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EPAM Systems, Inc. (EPAM)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 20, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the EPAM Systems Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Farrell Kramer. Thank you. Mr. Kramer, you may begin.

Farrell Kramer

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. By now you should have received your copy of the earnings release for the company's fourth quarter and full year 2013 results. If you have not, a copy is available on our website, epam.com. The speakers on today's call are Arkadiy Dobkin, Chief Executive Officer; and Anthony Conte, 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.

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Thank you, Farrell, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This December, we celebrated our 20th year in business and now I am proud to say that it was another strong year of growth for EPAM. EPAM's fourth quarter performance was better than we planned and in turn allow us to exceed our full year guidance, which we had revised upward in early October. Our fourth quarter revenue were $157 million, a sequential increase of 12% and an increase of 26% year-over-year. For the full year 2013, we delivered $555 million of revenue, which represented industry-leading growth of 28%. Our non-GAAP operating margin was within our target range at 17.4% for the quarter and 16.5% for the full year. Anthony will later review the quarter and year financials in more details, as well as give you our 2014 guidance. What I would like to discuss is the evolution of EPAM, some highlights of 2013, as well as explain a bit more on how we see the market growing and the opportunities for EPAM within this market. As we noted many times in the past, EPAM was born and iterated for many years as a company focusing on software engineering services for commercial software firms by helping them bring into life the products for their own clients. In turn, that focus on commercial software development allowed us to build a very strong engineering culture within the company and provided us with the opportunity to gain hands-on exposure to bring emerging technology trends, advanced development processes and techniques ahead of our competitors. Over time, our focus started to shift from only serving software and technology market to providing services to the firms operating outside of that segment. In 2007, the majority of our revenue was coming from ISVs & Technology.…

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Thank you, Ark, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking -- taking you through the fourth quarter and full year results, and then I will talk about our 2014 outlook. As usual, the full details of our results can be found in our press release and the quarterly fact sheet located on the Investors section of our website. As detailed in our press release, our fourth quarter revenues grew 25.5% over last year and 12.4% sequentially to $157.6 million, above the top end of our guidance. For the full year, revenues grew 28% to $555.1 million, coming in above our guidance. The revenue overperformance was driven by our ability to successfully complete projects ahead of schedule, combined with new client acquisitions at the end of the year. Looking at service lines, we experienced no significant change in our revenue mix. Software development and application testing services continue to be our largest service offerings in both the fourth quarter and the full year 2013. For the full year, North America represented 50.8% of revenue, up 36.2%; Europe was up 36.1%, representing 29% growth over prior year; and CIS represented 11.7% of revenue. Within CIS, Russia grew 12.3% and represents approximately 10% of revenue. Revenues from other locations in CIS declined due to the completion of a onetime project in 2012. Our growth continues to be fueled by new clients and deeper penetration into existing accounts. Our top 20 clients accounted for 56.9% of total revenues and grew 23.8%, while all clients below the top 20 grew 34.3% year-over-year. Our customer loyalty remains high with 94% of customers working for us at least a year and 78% coming from those who have been with us for 2 years or more. We talked about growing new clients into…

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Thank you, Anthony, and we would like to, before we start with the questions, to address clearly critical issue, which probably everybody worry about, the situation in Ukraine. And it's, as we all understand, very difficult and sad situation, to say the least, and our thoughts go to the people who were injured or killed and to their families there. To understand what impact it having on EPAM, first of all, we have about 2,600 engineers in Ukraine, and 1,500 of them are in Kyiv in several office buildings. Fortunately for us, those offices not in close proximity to any of the main government buildings in Kyiv, basically pretty far from the site of the main events, which you might be seeing on TV. So to this point, we didn't experience any interruption in our office infrastructure, in utility supply, in Internet, power and so on. And we don't anticipate any -- the scenario that would cause infrastructure interruption at this point. So all EPAM offices remain open and fully functional, including those we support several large financial clients, which is operating 24/7. However, the closure of main public transportation, the metro, by the government makes it difficult or sometimes impossible for us to have to get into the office. We definitely considered such situation during the last couple of months, and many of our teams were already configured to be securer access, either which relied on EPAM infrastructure or directly client infrastructure. And those measures allow them to work from home. So we are managing the situation in real time and clearly making some decisions in real time right now to make sure -- to address any concern for staff safety and to make sure that people will be capable to return home safely in a situation of worsened. We also allocated additional staff and additional equipment to build and strengthen our capacity for remote communication, for VPN, for any secure communication methods. So today, we have close to 50% of our people in the office. Yesterday, it was closer to 60%. And we have another 40%, 45% of people connected and working with a client project by secure VPN. So basically, at this point, we experiencing about under 10% drop in productivity in Kyiv. No any interruptions in other offices in Ukraine. We continue to monitor situation closely to understand if it would be necessary to execute any other specific plans for all contingencies. And we also consider in these plans very closely to specific account situation because there are different requirements in different situations. To this point, project continue to move forward, and we really appreciate our clients' understanding and support in this situation. So with this, I would like to turn back to operator to start Q&A session.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Moshe Katri of Cowen and Company.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Maybe you can talk a bit about guidance. Give us some more color here. If you look at the -- at calendar year 2014, what's embedded in terms of adjusted EBIT margins for the year? And then how do we expect the revenues to flow on a quarterly basis throughout the year?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Moshe, thanks. The revenue component flow should be very similar to what you've seen in past years. As I mentioned in my initial comments, Q1 is typically our slowest and then we ramp slowly over the course of the year, with Q4 being our strongest revenue quarter. So I would expect a very similar pattern to prior years as far as the revenue flow. And as far as the second part of it, you asked what was embedded within EBITDA. Are you referencing the investment?

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen and Company

The investment of EBIT margins. What sort of EBIT margin assumptions do you have in the model for calendar year 2014?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

We're expecting kind of adjusted EBITDA margins to be roughly in the 18% to 19%, which is historically where we've existed.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Okay. And then if you look at Q1, is there anything specific that would -- because it seems that the revenue numbers are within what we're looking for but then your adjusted EPS are a bit lower. Is there anything that would actually change your EBIT margin or EBIT adjusted -- adjusted EBIT margins for Q1 from where it has been historically?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Well, historically, I think our Q1 for 2014 is actually relatively in line with other Q1 performance. So there's nothing specific to highlight that's different. It's just that Q1 is a quarter that just deals with a little bit of a squeeze because we do have a lighter revenue quarter and we put in effect annual raises, so we just feel that normal squeeze. If you look at it, it's fairly consistent with Q1s in previous periods. It's not -- from a margin perspective, it's not that dramatically off.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Understood. And then last question. For Q4, you had a pretty big ramp from your top clients and then from your top 5 customers. The rest of the business obviously didn't grow as fast. Maybe you can give us some color on that?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

The...

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Cowen and Company

[indiscernible].

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Cowen and Company

The Q4 ramp did come from some of our larger clients. We saw a Q4 push to complete some projects. We brought in some new clients in Q4 that ramped up faster than we anticipated. And that was really the drive behind the increased revenue in Q4. And I think when you look at it, the top clients versus the other, the top clients are the ones that ramped faster. It's just a function of the mathematics. They ramped up a little quicker so we saw more of an uptick from them, and the other clients just continued to trend as they had throughout the rest of the year.

Moshe Katri - Cowen and Company, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Cowen and Company

And should that -- should we assume that, that kind of reverses itself a bit throughout this year?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Cowen and Company

It's definitely very difficult to say right now. So -- and we understand that it's kind of similar to last year's situation. But at this point, we cannot say that anything like this would be happening or not.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Mayank Tandon of Needham & Company. Mayank Tandon - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: So I just wanted to look at some of the key metrics here. Maybe, Anthony or Ark, if you could just share where utilization came in, in the fourth quarter? What your expectations are for 2014? And also, how should we think about hiring over the course of the year to hit your revenue growth targets?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Needham & Company

So utilization trend is -- were kind of -- were changing during the year, and it's 2013 where it's basically a function of what was happening with us in 2012, where our bench reached pretty significant levels because, like, all our training capacity were working at full, and plus what was happening with Thomson Reuters during that 2012, when it was still very aggressively downsizing. So what's happened in 2013 is that we had an opportunity to utilize bench, which builds up and then -- at the beginning actually of this last year. And if you will track our increase in headcount quarter-by-quarter you will see that, while our utilization was going up in Q4, at the same time the number of new employees were much higher in Q4 in comparison with Q3 or Q2. So we basically worked to bring more people to the company and utilization during the year will be maintaining around 76%, 78%. Mayank Tandon - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay. So just to be clear, utilization is going to be -- remain consistent with what it was in 2013 and then it'll really be hiring and then maybe some price increases that will provide the revenue?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Needham & Company

Yes, we're always -- we're maintaining the bench because if you put in staff for new projects internally, usually not hiring just for that specific opportunity but would like to make sure that we have a reliable team to start new projects. So basically, we're going to hire. We probably will be a little bit higher utilization rate than average for the last year, but it wouldn't be at 80%. Mayank Tandon - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay. And then maybe we can get some thoughts around attrition rates in your business as you finish 2013? And also, what is the expectation for wage inflation that is embedded in your model?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Needham & Company

Okay. So let me answer on attritions. Attritions for our actual operations was -- voluntary attrition around 11%, which is a little bit -- maybe a little bit higher than last year, maybe 1%, but generally in line with expectations. And in regards to wage inflation, I'll pass it to...

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Needham & Company

Yes. Wage inflation for 2013 was running roughly at 9%, 10%, and we're building into the model roughly a similar trend for 2014. So we expect to keep wage inflation right within that band. Mayank Tandon - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Okay. And then just finally on pricing. I know in the past you talked about pricing increments, I believe, in the mid to high single digits. Is that something you saw in 2013? And then what is the expectation for 2014?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Needham & Company

Yes, pricing was roughly right around 8% that we saw in 2013, and we're modeling roughly about the same going forward, possibly a little bit higher. But the range that we keep is roughly in that 6% to 8% range from a modeling perspective.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And the next question is from Darrin Peller of Barclays.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

I just want to go back for a moment to the situation in Ukraine. Can you give us a little more understanding? Are clients giving you any feedback? Is there any -- has there been any response from clients on new work? And then in terms of your hiring plan, maybe a little bit more specifics on the numbers in general? I might have missed that in the question -- in the answer before. And how the plan in terms of hiring is going to shape up around where you go for hiring given, again, what's happening in Ukraine right now?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

So the -- like in Ukraine, clearly clients who operate in there are going [indiscernible]. And we have constant communication and update with them. So one of the key member of our management team, Karl Robb, he located in Kyiv. So he has very close touch on situation. He lives, like, probably much closer to the main kind of event field than our offices. But again, we communicate constantly with clients and are providing updates. So some clients allowed -- formally actually offer us to move some people to working from home and help us to provide infrastructure necessary from their side. So we have kind of very good level of partnership cooperation with the clients right now. So how it affected the revenue or future work? It's very difficult to say. We didn't see much from existing clients that something changed. So clearly, during the last 2 days, situation become less predictable. We hope that it would be still be stabilizing during the next week. But again, this is -- we can evaluate only real time. So in regards to hiring people, we still plan to hire in Ukraine. We still plan to hire in Belarus, Russia, Poland and Hungary. So all these countries where we have locations today is growing. We will have to evaluate the situation again in regards to Ukraine in next weeks. But I don't -- we don't believe that it would affect any long-term plans for us.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

Okay. And I may have missed it, but did you mention anything about number of employees or number of net additions throughout 2014? I know there's -- sometimes you've said for -- on a quarterly basis what you've done, but have you mentioned anything going forward?

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Barclays

Are you talking forecast? Or are you talking what our net hires were in 2013?

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

Well, I guess relative to 2013, what you're expecting for '14?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

So we expect around 16%, 17% headcount growth.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

All right, that's helpful. And just one follow-up question. In terms of -- on that topic, in terms of the type of people you hired throughout 2013, I know a lot of them -- you were -- there was a pretty real goal of building out non-engineering personnel, a lot more around senior relationship management. Can you talk to some of that? And has that been successful? Has that helped with new business generation with some of your key clients?

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

Yes, I can give you some color on this. Yes, we have some very good success and we have some disappointments, which, I guess, normal. So -- and increase in business development was visible. But also, hiring the senior staff, for us, was very important to grow existing accounts. So we brought -- as I mentioned, we brought a good number of people from industries with very strong domain expertise in financial services and capital markets space. We brought number of people in retail and consumer vertical, as well. Also, we brought many strong technologies with client-facing capabilities, as I mentioned also, which extremely important for us because we have very good engineers globally but sometimes we have kind of the difficulties and a real gap between what they can do in offshore and actually how this links and communicated to our clients. So that was one of the important, for us, area of focus and specifically around all these competencies which we talked. So I think it's really proved to us that it should work. And I think that this kind of case study, which I was using this morning, is very good illustration of direction which we're going to continue. Because that's exactly combination, when you have strong enough on-site presence, new -- actually, new people which were hired even this year on technology competency were helping to bring this account to the level which is right now.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

Okay. Just one last follow-up and I'll go back to the queue. In terms of the areas of growth that are going to be sort of above company average in your guidance, your guidance being sort of -- I'll call it, top line, 19%, 20%. If -- which verticals are you expecting to outperform? Which verticals should we look to being slightly slower than that? Maybe specifically what's happening around telecommunications also? And then I'll turn it back.

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

Around telecommunication, we -- I don't think we work in telecommunication right now.

Anthony J. Conte

Analyst · Barclays

And it's probably...

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

So it's very, very, very small portion of our business in other category. So -- but at this point, we expect that all 3 industry verticals will be growing pretty significantly for us. You saw last year all of them were growing over 20%, and that's an expectation for this year, too.

Darrin D. Peller - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Barclays

Okay. I guess the -- what I was referring to is more business and media kind of area, specifically.

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Barclays

Okay, Business Information & Media. Yes, this was interesting year because, several years ago, majority of Business Information & Media, it was Thomson Reuters. And during 2011 and '12, it really kind of went down and brought the whole vertical with them. But as you can see, this year we're starting to grow back and Reuters actually itself is starting to grow back. So this is the second quarter in a row when we're growing with Reuters. Now we have pretty high expectations here.

Operator

Operator

We have no further questions in queue at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.

Arkadiy Dobkin

Analyst · Cowen and Company

Thank you, everyone, again. So it was a very good year for EPAM and clearly with a lot of challenges. And you see that the challenges may come in sometimes very unexpectedly. So we hope that they kind of will work it over and the situation in Ukraine would improve. So thank you, again, and talk to you in a few months. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.