Rohit Kapoor
Analyst · Stifel Financial. Your line is now open
Thank you, Steve. Good morning everyone and welcome to our first quarter 2015 earnings call. We are extremely pleased with our performance in the first quarter and continue to build on our momentum from the end of 2014. We grew our revenues, won new clients and solidified our leadership position in analytics this quarter. Our strong performance was broad-based across our businesses and we made good progress on the execution of our strategy. I'm excited to share that our organic revenue growth rate excluding transitioning client at constant currency was 14.6%, our highest achievement over the last eight quarters. Overall, in the first quarter, we delivered a $143.5 million of revenues representing a strong year with a growth rate of 15.5% excluding reimbursement of disentanglement cost in the first quarter of 2014. Analytics continues to be a stand out business for us with 42.7% year-over-year organic growth in revenue on a constant currency basis excluding transitioning clients. We also accelerated growth in our operations management business with revenues growing 7.9% organically on a constant currency basis excluding transitioning clients and disentanglement cost. In the previous quarter, the corresponding growth was 7.4%. I will now spend some time, our planning, our priorities for 2015 and subsequently share highlights from the first quarter. The key strategic priorities for 2015 are: 1. Win strategic deals across all our chosen domains leveraging our business EXLerator Framework and differentiated business process as a service that is BPaaS solutions. 2. Strengthen our leadership position in analytics. 3. Accelerate growth in our healthcare businesses. 4. Successfully integrate our acquisitions, and 5. Expand our margins and improve profitability. EXL won nine new clients in the first quarter, including four in operations management and five in analytics and business transformation.The nine wins were one of the highest in any quarter over the last eight quarters. Of the four wins in operations management through were lead by differentiated BPaaS solutions that leverage our propriety technology platforms. Our BPaaS solutions help our clients make their cost structures variable build scalable operations, leverage a flexible pay per use pricing model and gain access to the best technology. I'm pleased to share that our BPaas solutions are gaining traction in the marketplace and helping us completely transform our clients operating models. A great example is the success we are seeing with MED connection, our comprehensive medical records and bill analysis solution. In addition to strengthening our leadership in the insurance business and helping us win new deals MED connection also recently won recognition in the marketplace. We were named the 2014 Partner of the Year for technology and innovation by Aflac. We are excited by the market potential for MED Connection and have plans to extend it into new industries and markets. Such solutions can develop into industry utilities in specific areas where we have domain knowledge, technology platforms and analytics capabilities. One important point to note is that the competition in our BPaaS deals is very different to what we observe in our traditional operation's management deals. We compete with many smaller and niche players that provides such solutions. Overall, we remain positive on the demand environment and have a healthy new client-by-client across all our domains. Our pipeline gives us confidence that we can achieve our objective to win new clients over the next several quarters. In addition, a large part of our growth comes from existing clients as we expand the depths and breadth of their relationship with EXL. As we have shared in our Investor Day, we have a large portfolio of clients that provides us with the great opportunity to cross sell our new capabilities and deliver strong organic growth. In the first quarter, our existing clients awarded us 24 new processes in the domains of healthcare, travel, transportation and logistics, utilities, insurance and finance and accounting. We continue to maintain our leadership position in analytics, a high growth and dynamic part of our portfolio. For the quarter excluding RPMs contribution, analytics revenue grew to $18.5 million a growth of 39.8% year-over-year or 42.7% on a constant currency basis. We are pleased that we are able to maintain such strong momentum from the fourth quarter of 2014 as typically the first quarter is a sequential decline. This is primarily due to the greater proportion of annuity revenues and longer term contracts behalf in our analytics business today. We continue to be successful in winning new clients in analytics and have added new clients in retail and insurance. We also renewed some of our large analytics annuity clients with an increase in the total contract value and the scope of work. Given the strong demand environment and our commitment to strengthening our leadership position in this business, we have now invested in a brand new 100,000 square foot state-of-the-art center in Gurgaon, India. This center will include our analytics training facility and innovation lab and provide our data scientists the ability to collaborate and develop new analytical tools and techniques. This new center will provide us considerable room for expansion in line with our aggressive growth projections for this business. We have also been able to diversify our talent pool in analytics with centers in Mumbai, Noida and Bangalore and teams working in Singapore, Manila, the U.K. and several locations in the U.S. EXL analytics maintained its prime positioning as one of the leading first way recruiters at the top engineering and management Institutes in India. Our relationship with these institutes are over a decade old as we recruited a record 440 graduates across multiple campuses. These campuses include premier institutes like the Indian Institute of Management and the Indian Institute of Technology. The candidates from these institutions will be joining us over the course of 2015. We have also recruited onshore data scientists in the U.S. as we invest in resources that will work closely with our clients to design solutions that will help them transform decision making in their business. Overall, our analytic headcount in the U.S. is up 50% from a year ago. Finally, I'm pleased to share that we closed the purchase of RPM Direct this quarter. RPMs proprietary database and marketing analytics expertise is a strong complementary fit with EXL analytics offerings. Their rich database of 235 million plus prospects includes access to third party data on customer demographics, credit scores and property and auto ownership data. This aspect when combined with cutting edge predictive models and domain knowledge will enable us to provide a powerful end-to-end customer acquisition solution across our businesses and markets. Additionally, RPMs non-linear revenue model provides the ability to grow without significantly increasing headcount and provides us an opportunity to expand margins. We are very excited by the addition of RPM and it makes us one of the few, large and differentiated players in the global analytics market with a revenue run rate of over 100 million. Accelerating growth in our healthcare business and capturing the large market opportunity is another key focus area for EXL. Our focus is to meet the demand for highly customized and domain specific back-office processing work in healthcare. As an example, for one of the key healthcare clients we have recently commenced work on high end claims processes where our resources assist in early stage fraud detection and follow up. In addition, we have specialists and registered nurses providing coding reviews. The client expanded our relationship due to our exceptional service delivery during the first 12 months of running our clinical claims review process. Similarly, we are close to signing another new client, a healthcare pair where we will be assisting the client with status and resolution of healthcare claims. Both clients were impressed with our differentiated healthcare capabilities that leverage our large team of nurses, customer experience academy analytics models and technology tools. I'm also pleased to share that the integration of Blue Slate and Overland Solutions are proceeding as per plan. We are confident in our strategy of investing an extremely attractive growth areas and in enhancing our capabilities will help us broaden our existing client relationships and win new deals. Another key area of demand from our clients is to help support the global expansion of their operations. To cater to this demand we continue to expand our geographic footprint. Later this year, we will commence operations from our center in Columbia. We are working with Carvajal, who will be one of our first clients as we build upon this Greenfield capability to provide Spanish language services out of Latin America. In addition, we are close to finalizing a deal to service one of our large strategic clients from the sector. In the Philippines, our new business wins in travel, transportation and logistics and healthcare has allowed us to improve capacity utilization in our new centers there. This will positively impact the revenues and help us improve the profitability of this geography. In the first quarter our gross margin was 351.1%, this includes a negative impact of a 160 basis points due to the inclusion of a full quarter contribution of Overland Solutions. While we have good visibility into our revenues for the rest of the year, we are focused on executing our plan to enhance margins using multiple levers. These include rationalizing our cost structure, optimizing our pricing, fixing geography specific issues, achieving planned synergies from acquisitions and driving non-linear revenue growth using our BPaaS solutions and products. We remain confident of improving our margins in the second half of the year. Our client concentration continues to go down a year ago [indiscernible] five clients represented 35% of revenues whereas the number has dropped to 30% in the first quarter of 2015. Likewise, the revenue contribution from our top 10 has fallen to 46% of revenue from 54% a year ago. Lastly, our strong performance in the quarter has also been recognized in the market where in addition to the award from Aflac, we received a total of 7 winner circle or equivalent appellates in this quarter. We are especially pleased that we were positioned in the winners' circle - the topmost category in the HfS Blueprint: Population Health and Care Management Services.Only two other players were cited in this category. EXL was recognized by its clients both execution and for innovation. Our size, scale and capabilities in healthcare ensure that we have the right fundamentals in place to win market share in this high growth market. In closing, I'm pleased with the good start to the year and the way in which we are executing on our priorities for 2015. The market dynamics and demand environment remain favorable. Our differentiated capabilities are resonating and we are getting recognized in the market. We continue to accelerate growth in the high growth healthcare market and have strengthened our leadership position in analytics. These achievements and the ability to expand our margins make us confident and excited about the future. With that,I will turn the call over to Vishal.