Arkadiy Dobkin
Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed
Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me begin with a few financial highlights. We delivered a strong second quarter with revenues of $445.6 million, reflecting 27.7% year-over-year growth or 27.1% in constant currency terms. Our revenue growth was broad-based, both geographically and across all of our industry verticals. In addition, we delivered strong non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.01, which represents 26% growth from Q2 of 2017. Let me provide you with a brief update across the key dimensions of our business. Looking at our capabilities and offerings. Last quarter, we talked about enriching our offerings across digital transformation programs and connected digital platforms, which continues to be our key areas of focus with accelerated development of capabilities in intelligent automation, RPA, machine learning and IoT. Additionally, we also talked about expanding our horizons with new offerings around physical product innovation with close connectivity into software-controlled ecosystems as well as strengthening our design thinking and business consultancy skills. Finally, we talked about our aspiration to integrate, at different levels, EPAM consulting capabilities across business, experience and technology disciplines into our mainstream delivery offerings, and as a result, to significantly elevate the overall value of the solutions we build for our clients. In Q2, we continued to focus on those areas and are starting to see some results triggered by our new cross-functional initiatives in a number of potentially large engagements as well as in numerous wins of new types of deals because of broader adoption of such an approach. A couple relevant highlights to illustrate. While we were involved for sometime in many proof-of-concept-type efforts based on RPA technologies, some of those projects have evolved into much more complex and sizable intelligent automation engagements across several industries. As in the case of any organization, understanding the potential benefits of intelligent automation, realities of implementation in specific corporate environments, maturity and actual functionality of emerging platforms and setting achievable goals within a given time frame is critical and can mean the key difference between reaching the desired outcome or complete failure. This is where we started to bring new value by offering a very practical approach, built in close coordination between our consulting and engineering teams, working together to minimize risks and to better predict results. An example of this is the work we are doing for one of the world’s largest insurance companies. As in many other cases, we started with an engineering engagement where we demonstrated our traditional strengths. However, this time, we were able to bring our consulting capabilities very early on and expand into a comprehensive business assessment of what the client actually needed to accomplish. We demonstrated at that engagement that we could deliver value through entire end-to-end automation effort efficiently in a well-integrated and practical fashion. As a result, we are currently developing similar solutions in several new, much larger areas and helping the client to improve productivity and reduce costs with much higher probability of success. In another case, for one of the largest consumer packaged goods brands, an engagement which we started in the data area to build an analytical solution serving revenue and pricing, supply chain, brand management and customer teams was turned into the initiative where our engineers and data scientists become part of multiple innovation efforts, utilizing machine learning, natural language and image recognition techniques to bring efficiency via automation to a very new level while improving customer experience based on optimal planogram execution. These types of engagements and many in other areas demonstrate the value we can bring and our ability to help our customers achieve their business goals through real integrated and coordinated efforts of multidisciplinary teams of engineers, designers and consultants. So while well-designed and built software is a very critical and major component of the services we deliver, we now bring much more than just that. Moving to our people engagement and capability development. We ended the quarter with over 24,300 delivery professionals, a 19% increase year-over-year and a net addition of more than 600 production professionals during Q2. Our total headcount ended at more than 27,400 employees. As one of the relevant highlights for the quarter, I would like to share that in June, we expanded our operations in Hyderabad with the opening of our new digital engineering center. This state-of-the-art development facility is designed to enable advanced technical training, R&D and full-cycle customer programs ranging from commercial product development to digital platforms and innovative experimentation. The center is a good example of our continued investment in our people and capabilities and our goal of building a strong network of high-quality delivery centers around the globe. As we continue to grow, we are also investing in existing and new locations within the European Union, across Central and Eastern Europe and across other regions of APAC. I would also like to share that as more of what we do for clients is done at or near their locations, this requires us to attract, retain and develop employees in different markets than we used to do before. In some instances, our ability to respond to demand may take longer as we continue to learn and to balance what appears to be a strong year against the investments we need to make to bring the right talent to EPAM. Despite of that, we remain very confident that with the right level of effort in key areas, we will be able to meet the demands. Turning to market and client updates. Rounding out my comments on the second quarter results. We had broad-based growth across our industry verticals in the second quarter. The drivers of growth remain very consistent in the industries we serve, which include, as shared already today, the themes of digital transformation, an increased focus on customer engagement, product development and driving the efficiencies and deeper insights through artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics. In Financial Services, our largest vertical, we finished the quarter with 30% growth year-over-year. Travel and Consumer grew 30%. Software & Hi-Tech grew approximately 22%. Business information and media posted 23% growth. Life Science & Healthcare grew 33%. And lastly, our emerging verticals delivered 32% growth, driven primarily by clients from industrial engineering, energy and automotive sectors. We continue to diversify across our client portfolio by industry, geography and types of engagements. In the second quarter, growth in our top 20 clients was approximately 23% and growth outside our top 20 clients was approximately 32% compared to the same quarter last year. While we continue to bring new significant logos to our client list, it’s worthwhile to remind that close to 50% of our top 200 clients today are among the Forbes Global 2000 and provide to us a great opportunity to grow significantly within our existing customer portfolio as well. With that, let me turn it over to Jason for detailed financial update.