Tiger Tyagarajan
Analyst · BMO. Your line is open
Thank you, Roger. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2022 earnings call. We had a great start to the year with top line growth, adjusted operating income margin and adjusted diluted EPS, all coming in ahead of our initial expectations. Our investments in our strategic choices have positioned us well to help clients navigate the many challenges in this macro environment. We saw another quarter of strong demand for our data and analytics, digital and consulting businesses that make up transformation services as well as continued strength in our Intelligent Operations business. For the first quarter 2022, we delivered total revenue of $1.1 billion, up 14% on a constant currency basis. Global Client revenue of $973 million up 15% on a constant currency basis, adjusted operating income margin of 15%, expanding 60 basis points from the fourth quarter and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.60, up 2% year-over-year. The macro environment continues to be challenging with inflation rising to a 40-year high, a massive spike in energy prices, ongoing disruption to supply chains, hot talent market and the Ukraine/Russia award to name just a few. Our Eastern European delivery footprint, which is centered around Romania, Poland and Hungary, with approximately 7,000 employees has not experienced any operational disruptions. We’re also not seeing any material change in client behavior as it relates to our global business. Client demand remains healthy on the back of the momentum we saw last year, particularly as every company searches for solutions to help them undertake the transformation needed in these times. Bookings reached the highest first quarter level since quarter 1, 2019 with 60% being annuity-based deals and 50% sole sourced. While we don’t typically share color on quarterly bookings, given the environment, we thought this was a good signal to share. This included 2 large engagements with total contract value greater than $50 million, both in the banking and capital markets industry. During the quarter, we also added 32 new clients, up from an average of 24 new clients per quarter in 2021. Both our quarter end pipeline and inflows during the quarter reached all-time highs, coupled with robust bookings momentum, this is a clear indication of the expansion of our total addressable market and differentiated value proposition for our solutions and services. Global Client revenue was up 15% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, led by continued strong performance from our analytics, digital and consulting businesses that make up Transformation Services, which grew 29% year-over-year and now represents 37% of total Global Client revenue. On the back of deal ramps from recent wins, Intelligent Operations grew 7% and represented 63% of total Global Client revenue. Global Client revenue growth was broad-based across all our chosen verticals, including double-digit growth in consumer goods and retail, life sciences and health care, high-tech, banking and capital markets and insurance. Revenue from our GE businesses in the first quarter was up 2%. As we mentioned last quarter, we continue to believe that GE’s separation into three independent companies provides us with opportunities to win new work in support of the spin-offs. Demand for our analytics, digital and consulting services that make up Transformation Services, is being fueled by the strong momentum we are seeing across 4 specific service lines, sales in commercial operations, supply chain management, financial crimes and risk and financial planning and analysis. In each of these areas, we leverage technologies like AI, machine learning and the cloud to process complex data sets and build dynamic analytical models that then drive insights. We then use these insights to drive actions that deliver meaningful business outcomes beyond just cost productivity. Together, these four service lines were up 47% in the first quarter and their importance to clients’ transformation agendas in these times underpins the significant expansion of our pipeline. For example, in financial crimes and risk, we are leveraging our cloud-based financial crimes and regulatory compliance solutions, as well as our AI and digital technology-based solutions to enhance the customer experience provided by our banking clients. We are also seeing great traction with new age fintechs where we are helping them deal with critical issues around customer fraud and risk management and providing scale to their operations as they grow. This was highlighted by the two large deal wins I referenced earlier. All of this is driving growth in our banking and capital markets vertical. Our Global Client Analytics business grew a very healthy 40% year-over-year. Let me provide a few examples of how we are helping clients use data and analytics for strategic decisions and delivering improved outcomes. We are working with a large luxury consumer goods brand to significantly improve its data quality by aligning key performance metrics for its online and physical channels and building models to optimize inventory levels. Additionally, our Rightpoint experience team is helping to elevate consumer experience on e-commerce websites by providing updates to product marketing to improve the client’s e-commerce growth by up to 15%. For a large global insurance company, we developed an AI and machine learning model that leverages both internal and external data to quickly and accurately assess risks and prioritize policies to be underwritten to minimize lost opportunities. Our solution significantly reduces the clients’ response times from days to hours and is expected to drive an incremental low double-digit growth for the client. For a large global sporting goods brand, we build complex machine learning models, leveraging a vast amount of consumer transaction and demographic data to determine the best price, promotion assortment and inventory levels to create personalized engagement with consumers, led by an Enquero data and analytics team. This solution is increasing the client’s direct-to-consumer market share while improving their profitability. All of these solutions that drive tangible impact beyond just cost and productivity are replicable across other clients. We continue to see momentum in driving commercial models based on outcomes that we deliver instead of FTE-based pricing alone, creating deeper strategic alignment with our clients. We are bringing our teams with deep industry and functional domain expertise together with data scientists and digital technology experts to deploy specific solutions that add value to our clients in these times. Here are 3 specific examples. In response to the inflationary environment, we have developed a suite of services and solutions, all leveraging data and analytics to help clients drive proactive actions in sourcing and procurement, sales and marketing and supply chain to bolster their financial health. These solutions include supplier prioritization and consolidation, pricing and promotion optimization strategies and more accurate dynamic and real-time supply and demand forecasting. As the Russia-Ukraine war entered its third month, we are engaging with clients on cybersecurity issues, business continuity planning and geographic diversification of operations given our extensive global delivery model. And thirdly, most importantly, the war for talent has left companies searching for creative ways to fill critical roles. Our center of excellence hubs enable clients to access our highly scaled global workforce in sought-after areas, including data scientists and digital practitioners that also have deep domain expertise in services such as finance and accounting, supply chain management and financial grants and risk. All of this drove a significant expansion in the size of our global client relationships. During the 12-month period ending March 31, 2022, we grew the number of global client relationships with annual revenue over $5 million from $132 million to $149 million. Clients with more than $25 million in annual revenue increased from 24 to 30. Clients with more than $50 million in revenue, increased from 11 to 12. Our large client relationships are growing faster than the company average as we open up new buying centers and bring more end-to-end solutions to them. The passion and dedication of our global teams to deliver great service to our clients continues to be central to our success. Our investment in the learning and development of our talent not only helps us access in-demand skills but also provide them with the critical skills needed to build their careers in a changing world. During the first quarter, we welcomed almost 15,000 new team members reflecting the power of Genpact’s brand in a very competitive talent market. During the first quarter, our employees also completed over 2 million training hours leveraging our online on-demand learning platform, Genome. This includes our data bridge program that trains employees and data analytics, decision-making and storytelling capabilities to drive actionable insight generation for clients. Data Bridge was recently recognized by IDC as an industry-leading data literacy program at scale that could be one of the largest of its time. We have so far trained and certified more than 50,000 employees through this program. Using our internal talent match platform, we successfully redeployed over 5,000 newly skilled talent to support the needs of our clients. Our attrition rate in the first quarter remained at 33%, in line with the rate we reported over the prior two quarters. With our ability to reskill, redeploy and hire at scale, we continue to see no impact on our client engagements or the successful conversion of new opportunities. We believe this is a critical competitive advantage, particularly as talent supply pressures across all industries has led to clients needing partners like us more than ever. As we continue through the year, we expect our overall demand to remain robust, led by our data analytics and digital businesses. We are also actively engaged with clients on pricing adjustments related to the current inflationary environment and continue to make steady progress to date. These are complex conversations that take time but also open up possibilities to drive more value for our clients and to deliver a win-to-win – win-win outcome for everyone. With that, let me turn the call over to Mike for a detailed review of our first quarter.