N. V. Tyagarajan
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you, Bharani. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our earnings call today. In the third quarter, Genpact revenues, adjusted operating income, adjusted operating income margin and cash flows from operations all increased year-over-year. Our revenue results for the quarter were less than our expectations for this point in the year, and we are reducing our full year 2013 revenue guidance to a range of $2.12 billion to $2.13 billion. At the same time, our operating income margins are better than our expectations, and we are increasing our guidance for adjusted operating income margins to a range of 16.5% to 16.8%. The top 3 drivers contributing to the change in our revenue guidance, most of which we have discussed previously, are as follows: The first is the increase in the value and proportion of large deals in the pipeline. This trend started towards the end of 2012, continues to accelerate through 2013 and now includes deals in a broad cross-section of vertical markets. These larger complex transformational engagements often include multiple components and service offerings and require many levels of decision-making and approvals on the client side, which materially extends decision cycle times. Although conversion to revenues takes significantly longer than typical deals, transformational engagements are where we want to be and where the depth of our operational capabilities and benchmarks add the most value to our clients. This has created a short-term impact on our revenues. But in the long term, it's positive for our business. The second driver is the continued reduction in our mortgage originations business related to softness in refinancing volumes in the U.S. Historically, most of our Mortgage business has been origination processing in support of refinancing. Since midyear, we have seen a significant decline in refinancing volumes, in line with market trends in the U.S. We are investing in our technology platform to further differentiate our service offerings in new mortgage originations, and we expect to roll out that enhanced capability to clients in 2014. In addition, we now expect the full year impact of foreign exchange on revenue to be approximately $13 million to $14 million, which is significantly more than anticipated. Although most of our revenues are in dollars, we receive some revenues in other currencies. The depreciation of these currencies against the U.S. dollar, especially the yen and the rupee, is having an adverse impact on revenues. The highlights of our third quarter are as follows: Revenues of $535 million increased 9% year-over-year, led by Global Client revenues, which grew 13% in the quarter. Revenue growth was broad based across industry verticals, led by Insurance, Hi-Tech, Consumer Packaged Goods and Life Sciences. Growth across our service offerings was led by Banking and Financial Services core operations, reengineering and finance and accounting. GE revenues declined by 3% year-over-year in the third quarter. We now expect total revenues from GE to be flat to slightly down for the year. Our relationship with GE, which is highly penetrated, continues to be strong, as measured by high Net Promoter Scores and the value we deliver to GE businesses. Our performance on all other key financial metrics is strong. In the third quarter, adjusted operating income increased 19% year-over-year, adjusted operating income margin was 17.8% and cash flows from operations increased 62%. Improved adjusted operating income and AOI margin reflected cost and productivity improvement initiatives, as well as lower upfront spends related to delay decisions in large deals. Our sales and marketing spending increased to approximately 4.7% of revenue in the third quarter, up from 4.3% in the second quarter, as we continue to invest. It is taking us longer than anticipated to hire the right client-facing leaders, with a deep domain expertise in the industry verticals and geographies that we serve and who will integrate well into our company. We continue to expand relationships with existing clients in the third quarter across a range of our industry verticals. Clients representing $5 million to $15 million in annual revenue increased to 52 from 42 in the prior year third quarter. Clients in the $15 million to $25 million category increased to 13 from 11. And clients more than $25 million in annual revenue increased to 12 from 11. This is evidence of our ability to grow relationships, as we partner with clients to undertake transformational journeys and drive better performance and outcomes for them over many years of engagement. Looking ahead, the macro environment continues to be mixed, but our pipeline has increased to historically high levels, with a significantly bigger value and proportion of larger transformative deals. Clients continue to focus on improving their business models to adapt to a continuously changing environment, now with increasing interest in longer-term, more transformative engagements, as well as continued demand for immediate cost reduction opportunities. The fact that we are engaged broadly in these larger deals is a reflection of the investment we have been making in client-facing leaders over the last few years. So while the longer cycle times have clearly pushed out some revenue, the opportunity these deals present is very exciting for us and for the long-term secular growth in our market. Our market is large and underpenetrated, and we're addressing this expansive opportunity through our growth strategy. Today the key elements of the strategy are as follows: First, as industry thought leaders, we define and design the road map, and then guide global enterprises to best in class through our proprietary Smart Enterprise Processes framework that delivers measurable business impact and insights. Our clients seek innovative solutions that help them transform the way they run their businesses to drive real business impact. One of our key differentiators as a partner is our ability to understand the end-to-end process and deliver better outcomes and effectiveness, not just in the specific services we manage for the client, but across the client's entire delivery footprint. This strategic view of the process and road map, along with measurable outcomes, resonates with clients in today's environment. The second key element of our growth strategy is to invest in expanding our capabilities in specifically targeted industry verticals and build deep domain expertise in them. Clients want partners who are experts in their industry in a wide range of processes at a granular level. Our strategy is to focus our investments and resources on specific, targeted industry verticals that offer long-term growth potential, where our capabilities and services are truly differentiating. Our investments include building capabilities internally and through acquisitions that fill gaps and extend our end-to-end services, developing innovative solutions that combine and truly integrate process, technology and data analytics and recruiting professionals with deep industry knowledge. As an example, we have hired a number of very senior client-facing leaders over the last 2 quarters, all with tremendous pedigrees, similar to the investments we made in client-facing teams in Europe in the past few years, which have paid off well. The third element of our growth strategy is to allocate capital and resources in support of our strategies and drive sustainable profitable growth and shareholder value. We have committed to investing in the right people and capabilities to fully serve the needs of clients in our targeted vertical markets. And we believe the time is right to think more broadly about the next phase of our growth. This requires consistent discipline and cash and capital allocation, balanced with and measured by strong returns and cash flows. The fourth key element of our growth strategy is basic for us, to execute seamlessly for clients across service lines and geographic markets. This is in our DNA and a hallmark of our differentiated reputation for delivery, operational excellence and controllership and compliance, whether it is managing core operations, delivering on technology projects or building analytical insights from data. The entire organization is unified in support of driving client outcomes and best practices, while providing seamless delivery from any of our global delivery centers. Our relentless focus on operational excellence is a critical foundation for transformation. Looking forward, as we think about the medium and long term, we have begun a series of important initiatives that we expect to take Genpact to the next level. Specifically, we are actively driving change to our growth strategy to expand and capture a bigger set of market opportunities. To give you an early sense of this, in advance of our next Investor Day, we would point to 2 significant underpinnings. First, we're enhancing our level of focus, targeting specific industry verticals, service lines and geographies, where our capabilities are truly differentiated and our ability to generate business impact is the greatest. As part of this, we will be even more focused on how we are allocating our capital and resources. We are excited about the opportunity these changes create for our business and expect this to result in an even more compelling value proposition for our clients and a much larger share of the market. Second, we are increasingly working with clients who are seeking transformational change. Something that more companies are demanding. We are convinced that we will be able to add differentiated value. As part of this, we have already begun to deemphasize growth in some emerging markets, where clients are not yet ready to engage in transformation. These strategic shifts are already underway, but they will take some time to fully implement. We are confident that they will result in increased opportunities for our company. Given the importance of this, we will be speaking in more detail about this developing evolution in our strategy at our next Investor Day in February. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mohit.