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Infosys Limited (INFY)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jan 14, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Infosys Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants' lines will be in the listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sandeep Mahindroo. Thank you and over to you, sir.

Sandeep Mahindroo

Analyst

Thanks Inba. Hello, everyone and welcome to Infosys earnings call to discuss Q3 FY 2016 financial results. I'm Sandeep from the Investor Relations team in Bangalore. Let me start by wishing everyone a very happy 2016. Joining us today on this call is CEO and MD, Dr. Vishal Sikka; COO, Mr. Pravin Rao; CFO, Mr. M. D. Ranganath; along with other members of the senior management team. We will start the call with some remarks on the performance of the Company by Dr. Sikka followed by comments by the leadership team. Subsequently, we will open up the call for questions. Before I pass it on to the management team, I would like to remind you that anything which we say with respect to our outlook for the future is a forward-looking statement, which must be read in conjunction with the risk that the Company faces. A full statement and explanation of these risks is available in our filings with the SEC, which can be found on www.sec.gov. I'd now like to pass it on to Dr. Vishal Sikka.

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Thank you, Sandeep and good evening and good morning and thanks for joining our call. To start with I want to recognize the spirit and the passion of all Infosians, which in many ways define our performance in the third quarter. We entered this last quarter somewhat apprehensive about what was ahead. Q3 is known for its seasonality, the furloughs, the less number of working days et cetera and we were coming off an amazing Q2 performance and then we were faced with the devastating flood in Chennai last month, but despite all of this because of the spirit and the passion of our people. I am pleased with what we achieved and the momentum that this has created for us to end the fiscal year on a strong note. We ended Q3 of FY 2016 with revenue of $2.407 billion. This translates to a quarter-on-quarter growth of 1.7% in rupee terms, 0.6% in U.S. dollar terms and 1.1% in Q2 constant currency. Year-on-year, our revenue has grown 12.5% in constant currency. If we adjust for the one-time early termination fee paid to us by a client in the last quarter, our quarter-on-quarter revenue growth came in better than expected at 2.1% in constant currency and 1.6% in reported terms. Volumes grew by 3.1% indicating a healthy momentum in the underlying business. Utilization including trainees was 74.2% and 80.6% excluding trainees. Blended per capita revenue decreased 2.5% as a result of lesser price realization. If we adjust for the one-time termination fee impact realized in Q2, pricing decreased by 1.5%. Our operating margin for the quarter was 24.9% compared to 25.5% in the previous quarter. We reported EPS of INR15.16 for the quarter and in U.S. dollar terms EPS was $0.23. Margins were impacted due to the seasonality of price…

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Thank you, Vishal. Hello, everyone and wish you all a very happy 2016 ahead. On the big picture our revenues in Q3 were $240.7 million this is a quarter-and-quarter growth of 0.6% sequentially in dollar terms and 1.1% in constant currency terms. On a year-on-year basis Q3 revenues have grown 8.5% in dollar terms and 12.5% in constant currency terms. If you recall in Q2 we had a one-time revenue of $23 million due to a contact termination, after taking into account the termination our quarter-on-quarter growth is 1.6% in dollar terms and 2.1% in constant currency terms. Q3 is a seasonally soft quarter due to the impact of furloughs, and lower working days. Growth in Q3 was better than our earlier expectation since the impact of some furloughs was lower than what we anticipated. We were also able to overcome the client specific headwinds to some extent. We also had to navigate through unexpected events such as Chennai floods. However, our effective business continuity plans ensure that there was negligible impact of the same on our revenues. During the quarter we acquired Noah, which resulted in additional $3 million revenues for Q3. Volumes grew by 3.1% during the quarter, marginally lower than 3.7% in Q2. Realization for the quarter declined by 2.5% on reported basis and 2% in constant currency basis. If we normalize the impact of contract termination in Q2 decline in realization was 1.5% in reported terms and 1% in constant currency terms. Furloughs and lower working days in Q3 also impacted the realization to some extent. On a year-on-year basis realization was lower by 4.5% in reported terms and 1.1% in constant currency terms. Our utilization excluding trainees declined by 70 basis points to 80.6% during the quarter, so utilization including trainees declined by 120 basis…

Sandeep Mahindroo

Analyst

Now we can start the Q&A part.

Operator

Operator

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from the line of Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Edward Caso

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Hi, good evening. Congratulations on a good quarter. I was curious of the impact that you expect from the recent increase in the visa fee rates and also another company we follow indicated that there is a new bonus rule that was just enacted on a retroactive basis and we are wondering if that was impacting you?

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

On the visa – this is Ranga here. On the visa part there are two companies to it, one is what are the additional charges for the new applications that we put that has gone up by $2,000 per application. And there is a second component wherever we extend the visas beyond a certain period that component is up by about $4,000. There is some amount of clarities still required under second piece because we’ve heard different versions and different notifications. However, assuming that it is $2,000 for the first and $4,000 for the second and if we assume that we – for the next year we will have a similar additional visa applications and visa extensions. Based on our current estimate it’s about 30 basis points to 35 basis points for the next year. That’s our current estimate. However, this is based on the current information that we have on the visa changes. And the second part, yes, this particular thing primarily applies to our BPO employees, not on Infosys Limited employees. I think the aggregate impact is very negligible.

Edward Caso

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Okay, terrific. I noticed that the – my other question is on the infrastructure business that we're seemed a bit soft this quarter and it had been particularly strong in a while is that anything in particular to call out?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Edward this is Vishal. No it was a result of the one-timer determination that was paid to us by our client in Q2 that was in the infrastructure area that ended up giving the number in this previous quarter. We are growing infrastructure very well, we are – in fact our infrastructure offering has never been stronger and both from the prospective of the I mean infrastructure is the first beneficiary of automation. So the largest contributor to that 1100 people that I mentioned saving was in infrastructure and we have been pumping a lot of effort into bringing automation into all aspects of infrastructure management, but also working closely with our partners especially Amazon and Microsoft, but also others like EMC and others and helping to bring this Cloud Migration and some of the next generation elastic infrastructure offerings. And also on the innovation side we have been doing a ton of work with start-up companies, we have invested in Vertex Ventures which is an exclusively next generation infrastructure focused venture funds as well as we just did an investment and CloudEndure in the disaster recovery area and infrastructure services a Ki requirement for many of our plants. So I believe that our infrastructure offering has never been stronger and we are quite bullish on that.

Edward Caso

Analyst · Edward Caso of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead

Great, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee.

Moshe Katri

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

Thanks, congratulations and Happy New Year. Okay question on realization, which was down during the quarter. Can we get some more – maybe some more details on some of the drivers here? Does it have to do with the new mix of business and then how comfortable are we back, given the new mix of businesses coming on board that we're going to be able to sustain the margins that we're targeting?

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

Hi, Moshe, Ranga here. You can look at the realizations on sequential basis declined by 2.5% and reported and constant currency 2% and if you compared on an apple-to-apple basis with the previous quarter after taking to account that one-time terminations and sequential decline is 1.5% reported and 1% in constant currency. And likewise between quarter-to-quarter there will be a couple of items which will in the short-term change this decline. In our opinion the year-on-year is probably a more broader trend. When we look at the year-on-year in reported terms it was 4.5% decline and in constant currency terms 1.1% decline. That’s a broad picture on the actual numbers.

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

And hey Moshe, Happy New Year. Beyond the specific numbers that Ranga talked about I mean if you look at on the yearly basis, pricing declined by 4.5% on reported terms and 1.1% on constant currency. So there is clearly a larger scale, structural downward trend here that is at play and I have been talking about that obviously for the last several quarters. We believe that there are – I mean there are of course seasonal fluctuations in this and some quarters where it goes up and something where it’s not as bad. But generally if there is no doubt that there is a declining pricing pressure and my sense is that there are a whole bunch of operational levers that we can test, we can improve – to improve this around the utilization obviously but also the onsite mix and the roll ratios and things of this nature. But clearly the big thing to be done here is automation. And I mentioned I am encouraged that we have demonstrated this revenue of about 1,100 engineers in the last quarter because of automation. We need to bring this number up significantly and we are working on that as we look to the financial year ahead of us this is one of our key priorities to lastly expand the scope of automation. Both in terms of how we bring it to all our projects I mean so far we have been applying it to a subset of our projects, which are more fixed price in nature and so forth, but to also apply these to a much broader range of our projects. But also going beyond that to higher quality of automation meaning going beyond the more mechanisable, repeatable tasks, the tasks requiring more of the troubleshooting diagnostics, the more complex understanding of text, natural language processing, machine learning kinds of activities, which helps us get into the higher level kinds of tasks that our people perform. And even in application development, which is a much more non-mechanisable kind of the task to improve the experience of the developers to simplify the tooling to find framework that can simplify the developers experience. So, automation is the long-term counter to this structural downward pricing pressure that we see.

Moshe Katri

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

Thank you, for that. Just as a follow-up, the PCB number was significantly below of what we've seen a quarter before you did indicate on the first I think in your press conference that you had a couple of deals that was signed later after the quarter closed. Was there a deal slippage issue here? Maybe you can kind of get us some more color on that.

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

Yes, couple of the deals slipped out of Q3 into Q4 we have in fact signed them I mentioned earlier we have already signed $150 million worth of those and we are on the verge in the next few days of signing another one. But that is I don’t deal anything into that we are in a holiday season and so forth these are long-term projects so it doesn’t matter. We have already I mean we see a quite a healthy pipeline in large deals of getting close to $3 billion that we see right now. And when we look at the previous when we look at Q3 we did about somewhere a little bit more than $300 million of something like $367 million worth of large deals already and then if you count one large financial services deal that we did, by our technical definition we don’t count in this manner, but it was in the neighborhood of $600 million. So they do add up already to [define] deals add up to close to a billion anyway and then we have done more now. So our deal wins the win-ratio and deals has improved significantly compared to the past and we feel quite good about what is happening in the large deals area.

Moshe Katri

Analyst · Moshe Katri of Sterne Agee

Thanks for the color. Congratulations.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead.

James Friedman

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

Hi, let me echo my congratulations on the good start to the calendar year and to the fiscal year. I want to ask about the strategy regarding mining the top clients. You know that's really served you well over the first six quarters of your tenure Vishal. The Top 10, 5 and 1 did decline just marginally as a percentage of revenue in fiscal Q3. I guess my question is, as you look to achieve your mid and longer term objectives in 2017 and up to 2020, how important are the top clients in the initiatives to get you to your plans?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

They are very important James the top 5, 10 and 25 clients are a very key focus area for us. I keep an eye on that myself and our entire leadership team does as well. The number that you saw in the last quarter were a result of the seasonalities that I talked about in fact our relationship with our top clients has never been stronger, has never been more strategic than it is now. We are quite excited about the kind of engagements that we are starting to get into with our large clients in the new areas in Design Thinking and structural programs in large scale landscape renewals and mainframe modernizations things of this nature. If you look at the revenue from the top five clients there was a 0.3% decline quarter-on-quarter and then top 10 it was 0.1% quarter-on-quarter, but on a year-on-year basis the revenue from the top five clients grew by 13% and for the top 10 clients grew by 9.4% which is both are higher than the Company average growth and our top most clients has grown by 21.5% on a year-on-year basis. So from a mining perspective, from a strategic relationship perspective the top clients continue to be a huge area of strength for us, of growth for us and I can say anecdotally that our relationship with the top clients has never been stronger.

James Friedman

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

It's a great answer Vishal. I wanted if I could follow-up with one from the overnight. I think Pravin had mentioned that he anticipated the budgets would be flat to down for calendar 2016. You're saying you assigned a $150 million already year-to-date. I guess my question is $150 million a lot or a little. What reference point would we have for that as you start the calendar year?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

I mean it’s just the first week, working week of the year. So I think we are excited about that obviously, but we don’t read anything into it. It is just a way that the timing of these deals I know that’s happening. We have already been awarded another – verbally awarded several $100 million worth of deals already within this year. So like I said earlier we are feeling good about the large deal pipelines. In terms of the response that Pravin gave earlier and Pravin can add to this. We do see a downward pressure on the budgets especially in IT and the imperative that IT and last night – late last night I was talking to one of our clients in Texas and I was – there is this ongoing priority to find savings in the ongoing renewal of their landscapes and then using those savings to fund the growth initiatives and things like that. So even though the budgets are flat to declining, if we are able to be agile, to be able to redeploy projects and resources and if we are able to transform both the help with the renewal of their existing landscapes to simplify these, move to the cloud, find the savings, find the optimization and in parallel sort of their needs, their burden on the next generation digital client oriented strategic initiatives around creating new experiences for consumers and so forth. Then even though these budgets are under pressure, our growth can continue to be strong. And that is something that I wanted to make sure that the declining pressure on clients budgets is not the same as our inability to take advantage of that.

Pravin Rao

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

Pravin here. Just to add to that I don’t think there is any disconnect between the two metrics because whenever the budgets are under pressure, clients will look at more outsourcing and will look at cost savings and today when you look at the business and IT operation side of things there is tremendous pressure on cost, clients are typically looking at 15%, 20% savings for doing similar things. And that’s eventually will naturally will translate into large deals. So you will continue to see a healthy pipeline of large deals and particularly more so and there is a lot of pressure on the budgets.

James Friedman

Analyst · James Friedman of Susquehanna International Group. Please go ahead

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead.

Keith Bachman

Analyst · Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead

Hi, thank you very much. I have two questions. You've mentioned that Infosys you believe can achieve industry leading growth as you look out over the next 12 to 18 months I think starting after the conclusion of this March quarter. I want to try to revisit what do you think industry growth potential is if you look out over the course of the next 12 plus months?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead

I mean right now our visibility based on what we have said concretely on the near-term is that based on what we see from the part of your power business execution within this quarter we’ll get to 12.8 to 13.2 in constant currency terms for this current financial year and we’ll share our guidance for the next year in the April timeframe, but looking at where the industry is at and where the atmosphere in the clients is at I feel quite confident and that will get to the industry leading growth in the coming financial year.

Keith Bachman

Analyst · Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead

Okay. Let me try this one and is you’ve mentioned that if we normalize for the payment that occurred in the previous quarter, you've given some constant currency realization. You've also indicated that year-over-year realization was down about 1%, which was due to pricing? Is that what we should expect going forward, do you think you said that pricing pressure will probably part of what you face should we be thinking about realization trends down in the 1% range year-over-year as we look out over the next couple of quarters or over the course of calendar year 2016?

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead

Well, this is Ranga here. Yes, if you look at as you’ve said that we’ve had a reported basis 4.5% and constant currency 1.1%. And at least in the short-term this is the trend that we see in the short-term, but it is difficult to predict over a long horizon or even in the medium-term horizon what could be the trend line be, but at this point in time yes this is a broad trend that we see at this juncture, but it is difficult to kind of translate into medium-term trend line.

Keith Bachman

Analyst · Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead

Okay, thank you. I’ll see in the floor. Many thanks gentlemen.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Hi, thanks for taking my question. Just I had a couple of questions. From a pricing perspective, Infosys has been quite vocal about it’s willingness to be flexible and pricing and we are even seeing that in your overall pricing. Are your existing clients, particularly ones coming up for renewals asking for pricing breaks? And the second thing is you mentioned to automation you had saved about like 1100 engineers. Does it translate about like $50 million or $60 million or can you just give us some context of what does that translate into a dollar terms?

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

On the 1100 people that we saved that it is too smaller number, right now I mean that’s like less than around 1% of our delivery force. So it is difficult to start to put a tangible number on it. As we get closer to that point where these numbers become more substantive and we can start to assign dollars and percentages to them. We’ll let you know, I expect that to happen over the next few quarters if not sooner, but that is the – what was your other question.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Are your existing clients, particularly ones coming up for renewal, are they coming and asking for pricing breaks? Or is the pricing mostly among kind of new client signups?

Pravin Rao

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

This is Pravin here. We are not - on the rate card perspective we are not seeing any clients coming back and asking for any price discounts, it’s only when the deal comes up for renewal whenever it’s a competitive bit, there is a aggressive pricing because of the competitive nature of the deal and clearly expects 30%, 35% savings. So that’s the trend we are seeing and that’s where we are having the talk about pressure on pricing on the business and IT operation side of business, that is the reality we are seeing. But on the rate card there is not too much of a pressure.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

So would it be fair to say these are mostly kind of new client signing-ups?

Pravin Rao

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

It’s a mix of both I mean there are some deals where we are incumbent and when it comes up for a renewal plans put it out for competitive bit. There are deals where we are not incumbent so it’s a combination of both. And over the last few quarters when we look at large deal wins that we have announced, it’s been a mix of new logos as well as existing, new wins in existing clients.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Great. That's helpful. And just a separate question on - I realized at this point some of your questions, but your clients are still finalizing budgets, however, do you have some sort of initial feedback on budgets and how you’re feeling this year compared to last year when it comes to the kind of client budget?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

I think see overall the sense we get this budget will [indiscernible] remain flat in some industries maybe marginally up but end up flat or marginally down. Only industry where we can talk with confident where we are seeing lot of pressure is on the energy side where there is lot of pressure because of the oil prices there is definitely pressure and budget cuts, but in other cases budgets are typically flat. On a client-by-client basis it varies a little bit. And its similar to the trend we saw in the last year as well. In some sense the notion of budget the annual budget and cycles on the annual budget which we use to see in the past is no longer there given all the volatility many times, we are seeing budget resets on a quarterly basis. So and that is what we would expect given the continued volatile nature of the business. Overall every client is looking at taking cost out and repurposing that savings into newer areas, new transformation areas and so on and that pattern we expect to see in this year as well.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Great and I just let this one more and I'm hearing from many firms that they're growing and expanding their the capital operations in India. And that as they are sort of expanding the captive, do you look at it as a positive, because you have a role in expansion or do you look it as a negative where some of the work that have gone to Infosys is now going to a captive?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Its not such a big shift that is mix any material difference to what we do. We have in fact we’ve helping some of our clients that setting up of their operation so couple of large companies in the financial services industry and we have in fact recouping and training that employees as well as taking over more of their work so creating a true symbiotic partnership that our employees and their employees work together seamlessly and of course they have exceptional expertise and infrastructure and facilities and the operating environment which helps out a lot. So we see both kinds of moments and in some cases our client to set up captive but in other cases they hand over their captives to us or even we provide them help and services in establishing their captives. And then we also some of the work that we have been doing we invested in this ANSR, which is a new kind of set up creation entity here and - who heads our M&A and Corporate Venturing she visited these folks in last couple of days. That is an exiting new dimension but again these things are all not of a large enough scale that it makes a difference right now.

Arvind Ramnani

Analyst · Arvind Ramnani of Gordon Haskett. Please go ahead

Thank you very much and good luck for rest of the year.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Joseph Foresi

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Hi. I wonder if I could ask the pricing question a little bit different. Has your go-to-market, the pricing that you typically use in negotiating deals. Are you now changing that philosophy and pricing more aggressively to take market share as we start to see some of the work you commoditized?

Pravin Rao

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Absolutely not - we’ve in fact we believe that as we improve our engagement with clients and as we bring more and more sophistication and high value into our proposal process and into our engagement. We see that there is – that we have be actually end up having much more differentiated conversations by doing that. So obviously there is a pricing pressure especially in areas there we already have existing relationships or even when we end up getting new opportunity. But the key is always to get ahead of that wave, that wave is there we know that it is coming and it is already here, but the key is to be ahead of that by virtue of a combination of automation that helps improve our productivity faster than the decline in the curve and by virtue of innovation that helps us move especially move our people and our capabilities higher up in the value chain towards things like more innovative projects more next generation, experience and intelligence system oriented projects or in particular using things like Design Thinking and helping identify the most important problems and most game changing kind of opportunities for clients. So I know that there are folks in the industry who talk about the fact that we are sort of lowering prices and so far they want to categorically deny that and – talk instead about the fact that we are relying heavily on our innovative offerings in AiKiDo and – that become more and more a part of the mix that we offer to their clients, which makes our propositions more attractive.

Joseph Foresi

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Got it. And then just on digital. I know you stayed away from percentages of revenues from digital, but maybe you could give us some idea of what that investment is costing you and any kind of color around the financial associated with how you're participating. So in another words are you having to invest heavily there is that coming in at a lower margin, and any goalpost secure to put around percentage of revenue of growth rates?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

So I haven’t stayed away from percentages at all. In fact I have consistently said that 100% of our revenue is digital – we write software for digital computers. Joking aside, I think what people mean by digital is areas where traditionally where heretofore physical experiences and engagements are becoming digitized for the first time like experiences inside stores or creating new channels, which were not there before for engaging with clients and so on. And on these kinds of projects we have tremendous expertise and tremendous growth happening in these kinds of projects. We do a lot of work in there obviously Skava the technology that we acquired helps us to get a tremendous leap ahead. I mean they had nearly doubled the volume on mobile, commerce over Black Friday that just went by and so on. So we don’t see any particular need to invest any more than we are already doing there, we will continue to do that as a part of our normal course of business. I mean this is a service line for us and it is doing well. We have the right ability to teach people there and wherever necessary we hire and we obviously also acquire where necessary. It is true that the nature of those projects is different from the traditional large IT projects or outsourcing projects, these are smaller projects with using a more fragmented collection of technologies and so forth, but that is a way that particular part of business is. One other dimension of that business is something that we are extremely excited about and we have done a lot of leading work on which is in the area of the digitization of the physical world as manifested in the manufacturing and engineering areas, Internet of Things and creating digital trends and things like that. That is an area where we have been growing significantly, our engineering services work, which is largely in that area had significant growth in the last quarter. We have announced the strategic partnership with GE, we have done a lot of work with companies like Mitsubishi in helping design airplanes using new techniques, airplane structures through the large structures and so forth, working with companies like ALSTOM and others. So overall this endeavor of the software eating the world or the physical infrastructure becoming digital is a huge area of growth for us and I believe that we are well positioned in that area.

Joseph Foresi

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Got it. And then last one from me, we've talked about margins, and a plus or minus 1% and we've seen pricing obviously start to continue to decline because visa costs coming in there. And then there are some investments in kind of upgrading the skills for digital. Are you still comfortable with that band going forward or how should we think about the margin profile if we want to?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

So for now we are comfortable with that band of 25 plus or minus 1 and our aspiration is to get to 30% by 2020 and the more time that goes by the more comfortable we feel in seeing a path to get there. Obviously we are not going to get there in the near-term, but we do feel comfortable that with the moves that we are making we have a trajectory to get there. If that ever changes, we’ll let you know, but for know I feel quite comfortable with that. Ranga you want to add anything to that.

Ranganath Mavinakere

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Yes, Vishal that’s right. We continue to reiterate our medium-term goal of 25% plus or minus. If you look at the first nine months of the current year, we have been at 24.8%. Well, I think at the same time there are certain short-term levers and certain levers which by definition are more medium-term in nature. For example, the short-term lever is really in terms of utilization where our utilization as you noticed is 80.6. However, if you look that about a year ago, we used to be in late 70’s now consistently in the last four quarters we have been just above 80. And we believe that there is scope for us to improve our utilization beyond what we have at the current level. Likewise, if you look at our on-site mix is at 29.5%. It has gone up by 1% year-on-year and we do have some levers there, but that’s some more gradual lever than the utilization. Likewise, the subcontractor cost or the on-site ratios and employee costs as the percentage of revenues. These are some of the levers something like utilization is more short-term and productivity improvement that Vishal touched upon really is a lever to automation that we hope to kind of counter some of these pressures, but that’s more like medium-term.

Joseph Foresi

Analyst · Joe Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

Analyst · Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Yes, thanks for the opportunity. Vishal, one question around the demand environment going into next year. So if you look at it, there is clearly macro uncertainty around the world. We have seen kind of commoditization in the maintenance business and discretionary hasn’t picked up back well. And clearly there are some verticals, specific headwinds that the industry is facing. So with all that in the backdrop, do you see any areas which can potentially take demand higher next year versus this year or is it going to be more a function of wait and watch?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

I mean there is – Rishi there is always a – we operate our business in this greater economic environment. And there is obviously a lot of anxiety that’s around what is happening in China and with oil and things of this nature, but by and large there are huge growth areas in the world around us, there are huge growth market as well as in the big disruption that is happening and if you just look at the mainframe footprint in the world around us there is a massive mainframe footprint and we are very uniquely positioned to help our businesses safely, reliably, non-disruptively move off of this old mainframe stuff towards modern, agile dramatically cheaper cloud infrastructure. And the other opportunities I mean the conversion that we are having with Digital earlier in the previous question. So could there be things that happen that affect us all so badly that things goes out, of course, but looking at the way I see the near-term future I see that the when the times are bad there is need for innovation and when the times are good there is need for innovation.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

Analyst · Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Thanks. And the second thing is more on your target or basically aspiration over a five-year period on revenues and margins. So clearly, looking at the current trajectory, we are kind of on-track to achieve $20 billion and we have acquisitions and other things to achieve around that. But on the margin side with the medium term, range that we're talking about is it fair to assume that a large part of the margin improvement will be back ended and that too despite the potential acquisition revenues that we might have over the next 3 years to 5 years. Just wanted to understand, basically how it can potentially play out and then result in improvement in our revenue per employee metrics?

Vishal Sikka

Analyst · Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

The way I see that I mean it is still early and this is still an aspirational goal $20 billion, 30% and $80,000 and revenue per employee, but as time goes by we got closer to it gets more in reach and we start to see paths to get there. My sense is that the $20 billion, a curve that points to $20 billion will show up first then the curve that points to the 30% margin and then the curve that points to the $80,000 revenue per employee. Right now if you look at the situation the revenue per employee is in fact going down because the pricing pressure is higher and the utilization and operational improvement haven’t kicked in yet and in particular the benefits of automation haven’t kicked in yet enough to compensate for that, but I expected that will happen. Although, again in terms of the slopes of those three curves, the first curve to flatten out will be the revenue growth curve, the second one is with the margin and the third one will be the revenue for employee. That is my sense right now.

Rishi Jhunjhunwala

Analyst · Rishi Jhunjhunwala of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead

Great. Thank you and best of luck. End of Q&A

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen that was the last question. I now hand the floor back to Mr. Sandeep Mahindroo for closing comments.

Sandeep Mahindroo

Analyst

Thanks everyone for spending time with us on this call. We look forward to interacting with you again. Have a good day.