Arkadiy Dobkin
Analyst · Cowen
Thank you, Anthony, and welcome, everyone. I'm happy to report that EPAM's second quarter performance was strong and at the top end of the guidance for the quarter. Revenue was $133.2 million, representing an increase of 28.3% year-over-year and 7.2% sequentially. Non-GAAP operating margin was 16.3% or 110 basis point sequential improvement and seasonal target range. Market demand for our services continues to be strong. We saw growth across all geographies and segments. Services and financial vertical were up 54% on continued strength in investment banking, mostly in Europe. IT and technology increased by 36% on positive momentum in several key accounts and continued demand for innovation and expertise in emerging technologies. We have seen important growth in our travel and consumer vertical, especially in North America. This was driven by both organic efforts and synergies related to the acquisition we made in 2012. This was our second fastest-growing vertical in North America with 52% growth. It also brought one of our new top 10 clients to the company. North America was up 35% year-over-year, benefiting from growth in U.S. IT and technology clients as well as from recent acquisition synergies. Europe continued to show strength with 33% growth. Much of this was coming from the financial services sector. CIS was down 1%, and this requires a short explanation. You might remember from our call at the same time last year that we had one operating recognition in the second quarter of 2012 related to the project in Ukraine sponsored by World Bank. Excluding this one-off nonrecurring revenue, CIS would have been 35% on a year-over-year basis. Today, CIS represents still 12% of total revenue. Our billable headcount increased by 15% to 8,900 engineers. While we have slightly increased utilization versus last quarter, we continue to carefully manage the large enough branch with now global delivery optimization to make sure they are fully capable to engage experienced and trusted professionals into new production activities. This also allows us to have enough time in specific situations to prepare our delivery personnel for new, sometimes challenging, opportunities require advanced technical skills and strong industry knowledge. In addition to closing one of the branches, we are working on improving our talent acquisition and talent management organizations across all locations, which is one of our corporate priorities. While mentioning [indiscernible], I would like to share that as we stated in our previous calls, we continue to focus on our client operations, sales and marketing capabilities. Here in Q2, we brought to the company new senior talent in that area, both in North America and Europe. We also just hired new global head of markets. And in addition to the inclusion of the proximity to a number of strategic clients, we expanded EPAM's presence in several new locations across North America and Western Europe. Finally, additional investments were addressed in our ultimate goal of continuously improving software engineering skills and developing other key emerging competencies using EPAM. During the second quarter, we have brought on board a new CEO [ph] to lead our investments in developing continuous specific engineering processes and, two, specialized application frameworks in a number of other software assets critical to differentiate ourselves from some solutions both in the value and in quality within our competitive market. Also, we deployed the EPAM [indiscernible] quality which makes our delivery environment even more sophisticated and agile, with faster deployment and real-time cloud was taken. Most importantly, it's given every one of our engineers the ability to understand how to work in cloud environment and translate this knowledge to the current and future client initiatives with ability to improve time-to-market cycles. We also brought strong, experienced leadership to our Big Data Competency Center while drafting several senior technologists to our U.S. company. We have deployed over 100 people and upgraded almost the entire internal system portfolio. This is also significant for our multimillion investments this year, including critical licenses and internal label. While we already have one of the best in the market internal applications and tools, which allow us to ensure control and reliability across all project life cycle stages, we are now focused on developing a highly social and collaborative environment, robust analytics and reporting and very efficient and tightly integrated into our system and scale custom relationship management optionality. Our recent acquisitions continue to perform in line with our expectations. Our Canadian business is strong with retail and telecom making significant progress. Our newly created digital strategy and experienced design solution process based on the Empathy Lab acquisition at the end of last year is successful by multiple measures. Major account acquisitions and demand from existing EPAM accounts are strong and creating new synergistic opportunities amongst our solution units. In most of these situations, the combination of local relationships and technical expertise, together with our group global delivery platform, is demonstrating an obvious win for us and for our clients. Our pipeline and visibility continue to be stable and predictable. These allow us to invest in the business, invest in bench strength and improve how we run our operations. We also continue to feel good about our leading position in complex software engineering services and solutions segment of the general IT services market, which contributes to our ability to continue growing above the industry average. I think it would be appropriate to mention at this point a couple of industry-specific conditions. First of all, in June, we were ranked #6 in the Forbes 2013 list of America's Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. This is prestigious for the company to achieve as we were ranked just behind some of the most well-known tech companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Apple and a set of many other very well-recognized global technology brands. It's a tough list to get in. We're competing with other eligible [indiscernible] suppliers. So we were very proud of this recognition in general and also by the fact that we are one of the only 2 companies from IT services industry included in the Forbes Fast Tech 25. Second one, the results from the CT [ph] second quarter 2013 CIO survey were issued where 250 CIOs were questioned. These IT services were either gaining or losing share of the IT spend in dollars with the organization. In conclusion, we were -- EPAM and Cognizant were key the global share gainers. Likewise, this is a very respectable company to keep. It also reaffirms the fact that EPAM continues to gain market share on the strength of our differentiated service offering and expertise in emerging technology solutions. Now I will turn it over to Ilya, who will discuss financial performance in more details.