Endava plc (DAVA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Another great day at the UBS Technology Conference. Great to be having you here and those joining on the webcast. I'm here with Mark Thurston, CFO of Endava. I'll let him do a quick introduction of the company for those who may not be aware, and then we'll jump right into Q&A.

So Endava is a U.K.-headquartered, but listed in NYSE, IT services business. We are predominantly European focused with about 35% of our revenues in North America; about 60-odd percent in Europe; but also we have rest of world, which is around sort of 10% Asia Pacific, Middle East. We operate in the digital space, probably a bit of a misused term, but we're basically about building products for our clients, doing it in a distributed agile fashion. And we've experienced very rapid growth recently. But we're facing some macro headwinds at the moment.

Great. Yes. I think, Mark, with Q1 having just been released a couple of weeks back, where should investors be focused post Q1 and, of course, some of the highlights you think are important to bring forward?

So we faced a slowdown, as I just sort of alluding to, mainly as a result of what was happening with the likes of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse, no coincidence we're here today. But with their sort of issues, we saw -- think of it as a pullback in our private equity portfolio business. These are businesses that are owned by PE companies, and we saw a significant sort of pullback in that area. We saw also delayed decision-making in our banking and financial services segment. So we saw quite a rapid decel in our Q4. And we have a June year-end, so the quarter to June. What we're seeing at the moment, though, is very encouraging. We've put out a good set of numbers for Q1. We beat both on the top line and EPS. We maintained our guide. We do have quite a steep recovery implied in the guide, but it's based on the activity of opportunities that we're seeing in the sales pipeline. And what we're seeing, which is very different to what we're seeing 6 months ago and even this time last year, is the size of the client opportunities in that pipeline. The clients are also new logos. They are in industry verticals that are outside our traditional strength in payments, in financial services. The pipeline is actually moving at a sensible sort of pace, which isn't what we were seeing sort of 6 months ago. So it's a very encouraging picture and basically underpins the growth that we see in the second half of this fiscal.

If we could maybe break that down into a few components, the first of which, I think you said, the resurgence in the overall pipeline. If we look at Endava, maybe first from a geographic perspective, what do you think the macro changes are that are enabling that growth, maybe starting with Europe and then working into the U.S. and the rest of the world?

I think whilst the outlook may be a little uncertain, it's a lot more stable than it was 6 months ago. I think the other difference is the sense that we're at the peak of the interest rate cycle. And in terms of how those rates come down, the different geographies will be different. In terms of our geo outlook, we see North America for us being a bit more positive in terms of sort of growth trajectory. Europe will be stable, flattish. U.K., I think, is going to further weaken but start to come back a little bit more towards the sort of back end. So we're seeing a mixed geo picture. And from an industry vertical perspective, the payments space, which is about sort of 30% of our revenue, we're definitely seeing a slowdown there to our largest clients. Spending outlook is a little bit muted, but we see recovery coming later. More positive is we're seeing TMT start to recover a bit more strongly. And in payments and financial services, insurances actually sort of stand out. When you look at banking and capital markets, a little bit flat. So it's a little bit of a mixed sort of picture, I think, in summary, but overall, we see the swing-back coming through in Q4.

Great. And I think the second piece of that, right, as you mentioned, kind of more pipeline activity, more pipeline velocity, or is that across both new clients, existing logos? Are these projects that may have been started and then shelved? How should we see that?

I think the pipeline is a mixture of existing and new. I think the thing that is powerful for us is new logos. And it is new logos who are outside our traditional sort of strength. So we're seeing retail clients come into the mix, for instance. And we wouldn't have seen that. And these are quite significant deals from our perspective in our sort of scale. So the general activity is a lot more positive and the sentiment is a lot more positive. We're not getting any delays due to budget considerations, which is typically what we were seeing in the early part of the year. I don't know what that says about what calendar '24 looks like because most of our clients are December year-end. So that spend is progressing. We're not seeing any sort of budget issues or spend issues. I think for me, it feels as though there's been a hiatus in investment, but we focus on change in acceleration for clients. And I think that, that level of investment is coming back.

Fantastic. If we take that now, greater activity, growth starting to come back, how is that impacting the pricing environment? And what are you seeing from yourself and the likes of your peers that are obviously competing in the space?

Yes. The pricing environment for us overall is stable. We're seeing areas where, with existing clients, we're able to move prices up. Where we're having to be competitive is with certain new logo situations where we are trying to price out from a new client, from a competitor. So we've seen comments from competitors about a "pricing is pressurized" sort of situation. It's becoming more competitive. So I think some of our peers and competitors are pricing to retain work. Now we try and obviously win those opportunities. But again, we want to earn a decent margin. We deliver value as our key sort of proposition. So we don't want to sell work cheaply. But overall, I would say we're sort of stable. And we look at each sort of situation on its merits in terms of whether the client's at scale and we can deliver, over a period of time, a multiyear relationship that delivers both value to the client and us at a reasonable margin.

So maybe digging into that margin component on the second side -- on the supply side, any key trends? Obviously, significant disruptions in the overall supply markets from '21 into '22 and now '23. How have you seen that market evolve?

So it's been a bit of a rollercoaster the last 2 years. So COVID, things went sort of crazy. It was a very hot market. In terms of accessing the talent to deliver that, it was also equally crazy. So there was cost pressures, there was getting ahold of the right talent at the price. And we've sort of come sort of off-peak, obviously. Demand in the near term has weakened. So the hot labor market has cooled quite sort of considerably. And when we're looking at pricing, it is a key component. We deliver through people. So making sure that we source talent at, let's call it, an effective market rate is critical to our success in maintaining margin. So our main pay rise is coming up in January. We know what the pricing market is like at the moment. It's stable. We have to be competitive. We want to onboard new clients. And so the pay rise will bring that into context. So it's definitely not as hot as it was. But we have to be sort of mindful where we're forecasting that things are going to recover quite quickly, that we maintain and retain the key people, that we want to make sure the successful delivery of that work. So we're going to have to be selective about the pay that we give to individuals in our company.

Yes. As we think of the broader supply centers, are there any key trends we should be thinking about or be aware of, particularly with the global delivery base?

Not really. We're not seeing any hot markets or competitors come into our space and driving up competition for talent. I mean, we have most of our people in Central Europe and Romania. Over the years, people have commented about are you seeing people come in to tap into that market. And it's not all about pay. It's about the employee brand and the proposition for employees. And we focus very much on culture, creating great careers for our people, the training, including sort of soft skills. And that, when you put it all together with a market-leading package but a competitive sort of package, means that our attrition has been very low. So we're currently at about 11%. And people have tried to crack the market, but they haven't made any meaningful sort of inroads into it. And I think our employee proposition is what keeps the attrition in a sensible place. And we don't see much variation actually market to market. Obviously, we are in South America, LatAm, as we call it. And we just make sure that we just see what the competition is doing and make sure that we don't get out of step.

I think that, one, the attrition rate is fantastic, obviously been a challenging environment. How would you compare today's market? As you noted, a bit more cool on the demand side but also from the supply side relative to 2020, 2021 during peak COVID. Were the priorities still the same from a supply side?

Well, we were in a situation, and I think it's always that we didn't want to turn away work because we couldn't provide the people to deliver it. And there's always a balance. You've got to provide the right people to make sure you're delivering the quality and value that Endava is known for. And that's why that was what was driving basically high IT wage inflation, particularly. And so it's a very sort of different sort of situation at the moment. We, at the moment, are maintaining a bench. So the bench basically means that we have people in excess of work that they can deliver fees for us on their external work. We're training them or reskilling. They are working on propositions, such as AI. And we are maintaining that sort of investment because we expect that recovery to come. Now it's going to be interesting in the second half. So we expect the recovery to come. We expect the bench to burn down. We will find out whether we've placed our pay rise appropriately, to see whether we can keep the attrition where we need it to be. And basically, it's keeping the faith with our employees, about Endava being a great brand and a great place to work. And then these are the day-to-day sort of operational issues that we're always having to work through, but it's quite sort of challenging at the moment, as you can imagine, with this rapid sort of acceleration in demand that we are anticipating.

Yes. And if you also take a step back, right, the ability for Endava to continue to attract high-quality talent, specialized talent, has there been any shift in the ability to bring those individuals in? Are you seeing greater competition from corporates? Or is it really you remain a center in the areas that you deploy for top talent?

Not really. I mean, it's a good question. In terms of AI, for instance, so some people have taken a view, "Okay, do you have machine learning expertise," which we do in the business. But it's about industrializing the competency, if I can call it that, so how do you deliver AI projects at scale to test the quality, et cetera. So it's about developing a disciplined capability. Our people are generally smart enough and willing to learn new skills and are genuinely curious about new technology. So they play with it in their spare time. They want to learn about it. And so we don't feel the need to go out and recruit specific skill sets for a specific type of work. And it's also a judgment about is the shape of the work changing: is it an opportunity-by-opportunity change in terms of you can have language skills like Python or whatever, but you don't recruit a lot of people with that skill; or is it a slightly ephemeral or short-term sort of needed; and then if you see it as a longer-term demand, do you start to then train it and then industrialize that sort of capability. But generally, the shape of the work that we are seeing at the moment coming is the capability that we have broadly with some modification around the edges.

Fantastic. And you brought AI up in the development for your clients and where their heads are focused. Where is Endava focused on AI internally, for internal use or deployment?

So we're looking at it as a productivity tool. We are experimenting, for want of a better word, with GitLab. We are thinking, at this stage, we know that from experimentation that it does improve productivity in some of the simpler tasks, for want of a better word, by 20%, 30%. Some of the more complicated pieces of work that we do, it doesn't actually do much for us. So the deployment is going to depend on the selection of our people that are going to be using it, i.e., for the simpler sort of tasks and also which clients to use it in anchor. So some of our clients have said, "We don't want to use it at all," because they're worried about IP issues or regulation. Others are more open to it and are open to using it in a selective way. So from a productivity perspective, we're going to sort of pilot it and see how it plays and then what the wider sort of adoption of it will be.

Fantastic. Last question for me. You had touched on this in kind of some of your opening remarks, but Endava is mostly known as an industry specialist, but you're seeing new wins in broader industries and verticals. Can you talk about how that penetration is really being generated? What's bringing those companies in to Endava to work with you on something you may have not worked on before?

Yes. So we have great sort of payments credentials and financial services. So it's convincing people, say, in retail or health care to use it where we have a less strong sort of story. One route into it is through what we call payments as a horizontal. So where we can use our payments expertise to help in the transaction journey for a retailer. So for example, a retailer we can help then build a particular buy now, pay later for them rather than outsourcing it to sort of Klarna, for instance. So there's leaning on payments as a horizontal. We've invested a lot in sharpening up our industry vertical approach to market with marketing and sales sort of collateral. And that is getting traction. I think that is due -- we're seeing that in terms of the size of the opportunities that are coming through the sort of pipeline. So I think it's a mixture of leaning on the payments as a horizontal and sharpening up our story and messaging to the market along these two vertical lines. I think when they actually see what we can do -- because when we make proposals, they meet the team, we have a differentiated approach. And actually, before they buy, they get a sense of what our sort of capability is, they are generally impressed with the differentiation they see.

Fantastic. Well, look, before I open it up for questions from the audience or on the webcast, I guess in closing, what do you think is most exciting for Endava as you move into the second half of your fiscal year and calendar 2024?

So I think we're turning the corner. So we've had successive revenue declines quarter-on-quarter. And I think the momentum is starting to shift for us. It's encouraging about the deal pipeline that's coming through, these larger deals. I think also the shape of these deals in terms of they're coming from new logos and also from different markets, in terms of outside our traditional payments and financial strength, so it bodes well for the rest of this financial year and beyond.

Fantastic. I'll open the line for questions from the audience or if you'd like to use the QR code up here and submit, we can go either way.

[ Talk about M&A ].

So we have an internal rule of thumb for M&A, which is we tend to go for bolt-on. Bolt-on acquisitions is, in our mind, now more than 10% of head count. So at the moment, that would be 1,200 people. We do that because we have a well-established culture in the way that we deliver. So we don't want to acquire a company that is too big, which is not culturally aligned and discombobulates our entire sort of process. So that's our rule of thumb. We will go bigger than that for certain strategic aims, which for us is to grow in North America and move into different industry verticals, such as health care, for instance. In terms of what we're seeing at the moment, prices have been very high in the private markets and price expectations have been slightly unrealistic. I think they're starting to normalize. So I think there's a lot more opportunity now and in the future than there has been over the last 12 months or so.

Great. Any follow-up?

[ Is it equity or cash ]?

We tend to focus on cash because we don't want dilution. We will offer equity. I mean we try and keep it a bit narrow because that then retains management interest is when they become part of Endava. We also tend to also focus on the tier below the ownership structure, the key people. Because they're not owners of the business, you can't offer them consideration. But the way we try and buy them into or bring them into Endava, to make sure they're aligned with the success of the business, is through equity incentive plans, so options, et cetera, LTIPs. And that has worked pretty well for us. And usually, when we do businesses, we don't see much attrition afterwards. Integration can be a little bit painful as they adapt to the Endava way of working, but it's a model that's suit as well so far.

Great. Any other questions in the room? I don't think we have any on the webcast. So Mark, if it's okay with you, we can wrap a little bit early. Again, I appreciate everyone coming out to the conference and for taking the time to spend with us here, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you.