John Cotterell
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead
Thank you, Laurence. I'd like to thank you all for joining us today and I hope you're all well. We're pleased to be here to provide an update on our business and financial performance for the three months ended June 30, 2022 and for the full 2022 fiscal year. We continue to be in a strong demand environment, despite continued global macroeconomic uncertainty and volatility. Given the current environment, I'd like to highlight that we remain focused on leading companies with strong balance sheets helping them to be more agile and react faster to market changes. We see them continuing to invest in driving change, while our exposure to startups and the crypto industry continues to be low. For the quarter, and the full fiscal year ended June 30, 2022, I'm pleased to report Endava's business remains strong across all our verticals and locations. Before going into the details of our latest results, I'd like to start by putting our growth in perspective. It has been just over four years since we became a public company, with our listing on the New York Stock Exchange. And it is with great pride that I look back at our accomplishments since then. Since we listed in July 2018, we have tripled revenues from £217.6 million for the fiscal year 2018 to £654.8 million for the fiscal year 2022. At the same time, we have significantly progressed our object of diversification, moving from a concentration of 79% in the UK and Europe in fiscal year 2018 to 62% for fiscal year 2022 and seeing North America grow from 21% of revenue to 35%, and rest of the world commence now at 3%. We've also diversified our delivery footprint, which moved from 82% of our people in Central Europe to 76%, most of which is in NATO countries. With LATAM now 17%, compared to 14% in fiscal year 2018, supporting our near-shore delivery for our growing North American business. Our total headcount has grown by 146% from 4,819 in June 2018 to 11,853 in June 2022. This strong headcount growth came with a solid increase in revenue per operational person from £55,000 in fiscal year 2018 to £69,000 in fiscal year 2022, a very strong trend and a real demonstration of the growth in value delivered to our customers by Endava. It is worth reflecting that at the time of IPO, we set a medium-term adjusted PBT margin target of 17% from a fiscal year 2018 reported figure of 15.4%. Since IPO, we have annually achieved an adjusted PBT margin in excess of 17% and we ended fiscal year 2022 with a margin of 21.1%. As we look to the next four years, we aim to continue this level of growth with revenue tripling again. We will continue to diversify our client footprint, both in the geographies we operate in and in the industry mix across the business. Driving the shift is the acceleration in our target industry is driven by new and emerging technologies. As we scan the horizon for technologies that we believe will have a significant impact on our business, we are building a picture of how technologies such as autonomous vehicles, cobots, and frictionless payments may have a broad impact on multiple verticals. We believe 5G technologies, as well as new devices providing broader access to the [Metaverse] [ph] will revolutionize the experiences individuals will have, bringing people together in ways that will enhance the requirement for seamless commerce experiences. Further forward, we see an increasing impact on our verticals with the broader adoption of language prediction model-based AI integrated alongside traditional technology, leading to innovation in human centric tasks that require deep understanding of language. We will also continue to further diversify our delivery footprint to see a higher proportion of work delivered from LATAM and Asia Pacific. Together, these shifts will enable a more balanced, scaled, and impactful operation, making us even more attractive to the large enterprise customers that we target. Moving now to this current quarter and annual results. Endava reported revenue of £180.4 million for Q4 of our fiscal year 2022, representing a 35% year-on-year increase from £133.6 million in the same period in the prior year. We ended the quarter with an adjusted profit before tax for the period of £36.2 million, representing a 23.5% year-on-year increase from the £29.3 million in the same period in the prior year. Our strong revenue growth continues to be driven by both the expansion of work for our existing clients and the acquisitions of new ones during the quarter. We continue to scale existing projects and accounts to drive the growth of larger clients and increase the spend by these clients. We ended the quarter with 732 active clients, up from 615 at the end of the same period in the prior year, a 19% year-on-year increase. Importantly, we continued growing the number of larger clients with a total of 134 clients paying us in excess of £1 million per year, compared to [£85 million] [ph] in the same period last year, representing an impressive 57.6% year-on-year increase. Additionally, the average spend of our Top 10 clients continues to grow strongly and was up 21% year-on-year in the three months ended June 30, 2022. Moving on to our results for the full fiscal year 2022, we reported revenue of £654.8 million, representing a 46.7% year-on-year increase. In the last fiscal year, we grew nicely in all our regions and verticals. Our strong revenue growth continues to translate into strong profitability and we ended the year with an adjusted PBT margin of £138.3 million, compared to £92.1 million in the fiscal year 2021. Today, I'd like to highlight some of the work we're doing for our clients in the financial sector. In the banking sector, there is a strong move towards the provision of extensible API based platforms rather than large single purpose monolithic applications. API-based platforms increase organizational agility and allow banks to offer an evolving range of services through a single integrated platform and better compete with new fintech entrants to their markets. An example is the move by a number of banks to offer a range of integrated digital first banking services. Our proven skills in developing flexible API-based solutions have allowed us to work with a range of organizations on their journeys to create application platforms for their businesses. For instance, we are working with a top U.S. bank on building a full suite of software design, engineering, testing, and integration services for a new cloud-based digital banking product that will eventually offer a new generation of lending and deposit products. We're also working with Primis Bank based in Virginia and servicing individuals and SMEs. Primis embarked on a greenfield implementation of a digital core platform, and this new cloud-based tech stack will allow for broader product offerings, greatly enhance speed to market and expanded geographic boundaries. We are helping them with this transformation effort by providing solution architecture, system configuration, engineering, and overarching domain expertise. First Bank, headquartered in Colorado and serving the Southwest region of the U.S. is undergoing payments modernization and is leveraging Endava's domain expertise to guide their product strategy and technical approach to the work. In addition, First Bank is leveraging our architectural and engineering expertise to execute on implementation. In addition to working directly with these financial institutions, we are also partnering with companies such as Backbase and Snowflake in order to facilitate the modernization of these banking platforms. We help the asset management industry address the challenges of fee compression, flattening returns, regulatory pressure, and evolving distribution models by enabling their platforms to be future proof through designing and building real time data platforms, self-service reporting solutions, and advanced trading analytics, which together facilitate enhanced predictive decisioning for the front office and enable rapid automated reporting to clients and regulators alike. We're working with Royal London Asset Management to establish their central data platform, to provide a cloud-based central data spine, that acts as a central source for all the firm's data needs to serve the business for years to come as regulation and products evolve. With Janus Henderson, we are consolidating reporting onto a modern cloud-based platform, which delivers self-service efficiencies and data visualization to gain additional insights across the business operations. Market infrastructure providers are having to modernize their platforms, due to the ever-increasing complexity and real-time demands. Some recent high-profile outages are forcing the industry to modernize technology stacks. This is forcing large legacy replacement, as well as innovation brought upon by crypto tokenization of assets and the more forward-thinking incumbents driving ahead with blockchain tokenization, and expanded offerings based on digital technologies. We, have been designing, building, and evolving an award-winning cloud-based derivatives trading platform for TP ICAP, a world-leading provider of market infrastructure and information. Branded Fusion, the platform encompasses everything from market connectivity to tailor-made matching engines and algorithms to high performance UI for a consistent responsive user experience for brokers and clients alike. We also have a rich heritage of working with hedge funds, helping with their innovation in gaining competitive insights through the front office decisioning process. We work with [comp firms] [ph] on data warehouses supporting third-party structured and unstructured data, trading strategies, and modeling sitting at the heart of their business. In the U.S., we're working with a leading alternative investment firm helping define and drive their data strategy alongside the modernization of their core architecture. Our experience and credentials in the financial industry continue to gather momentum and we believe we offer our clients the ability to differentiate their offerings, despite the rigid frameworks and controls that they need to operate within. Over the last five years, 88.6% of our revenue on average was generated from clients in the previous year. We take client satisfaction extremely seriously, and we have in place a customer satisfaction program known as CSAT that reaches out to our clients and allows for systematic feedback. We have a dedicated customer experience team who analyze and manage the feedback to constantly help create the best service experience for our teams and clients. Our latest CSAT survey reported a 95% likelihood of repurchase. We continue our geographical expansion and diversification. While competition for talent remains intense, we remain very successful in recruiting the people we need and our attrition rate remains low. We are continuing to expand our team in LATAM with strong recruiting in Mexico, and we recently opened a new office in Cali, Columbia. We are also moving along with our global expansion and expanded our footprint in Australia with a new office in Brisbane. We have an ongoing commitment to make a positive impact in support of our people, customers, and the communities where we operate, and we are delighted to share an important milestone in our We Care Sustainability Journal. We have been awarded a bronze medal by EcoVadis in recognition of a very good ESG performance, placing us in the top 50% of companies in our industry. In summary, as demonstrated by our financial results, demand for our services remains strong. We are successfully navigating a challenging global macroeconomic environment and remain excited about the opportunities in front of us and confident in our ability to execute on our objectives. I'll now pass the call on to Mark who will walk you through our financial results for the quarter and provide guidance for the coming quarter and the new fiscal year.