CGI Inc. (GIBA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. I would now like to introduce the Vice President Executive, Mr. Benoit Dube.

[Interpreted] Thank you. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Board of Directors and management, I would like to welcome you to this Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Once again, this year, our AGM is being held by audio webcast. As usual, it will be conducted in French and in English and simultaneous translation is also available. Using the webcast setting at the top right of your screen, you can select your preferred language or listen to the floor feed in real time without translation. The webcast platform allow participants to attend the meeting virtually for shareholders to ask questions, and for registered shareholders and duly appointed proxies to vote at the meeting if they haven't done so in advance. Release of January 26, 2022, we will cover in this meeting, the items of business on the agenda, followed by brief remarks by our executives. A review of the financial results of the company as well as a discussion on our outlook, were presented earlier this morning by our CEO and CFO during a conference call that has been archived on our website. We encourage you to listen to it for more information about the company as we will not cover such topics in detail at this meeting. We would now like to draw your attention to the information on the screen. Our presentations and statements made during the meeting may be forward-looking and be subject to risks and uncertainties. Therefore, we recommend that you review and consider all relevant risk factors identified in our continuous disclosure documents and not place undue reliance on such statements.

[Interpreted] Since the meeting will be held virtually, we have established some rules to ensure everything runs smoothly. We would like to remind you that only those persons whose names appeared on the shareholder register at the close of business on Tuesday, December 7, 2021, our record date and duly appointed proxy holders are entitled to vote at the meeting. Guests may attend the meeting but are not able to ask questions or vote. Please take note of the following in order to log in and register your vote. To login, registered shareholders must enter the 15-digit control number and the password CGI2021 found on their proxy form. Proxy holders of nonregistered shareholders who wish to login must follow the instructions under proxy form or voting instruction form and enter the 4-letter ID code e-mailed to them by Computershare and the password CGI2021. In both cases, the window on the right-hand side of your screen can be used to navigate between the items being voted on. You must make your selection and confirm each vote afterwards. Voting will be open for the duration of the meeting. You can vote at each resolution or wait until the last item on the agenda has been put to the vote before voting on all the resolutions at the same time. In this case, you will have 1 minute to record your vote. All votes cast by registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders at the meeting shall be counted and added to the votes received by proxy.

And newly appointed proxy holders may submit questions at any time during the meeting by using the question box at the bottom left of your screen. When submitting a question, please provide your full name and, if applicable, any fund or person on whose behalf you are acting. Relevant questions will be answered during the Q&A session following the adjournment of the business of the meeting. Any relevant questions that cannot be answered during the meeting will be posted online along with the company's answer.

I would now invite Mr. Serge Godin, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board to open the meeting.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Benoit. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I would like to welcome all of you who have joined us today. We are very glad to host you today. Before we begin, I would like to introduce my colleagues present today Julie Godin, Co-Chair of the Board, Executive Vice President, Strategic Planning and Corporate Development; George Schindler, President and CEO, and Francois Boulanger, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Benoit Dube. In accordance with the notice of meeting that you received, our proposed agenda is as follows: one, the presentation of financial results for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2021; two, the election of the Board of Directors; three, the appointment of the auditor; and fourth, two shareholder proposals. We will end the meeting and invite questions from shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders. Please note that I will act as meeting chair and Benoit Dube will act as secretary. Benoit were all notices and other relevant documents sent to shareholders?

Again, this year, the company made use of the Canadian notice and access rules for the delivery to shareholders of our management proxy circular, management's discussion and analysis, annual audited consolidated financial statements for the years ended September 30, 2021 and 2020 as well as other materials related to the meeting. Instead of receiving paper copies of such documents, shareholders received the Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders and notice of availability of meeting materials. This notice explains how to access the documents online, how to request a paper copy of the documents and presents the items of business for the meeting. Shareholders also received a voting instruction form or form of proxy. Computershare, the service provider responsible for mailing our proxy materials, confirmed to the company that the materials relating to the meeting have been made available to shareholders entitled to vote. As secretary, I am including a copy of the notice of meeting, the management proxy circular, the affidavit and other documents distributed in relation to this AGM into the meeting record.

Thank you, Benoit. The company's bylaw are hereby appoint Steve Gilbert and Clare Girard of Computershare to act as scrutineers for the meeting. I have been advised that based on the proxies received and on proxy holders and shareholders present on the webcast today, we have quorum. [Interpreted] I would like to ask the scrutineers to submit their report to the Secretary as soon as it is ready so that it can be included in the meeting record. I would also like to ask the secretary to file in the record of this meeting of the minutes of the last General Meeting of Shareholders held on January 27, 2021. The first item on the agenda is the presentation of the results for the year ended September 30, 2021, including the financial statements, the auditor's report and the related management discussion and analysis. These documents were previously made available to shareholders through notification and access procedures. In addition, a paper copy was sent to any shareholder upon their request. These documents are also available on cgi.com and through the links provided on this platform. They've also been filed with the appropriate regulatory authorities in Canada and the United States. Since you have had the opportunity to review them, I would ask the secretary to include these documents in the meeting record. The second item on the agenda is the election of directors. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Tim Hearn who has decided to retire as a CGI Director and as our Lead Director and not stand for reelection this year. On behalf of the Board of Directors and all of our members, I would like to thank him warmly for his invaluable advice, counsel and leadership throughout the years as well as for his remarkable contribution to CGI's success. I declare nominations open.

On the recommendation of the Corporate Governance Committee, the Board of Directors proposes that the following 16 nominees be elected as directors of the company. Our Board of Directors would, therefore, continue to be composed of a majority of independent directors. In fact, 12 independent directors and 4 from management. I am proud to introduce the nominees for election to our Board of Directors. Alain Bouchard, George Cope, Paule Dore, Julie Godin, Andre Imbeau, Gilles Labbe, Michael Pedersen, Stephen Poloz, Mary Powell, Alison Reed, Michael Roach, George Schindler, Kathy Waller, Joakm Westh, Frank Witter and myself. Frank Witter is a new nominee standing for election to our Board of Directors this year. Thank you, Frank, for your confidence.

[Interpreted] I would ask for a motion for the election of these nominees as directors, please.

My name is Rachel [indiscernible], and I'm a CGI shareholder. I move that the 16 people who were just introduced by the meeting chair be elected to the company's Board of Directors.

Thank you, Mrs. [indiscernible].

Hello. My name is Andrew [indiscernible]. I am a CGI shareholder. I second the motion.

Thank you, Mr. [indiscernible]. So we are now ready to proceed to the vote. Please note that you are asked to vote for each of the 16 candidates proposed for election to our Board of Directors.

[Interpreted] Next on the agenda is the appointment of the auditor. The Board of Directors on the recommendation of the Audit and Risk Management Committee proposes that PricewaterhouseCoopers be reappointed as the company's auditor. I would ask for motion to approve the appointment of the auditor.

[Interpreted] My name is [indiscernible], I'm a CGI shareholder. I move that PricewaterhouseCoopers be appointed as the company's auditor until the next shareholders' Annual Meeting and that the Audit and Risk Management Committee be authorized to fix the compensation of the auditor.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Mr. [indiscernible].

My name is [indiscernible]. I am a CGI shareholder and I second the motion.

Thank you, [indiscernible]. We are now ready to proceed to the vote. Please vote on the appointment of the PricewaterhouseCoopers as CGI's auditor. [Voting]

[Interpreted] The last item on the agenda concerns 2 proposals submitted by the Mouvement d’éducation et de défense des actionnaires, the MÉDAC. They can be found under Appendix C of the management proxy circular along with the responses from our Board of Directors. As stated in the proxy circular, it was agreed that only 2 proposals would be put to a vote today. I would like to invite Mr. Willie Gagnon of Médac to introduce those proposals. Over to you, Mr. Gagnon. And can you please introduce them within 2 minutes.

[Interpreted] Thank you. Mr. Chairman. Can you hear me?

[Interpreted] Yes.

My name is Willie Gagnon. As every year, I make a representation of Médac on behalf of [indiscernible] as we are shareholders of the company. We have submitted this year 5 proposals. So 1, I had to do for the disclosure of the presence of women at the various high-level positions, and we came to an agreement with you not to submit this to the vote in view of the good practices put in place by your company. And we have 2 other proposals that we sent you about consultative votes. So those 2 other proposals will not be submitted to vote this year, unfortunately, but we also submitted 2 proposals that will put to vote. For instance, for the company to increase formal employee representation and highly strategic decision-making, we would have liked to have a discussion about this in the U.K., where CGI has activities. We would have liked the CGI to take into account the best practices that are used in most other places in Europe. But since you feel that you have the best practices, we find it unfortunate. So we ask the shareholders to support this proposal. And there is also a second proposal about the French language. I asked shareholders to look into this because this is absolutely reasonable. It should be adopted by all companies instead of having to endure [indiscernible] about the language in the media. This has to do with social responsibility of the company towards the collectivity at large. And for the past 25 years, Médac has been sending this proposal. And we've certainly been in touch the most often with CGI about this. So this is exceptional. But in one of your reply to say that Médac sometimes refuses some generic request doesn't reflect reality in view of the constant exchange and frequent exchange that we have. Everything that we mentioned here have been mentioned to the company on a great number of occasions. So we ask shareholders to approve these proposals, and we ask all interested parties and the community at large to publicly support this. So thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Mr. Gagnon. We have someone to support Proposal 1 and 2. So would someone like to second proposal #1 and Proposal #2 from Médac.

[Interpreted] Can you still hear me, Mr. Chairman?

[Interpreted] Yes. [indiscernible] should be on the phone line right now. I don't know exactly which line they are, but...

[Interpreted] Hello, can you hear me?

[Interpreted] Yes.

My name is [indiscernible]. I'm a proxy holder, and I second these proposals.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Mr. [indiscernible]. Regarding proposal #1, I have been informed that 98.61% of the votes sent by proxy are against this proposal and that 1.39% of the votes are in favor. For the reasons outlined in the management proxy circular, the Board recommends voting against proposal #1. We are now ready to vote. Regarding Proposal #2, I have been informed that 99.51% of the votes sent by proxy are against this proposal and that 0.49% of the votes are in favor. Again, I would like to remind you that for the reasons outlined in the management proxy circular, the Board recommends voting against proposal #2. We are now ready to vote. We have now covered all the items to be voted on at this meeting. The voting time for these items will end in 1 minute. If you have not already done so, please submit your vote. We will now take a 1-minute break to allow you to vote on the resolutions if you have not done so already. [Voting]

Now closed. The scrutineers have confirmed the following preliminary results. All directors were elected with, on average, more than 99.15% of the vote cast. PricewaterhouseCoopers has been reappointed as auditor of the company with 99.57% of the vote cast. Shareholder proposal #1 has not been approved with 98.61% of the vote cast against the proposal. Shareholder Proposal #2 has not been approved with 99.51% of the vote casts against the proposal.

[Interpreted] Resolutions concerning the election of board directors and the appointment of the auditor are therefore adopted while neither of the shareholder proposals were adopted. A report on the final vote results will be available on the SEDAR website and a report on the final results of the election of directors will be published through press release. As all items on the meeting's agenda has been covered, I declare the formal part of this Annual General Shareholders Meeting closed. We are now happy to share with you some insights on our last fiscal year, including financial results and prospects for the future. I am proud to say that we have emerged from the second year of the pandemic in an even stronger position. Our culture, the balance of our diverse presence across industry sectors and regions, and our end-to-end consulting services offerings serve as a steadfast foundation. This foundation has enabled us to build on our strengths and deliver on our commitments for all 3 of our stakeholders; our clients, our employees who we call members as they are owners and you, our fellow shareholders. Importantly, we have always sought to achieve the best equilibrium among our 3 stakeholders, all while serving as a responsible corporate citizen. This past June, we celebrated our 45th anniversary, a key testament of our ability to sustainably deliver value to all of our stakeholders. We would like to thank our clients for their ongoing trust and support, and to all of our CGI members around the world, we would like to recognize your outstanding talent and thank you too for your dedication for -- to serving our clients. Next on our agenda, I will invite Francois to review the financial results for fiscal year 2021 and the first quarter of fiscal 2022. George to discuss operational highlights for fiscal 2021 and our growth outlook for 2022 and beyond. And Julie to provide our perspective on CGI's future and perenniality. Before we go to Francois, I invite you to watch this short video about how CGI positively contribute to the lives of millions of people around the world. [Presentation]

Over to you Francois.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Serge. CGI ended fiscal year 2021 with strong financial results for the benefit of all 3 of our stakeholders, our clients, members and shareholders. We ended fiscal year 2021 with revenues of $12.1 billion. As planned, in the second half of the fiscal year, constant currency revenue increased by 4.9% compared to the second half of fiscal year 2020 due to the leadership and discipline of our teams as well as growth in client demand. This strong client demand drove a robust bookings resulting in a 114% book-to-bill ratio for fiscal year 2021. This was up nearly $2 billion compared to fiscal year 2020. Moving to profitability, excluding acquisition and integration costs, earnings per share increased by 11% driven by a combination of revenue growth, improved business mix, operational excellence and share buybacks. Our EBIT expanded to 16.1% in 2021 compared to 15.3% in the previous fiscal year. Cash provided by operating activities was $2.1 billion or 17.4% of revenue. Compared to the same time frame last year, this was an improvement of 9% or $177 million. In fiscal 2021, we invested $1.9 billion in our build and buy profitable growth strategy, comprised of $301 million back into our business, mainly in IP and managed services engagements, $99 million on business acquisitions and $1.5 billion to buy back our stock. In the year, CGI was proud to gain a new group of investors through our first bond offering raising in the process $1.8 billion across the U.S. and Canada. We used a large portion of these funds to prepay the USD 1.25 billion loan facility that was due in 2023. More importantly, with this debt raise, the weighted average maturity of our debt has increased from 1.6 years to 4.9 years with 100% being fixed interest debt. In delivering these superior results, the value for our clients has been significant. I will now turn it over to our CEO, George, to comment on some of the ways our consultants and professionals have supported clients this past year. George?

[Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you, Francois. Good morning, everyone. As Francois said, CGI has started the year strong. We have created value for our shareholders. The commitment of our professionals remains strong, so does the trust of our clients. We earned their trust this past year by helping them realize the full potential of digitization by partnering with clients to innovate and adopt newer technologies at a faster pace. We are helping them to deliver on customer and citizen expectations while reducing costs and driving clients' growth and profitability. For example, with France-based FashionCube, we are partnering on a 10-year managed services engagement to help unite and transform the technology capabilities of their 6 leading fashion brands in the European market. For the European Space Agency, we are collaborating to develop a new service combining recent advances in earth observation, machine learning and cloud computing to help the agency better map and monitor the impact of wildfires on people and to the planet. With Nexelis, an international life sciences firm, we are partnering to support the execution of their 3-year technology transformation road map to modernize, secure and manage the company's end-to-end technology value chain. For OP, Finland's largest financial services group, we are collaborating with their insurance business to deliver advanced analytics and automation support, allowing them to enhance their customer and employee experience as well as generate cost savings. For Western Power Distribution in the U.K., we are helping to enable the decarbonized energy grid of the future by building a digital network model using data from core operational systems and CGI's Open Grid 360 IP platform. For AT&T, we are delivering digital design studio as a service, to create a unified vision for customer experience across multiple commercial platforms, 30 products and more than 50 development teams. This is improving the company's agility and reducing their overall time to market. With Volkswagen, we are partnering on an enterprise-wide robotic process automation initiative to implement factory-based automation solutions, delivering efficiency improvements and substantive cost savings. And for the U.S. centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, we are leveraging our digital modernization services to support the transition of their legacy platforms into the cloud. As I will share in a few minutes, CGI remains well positioned to help clients modernize and digitize. Now I will turn it back to Francois to present the highlights from the first quarter of 2022. Francois?

[Interpreted] Thank you, George. This morning, we announced our results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2022. Revenues of $3.1 billion, up 6.8% in constant currency from the same fiscal quarter last year. Adjusted EBIT of $521 million, an increase of $26 million year-over-year and a margin of 16.9% compared to 16.4% in the same fiscal quarter last year. Net earnings of $367 million, up 7% and a margin of 11.9% compared to 11.4% for the same fiscal quarter last year. Diluted EPS of $1.49, up 12.9%. Net earnings, excluding specific items of $369 million and diluted earnings per share of $1.50. Bookings of $3.6 billion for a book-to-bill ratio of 116.5%. And finally, cash from operating activities of $484 million, representing 15.7% of revenue. In addition, yesterday, our board approved the extension of CGI's share repurchase program until February 2023, allowing us to purchase up to 18.8 million shares over the next 12 months. We continue to utilize our strong cash position to drive growth in our business, with cash of $1.2 billion on hand and a $1.5 billion revolver that remains fully accessible, we have $2.7 billion readily available. In addition, we now have access to the public debt market to support our build and buy profitable growth strategy. Now I will turn it back to George to discuss the outlook for CGI's continued growth in fiscal year 2022. George?

Thank you, Francois. Today, I'm pleased to outline some of the key elements of CGI's growth agenda for the year and how we are investing in the talent and capabilities necessary to expand our services and global footprint, all in support of our clients' evolving business transformation. Over the past few years, we have discussed the move to digitize every aspect of business, governance and society. This dynamic remains at the center of every opportunity in front of us. In fact, client demand for our services continues to accelerate across every industry sector as technology becomes further embedded across the entirety of clients' business value chain. Clients are addressing their digital strategies more holistically with more organizations now considering their transformations to be continuous. Taking this approach allows clients to rapidly adapt to the evolving expectations of their stakeholders. CGI's positioning as a leading global consulting and services firm is centered around our end-to-end portfolio of offerings, enabling us to support every stage of a client's transformation, including business and strategic IT consulting to design the transformation, systems integration to build, integrate and implement what we design, managed services to efficiently run and operate what we design and implement and intellectual property to accelerate business results. This client demand for end-to-end digitization is the key driver for CGI's planned growth in fiscal 2022 and beyond. This informs the investments we are making this year, which are, first and foremost, an industry knowledge to help clients in their quest to build the right future and technology expertise to support them in building it right and offering intellectual property assets to enable them to build with speed. And finally, the operational excellence to help clients operate and evolve their planned future state. In each of the 4 areas I just outlined, we have set annual and 3-year objectives that will enable us to achieve our profitable growth plans. Starting with the right industry knowledge to consult with clients and help them balance business vision with business practicality. We plan to grow our strategic business and IT consulting services revenue by 15% to 20% on a compound annual growth rate basis over the next 3 years. Our technology expertise helps clients balance the potential of technology with the reality of complex enterprise delivery. To do this requires our experts to have the right industry skills and also the right technology skills. We increased by 33% our fiscal year 2022 investment in member training and digital technologies, and we aim to add over 15,000 member certifications of Global Alliance Partner Solutions over the next 3 years. While expertise is critical, it is only part of the equation. Clients also need us to help them with the tooling, methods and solutions required to accelerate business transformation. Therefore, our plan is to reach 30% of our revenue derived from CGI intellectual property by 2025. Lastly, operational excellence is clearly an important element that our clients are looking for, not only for us to be a safe pair of hands, but also for us to deliver in a cost-efficient manner. Therefore, our 3-year plan is to have a headcount increase of 15% on a compound annual growth rate basis across all of our global delivery centers, particularly in our India offshore centers. Taken together, these 4 investments will ensure that CGI continues to be best positioned to help organizations drive forward their digital value chain transformation. Now as always, we are committed to executing our growth strategy through both build and buy. On the buy side, we increased our M&A team by 25% this year to facilitate our stated plan of allocating $1 billion of capital to merge with metro market services firms and/or merge with firms focused on delivering proprietary intellectual property. As mentioned on our first quarter earnings call this morning, these investments in our people and services are already delivering results on behalf of our 3 stakeholders. Clients recognize the depth and breadth of our knowledge and expertise. We continued to earn record level client satisfaction scores across every dimension we measure, including the level of innovation we bring. As a people-centered firm, we know our success is founded upon the strength of our consultants and professionals, 85% of whom are CGI shareholders. We ended our first quarter with 82,000 members, a net increase of 6,000 consultants and professionals compared to Q1 last year. Our member satisfaction scores also continued to be at record levels, given our investments in career development, digital tooling and health and well-being. I want to thank our talented and dedicated experts around the world who bring the best of CGI to our clients each day. For you, our shareholders, we recognize the importance of both short- and long-term value creation. Over the past decade, CGI averaged 13.7% constant currency growth and over 20% average annual share price appreciation. During the same time frame, adjusted EPS increased by 277%. This year, our plan is to once again achieve double-digit EPS accretion with an increasing proportion coming from revenue growth given the opportunities ahead of us. In closing, CGI remains one of the few firms with the scale, reach, capability and commitment to be a client partner of choice and an employer of choice. We remain committed to delivering accelerated revenue growth and double-digit EPS accretion for fiscal 2022, ensuring we continue to be an investment of choice. I will now turn it over to Julie, our Co-Chair, to provide our perspective on CGI's longer-term future and perenniality. Julie?

Thank you, George. As we look ahead, several key macro trends and opportunities are shaping CGI's future. Today, I will highlight why we strongly believe we are well positioned to continue to grow and lead in the coming decades. But first, I would like to start with a few words about our history as our dream and constitution are at the core of what makes us unique. The dream at CGI permeates our culture and identity. And this has been a fact since we were founded 45 years ago. At that time, we were convinced that the world will continue to change rapidly, and that technology will be at the heart of these changes. We wanted to help our clients leverage technology to create new opportunities for their organizations. And this meant we would need to possess business expertise and stay abreast of market dynamics, while also mastering technologies and being aware of emerging ones. As such, we needed to attract and retain highly talented professionals and leaders. We also put in place mechanisms to constantly listen to our clients to ensure we were expanding our capabilities in line with their ever-evolving needs. [Interpreted] In addition to our dream, our skills and our constitution, our culture has 3 characteristics that set us apart from our competitors. And these features are more important than ever if we are to continue recruiting and retaining top talent at CGI. First, we are people-centric. From our ownership culture and our client proximity model to our engagement in the communities in which we live and work, people are at the heart of everything we do. Second, we are a pragmatic facts-driven company. We draw on our experience to collaborate with our clients and build concrete strategies that produce tangible sustainable results. And with 82,000 professionals in 40 countries, we leverage our global presence and rigorous management frameworks to provide our clients with the best possible approach and operational excellence that they can count on. With all this in mind, let's take a look at what the future holds in the long term. Our business planning cycle provides for regular consultations with our 3 stakeholders, namely our members, our clients and our shareholders. This year, due to the ongoing pandemic, in addition to consulting with our stakeholders, we went beyond our 3-year plan to identify trends that will help us prepare for the coming decades. This kind of initiative requires a solid understanding of both the geographies and the economic sectors in which we operate. That is why we first consulted with each of our board members. As you know, over the years, the board has carefully selected its members based on their extensive expertise, ensuring that collectively, they represent the economic sectors we serve as well as our clients' geographies. We also surveyed our internal industry experts and external senior executives. This fiscal year has provided new insights and has been truly inspiring, given the many changes we have experienced over the past 2 years. We have identified some key trends that we believe will create opportunities for CGI today, I'll go over 3 of them. Let's start with the changing dynamics of globalization. While globalization of trade has been synonymous with economic growth in some countries, they have brought unexpected constraints that were intensified during the pandemic. In fact, many countries have realized that they depend on fragile global supply chains. As a result, governments are beginning to review their sovereignty in strategic areas such as biotechnology, data privacy, energy and telecommunications infrastructure. This will result in substantial investments by our clients as they seek to reconfigure global supply chains. We already see a considerable demand for CGI's management and technological expertise in these areas, particularly for our high-end management consultants. The second trend we are seeing has to do with climate change and energy transition. The world is in a race to decarbonize and reinvent energy systems and such efforts require massive investments in research, development and innovation. This amounts to a major transformation within the global economic ecosystem. Our teams are already working with our clients to support and accelerate their energy transition initiatives. We are also doing our part by committing to our own net 0 carbon emission targets. The last trend I would like to share with you today concerns demographics. An aging population worldwide is having a major impact on the global workforce as well as on governments, especially in the area of social services. With many OECD countries already spending 50% of their budgets on health care, they will need to find solutions quickly to maintain and improve services they provide to their citizens. These countries will, therefore, need to invest heavily in their digital transformation and continue to leverage public private partnerships. CGI has a clear advantage here as this is part of its mission, respecting its government clients. Naturally, our clients are not all starting from the same point. However, all we have to undergo major transformations in the coming decades. To secure their future, public and private sector clients will need to continue to invest heavily in their organizational and technological transformation. They will all seek to improve how they operate, deliver their products and services and create value. CGI's role as a partner and expert of choice is to support our clients in achieving their goals of transforming their value chains to effectively integrate their lines of business and technology. For 45 years, we have helped our clients to adapt to change. Change is the very essence of our expertise at CGI. I would like to conclude by thanking you all for attending this meeting today and for giving me the opportunity to share in the passion, pride and commitment that CGI's 82,000 members invest every day while working with our clients. Before giving the floor to Serge, who will take your questions, we would like to thank you, our shareholders, for your unwavering trust and support. Rest assured that we will continue to make CGI 1 of the best business and IT consulting firms in the world. Serge?

[Interpreted] Thank you, Julie. Let's move on now to the question period.

Shareholders may submit questions by using the question box at the bottom left of your screen. Please note the questions can be asked in English or French. I will read them in the language in which they were submitted. I will read the questions allowed and may answer them directly or direct them to my colleagues. We have a first question. This is a question for Julie. During your recent Investor Day, you said you had planned $1 billion in merger and acquisition for 2022. Are you on the right track to respect this call?

[Interpreted] Thank you for this question. In fact, the answer is yes. We are on the right track. On the first quarter, we have concluded 2 new mergers [ Hawaii ] in the United States and CMC in Spain. Furthermore, we've announced an engagement to acquire Unico based in Australia, systems integration consulting firm. The transaction is subjected to approval of government authorities. It should be concluded in the second quarter. With these 3 mergers, we are confident to be on the right track and comply with the allocation of $1 billion in capital related to our M&A businesses.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Julie. We have another question, Ricardo [indiscernible] question addressed to George or Francois. CGI stock price has not reached its prepandemic price of $116 million, even after increasing revenues over the past 2 years?

George, or you want me to answer?

Yes, Francois.

All right. So [indiscernible], thanks for the question. But it's now the fourth quarter that -- in a row that we are seeing growth or CGI came back to growth. While we're not -- and to be exact, the $116 million was not hit in 2019, but in the middle of this year. Actually, we're at $113.30 million to $113.40 million the max in 2019. And this morning, with the result that we issue, we're pretty close back to these levels. We're north of $112 million. And the expectation and the outlook that we have and with the -- we're still confident that we will be able to produce double-digit EPS growth for the year. We can expect that this will be reflected in the share price.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Francois. It sounds like CGI's growth opportunities are strong. What are you doing in this high-growth environment to attract and keep talent?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I agree the growth opportunities are very strong, but our employee value proposition is also very strong. I mentioned that we had an increase of 6,000 employees from the same time last year, 76,000 to 82,000. And we actually have a retention rate that is better than the industry average. And that's really by focusing on some of the items I talked about in my remarks, career development and training very important to our members in order to grow their careers, and we have increased our training by 33%. Health and well-being, obviously, as we go through a pandemic, that's been really critical. Community involvement, our members want to have a purpose beyond their projects. And our community involvement, we're issuing our CSO report here shortly, definitely is something that helps with retention. And then most importantly, I would say, employee ownership. Our employees, we call them members because, as Serge said, they're owners of the company that's currently at 85% and taken in aggregate, that's why we have a very strong employee value proposition even in this more competitive market.

[Interpreted] Thank you, George. We have another question coming from Mr. Willie Gagnon. Another question by Mr. Gagnon from the Médac. Who will be the next leader of the company? I'll answer that question. Mr. George Cope was until last year, the President of Bell Canada, and he sits on a few other Board of directors of Canadian companies. So I see there are no other questions. So the Q&A session is now closed. I wish to thank the members of our Board of Directors for their thoughtful advice and wise counsel throughout the years. [Foreign Language]

I would also like to thank our clients, members and shareholders for their continuous support and trust. Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]