concludes this
conference call. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines.
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Note:
This transcript has been edited for readability and does not purport to be a verbatim record of the
proceedings.
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