Earnings Labs

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (CTSH)

Q1 2012 Earnings Call· Mon, May 7, 2012

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cognizant Technology Solutions First Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Nelson, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury at Cognizant. Please go ahead, sir.

David Nelson

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release for the company's first quarter 2012 results. If you have not, a copy is available on our website, cognizant.com. The speakers we have on today's call are Francisco D'Souza, Chief Executive Officer; Gordon Coburn, President; and Karen McLoughlin, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments made on today's call and some of the responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Francisco D'Souza. Please go ahead, Francisco.

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst

Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. On the call this morning, we'd like to cover a few topics. First, I'll provide highlights of our first quarter results and our revised 2012 guidance. Next, Gordon will discuss our detailed operating results with a particular emphasis on the trends we've been seeing in the demand environment for our services over the past 90 days. And then Karen will come back and cover our financial metrics and revised guidance in more detail, at which point I'll return to put some color around the investment that we continue to make over the remainder of 2012 to ensure that we maintain industry-leading growth. As always, we'll leave time at the end for questions and answers. Our first quarter revenue grew nearly 3% sequentially and nearly 25% over last year to over $1.71 billion. These financial results slightly exceeded our guidance and demonstrate continued industry-leading growth. While we delivered solid performance in the quarter and we continued to gain market share relative to our competition, we did not see as strong an acceleration in growth as we typically see coming out of Q1 and into April. This has led us to take a conservative approach and to reset our full year 2012 revenue guidance to at least $7.34 billion. When we provided our prior 2012 outlook in February, we anticipated a softer and volatile European business but expected North America to be on a normal revenue trajectory. However, when we looked at revenue for the month of April, the acceleration we usually see in our North American business coming out of Q1 is slower than what we anticipated. This trend was particularly evident in the banking portion of our financial services segment and the pharmaceuticals portion of our healthcare segment.…

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

Thank you, Francisco. Although we had to reduce our full year growth expectations, due primarily to the performance of our core Horizon 1 businesses, it's very important to keep in perspective that these businesses are still extraordinarily healthy, as demonstrated by our continued industry-leading growth. We believe that the market for our Horizon 1 and 2 businesses is under-penetrated, which provides a strong -- which provides strong opportunities for continued growth, and that our unique financial model, global delivery network and intimate client relationships positions us to capture an outsized share of that market. The longer-term demand environment remains strong. We are helping clients navigate secular shifts in their industries while at the same time driving more efficient and effective operations. For Horizon 1 services, we continue to see broad opportunities to expand our global delivery model. Our clients continue to turn to us to help drive greater levels of productivity through best-in-class methodologies. At the same time, the dual mandate of driving both operational efficiencies and innovation has resulted in a notable increase in large transformational deals across our business. Clients are reinvesting savings generated from these cost-optimizing programs into initiatives that will enable them to rethink their business model, rewire operations or reexamine which activities are core to their competitive edge versus which would have been -- which would be better handled by a partner like Cognizant with deeper, more scalable expertise. From a demand standpoint, this is creating newer opportunities for partnership with our clients across multiple service lines. Within Horizon 2, our addressable market is expanding, particularly within the BPO area. Our core BPO offerings continue to show solid growth, supported by expansion of work with existing clients and recent wins with new clients. The vertical focus of our BPO practice based on deep knowledge of…

Karen McLoughlin

Analyst

Thank you, Gordon, and good morning, everyone. As detailed in our press release, our first quarter revenue grew 2.9% sequentially and 24.8% over last year to over $1.71 billion versus our guidance of at least $1.7 billion. We were pleased with the growth across our business segments and geographies. Although the first quarter played out as we anticipated and we have seen acceleration in demand as we entered Q2, the acceleration is slower than we would expect at this time of year. Given this, we have taken a conservative stance towards our assumption for reacceleration of growth for the remainder of the year, and we are accordingly revising our full year 2012 guidance. For ease of reference, we have included a fact sheet with the earnings release to provide key data on revenue by industry and revenue by geography, which has already been discussed by Gordon. Now let me discuss some of our other results, and I'll begin with revenue and customers. Application development represented 51.4% of revenue and application management, 48.6% for the quarter. Development grew 27.9% year-over-year and 3% sequentially. Management grew 21.7% year-over-year and 2.7% sequentially. We saw fairly balanced growth between development and management as clients expanded outsourcing projects to address their 2012 savings objectives. 31.3% of our revenue came from fixed-price contracts during the first quarter. As expected, on a sequential basis, our pricing during the first quarter was stable. We closed the quarter with 805 active customers, and the number of accounts which we consider to be strategic increased by 5. This brings our total number of strategic clients to 196. Turning to costs. On a GAAP basis, cost of revenues exclusive of depreciation and amortization was approximately $984.5 million and included $4.6 million of stock-based compensation expense. The increase in cost of revenues…

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst

Thanks, Karen. I'd like to end our prepared comments by putting our Q1 results and our projected 2012 results into context. I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that our performance in terms of first quarter sequential growth and our outlook for Q2 and for the rest of the year is at the very top of our peer group. Relative performance compared to our peer group is the best indicator of our competitiveness. We continue to increase our market share, and we are still benefiting from the investment that we've made over the years to gain advantage in the marketplace. As we look forward, our objectives for the remainder of 2012 and beyond are clear. We're focused on running our company in a prudent manner today while at the same time making the necessary investments to ensure that we remain competitive in the long run and continue to post industry-leading revenue growth Our priorities going forward are as follows: First, our teams are laser-focused on working with our customers in order to ensure that we maintain our track record of winning a disproportionate share of opportunities in our robust pipeline; second, we'll maintain our focus on operational excellence to maintain our target operating margins within the 19% to 20% range on a non-GAAP basis. We're confident that we can deliver this while still protecting our core areas of investments. And finally, we continue to invest in our Horizon 3 services to ensure that we remain the best partner to help clients to deliver on the dual mandates of both cost-saving and revenue-generating solutions that address the specific needs of their businesses. We're pleased with the progress that we're making in our Horizon 3 areas. Though these services don’t meaningfully contribute to revenue today, they…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Tien-Tsin T. Huang - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: I guess my one question, maybe if you can just give us an idea on North America and the expectations for growth in the second quarter, maybe the same thing for Financial Services, just to give us an idea of what the second quarter might look like and then just the balance of the year. And then maybe just as a follow-up, if we can get an idea -- I know you give it usually in the Q, but just your growth in your top 5 and your top 10 clients?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

Sure, Tien-Tsin. Let me comment on North America, then Karen can talk about the top 5 and 10. In North America, we would expect in Q2 where we guided to about 4.6% overall growth. North America, we would expect to drive that growth, so it will probably grow a little bit faster than company average. And we're assuming Europe would grow a little bit slower than company average in the second quarter. And that's -- that obviously bakes in all our assumptions about the slower-than-expected acceleration in Financial Services. Karen, do you want to talk about the top 5, top 10?

Karen McLoughlin

Analyst

Sure. Top 5 for the quarter was 14% of revenue and top 10 was 25% of revenue. Tien-Tsin T. Huang - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Okay, maybe I can just sneak in one more, just your strategy for buying back stock. I'm curious, obviously stocks indicating weaker. I'm curious if it's going to be 10b5-driven, opportunistic? What's the strategy?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

We have in place a 10b5 program from before increasing the authorization today. How we'll use the additional authorization, I think it will be somewhat opportunistic, certainly depending on where exactly this stock price settles down. We're in no huge rush to do it, but certainly depending on valuation, we would look at doing it on an accelerated basis.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Edward Caso with Wells Fargo Securities.

Edward S. Caso - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Can you talk a little bit about the wage increases that you may be giving this year. Karen mentioned sort of controlling expenses and just curious how that part of the equation worked into it?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Sure, Ed. Let me be very clear on this. We're still growing at a great pace. Yes, we're certainly disappointed. We had to take our growth from 23% down to 20%, but that's still tremendous growth. That change in full year expectations has no impact whatsoever on our plans for salary increments. We communicated earlier this year that our salary increments for our junior middle population go into effect this month and for more senior people, at the end of the quarter. Those plans are unchanged. The magnitude of the salary increases, I think, are going to be very consistent with what we're seeing at other top players in the industry. We're expecting approximately 8% offshore, that excludes promotions and low single-digits on-site. So no change in our plans.

Edward S. Caso - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Can you talk a little bit about the visa challenges, and how that's causing you to change or not change your sort of workforce deployment?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Sure. We've been evolving our workforce deployment for a number of years now. As we have scale, as we have credibility in the U.S. market, we're certainly doing more U.S. hiring, both of lateral hires and the last 2 years, college hires. We now recruit at 15 to 20 campuses, we hired several hundred U.S. college students this year. The challenge is there are not enough U.S. IT workers. It's very simple math. We're not graduating enough. So we can certainly continue to supplement what we can find locally with talent from around the world. We continue to have access to visas. That access to visas has not caused us any revenue leakage. Clearly, there's a very significant cost to it that's baked into our plans. We certainly monitor the situation carefully, but it has not impacted the business.

Nitin Mohta - Macquarie Research

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Last question, given the lower -- the still low attrition here and then its lower forecast, are you going to be pulling back your growth, your hiring expectations for this year?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities.

Sure, Ed. Absolutely. Remember, the way the business model works and is supposed to work, is that we can flex up and down our lateral just-in-time hiring. Obviously, now that we're expected to grow at a slower pace this year, we'll still add a lot of people. But we will add not -- fewer people than what we would have otherwise, so we'll continue to do lateral hiring, but the pace of lateral hiring, obviously, will not be as fast as if we were growing at 23%. We're obviously going to honor all of our offers from colleges for the people who are joining this year. So there's no change in plans for that, but certainly the pace of hiring will not be as fast and it will be adjusted for the revised guidance. It's exactly the way the model should work as the demand environment changes.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Rod Bourgeois with Bernstein. Rod Bourgeois - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division: All right, guys, so the lack of acceleration in the U.S. Can you elaborate more, almost mathematically whether this reflects a weaker pipeline, decision slowness or is there a situation where there's cutbacks at existing large clients that's offsetting the benefit of new deals that are currently ramping? If you could give us a little more specificity on what's mathematically driving the lack of acceleration.

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst

I think, let me -- this is Frank. Let me take a crack at it, and then I'll ask Gordon to jump in as well. I think what we're seeing in North America is at the first level that, as we said coming into the year, that IT budgets remain flat, perhaps at the slightly upward bias year-over-year. The -- and when we look at the overall level of deal activity across the business, we continue to be -- to see a number of deals in the marketplace. Clients are actively out there. What we have seen, though, is that some deals are, particularly in financial services and in life sciences, are shifting out, particularly on the discretionary side. We saw a slow start to the year. We talked to you about that in the first quarter. What we would normally expect to see at this time of the year, as we've said to you in past years, is that coming into the second quarter, we would see a -- quite a significant acceleration in growth as budgets get finalized and you start to see the full quarter impact of approved budgets. That's what we -- we've seen that acceleration this year, but not to the extent that we would have expected when we gave you our prior guidance. And that's really what -- that phenomenon is really what's caused us to temper our full year expectations.

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

I think that's accurate. And as you said, particularly pronounced in life sciences and the large banks. And why the large banks and not the midsized banks? The midsized banks, there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit. So one of the ways that they can control their cost is to transition existing activities to global delivery. Obviously, the larger banks have already done most of that, so therefore they look at are the activities necessary or are there ways to reduce the total cost of ownership? So it's -- given the pressure in the industry, we understand what's happening. Clients are being very transparent with us about their need to do this. In some cases, their need to understand budgets; in some cases, the need to move things around. It's a challenging time out there for some of our clients. But once again, the good news is our clients are still growing with us. It's just issue of the pace of growth is not as robust as we would like. Rod Bourgeois - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC., Research Division: And Gordon, can you just elaborate, kind of as a follow-up, is the -- has the pipeline actually contracted over the last 3 months? Or are these discretionary projects remaining in the pipeline, they're just further down the road in terms of when they'll get funded?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

Oh, I think it's the latter. The discretionary projects, particularly ones that were originally in scope for this year, are obviously ones that are priorities for clients. So when they don't have the dollars, you, generally, you're not seeing them say, "Okay, we'll never do it." They're saying, "Yes, it's not going to make this year's cut." Will there also be examples of projects that are shuttered? Yes, of course, but that's the small piece of it. The bigger piece is clients are saying, "I have to make tough decisions on what I can afford to do this year."

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller with Barclays Capital.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays Capital.

One question on Europe and a quick follow-up to Rod's question in the North America. But on Europe, it looked like to us in the first quarter, the trends were a little bit are milding [ph] better than at least we would have expected, especially following last quarter's results. A, is that kind of trend with confidence in your view sustainable through the rest of the year out of the European sequential growth rates, or was that also seasonal? Can you give us a little more color on what drove the pick-up there sequentially? And then just back to North America, and in the bank side, specific to drivers, what are the drivers specifically that are going to leave that to come back down the road? I mean, obviously, right now capital markets, banks are a little weaker. Can you give us some specific examples?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Barclays Capital.

Sure, let me take Europe, and then Frank will talk about Financial Services. In Europe, I would not, not expect the trend of strong performance that we saw in Q1 to continue. Our assumption is that, as I've mentioned earlier, in Q2, we would expect North America to grow faster than Europe. The strength in Europe in Q1 was somewhat isolated. It was 1 or 2 accounts that primarily drove that growth. Outside of that, Europe really -- outside those 1 or 2 accounts, Europe really played out the way we were originally anticipating for the quarter.

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst · Barclays Capital.

And when we look at -- let me just sum it on the question about banking. When we look at our banking clients, I think that in North America with the banking clients, the incredible volatility that many of our clients are seeing right now is causing them to pause, particularly as Gordon said, the bigger clients who have significantly already leveraged the global delivery model, that's causing them to pause and to sneak out a new floor. What I expect is that once that industry stabilizes and then starts to -- and we start to see spend reemerge, because many of the banks do realize that they need to continue to innovate for growth and they do need to -- and there's also some drive based on the regulatory changes that are happening in the industry. So my expectation is that, that growth will reaccelerate, but it will probably take 1 quarter or 2 for that to emerge. And certainly, our current planning assumption is that banking, while we expect to see growth, will not be at the company average for the remainder of this year.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Julio Quinteros with Goldman Sachs.

Julio C. Quinteros - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division

Analyst · Goldman Sachs.

So Gordon, I think in the past, and Francisco, we've talked about this idea that as growth eventually decelerates for the model over some period of time that you guys would actually allow the margins to rise essentially to offset some of that potential impact. How far along are we in that thought process? Is this really just a temporary situation, or are you beginning to think about the potential for letting the margins expand at this rate with the growth beginning to decelerate?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Goldman Sachs.

Sure, Julio. Let me be absolutely clear about that. I don’t think we are anywhere near that issue. There is, in our belief, a lot of growth left in this business. Once again, put it in perspective, yes, we came down from 23% to 20%. Compared to any other industry, that's -- that would be exponential growth. Even in our industry, it's dramatically above others. So we don't view the fact we took growth down by 3 points this year, especially given everything that's happened in the economy, as a signal or inflection point that growth, long-term growth for the industry is over. We still think there's a lot of growth left for this industry.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Hickey with Atlantic Equities.

Christopher Hickey - Atlantic Equities LLP

Analyst · Atlantic Equities.

Could you provide us a little bit more color on dynamics in the pharma business, please? Specifically, color around the client behavior. It seems some of the challenges the pharma companies are facing are fairly structural. So just trying to understand why the discretionary plans changed in a 3-month period?

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst · Atlantic Equities.

I think it's a -- this is somewhat of a normal pattern that we see. As we've said in our prepared comments with pharma, although this year, that trend was more pronounced than we've seen in prior years. We see pharma companies, as a general trend, every year, once they go through their budget process, in the first quarter, they will then sort of assess what their view of is of demand for that year, and based on that, moderate or regulate their discretionary spending for that year. And so, while you're right that many of the issues that pharma are facing are longer-term structural issues, there is the quarter-to-quarter volatility that we always see in the Q1, Q2 timeframe based on what their outlook is for that particular year. This year, we saw that, as we said during the prepared comments, pharma as a group declined 4% in the first quarter. That's unusual. We normally, in past years, have seen that sector be roughly flat, maybe slightly up. It's unusual for us to see a decline, even in the first quarter. So the severity of that was a little more than we have seen in the past. And as a result of that, we're expecting that this year will be a weak year for discretionary spending in pharma and that for the full year, pharma will lag the overall company in terms of growth.

Christopher Hickey - Atlantic Equities LLP

Analyst · Atlantic Equities.

If I could just sneak in a quick follow-up. Given what happened there and also the change in the banking dynamics in Q1 and also if we go back a year ago, the European situation, are you comfortable with your internal forecast, then, and that this is genuinely just changing dynamics of the end clients rather than anything else?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Atlantic Equities.

The answer is, yes we are. The March, April timeframe each year is a very critical period for us, because that's when we see what is the pace of acceleration -- and which really sets the tone for the rest of the year. And quite honestly, it's tough to get that exact. When we look at the differences, it was primarily, as we said, financial services, life sciences. We understand why those things happen. So I don't think this is a breakdown in processes or a breakdown in our ability to forecast. But it's a very dynamic environment out there. And of the entire year, this March, April time point and the information we learn in March, April sets the tone for the year. So it's -- that's when we get, really get to understand what clients are going to do and how fast they're going to do it.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar with Citi.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Analyst · Citi.

Guys, can you comment on the third quarter? Do you expect third quarter to be an acceleration from 2Q, or is it pretty much going to be similar to 2Q in terms of how spending plays out? If I use the low end of your 2Q guidance, it implies that Q2 year-over-year growth might actually be lower. And I just want to find a bit, is that caution or is that something you're seeing in the business LAMPs continuing that way?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Citi.

We think that's the appropriate assumption at this point. So if you back-calculate Q3 and Q4, we said, we're essentially saying that we expect sequential growth to be steady for Q3 and Q4 compared to Q2. We think that's appropriate right now based on the pace of acceleration that we're seeing. Once again, would we like it higher? Of course. But we're still very proud of the fact that we're expecting to grow at least 4.6% in Q2. And we're quite comfortable that, that pace of growth would continue for the remainder of the year.

Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Analyst · Citi.

And can you provide a breakdown of pharma and payor within healthcare and maybe a similar breakdown between banks, insurance and other financial services within BFS side?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Citi.

Just give us a second. If you look at banks versus insurance to start with, I'm rounding a little bit here. But banks is about 2/3 of our BFSI segment, and insurance is about 1/3. And if you look at healthcare versus life sciences, there it's a little bit more weighted towards healthcare.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of James Friedman with Susquehanna.

James E. Friedman - Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division

Analyst · Susquehanna.

I wanted to get your perspective about the application maintenance versus development. In terms of the Q2 guidance and the remainder of the year, what are your assumptions with regard to which of those drive the growth? And what the percentage contributions may be?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Susquehanna.

If -- my expectation is that for the year, we would see maintenance revenue grow faster than development revenue based on the revised guidance. The exact numbers are, obviously, always difficult to predict. But obviously, we think it will be a bit of a weaker development environment this year. So probably faster growth and maintenance.

James E. Friedman - Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Then maybe as a follow-up, with regard to the Horizons 1, 2 and 3, could you map similar assumptions? It sounds like Horizon 1 may be more discretionary versus 2 and 3. Can you flesh out some perspective as to the assumptions about those 3 buckets?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Think about that a little bit differently. Don’t think about it so much as maintenance versus development. Think about it as where they are in their life cycle. So Horizon 3 is all the brand-new stuff where we're planting the seeds for the future. So on a percentage basis, it will grow very fast. But as a impact on revenue, it will be minimal, because it's growing off of a negligible base. Horizon 2, which are the businesses that have recently hit critical mass, certainly, I would expect those to grow faster than the business overall. If you look at Horizon 2, obviously, both ITIS and BPO, we put it into the maintenance category. Consulting would be the discretionary category. And then in the Horizon 1, which is the vast majority of our revenue, that's the one where I think we would expect greater strength in maintenance than development.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Foresi with Janney Montgomery Scott.

Joseph D. Foresi - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

My question here is, first, what do you think in your opinion is the delta in the back half of the year spending? Is that discretionary spending? And if it is, what's your confidence in that delta and why?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

Are you saying delta for over-performance of guidance or to get to guidance?

Joseph D. Foresi - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

Either one, Gordon, whichever one you want to take first. Both would be great.

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

Sure. So to get to guidance, we're assuming there's no acceleration in growth rates compared to Q2. So, yeah, the math kind of works out to same sequential growth in Q3 and Q4 as we're projecting in Q2. So there's no hockey stick whatsoever built into our guidance. If there were to be over-performance for the year, that, I think, would come more from the discretionary work, because, obviously, we're being quite conservative on our assumptions for discretionary work based on the trends that we're seeing in March and April.

Joseph D. Foresi - Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

Okay. And then is there anything outside of sort of what that particular piece is? I mean, discretionary side, I mean, you've lowered it once here. How do we have confidence that the back half of the year and visibility increase on the back half of the year, are you taking less of a cut at discretionary spending? I'm just trying to get a full feel for how you would characterize the lowering of guidance and what gives you confidence that this is the only time you're going to have to do it?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott.

Sure. As I said earlier, March and April are the critical period for us, because that's when people start spending their current year budget. So we now have that under our belts, so we understand what the trajectory is. And that -- so that gives us much a better ability to forecast what people are planning, because now they're actually spending those dollars, and we're seeing it at the pace that they're ramping it up. Obviously, we've -- obviously, we're being conservative on discretionary spend, which I think is appropriate in this environment. And the fact that there is no hockey stick in the back half of the year I think is very important. So we're not assuming that there's this great rebound in discretionary spend in the second half of the year. We're assuming it will kind of continue at the pace of growth that we're seeing in Q2.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Bryan Keane with Deutsche Bank.

Bryan Keane - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

In banking, do you think Cognizant is reaching a full penetration level inside these larger banking clients? I guess in other words, there isn't a lot of -- maybe there isn't a lot wallet share gains left in those large banking clients?

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

I think that in the traditional services application, development, application maintenance, that might be true in some of the very largest banks. But remember that we've got a whole range of new services, IT Infrastructure Services, Business Process Outsourcing, consulting and so on and so forth, not to mention the Horizon 3 services that we're now working on, where I think there's still plenty of growth available. What I think is also the case, though, is that as penetration rates increase in some of these larger banks, it does make us, perhaps, more sensitive to their ups and downs in their business environment because in past cycles, what we've seen is that as our clients, whether in banking or in any other industry, as they come under cost pressure, that serves somewhat as a catalyst to move more work to a global delivery model. That tends to -- that trend tends to be somewhat muted as penetration rates in these banks increase. So I think there's a little bit of an offset there. But in general, I don’t think that even in the largest banks, I would say, that penetration rates across our full range of services are -- we're fully penetrated. I think there's still growth there.

Bryan Keane - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Okay, just one quick follow-up. I think, Gordon, you said Q3 and Q4 look probably pretty similar. But isn't Q4 usually seasonally weak? So just wanted to get your thoughts there.

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

Q4 can go either way. When it's seasonally weak is in years that are very robust. Obviously, we're not going to see clients spend at their full budget capacity early in the year. So I don't think we're going to have a situation where clients run out of budget dollars during the year. So it's -- where you see that is where people run out of dollars. And given the pace, there's -- typically, clients are under-spending their budgets early in the year. So, I'm not particularly concerned about that.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Moshe Katri with Cowen.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen.

Your thoughts about the recruiting for the remainder of the year, just given the fact that the additions during the quarter were kind of light?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Cowen.

Sure. Let me -- that sort of sets up to hit on just people in general. Our people statistics are unbelievably good this quarter. We had 10%, 10.6% attrition. And that's an all-in number. Just by comparison, that number was 15% last year. And even last year was a pretty good year. So we are doing terrifically in terms of both attracting people and retaining people. Our slots on colleges are the best they've ever been. Our yield ratios are great. Our -- as I think we may have mentioned on our last call, our most recent employee satisfaction survey, highest scores in our history. The headcount additions in Q1 are light. That was intentional. And part of the reason why is we onboarded our -- all of our college students last year on schedule, so we didn't defer any of it. So a lot of people joined us sort of Q3 of last year, so we have a lot of people coming out of the training program and becoming available for billing, so -- during late Q1, Q2. And that's why we didn't have to, obviously, do a whole lot of lateral hiring. And you never do a lot of college hiring in Q1. So the light attrition -- additions in Q1 make sense. In Q2, we're now starting to onboard the current year class. So you'll certainly see a pickup in the number of additions of college students in Q2 compared to Q1.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen.

And then just a quick comment, a quick follow-up. Did you have any project cancellations during the quarter? Anything that's kind of notable?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst · Cowen.

Nothing, no trends. We always have normal course-of-business cancellations. We had 1 larger project that's ramping down due to some M&A work in one of our industries. That would be the only one that's material, and that actually had nothing to do with the economy. That was due to M&A.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Greene with Oppenheimer. Glenn Greene - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Maybe just a little bit more color on the North America financial services, specifically, the large banks. Was it more specific to capital markets? Or was the weakness broader-based across both the consumer and commercial banks as well as capital markets?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

No, it was broad-based at the large banks, more pronounced in capital markets, yes, but not -- certainly not isolated to capital markets. Some of the broad banks just have set overall cost-containment goals at the corporate level. Glenn Greene - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Okay. Then just a quick follow-up, sort of the timing on when you saw the weakness. We obviously heard from a lot of your peers throughout the quarter. And it seems like a clear trend that there was some apparent weakness, even at the beginning of March, let's say? Did you kind of see this sort of slower ramp of demand throughout the quarter? Or did it become very apparent as you kind of went into the beginning of the second quarter?

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

No, remember, it's compared to expectations. So January is always soft. That's exactly what we would expect. February picked up a bit. The key is what's happening in the back half of March and April, because that's normally when you see the significant acceleration. And we did not see as much acceleration in -- coming out of March and into April. Glenn Greene - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division: Okay. And then just quickly, the expectations for pricing for '12?

Karen McLoughlin

Analyst

We would continue to expect pricing to be stable as maybe a slight upward bias but essentially stable overall. Because if you remember, most of our rate increases kicked in, in the early part of last year in 2011.

Gordon J. Coburn

Analyst

The pricing was flat in the first quarter sequentially, so it played out just as we anticipated.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of George Price with BB&T Capital Markets. George A. Price - BB&T Capital Markets, Research Division: Many of my questions have been answered. But I did want to ask you about whether the continued volatility and uncertainty in BFSI -- it doesn't seem like that's really going to end anytime soon. If that drives any increased urgency in your part to expand and diversify your vertical footprint maybe more quickly away from that industry.

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst

It's Frank. Clearly, we're seeing volatility in some of our industry segments, financial services, as we said, also parts of the healthcare segment, we saw volatility. Clearly, our long-term growth is -- growth objective is to continue to diversify the business into new geographies, into new industries. It's part of our Horizon 3 effort to look at new markets, like, as I mentioned, the government and -- new industries like the government and new markets like Latin America. That's an ongoing process. I wouldn't expect to see that shift happen rapidly, given the concentration that we have in Financial Services. So while it's a long-term strategic objective, I wouldn't expect to see significant changes there over the short run. George A. Price - BB&T Capital Markets, Research Division: Okay, and then just one more. We've been hearing about a trend of an increased desire by clients to increase the mix of higher-end on-site resources. Part of this, I think, is probably a follow-on from what's going on with visas. But I think there's more to it than that. How are you addressing that? And, I guess, what are the -- more importantly, probably, what are the implications for your global delivery mix going forward?

Francisco D'Souza

Analyst

No, I think that to the extent that we're seeing that trend, it's -- I would say that it's confined to some of the newer, what I would think of as higher-value services, what we have been characterizing as our Horizon 3 services and some portion of what we would characterize as Horizon 2 services. So for example, our management consulting business and some of our new practices in areas like mobility and social will require a much stronger on-site presence. But this has been, I think, a key strength of Cognizant over many, many years. We think that we've invested over many years in building extraordinarily strong front-end teams. And in fact, I don't see that, that trend presents any sort of challenge for us. I'm very comfortable with our front-end teams. And in fact, I think it's a point of differentiation for the company. So I don't expect it to change our mix. I think that it's an area of strength of Cognizant's. It's one of the reasons that I'm very optimistic about our growth prospects going forward. And with that, let me wrap up this call by thanking all of you for joining and saying that I'd like to reaffirm that we're very confident in our ability to deliver our revised 2012 revenue growth guidance and maintain our position as the growth leader in our industry. Our businesses remains incredibly healthy, and we continue to invest in our long-term future. So thanks, everyone, for joining us, and we'll see you on the next call.

Operator

Operator

This concludes Cognizant Technology Solutions' First Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. You may now disconnect.