Thierry Delaporte
Analyst · Sudheer Guntupalli from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead
Aparna thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Those of you joining in from India, many of you maybe coming out of very difficult period during the second wave of the pandemic, so I wish you well. And with all humility and hope, I believe the future holds better days for everyone around the world. This is not an experience that we can write off lightly. Many of our colleagues and their loved ones have experienced grief, stress, suffering. Over the past 15 months, Wipro has stepped up in every way possible to support those affected. Our COVID task force, led by Saurabh and our COO, Sanjeev, have done everything possible for our colleagues. We ramped up efforts around oxygen provisioning, COVID testing. We established isolation centers in many Indian cities. We partnered with hospitals and managed hospital admissions for many of our employees who are stationed onsite with family members in India, Wipro’s task force have managed their specialization and care of their family. Globally, we are continuing to offer COVID care sick leaves and enhanced medical insurance coverage. Unfortunately, we lost some of our colleagues to the virus during the second wave. In some cases, we have a spouse or such an employee has sought jobs with us, we have treated as a priority and we have offered them a relevant role in Wipro. And we have recognized the emotional toil on people, so mental health resources are being made available for our colleagues around the world. Presently, about 56% of our employees in India are vaccinated and we will continue to provide vaccination facility in our campuses. But more broadly, for our community, we continue to operate a dedicated COVID hospital in our Pune campus, which has treated almost 6,000 patients so far, providing some relief to the city and the small things that we were able to do have gone a long way to bring relief, leading us through this extraordinary time. I want to thank my leadership team for steering our people and our business and every one of our employees for being such strong custodians of the spirit of Wipro and for giving us the best. This has definitely made Wipro stronger, more resilient, more dependable company than ever before. This actually reflects in our results in the last few quarters and also in what I hear from customers. They say they are seeing a more innovative mindset and operational agility from Wipro’s team. Clearly, our new business strategy, simplified operating model and gold approach is starting to pay off. Our Q1 performance therefore continues to show considerable expansion and buoyancy. Our revenue growth trajectory has continued to show sharp improvements. Bookings have remained healthy and our execution showed remarkable perseverance. Let me share now some specifics. Our revenue growth during the quarter was 12.2% in reported terms and 12% on constant currency terms, which is well ahead of the top end of our guidance range both on an overall basis and excluding Capco. This translates into a 21.3% year-on-year growth in constant currency terms. Not only is this the best ever quarterly result, Q1 also saw us report the highest organic sequential growth that we have delivered in 38 quarters. This tremendous growth was really led by strong volumes across almost all markets across all sectors and service offerings. Our billable headcount addition during the quarter, therefore, was the strongest ever. Revenues from our latest acquisition, Capco was also ahead of the guidance. Thank you very much. Sorry to all of you. I heard that I lost you actually couple of seconds before I realized it. So I am going back to the specifics. So, first is our revenue growth during the quarter was 12.2% in reported terms, 12% on constant currency terms, which is well ahead of the top end of our guidance range, both on an overall basis, but also excluding capital. This translates into a 21.3% year-on-year growth in constant currency terms. Not only is this the best ever quarterly results, Q1 also saw us report the highest organic sequential growth that we have delivered in 38 quarters. This tremendous growth was led by strong volumes across almost all sectors, all markets and service offerings. Our billable headcount addition during the quarter, therefore, was the strongest ever. Revenues from our latest acquisition, Capco was also ahead of the guidance. Now, looking at the environment, the demand environment is robust and the quality of our overall pipeline is better than before. Our growth channel addition during the quarter was strong and we continue to increase our participation in deals in the marketplace. We closed 8 large deals, resulting in a TCV of over $715 million. Surely, all markets are witnessing solid demand. But in the Americas 1 market, large deal wins were exceptionally strong. At this point, we are seeing a good mix of large, medium-sized and smaller deals. At the announcement of acquisition of Capco, we have shared with you that the long-term sustainable operating margin band post the dilution of Capco was to be between 17% and 17.5%. During the quarter, we have delivered margins well above that range at 18.8% after consolidating 2 months of Capco results and significantly investing in talent and supply chain. We have added over 12,000 employees on a net basis, which is 80% of what we have added in all of last financial year and the highest in the last decade. Now, let me add some color to the underlying business performance. All numbers are in constant currency for ease of reference. There is significant traction across all our markets and our growth is broad-based. The top three markets grew double-digits on a year-on-year basis even without capital. In Americas 1, we grew 18% year-on-year. Most of the sectors have seen strong traction, with health and consumer verticals leading from the front. In Americas 2, we grew 24% year-on-year driven by a strong volume increase. Capco obviously has further elevated this performance. The demand in the BFSI sector has remained strong across all service offerings this quarter. The high-tech business grew by 26% year-on-year, while our manufacturing business is making a recovery slowly. Our European business has delivered a year-on-year growth of 32.5% on the back of several large deal wins as well as the Capco acquisition. UK, Southern Europe and Germany led this growth. Our APMEA markets grew moderately at 0.8% year-on-year and we are now seeing improved environment in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. The pipeline in these markets, are healthy and growing. From a service offering standpoint, our IBS global business line grew by 18.3% quarter-over-quarter and 25.3% year-on-year. Most of the sub-practices showed a healthy growth. We are seeing increased demand in new age offerings like cloud transformation. The shift to cloud is unmistakable. We announced a number of cloud-related wins in different industries and geographies in the last few months. And to further our growth and commitment to clients and hyperscaler partners, we will be making a significant announcement about our cloud business in the coming weeks, which I encourage you to look out for. Our iCORE global business line grew by 3.7% sequentially and 15.9% year-on-year. Both of our large scale practices, infrastructure services and digital operations grew in double-digits on a year-on-year basis. Our top 10 customers grew 13.4% Q-on-Q and 17.9% year-on-year in constant currency terms. We added 2 customers to the over $100 million account category and 2 new customers in the over $50 million account category. Now, let me give you a sense of the kind of deals we are winning. First, we secured a multiyear multimillion dollar contract this quarter from a U.S. based healthcare company to consolidate the entire on-premise and cloud infrastructure operations as well as end-user services using intelligent automation. The consolidation will create attractive opportunities to streamline operations, enhance user experience and ease the application portfolio migration to cloud by using the digital first approach. Second, a leading European automobile manufacturer has already does a contract to transform and modernize their Internet and cloud security access, so they can meet the requirements of remote working. Our solution will provide protection from advanced cyber threats, enhanced security compliance, protect corporate data leaks, reduce cost and provide scalability. Another example, a leading U.S. based distributor of plumbing supplies has selected Wipro to support their cloud transformation journey by embedding quality engineering in the development lifecycle, encompassing CRM implementation, data migration and legacy applications. Additionally, Wipro will provide managed services for cloud ERP covering multiple business functions and resulting in improved business agility and customer experience across more than 1,400 store locations. As most of you will know, we completed our acquisition of Capco at the end of April 2021. Over the last 2 months, we have made sure that they are gradually inducted into Wipro and start to feel at home. While these are early days obviously, we continue to build good momentum on our joint go-to-market efforts. Not surprisingly, the synergy pipeline is shaping well and we have started seeing some early wins. For example, we have the joint consulting win with a leading global payments provider, where we will create a migration framework for 950 regional banks and merchants to move to a new digital platform for debit cards. We will continue to announce more such wins for sure. And finally, on to our outlook for the next quarter, we have guided for revenue growth of 5% to 7%. Even at the lower end of this guidance, we will cross the $10 billion annual run-rate of revenues, which we are very excited about. While we don’t guide for full year, you know that, the Q1 performance and the Q2 guidance sets us up for well ahead of double-digit growth for the full year, even excluding Capco. While sharing with you our new strategy last year, I had said that talent will be a critical success factor. This pandemic has overturned notions of how organizations traditionally approached talent engagement and development. The dramatic shift to a remote working environment has made labor across all sectors and markets more mobile and liberated. Therefore, higher attrition has become a universal issue. Wipro acknowledges this and is adapting quickly. We have doubled down on increasing intake from campuses across the world as well as reskilling our existing workforce. We will onboard 33% more freshers in FY ‘22 versus the previous year. We also intend to onboard 6,000 freshers in Q2 itself. Growth is our priority and we will ensure that talent supply is not a constraint to our ambition. In the short-term, we will experience some inflationary pressure in people costs. We have announced a salary hike for 80% of our employees effective September 1, the second hike in this calendar year. Now to summarize, we are pleased with the sharp improvement in our growth trajectory and we are optimistic about building on that momentum in the remaining quarters of the financial year. On that note, let me hand over to Jatin for his comments on the financials. Jatin, over to you.