Arkadiy Dobkin
Analyst · Steven Milunovich with UBS
Thank you, Lilya. And good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I am pleased to report that while the fourth quarter showed some challenges, primarily with the currency volatility in several of our markets and the continuing conflict in the Ukraine, it proved to be another strong quarter for EPAM. So despite of all that, we closed with revenue of USD 202.2 million, above consensus and at top end of guidance, it's 28% over prior year and 5% above last quarter. While I would note that this was the first quarter for us with over $200 million in revenue and we were very proud of that, I still would like to highlight the fact that if you look at our results in constant-currency basis, year-over-year growth would have been close to 37%, and sequentially Q4 would show 9% growth. Clearly, Russian rubles were the primary challenge but we also had exposure related to the euros, pounds, Canadian dollars and Swiss francs. For the full 2014, we are finishing at the top end of our guidance at USD 730 million, which is 31% over previous year. At the same time, please note that for those last 12 months we lost approximately $15 million in revenue, making our constant currency growth at 34.2% for the full year. Anthony will provide more detail into the financial results and more clarity around the currency situation and impact on the full P&L. At this moment, I would like to share some highlights to 2014, which was a very different year than we expected 12 months ago when we tried to predict our future. For the first time in our history, we've had to deal not with high-tech or general financial crises as we experienced in 2000 and 2001 and then in 2008 and 2009. But with the large scale political and not only political crisis in Northern countries for EPAM has thousand of talented people and important operational infrastructure. This wasn't something we or anybody around us anticipated when we prepared ourselves for 2014. As a result, during this year, we had to make many adjustment to our original plans, and act very much in real time, to be able to continuously deliver while addressing many unusual challenges. Today, 12 months later, we can say that 2014 was actually another year of growth and strategic exploration at EPAM that was very much in line with the growth we communicated since our IPO day, which actually happened almost exactly 3 years ago. During this year, we proved that many of our efforts and investment from prior year indeed brings the company to the next level. We expanded our industry solution focus into a new segment, life science and health care, and very -- we are very excited about prospectives we see in this area, and how we can reapply the experience we accumulated to this new [indiscernible] vertical. We significantly increased our presence in our targeted markets. You probably remember our goal of 10% of people in North America and Western Europe, now we achieved it. We added China, Hong Kong and Singapore to the EPAM map in order to support global strategic programs for our largest clients, which in turn was triggered by our expanded capabilities in digital strategy, experience design and our ability to be in the new [indiscernible] engagements. Last year, we brought into the company one new important capability service design, and now we should be able to help our customers even more, by finding new and innovative solutions to their most complex business problems, and transform their business to meet the demands of their industry-respective challenges. So let me highlight some most important recognitions which illustrate how our clients, in the whole market, sees EPAM progress into our becoming one of the leading software solution providers. First, we won a good number of top innovation awards across our worldwide client base in 2014, and this is a direct client recognition of our new value. I would like to highlight just one. EPAM won the Most Transformative Branch Experience award in the Citi Mobile Challenge, which was an extraordinary event that brought together more than 3,000 developers and 744 teams from 319 cities, 62 countries and 6 continents. It was a virtual competition hosted by Citi that is designed to accelerate digital banking innovation by bringing together the most talented and creative developers and designers in the world, to create cutting-edge applications for Citi digital working platforms. Our effort resulted in 4 ideas that were all selected for the Citi Mobile Challenge finals. Only 60 from initial 744 were selected for this. Our winning project, Citi Concierge, was delivered by EPAM digital engagement practice, which created a personalized experience for customers at Citi branch and provided analytics for the Citi to optimize branch operations. By the way, I just mentioned EPAM digital engagement practice, which is a reflection of our effort to reorganize EPAM in a way to very closely integrated digital strategy in experienced design capabilities and our traditional strong software engineering skills in complex commerce content, mobile, analytical areas. We are really focused on how to blend it together and bring very much integrated value to our clients. We also [indiscernible] as a independent unit which just loosely complement in capabilities. It is very challenging task, but we do believe we are moving into the right direction and we do believe our clients started to recognize the value too. And our digital engagement practice is just one of the examples of EPAM internal transformation, which focuses on bringing new value to the clients. So in result of all that, Forrester Research, the leading global independent research firm, cited EPAM as a global leader in the product development services space, included EPAM in the list of top 10 largest commerce solutions providers, and recognized EPAM as a Primary Agile Service player. Finally, just before the end of the year, EPAM was ranked #3 on the Forbes 2014 list of America best companies under $1 billion and also scored EPAM as the #1 among technology companies on the list. All of this shows the impact we have had at some of our world's greatest companies via the technology solutions we built, the public equation and digital experience we created and the obstacles we have overcome time and time again on behalf of our clients. I think it's now a good moment to also note that during the past year, we put an effort to defining our true self in continuation of what we started several years back. In 2014, we took the time to look at what really drives us at EPAM, what kind of company we want to be, and how indeed our brand should reflect it. As we stated before, we have been engaged in a year-long process to evolve many elements of our brand. We will be changing how we speak and how we look, and at this point, planning to launch our new brand by the end of Q2. With that, I will turn to Anthony to give more structural information and to provide our guidance for this 2015.