EPAM Systems, Inc. (EPAM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Our presentation will begin in 1 minute. Please begin to find your way to your seats. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. For those who I've not met, my name is David Straube. I'm Head of Investor Relations for EPAM. Welcome today. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our 2022 Investor/Analyst Day. It's been a while since we last met, November 2019. We've been pretty busy. EPAM is involved -- has evolved, and the team here today is to talk about that. We have a diverse selection of our leadership team joining us, both in person and remotely, and [ help place faces' ] names. We have published a look book that's displayed here in the room and then also on our Investor Relations webcast section. Our agenda covers several key areas, starting with Arkadiy, our CEO and President, will update you on our strategy. It's not a new strategy but more of an acceleration of our existing strategy. FB and our business unit leadership will talk about the drivers of demand through the lens of industry and technology. Kevin Labick and a few of our consulting leaders will provide an update on EPAM Continuum, our integrated consulting offering. Larry -- sorry, Victor Dvorkin and leaders from our global delivery team will speak about EPAM's next-generation delivery capability. And then Larry and team will talk about our focus on employees, specifically our support to our colleagues in Ukraine, in addition to EPAM's commitment to ESG and an update on EPAM's nonstop focus on education and learning. And finally, we're very fortunate to have customers from Bridgewater and [ Regeneron ] with us today, who will help bring to life the work that we're doing for them. Lastly, we have a Q&A session pocketed throughout [ here ]. So I'd ask you to hold your questions till we get there. So with that said, it's my pleasure to introduce Arkadiy.

Thank you, Dave, and very good to see people in the room. So last time, we did it like 2.5 years ago. Thank you for coming and let me start. I think like while we've taken practically, we think that we've taken, each quarter, sharing like our results and relatively short view of the situation. Sometimes it's [indiscernible] Today, I would like to give a little bit longer perspective. Also, with understanding that there is a very big question in the room about current situation and what we do to ensure that we have a really good longer perspective. So before this, I'll bring us to the point, which we started 2.5 years ago, and it could be an update for some people who are new to EPAM. But when you're talking about EPAM, you're talking about our journey as a pure software engineering company to become much more end-to-end solution company. And this is what we were sharing in more details, last time, in the same room. IPO was an important point for us. We also were talking about our digital [ extent ], which is a very important component to empower all what we're doing. We were talking about change in the client from our IPO days when we were working with these companies, which were giving us relatively small tickets to actually the client base, which become Fortune 500 for 2000 type of companies. What wasn't changed during all of these years from '93 to 2018, it was our engineering team. We were talking about it from the day 1, and we were very [indiscernible] on each earnings calls. And I think it's very important differentiation, which we would like to keep. [ IT Day ] was a great event for us, not so great from financial returns, but from starting to build a brand of the company. But I'm bringing the slides here specifically for 1 data point, 85% in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia 10 years ago. Also, we were sharing how we were transferring company since 2012 to 2019 when we went in 3 years periods and putting on us very serious targets, how to transition from being just engineers to consulting to solution providers, what additional capabilities we need. And we also -- this is like was our internal missions. We definitely didn't share this as our guidance for 3 years. But internally, we were communicating to the company and putting pressure on ourselves to double the company in 3 years. And we did twice, in '15 and '18. And in reality, we are transforming the company. We also established at this time, our purpose. And the idea was how to enable our clients to be competitive and disruptive and helping them to [ mitigate ] through very specific, very often multiple [indiscernible]. And how to do it? By making future real, not only for clients but for [indiscernible] communities to educational health platforms and many other aspects of the life. And doing this also fast action as the startups, working with experts, multidisciplinary teams. And I know that usually, this process is very marketing driven. We actually put a lot of thought in this, and it's proven to us right now that it actually was very -- What's happened during this period from 2012 to '18? We also experienced something new for us, which is the fast invasion of Russia in Ukraine in 2014, which triggered for the first effort to start diversification of our [indiscernible] platform. That's when we entered India, APAC and Latin America, exactly in 2015, after this. And you can see a decrease in share of Belarus Russia and Ukraine. What we also learned that it's not so easy to globalize, like the first 2 years in India [ Venus ], and it was an acquisition of about 1,000 people, decrease in headcount was 25%. The next year, we restored a little bit. But we understand that it's rather difficult to replicate exactly the same way like we did in different geographies. And we got our lessons. So at the end of presentation 2.5 years ago, we shared our ambition that having these new events, having -- understanding how much everything changes, seeing how our clients trying to adapt, We decided that we need to build EPAM as a very much adaptive enterprise as well to help clients doing the same. And we say that we need to ensure that we adapt if we build a company which can quickly respond to change. This is exactly the slide which we showed 2.5 years ago. And build EPAM digital platform to make sure that people are connected and working together and extended leadership through integrated consulting and engineering and open opportunities for everybody anywhere. And this were not just [ work ], it was elements of platforms, which we're planning to put together. And if it's all successful, then we will be doubling the company again. And back then, it was our aspirational goal and not a guidance, and we've already clearly pointed this out. We also understand that to become this adaptive enterprise, we will have to transfer EPAM to one of the best innovation design company in consulting, [ communication ] and social responsibility, but we have to keep this engineering DNA. That was very important point back then. And to do this, we wanted to extend our platforms to cover 3 main aspects of our existence. First of all, people in general, educational components and productivity delivery. This was our focus. So this is bringing us exactly to the point when we stopped during our previous Investor Day. So EPAM 2021, very challenging year. So in November '19, we didn't expect all this would be happening, call it, social and very specifically for EPAM situation in Belarus. It's probably not everybody you worry about. This all prove very quickly to us that constant change is really must and being adaptive is really necessary. First of all, COVID proved that digital strategy is no longer optional. So that becomes status quo. And we're very, very quickly starting to change ourselves and remote by design become our practical slogan how we're working. It was very good to see that Gartner kind of recognized it. And exactly in May 2020 during one of the conversations, they put it like a review of the top companies in IT services and highlighting [indiscernible] EPAM as the 2 best position for the COVID -- after COVID time. It was very nice to see the recognition of the efforts and specifically highlights which is very much in line with what we're highlighting as well. Product engineering heritage and platforms enabling all this. During this couple of years, we also expanded our client base. But what's more important that we still are keeping this -- in this specific sectors. We're still doing product engineering work for software companies, which is extremely important. We're also expanding our digital native companies, and all of this experience which we are accumulating, we bring into industries. Industry has expanded. We started to advance in insurance, for example, in private equity sector. And these two bottom lines have a significant portion of our revenue, it's 35%, 40%. So -- which keeping us very much on the cutting edge of what's happening in the world. So we also expanded our capability map. And consulting started to play a much more visible role, but it's also depth and breadth of offering that allows us to cross-sell across the account. So we will be talking about it more, business we'll be highlighting very specific things, and our delivery leadership will be sharing as well. EPAM Continuum our constant focus. And clients starting to take a taste of what it means when one company can do end-to-end story and the way are coming with us with very different challenges. And, again, we will be talking in more details, but just to highlight what's happened from 2019 to 2021, like we started to show up on the maps, which we never were before, like product development, digital product development, together with BCG, for example, for design. On customer experience strategy, together with McKinsey, [ Barron ] and [ Accenture ] and Deloitte, we become one of the top 20 agencies in the world. And one of the latest from Forrester, when they were analyzing customer experience strategy consulting practices, they highlighted 9 largest ones. And you can see that EPAM amongst the Accenture, [ Barron ] in Boston, BCG and Deloitte and Huawei, IBM, like a very different competitor risk. During this last 3 years, we were also focusing exactly what we said before, how to expand our digital platform and how to diversify our delivery. So first of all, we're often talking about our platforms and how much focus we have in this, and we'd like to bring a little bit more tangible feel what it is. So being engineers, we're trying to do it very well. We have internal software lab, which we're focusing on this. This is a very sophisticated set of applications, which cover in practically all aspects of our lives, from demand to fintech, to internal marketplaces, to supply, bringing these individual environments and our [ crowd ] anywhere platforms and workforce operations and all related to productivity. Again, some more details we will be sharing, but the complexity and sophistication and this is integrated through APIs and dashboards is very high. And different views. This is actually dozens and dozens of applications, covering everything from people to education, to [indiscernible] and all built in-house, which means that we can adapt very, very quickly. We don't need to wait for another release. And we have indefinitely a competitive advantage because it's a unique setting. Like all related to education part of this and integrate it with our people platforms. And communities, which is feet of our talent. So we will also support external communities through our digital platforms. In other angle of growth and capability and seats, it's actually acquisitions. It was pretty much nothing during the 2020. But then during the COVID, we did acquisition even without meeting some companies, salesforce capability, cybersecurity company in Israel, data in Netherlands [ cover ] our first acquisition of strategic consulting firm in Germany. Seats for accelerating Latin America, Colombia specifically. Some media consultancy and MACH e-commerce technology company. I just highlight a little bit on the largest one, which is [indiscernible], which is a network of marketing agency across Europe and Middle East, which bring us additional capability, marketing type of agency which we do in fact before, but also strengthen the whole network of agencies around the world for EPAM and giving assist to start scaling up in countries which we are not present before, including Turkey, but many countries across Western Europe. We shared this competitive map last time with you as well. And we're still competing with global services companies a lot. We're still competing with professional services from software companies. But we're seeing more and more change coming to agency [ conglomerates ] and consultants. It's interesting to see how we deal in, and this is a Gartner data, in category of live service providers, with revenue between $1 billion and $5 billion. The extra [indiscernible] is even bigger than that. But you see how different we are with our [indiscernible] and how much faster we were able to run, like I need to keep myself like running and will be running with current situation all the time, but that was 2021. Also, the end of the year was perfect for us. Sometime in the [ row ] we were on the 100 fastest-growing publicly-traded company by Fortune, #1 IT services company on this list, and accepted to S&P 500 in December. And finish the year, to our surprise, after 2020, actually doubling the company again, exactly like [indiscernible] And one more highlight, which I think was missed mostly. The situation in Belarus, each [ political ] demonstration with 100,000 people, put a country in a very different setting. From practically August 2020 and now continues, it's a different country. During these 2 years, we have to move over 2,000 people from Belarus. At this point, was the largest EPAM location, which actually triggered another effort to rebalancing. This time, we have to rebalance much, much quicker than last time. In 3 years, we went from over 70% to under 60% in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. But it also allowed us to seed new talent in new countries, and Central Eastern Europe and Western Central Asia started to grow very fast. You can see 2.5x and just in 2021, 75% growth in Central Eastern Europe, and 2.5x in Western Central Asia because we are bringing talent there and we're able to change perspective for the local talent as well. We're able to mentor better, train better and grow like -- we were growing centers from 0 to 1,000 people in 12 months each, in relatively small countries. So in the Western as well, in these 3 years, we grew the 4x and just over 2x in 1, 2021. So because we understand, we learned our lessons how to do it better, we started to bring the DNA education, which we were able to kind of export from our traditional places. And Latin America, same thing, 4x, 2.5x, 2x speed rebalancing. What we realized that we have to adjust as well. How perfect because it's not only about technology ways. Actually, social changes much is important. We learn it in U.S., we learn it in Belarus, big time, which bringing us to 2022, which was very happy beginning of the year. We celebrated 10 years of IPO. We increased company by 10x since IPO. One week later, we shared it with you our guidance, which was probably the strongest guidance in our history. We couldn't understand how we can grow less than practically 40% in 2022. Just to find out one week later that something happened, which I was absolutely sure wouldn't be happening. We [ shared ] our position very quickly. We stand with Ukraine. One week later, we announced that we will be exiting clients in Russia. And one month later after this at the beginning of April, we said that we're closing Russia completely within the next several months, which bringing us to the third restructuring. And these times, I would say, it's 4x speed just in 6 months. This is still projected because we are not out of this mark, 6 months yet. We're moving to under 40%, and we believe that by the end of the year, we will be under 30%. What's happening as well, Central Eastern Europe, growing 40%. This is in 6 months. Western Central Asia, 3x in 6 months. India growing 30% in 6 months, Latin America 60%. So we were prepared for this by all previous events. And this is how a very high level map is looking. This is small, medium, large, small under 1,000, medium under 5,000 and large over 5,000 dev centers at EPAM. So what's happening is that there is a significant transition in all of this moment. And just to understand a little bit better in the [indiscernible] there, exit of declining growth with caution, business as usual, targeted growth. I think putting this on one page, and this is 4 regions where we're going to grow to do the transition. Clearly, the question in our mind, and I'm pretty sure the question in the room, how are you going to keep the quality? How are we going to scale? How are we going to keep the brand image, which EPAM built in the last decades? So let's talk EPAM education in global campuses. We were talking about it a lot, we will have some more details update today. But this is what we established in Eastern Europe, and this is what we were benefiting from. Now, we're exporting all of this. During the last couple of years, we also built a network of boot camps. As we speak, we practically opened it in 3 universities, in Central Asia, in Ukraine, which we announced before the war and we're still going to do it, and in Central Europe. Talent ecosystem and communities expansion. This is a whole feed for our talent pipeline. So this is very important, and we're building these communities very much globally. But the main things still coming back to our engineering DNA, which we started this conversation today from. Engineering excellence culture, and EPAM is a home of the modern engineer or modern cloud engineers. So kind of to proof -- illustrate this, I select in the slides from our workshop for one of our largest clients, which after working with us almost for 15 years, finally came to us and said, help us to transition our internal IT, help us to become a technology company, help us to -- and this is like some slides which we are sharing with us to bring here that all this engineering excellence, which we're talking about, not just the market and components. There is a lot of very tangible things behind of this. Like you can see how we're thinking about promoting engineering culture through boot camps, part of onboarding from company communication channels, engineering excellence community, special products, which we're developing constantly in our internal software lab. Also, this is -- you can see [ Bridge's ] recognition for [indiscernible] mentors [indiscernible] experts. So we're doing constant assessments. And this is actually what we did in 2021, how to bring this culture to new countries. So how to make engineering culture self-driven. Very serious community focus and how all of this actually impacting software delivery performance through [ index ] value, learning journey, continuous improvement program and recreational program. So what's important, all of this supported by our digital ecosystem. So all of this blue boxes, most of them, it's a special applications, integrated to create really strong engineering DNA inside of the company. And if you look at our diagram, you can restructure this to make sure that it's actually reflected in engineering DNA architecture inside of EPAM. And I'll just click through some screens on special applications, which we have -- this is like skills [indiscernible] it's a lot of, a lot of details. And again, we will talk more about it through our Delivery and People sections. The second point, it's about how to empower talent with our digital platforms because the first point is still coming to your question, like when we [ transpositioning ] thousands of EPAMers. We have opportunity to see it and sell exactly much faster like we proved possible during the last 2 years when we had this challenge of moving thousands of people from Belarus. It allows us to grow faster, mentor and bring our culture much broader. That's exactly opportunity on hand right now, which closed in Russia and still people moving from Belarus. And [ exploring the ] whole pieces of ecosystem which we built. So EPAM organization is a platform. If you think [ REM ] on market, what's happening, so we can think about our platforms, which allowed us to address some unexpected things, having like pieces of our platform, [indiscernible] events, bringing this to dashboard and decision panels, human-assisted decisions. And when something like this is happening, building automatically -- semiautomatically some type of defense mechanism. That's how we're thinking for 2022 and view on how to develop what we built internally. And in this case, this could be transition to different structure, where all these components structuring to create this internal mechanism. So that's a very important part of our adaptability, adaptiveness decision. And it's reflecting the needs of individuals. If you're thinking about remote and hybrid work, productivity, well-being, teams collaboration inside of this, organization collaboration across the teams and social component, and specifically like geography, remote, unpredictable, incomparable impacts, which we're actually experiencing right now. And obviously, it's all about adaptability and scale, which turn in for us for the speed advantage. Interesting enough, Forrester is -- what we're doing, put us on the product list of Innovation Management Platforms, just recently. This is just May 2022. Because we are offering this to clients as well, and this is very much in line when we said we need to be adaptive enterprise itself to make sure that we're helping our clients to become more adaptive. And this is exactly the story which I shared, like how a company inviting us to help them to transfer themselves, even from engineering excellence standpoint. So how to scale business to [ 10 billion ]? First of all, on client side. Despite of all expectation of recession, at this point, we definitely believe that the market is pretty strong. And it's strong because of all the pandemic disruptions. Digital improvement. Digitally native companies advancing and pushing the other traditional corporations to run faster. The war in Ukraine put a very specific pressure on the talent. Think about displacing of from 300,000 to 400,000 potential talent across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, which creating demand in some [ term ]. And then everything what's happening with digital data and cloud ecosystem, which create a new platform, which give an advantage for some companies. So everybody has to run. So this is a slide from last time about -- it's Gartner data, 1 trillion. We were sharing this, and we're saying that we're focusing on build part, which is much, much faster moving part of the equation. 1.3 trillion in 2023, projection to 2026. And again, we're focusing on this subset, which is more demanding for capabilities and skills and also fastest growing. That's why we do believe that demand for us is there. Also having the client base, which we have, this is specifically to highlight number of clients in 2000 and Fortune 500. And even with our growing size, we still underpenetrated them a lot. So you can see at the bottom of this how many clients, very, very small. We have only 50 clients over 10 million on Forbes list and 20 on Fortune list. EPAM continue very important component. And what change you saw is analyst recognition. Also, the buyers changed during this last 3 years. Capability expansion and the right orchestration, increasing the check across our top 20 clients, significantly in 3 years from 46 million to 70 million today. 20 top clients. So because we can cross-sell, we can do end-to-end solution in more, we can enter new areas. When we were talking about competition, competition kind of presented all these aspects of the IT services. The focus, how to solve the challenge that you still need to do strategy and execution and implementation simultaneously? It is extremely important, and nobody doing this well. And we have to put a lot of efforts to do it well as well. But that's exactly our [indiscernible] from EPAM in 2009 to more EPAM digital in '12 and later and EPAM Continuum, and then how to put this exponential components of the enterprise through interfaces [indiscernible] experimentation and autonomy and social and staff and demand and community and crowd, all of this part of the ecosystem, which is very important to create this adaptiveness. So that's an opportunity, how to deliver this end-to-end story and how to do strategy and implementation better than others, which could be a huge benefit for the clients. And if we're doing this right, then we will be able to grow again, and this is just a measure of our success and keep our startup roots and adapt EPAM and adapt clients and go to this level with the next very visible timeframe. So again, it's intention, aspiration, not the guidance. And engineering DNA, we know for sure, we have to keep. What we don't know -- and whatever else would be happening. And at this point, I wouldn't be surprised by anything happening. So I think, with this, I will pass to FB, our President of Europe and Co-Head of our Global Business to go in details on our clients with the team on the list. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and good morning. I'm joining you from Budapest. And I'm sorry not being with you, but probably at this time, we got so used to doing this presentation remotely that nobody takes a notice of that. So joining me on presenting the global business update is Boris Shnayder and Sergey Yezhkov, who are also the co-heads of businesses for EPAM; Greg Killian, Dmytro Seredenko, Regina Viadro, who are the co-head of business for North America, its different parts of the business. So I would -- I wanted to start with the -- if you can get my next slide. I wanted to start with a little bit of reflecting on what Ark shared a couple of minutes ago. Clearly, the demand, we feel the demand is strong, right? The demand is driven -- the core demand is driven by digital transformation, which continues to be a very strong driver for change and actually for the need to adapt and transform the enterprise because people understand, due to the pandemic and due to -- especially due to the geopolitical changes, that business strategy is no longer possible without really focusing on your digital strategy. So the need for an integrated business and technology changes there, right? And people are executing these changes on a whole scale. To do that, we are focusing on advisory-led business technology transformation. This way, we can drive larger engagements, and we can drive end-to-end engagements across the whole enterprise. This brings us opportunities not just to execute point solutions, but actually to drive through whole organizational transformations where we bring new capabilities to bear, also building new types of experiences, physical and also metaverse capabilities because people realize today that this is the differentiator. That's how you can differentiate yourself from the competitors. Also, as we are building this, we are now building it on cloud-native technologies, helping companies to transform, move from on-prem to cloud -- engineered solutions on the cloud and scale it across multiple and diverse technology landscape. At the core for all these transformations, the platforms that we're building [ has become ] the data. And we're helping organizations and trying to help organizations to develop end-to-end data platforms and products and also deploy them globally. And clearly, deployment [ at these days ] is not about going around and deploying it country by country, but actually taking in the requirements, designing it around and understanding the different cultural aspects, different user journey needs of our customers and creating a global solution. As people are transforming and actually driving transformation, there's a need for transforming the organizations to be more agile, more nimble, to be a learning organization. And the entry point for us is an assessment methodology, which we developed and worked on and provided technology and tooling around it, which we call [ vasal working ], which we utilize to drive organization's adaptation to cloud technologies and bring on new capabilities. Also, [ bringing to bear ] and deploy our educational assessment and we could call talent management tooling because people, throughout this journey, they recognize that there are worsening talent shortages. So you need to increase software and upskilling of talent, and you need to bring in different capabilities, capabilities which EPAM mastered throughout this period, and now our clients are very much in need to build this out. Also, we're experimenting and continue to roll out new types of engagement models or commercial models, engineering or testing as a service, because people realize that to run large engineering organizations or testing organizations are not just about recruiting people, but actually providing necessary tooling around it and delivering in a successful way and keeping the delivery healthy. It's not as easy as people claim to be. But this is a new world. This is a new way of engaging, and we're starting to deliver these services in a different commercial models. So let me pass the word to Greg, who will update us on a couple of case studies which proves some of the points what we executed in the last 3 years.

Very good. Thanks, FB. Just do a quick introduction here as well. I'm Greg Killian, business unit head, primarily responsible for life sciences and health care. I've been with EPAM about 3.5 years now. In fact, I'm based in our Newtown headquarters. I was there back in 2019 when we had this last event in Boston. This week, however, apologies for being in remote. I happen to be in Europe this week, so I'm coming in remote. So as FB mentioned, I wanted to take -- kind of bring some of this to life here with a couple of case studies. And really, as we've been seeing an absolute increasing amount of business coming with both advisory and consulting-led engagements before engineering starts, I wanted to share 2 examples of those and really focus in on some trends. And I think one thing we see in both life sciences and health care, these are industries which are often not leading innovation and copied by other industries. But what we often do hear, especially because of the regulatory nature of it, are often followers. And innovation in these industries happens by taking learnings from others and then quickly adopting them and moving them into this environment. And that's a key theme you'll see here both with consumerism and personalization. So starting with Walgreens, which you see here on the screen. Some of you may know of this. Some of you may have participated in what really is a massive business transformation for Walgreens. They're moving from being a pharmacy and retail store really to becoming a part of the health care ecosystem. And what we're seeing is that, again, in our own home lives is this decentralization of health care away from what are typically very expensive and very inconvenient environments to something which is much more accessible and friendly and at the corner. So -- and these expectations have changed, too, right? So as Walgreens has moved down this journey, we got involved with them very early into this transformation, which has begun and is continuing today. So part of this was looking at the interactions and especially in -- their focus has been in chronic care management, things which -- conditions which people have for life, but also have to be managed on a daily or a very, very regular basis, and that's the niche and the focus Walgreens is focused on. And in partnering with EPAM here, what we have done is really focused on that user experience that a person who -- making sure that their digital experience -- COVID has certainly driven a lot of the remote involvement of how we all manage our health care and brought that together with what is the retail, what is the in-store experience and having a whole experience, whether they're on the phone, whether they're online or in the store, making sure there's a really unified digital experience with, again, those expectations. People have different expectations when they're in Walgreens dealing with their health care as opposed to in an acute care hospital. This also -- following along the themes FB mentioned, before any developer started developing anything, we worked with Walgreens' health care domain experts, people who are clinicians, nurses and others who have managed patients for decades of their lives, helping them with what is that experience -- what is the consumer experience, learning from our partners on the consumer, which you'll hear about in a little bit. So really, first, making sure we're working with the client, making sure we're building the right thing and then, of course, to the roots of what that is and building it right. So they've now launched. This is launched and live in both California and New Jersey. Continuing expansions are happening and [ jumping to ] the App Store and the Walgreens health app is there. These are all assets which EPAM has developed in partnership with Walgreens and a really exciting part of our business. If we could move to the next slide, I'll give another example from the life sciences. And here, there's also these same trends. Consumerism and especially personalization are key themes that we're seeing. If you look back a decade plus ago, therapeutics and drugs were very focused around blockbusters and these big medications which would handle an entire population. Things are -- as patients, we're now expecting things to be much more personalized. So Novartis actually has a very industry innovative and a pretty well-known program called data42. And in fact, if I look back at Novartis, their CEO has quoted saying that Novartis really is a data science company. And what they did is put together a platform, taking 25 years of data really from across the organization from research, drug development, clinical trials, post-market launch, real-world evidence and brought all of this together into a data platform, which you heard as well has really been a key part of data-led transformation as part of digital. So that personalization comes in and the fact that there's also genetic and genomic information, which is massive upon massive amounts of data which get blended with those other sources I mentioned and really what has been an industry-changing initiative. Again, a common theme here. EPAM was working with the client several years ago as this was being envisioned and using this genetic information have helped them discover and develop personalized medications. Beyond the development of those personalized and precision medications is also the scientists, right? So scientists are consumers, too. And when they're going into these stores of data, when they're building machine learning models, they want to make sure that data is searchable. They want to find it in ways in which they have become used to searching and accessing data now. So all of these consumer type of experiences are really coming to some rather technical environments in situations like this. So with that, it's actually kind of a nice transition of a learning -- I'll go back to a learning life sciences had from gaming. In fact, the first processing of genetic sequencing was actually only made scalable by [ taking ] gaming processors, right? It was a gaming processor we used for sequencing because nothing else could perform it. So just like that, we learned some technical connections. Now it's that immersive gaming, immersive experience and design, in fact, that we're learning from gaming and now applying in medical technologies. So I'm going to send you back to the room there in Boston. And Dmytro, over to you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Dmytro Seredenko, and I'm running the West Coast part of North American business out of Los Angeles, California. I celebrated 13 years with the company this year and quite of those -- quite a few of those, I spent working with media entertainment companies [ out ] of the West. Media entertainment industry is changing with unprecedented speed. The pandemic and geopolitical challenges that Ark and FB spoke about are obviously contributing to that. Even if you don't run media or telco enterprise, you can see the change out of your living room. And a lot of people consuming more and more content, they're spending more time consuming various type of contents like social media and gaming. And as they try to discover those, they face a lot of challenges because that content is actually distributed across segments and catalogs. So we think that new ways to search and discover that content across all those catalogs will be actually a differentiator for the companies coming up to the market. As the competition in the space grows, consumers expect premium quality application experiences. The challenge is amplified by the ever-growing number of smart devices that we use to consume our content. We see there's a lot of new entrants to the market coming up as digital natives, digital-born companies. And they possess a risk to established enterprises like telcos and media companies that usually sit on legacy stacks, and they push them to enable agile development and decrease the time for products coming out to the market. So we see a lot of agile transformation programs actually starting and going across those enterprises. For decades, telcos used to be the kind of super aggregators who are aggregators of broadcast content, right? Like that's how we used our TVs. As the number of streaming services or as we call it, OTT, over-the-top, services growing up, there's clearly a need of like super aggregator. Some of the consumer device manufacturer has done a good job, like Apple TV and [ DIRECTV ]. I'm sure many of you use those. But the journey is not over yet. There will be more devices and more challenges actually how to aggregate content better and allow you to consume it in a very smooth, ubiquitous way across whatever screens and devices you have. As video platform delivery and video platform technology stabilize, we have actually a good set of competitive solutions for -- competitive choices for point solutions. But there is another challenge coming out of it because now you need to integrate that, that comes with the complexity and the challenges, while you need to keep the operational costs down. So those are type of the projects that we see coming up with some of our customers. And probably, it wouldn't be a proper ending for the trends section if I wouldn't mention metaverse. And I mean, it's a buzzword. Everybody speaks about that. Metaverse is in very early stage right now, right? Some of the companies are looking for new business strategies while trying to reuse either built-in infrastructure or participants in the metaverse. They're researching new business opportunities and new business models actually how to monetize that. EPAM has unique capabilities that would help them to structure that research and to structure then that metaverse discovery work and actually try to bring some viable solutions to life. And as we stay on the metaverse topic, I would like to highlight one of our -- one of very unique players actually in the space. It's a company called Epic games. It's our [ DevOps ] customer since 2015, and we help them across a number of products and services that people know [ them about ]. Epic Games is a very special place because a lot of people know them as the creator of the widely popular Fortnite game. But they're also known to the gaming industry as a gaming ecosystem creator. If you think of it, the Unreal Engine is actually used to create those like almost hyper-realistic experiences and bring game creators' ideas to life. Then the game studio's engineering teams use Epic online services to power their creations while they're reaching worldwide players community through publishing the games on Epic Games' store. We call it online store. EPAM is very excited to help them in that journey, and we continue to work with them in that space. If you look at the bottom of the slide, the developed service published play vision is very unique in a way and has applications outside of gaming world. We do believe that Epic Games has all the necessary components to create their own metaverse solutions and bring third parties into it and adopt it. A Fortnite-based world that we actually saw hosting very popular virtual events filled with photorealistic human avatars created in MetaHuman Creator tool. And then if you add their robust set of services on top, like e-commerce or social, then you probably get an experience like never seen before. We're actually very happy to partner with them on that journey. And at the same time, we continue our investment in the EPAM IP and R&D initiatives around metaverse. With that being said, I want to pass the mic to my colleague from the east, Regina.

Hi, everyone. My name is Regina Viadro, and I'm very excited to be here today. I'm the Co-Head of North American business for -- and I lead our consumer and retail vertical for North America. I've been with the company for over 17 years, and I'm based in New York City area. Today, I would like to talk to you about the trends that we have been seeing in the consumer industry, an industry that was forced to transform more aggressively as a result of the pandemic than it likely would have happened. We continue to see companies invest into technology-enabled consumer experiences, and we continue to see investment in innovative solutions and many of our clients are bringing EPAM to help across the entire life cycle. We see continued vertical integration happening between manufacturers and retailers as manufacturers are launching into direct-to-consumer models and retailers are creating their brands, and retailers are prioritizing supply chain investments post pandemic while still focusing on innovation. Businesses have an imperative need to make real-time decisions about pricing, inventory and fulfillment, and data platforms and solutions and products are paramount in allowing companies to make those decisions. Consumer enterprises require a full mix of experience, data and advisory services with demand emerging for go-to innovation and execution partners that are able to play across the entire spectrum with the goal of minimizing the number of handoffs and transitions between different phases of the ideation and execution cycle. I would like to share with you one customer story as our work with this great global brand called Estée Lauder well represents the trends that we just discussed as what's started as a simple engagement has quickly transformed into a true strategic partnership for both of our organizations. We partner across a spectrum of different services, but there are 3 that stand out that I'd like to highlight. These are innovation, data and advisory services. An example of innovation could be a multi-brand platform for virtual try-on solution that allows you to try various shades and makeup virtually using the advanced capabilities of computer vision or reimagining what a store of tomorrow could look like for a manufacturer. When it comes to data, and data-driven decisions underpin all business functions right now, we work together on data platforms and tap into cloud-native functionality of those to understand consumers, dynamics and supply chain and future buying behaviors. When I mentioned advisory services, our work involves strategic assessment of new products and new business lines. And as we just covered a couple of customer stories, this is a good point to introduce a longtime colleague, Kevin Labick, who will talk about integrated consulting, which is often a key enabler of our strategic partnerships with our clients.

Thanks, Regina. My name is Kevin Labick, and I Co-Head our Digital Engagement Practice. I've been with EPAM for 10 years. I came by way of acquisition. I was the CEO and Co-Founder of Empathy Lab, which was EPAM's first foray into digital strategy and experienced consulting. So back in 2019 when we last had this event, we announced the launch of our integrated consulting offering, and it's designed to help our clients successfully build, evolve and operate digital businesses. And we are going to house it under the service brand EPAM Continuum. And as we explained, EPAM Continuum will be where we would combine our growing business, experience and technology consulting capabilities and then seamlessly integrate them with our global delivery so that we could make real even the most ambitious or complex program, product or experience. The focus was on driving business growth as well as infusing organizations with operational agility. So what's happened? Here's the update. Back when we made the announcement, our strategy and our innovation practitioners, even the ones -- some of which were housed in the studio here, were actually largely decoupled from each other and from the execution power of EPAM. Since then, we've integrated these skills, and we've scaled them. And this has enabled us to make a significant pivot to a business transformation-led proposition. We've doubled down on our belief that even the most technology complex solution, technology sophisticated solution, really requires a deep understanding of the human beings involved: our clients' customers, their partners and all of the key constituents within the business ecosystem. We strengthened our industry talent, and we created advisory boards focused on key verticals and horizontals that give our practitioners as well as our clients access to outside luminaries. We also expanded our consulting offerings to represent a much more transformation capability. And this, combined with our vertical and business domains and also our critical new skills, allowed us and allows us to provide strategy and execution simultaneously. You've been hearing a little bit about the investments into our digital platform, our ecosystem. Well, for EPAM Continuum, our platforms are providing really valuable tools that enable us to look at our population of 60,000 and identify and then onboard highly curated teams. They also, like in the screenshot here, provide training learning modules -- interactive learning modules that train our cross-disciplined consultants on a common method and approach. Ark mentioned some of the external validation that we've been receiving from industry analysts, some of which are focused on the capabilities of integrated consulting and EPAM Continuum proposition. Well, to a degree, this is a very good qualitative measurement for us so we can kind of track how we're progressing, but quantitative matters a lot to us as well. And so in the past 2 years, EPAM Continuum is in market globally and has over $1 billion of attributed revenue. This has come from a significant expansion of business within our existing client portfolio. EPAM Continuum has given us brand permission to treat with very different stakeholders on very different types of challenges within our clients. And these are clients that include those who have been with us well over 15 years and previously thought of us only as an execution player but now are seeing us as a strategic transformation partner. The growth is also coming from new logos that are seeking us out specifically because of this ability to do strategy and execution in parallel. The capability has also led to the creation of a new vertical at EPAM, which is M&A services, and Frank Burkitt is going to touch upon that a little later. We want to now bring more of this to life through customer stories. I would have talked to you happily about Estée Lauder or Walgreens, but Regina and Greg Killian have beaten me to it. These are great examples of EPAM Continuum at work. But at this point, I'm going to introduce Albert Rees, who's going to talk to us a little bit about one of his clients.

Good morning. Albert Rees, I'm the Head of North America Business Consulting for EPAM. I've been here about 5 years now, live down in Atlanta. Back in 2019, I had an opportunity to meet with you and share with you the profound impact we were having on a top 5 global insurer. We're doing work in their North America claim organization, and we introduced some very interesting digital technologies, which they've since then extended into all their major geographies, the claim organizations throughout the world. Since that time, we've actually led their transformation efforts in EMEA and in Latin America. As oftentimes happens, we have clients leave those organizations and go elsewhere. Most recently, one of our key clients' stakeholders within that top insurer left and most recently joined HomeServe, and you can see HomeServe on the left side there. When he went into -- he's now, I think, the digital head of claims for HomeServe, went into the role. We got a call very early on, and he expressed, "Okay. I probably need some of the things you did for us at that other top insurer, but not sure yet. I got to figure out what our existing capabilities are around digital. I have to figure out what our capacity is to drive change and really understand why I'm here and what they thought was important about digital claim and what they're looking for me to do." Back in January, I got the call back again and he said, "Yes, we'll definitely need some help. We want to start a digital journey, but it's a little ambiguous at this point. We're not sure where to start, what we need to focus on." So I suggested, "Why don't we bring in a couple of folks, sit down with your leadership team and start to hash out really where you can have the biggest impact?" As you can see, after a couple of meetings, we started with elevated future, focusing on claims experience for customers, for employees and for contractors. We brought forward a team -- a very small team of experienced consulting -- transformation consulting and an industry expert. And through this activity, you could -- we focus on the experience. And when you talk about the experience, their reaction -- the leadership team's reaction was what is that interaction point? What does the interaction point a customer, an employee or a contractor has with our organization? And of course, it stopped right there. So we had to spend time with them to get them to recognize the experience may start with that interaction point, but if you don't have the processes and business architecture and systems behind it to keep in enabling those interactions all the way through your systems, the system fails. So through a number of conversations with them, we were able to demonstrate that. Today, we're now working with them through identifying all the digital systems that they need from the interaction point all the way through their entire enterprise to enable a better claim experience and also to optimize and take cost out of their operations. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Eli Feldman, who's going to talk about a leading auto dealer.

Thank you, Albert. Good morning. We want to bring another example of work that we have done. And this is something that, I guess, touched pretty much every one of us at some point in our life. You come to a dealership, a classic dealership. I'm not talking about like the Teslas of the world. And you have the salesperson and then you have the contract person and then you have the finance person. And then they hand you these papers, like the ones that are printed on line printers, that you actually have no idea. You have never seen it anywhere other than these places. Now for them, it worked. I mean there is not much competition. Yes, there are start-ups and stuff like that. But for them, it worked very well for many, many years. So why change? Why digital is such a necessity? Well, the pandemic happened. The pandemic happened and obviously, dealerships closed. And the interactions were very hard and all of that stuff, and people were expecting some form of a normal experience on how they can buy a car. So enter this program that we have been running, essentially, since the beginning of the pandemic. It's a 5-year program that we started. For us, the technical components of that were given. The architecture, the design sort of around cloud native, around data-driven architecture and all that stuff, that was given. That's a modern marketplace that needs to serve, provide experience -- provide a very good experience to customers online, off-line with all that transition. Cloud native makes sense, data-driven makes sense, not a brainer. So that was one vector of the work that we were actually doing with these customers. But then we very quickly realized that, that mode of operations for a company like that where in dealership, essentially all of the software is record-keeping software. It's systems of record, nothing else. They don't interact with anyone other than the dealers that are actually entering data into the systems. All of a sudden, they need to transition to customer-centric, dynamic, hyper-automated sort of experiences across the customer engagement layer, all the way to back-end integration across financial systems, across lenders, across all of that stuff. And we very quickly realized that a classic sort of program approach or project approach to an effort like that, jointly realized, is not going to work, and we need to do more to essentially enable this organization to shift to this new modus operandi. One of the areas where we focus extensively is what that new experience, what that new approach to developing these capabilities is. And project to product transformation was a cornerstone for enabling that capability, essentially shifting them from thinking this is a 5-year program and this is like a set of projects within this program, to this is a set of products that are going to enable certain functions, they will continuously evolve, continuously enable the customer experience, the dealer experience, the lender experience and all of that stuff. So all of a sudden, it's not a 5-year program anymore. It's actually something that's continuous altogether. The other thing that we realized, record software is being released once in 12 months, once every 18 months or whatever that is. This is not the case with experience systems. The releases have to be continuous. They have to be quality, and they're engineering excellence. We worked extensively and actually transitioned the engineering capabilities within the organization from mundane stuff of how actually to deliver software, to cultural stuff, to operating model around the IT organization and stuff like that. And then we realized that, again jointly, that even that is not enough. Both the technology and the product capabilities actually need to transform to connect better the technology with the business within this organization as well to be able to continuously evolve and release this customer -- cutting-edge capabilities to the customer on a continuous basis. So overall, we are year 2 into the program. We already released this capability into the hands of the customer. The teams -- the joint teams between EPAM and the customer did an amazing job at the initial releases, and it's being adopted at scale across dealerships in the U.S. It's providing online marketplace experiences. It's providing much better sales capabilities and also continuously changing the business. And I mentioned before -- as I mentioned, the capabilities, all of the product clients that will continue this program for some time to come. Thank you. With that, I will transition the virtual microphone to Frank Burkitt to speak about M&A services.

Thank you, Eli. Good morning. I'm Frank Burkitt. I joined EPAM in the last year to lead our global business and strategy advisory services. I'm based out of New York. I'm speaking to you today from Amsterdam, and I'd like to highlight one of our advisory services today, M&A. M&A is a rapidly growing capability for EPAM where we're focused on serving both private equity and corporate M&A activity. It's interesting because it's an opportunity to look at companies holistically at a point of significant change. One of these offerings, product, tech and IT M&A includes due diligence, pre and post close integration and value optimization. This is a natural extension of EPAM's technical capabilities. It's an offering that can be leveraged for both target acquisitions and to assess current portfolio assets. For example, we're working with a global private equity firm with about $25 billion of assets under management, and they invest in middle-market growth companies that operate in financial services, health, technology-related markets. We recently conducted a rapid assessment of an underperforming portfolio company. Their goal was to make this a fully cloud-enabled enterprise, but the operating partners were concerned that the company was under delivering on its potential. Leveraging our due diligence methodology, we conducted a holistic assessment of their use of cloud for enabling products and services. We assessed their infrastructure, their application architecture, cyber, dev practices, data and analytics, business functions, organization, governance. To conduct this diligence, we combined our industry and tech expertise that was relevant to that specific asset profile, which included EPAM SMEs from our cloud practice, our platform modernization, advanced tech, agile, cyber, data practices. And we identified product, process and organizational improvements needed to achieve the cloud-enhancement goals. We're jointly planning a transformation program with them to address these deficiencies and optimization opportunities. And moving from diligence to implementation, this pulls through our core delivery capabilities like our cloud platform build-out; compute, storage and network enhancements that this asset needs; infrastructure improvements and optimization of their use of cloud services in their services. This PE firm has now asked EPAM to support the due diligence on 2 target acquisitions and to conduct cybersecurity review of another asset. This is a pattern that is emerging across a growing number of PE firms that we are serving. They are repeat clients for holistic assessments of companies, and there's a long tail of value optimization opportunities that come after that diligence activity. Our market-leading engineering DNA provides a highly differentiated capability to provide deep insights that go beyond what other providers can provide. We're currently expanding these offerings to include operational M&A services and again, due diligence through value realization. This is a service that we are also investing in digital platforms and tools to support a consistent and scalable offering on a global basis. Kevin?

All right. So I think it's becoming clear, these are multidimensional client challenges. So we thought we'd just round out this section, we thought you might be interested just to meet some of the people who are leading the EPAM Continuum charge. So Chris and Holger, if you want to just come up and say hi? You can stand in front of the podium.

Hi, everyone. Chris Michaud, joined EPAM about 4 years ago through the acquisition of Continuum, which was one of the original human-centered design innovation firms. I operate out of Boston, actually out of this office, which used to be the headquarters of Continuum. So now that I'm part of EPAM, my job here is really to help our clients navigate digital transformation by bringing a very keen focus on how do you use technology to better serve your existing customers as well as open up new business white space opportunities. So I do that in the role of heading up our experience and innovation consulting team, and we work across all the industries that you've heard us talk about today. So that's a little bit about me. I'll hand things over.

Many thanks. My name is Holger Friedrich. It's great to be here in Boston, but take a look at Berlin. I'm the Managing Director of CORE. CORE is a technology think tank, and we support our clients with IT strategies, IT architectural management and sometimes, we help to survive in complex technology transformation programs. So we are located in Zurich, Switzerland; in Berlin, Germany; and in London in U.K. And since 15 years, I was a proud client of EPAM because EPAM was one of our preferred engineering partner when we start these complex transformation projects. And 1.5 years ago, we got an invitation to be a part of the EPAM family, and that's why I'm working since -- one year since summer last year as Managing Director at EPAM. And I'm very proud to work with these fine gentlemen and some ladies because it's a world-class management team if I took a look from the perspective as a software engineer in the management position. So I hope it helps for the moment to get an impression. Thanks.

Thanks, Holger. And I think we're going to go virtual and Anatoli will say hi first. All right. Well, Anatoli is a man of few words. So why don't we jump to the next piece, and I'd love to introduce my close colleague and my favorite tormentor, Victor Dvorkin.

Victor Dvorkin, head of delivery with EPAM. Some of you know me. I'm with EPAM for 25 years this year, [ kind of celebrating ], and I'm here today to actually introduce my truly global delivery team. We will start with people here. Ethan, welcome.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Ethan Matyas. I've been with EPAM for about 3 years as well. In fact, I started the same week as Greg Killian. So it was a good onboarding class. Prior to EPAM, I was actually a customer of EPAM about 3.5 miles that way, in Cambridge. And I'm responsible for delivery across Americas. That includes all of our customers in North America, along with our delivery centers in Latin America. Good morning.

Pavel?

Hello. Pavel Veller. I am the CTO of our Digital Engagement Practice, and I'm the chief technologist driving the next evolution of our own digital platform, based out of Atlanta and almost 20 years with EPAM.

Volha didn't make it here, couldn't make it today, and so I will introduce her myself. Volha joined us from Belarus 8 years ago. She very quickly became our Head of Belarus, which was at the time the largest location for EPAM, expanded her responsibility across the region. Last year, she moved with selected members of her team into Poland and continued leading the region as well as expanded her responsibility into Central Europe where she's co-leading it with Yury. Yury, he's virtual today.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Yury Antaniuk, Co-Head of Central and Eastern European delivery for EPAM. My team is [ another 15,000 ] people distributed across the region, mostly in such countries like Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Spain and so on. I joined EPAM more than 20 years ago in Minsk as well [ at the time ]. Then around 15 years, I developed delivery reorganization in Ukraine and now currently I'm located in Zurich, Switzerland. And I pass to Amit.

Hello. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm the Global Head of Delivery for our European and Middle East customers. Today, I'm in Dubai, but otherwise based in London. I've been with EPAM for 7 years. Let me tell you, there has not been a single dull day. Good to meet you all, and I'm going to pass over to Srinivas, who for several years now has been working really hard to build a different kind of EPAM in India. Srini?

Thank you, Amit. Hi. Good morning. My name is Srinivas Reddy, and I head the India delivery center for EPAM. I'm based [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. So while Srinivas is fixing the mic, maybe a quick summary on India. We brought India as part of an acquisition, and Ark spoke about our first learnings. Now effectively, 6,000 people doubled in the last 2 years and growing extremely successfully across multiple locations in the region. And I will pass to Ethan to talk a little bit about Latin America.

So we've been working in Latin America for about 7 years now, starting first in Mexico and growing rapidly, but given the events over the last couple of years, decided to diversify further. We entered Colombia and other countries in Latin America around midsummer of last year, both organically through growth and then through a midsized acquisition, and actually have already grown Colombia and some of the neighboring countries to nearly 2,000 people. And so given support that we have between teams in North America, U.S. and Canada, working really closely with our teams in Latin America, we're really confident about our ability to scale there to more than 5,000 people this year.

So as you can see, we are actually growing the existing locations very fast. We are developing new locations. We are also very much focused on [ relocating ] our people across. And with all of this, it's actually not enough. The important point here is actually is all of this complexity to [ preserve ] and develop engineering DNA in existing and new locations. And I would like to introduce Sam virtually, who is a passionate engineer, and he will talk about this [ evolution ], how we are making our development even more agile and secure. Sam?

Thanks, Vic. Hi, everybody. I'm Sam. I'm EPAM's Global CISO. I've been in the software and security space for over 35 years. But I honestly just introduce myself often just as the software engineer that doesn't want to grow old, to be frank with you, because that's true. I have to admit, I have a whole zoo of animals here. So if you hear anything howling or any weird noise, it's my animals. I'm safe, don't worry about it. But this is a topic that I'm really, really passionate about and, in fact, is a treat for me to talk about engineering and security today. But in many ways, if you look at this slide, this really truly speaks to who we are. Our obsession in engineering and solving large scale, complex problem rooted early in the beginning of our company where we started out working with some of the pioneers and innovators and later on, disruptors in the software industry space. You can imagine years of collaboration like that shaped our thinking and how we appreciate and respect great engineering and product development and attracted like-minded technologists. I mean, honestly, great engineers want to work with great engineers. That's just a fact. And to be very honest with you, that's why I'm here. And we, naturally, started to raise the bar ourselves in how we work, how we foster and how we bring up a lot of our teammates together [indiscernible] who we hired, how we hired and constantly elevated our standards to what we consider great software. In many ways, that shaped our engineering culture. You could feel it, you could taste it when you talk to people [ inside ] of the company. And as we expand our horizon and work with more and more clients in different verticals, different stages in their software, digital and cloud journey, we naturally bring the product-centric and engineering approach, which is who we really are, to our customer. And that seems to be very impactful for them and start to help them -- and extract most of the value from the existing software and help them innovate as well. Now everything we've talked about, from our engineering culture, advisory-led end to end solution, how we adapt, how we evolve, how we innovate, all that's only possible because of everybody in the company working relentlessly and especially in solving real challenges. And I just want to take one second, if I may, to thank everybody in the company [ from the bottom ] of my heart. It's really -- they're really the ones that shaped the company and just great people. Next slide, please. This is -- if you can go on one more slide, appreciate it. Now this engineering DNA in building great products and solutions while collaborating with our clients is why I think a big part of the reason why we're unique in this space. Our product thinking approach to solve strategic and technical problems allow us to both be thinkers and practical developers so that ideas don't just stay as ideas. Unfortunately, a lot of that happens that way, but we allow them. We can actually help them to actually realize these ideas together with them and turn them into real functional operating software and systems and continue to evolve. And evolve is what every organization needs. We, at EPAM, constantly try to evolve and improve ourselves, as Ark talked about. This allowed us to truly help our clients with practical and real ways to become adaptive and agile, not just preach, but really think together, discover together and execute together. From our own journey, we see the power of connecting people. We see that we can provide value to each other, amplifying and accelerating creation process while reducing a lot of the risk of failure because of rigid process and misunderstanding. This is why we foster value creation through our organic network of great people. Our teams extending to clients are like frictions. And I've talked a lot about our fascination experience towards complex and large-scale problems. That's really who we are. And that is a big part of how we work, which is we love tackling those problems. Last but not least, approaching the problem, [ crystallize over an ] agile yet secure platform is critical so that our team can innovate in an environment. People need to feel safe to be able to innovate and create. When there is support, consistent, scalable and secure platforms in an environment, that is amazing possibility. Now if you could go to the next slide, please. As you have heard from everybody, all that amazing work, innovation, collaboration, tremendous value and clearly is worth protecting. This is why we treat software security very, very seriously. As part of our evolution, we continue to weave strategic tactical measure into how we work from our IT [ controllers, parts and ] services, security training and how we collaborate with our clients. Our guiding principle is what we believe in this practical and pervasive security, understanding and aligning and mapping all these policies, embracing our Zero Trust model as well as unifying our [ IEM ] and building this platform that's secure with all the software around it that's weaved into security is what we call security by design. And all of that lines up to our standard certification compliance work on our customers, of course. Now with that said, obviously, all this work really is fostering the speed and productivity that we're talking about, and I can't think of anybody else better than Ethan to talk about this. So Ethan, can I hand this to you?

Sure, Sam. Thank you. And so the point here is that speed kills especially when you don't have it. And so we're then working with our customers day in and day out to make sure that we're giving them the disruptive tools that they need to compete. And it really starts with a core team that work day in and day out with our customers. This includes account managers, delivery managers, business consultants and more that spend all of their time with our customers to understand where they're going to make sure we're aligned with them, proactively addressing issues, addressing opportunities and more. And of course, we look at revenue growth, at customer growth, but of course, customer satisfaction as well, constantly getting feedback from them to understand how we're doing and looking for opportunities to improve day in and day out. But I'm a bit of a visual person, and so I wanted to talk about just a specific example. So this is an actual customer, and Ark had earlier given an overview of what we look geographically before the war. This is a picture for a specific customer in late February. And obviously, the war is not something that we expected to happen, but something that we had to respond to very quickly. And so these dedicated account teams worked with this customer, worked with our teams and measured really in hours and days move delivery. This is moving people, this is moving knowledge, transitioning work and more. And the important point is not just to have people working in new locations. It's actually people delivering in new locations, hitting commitments that we have for those customers. And the feedback was specifically that where they expected a disruption to their business from the issue, we actually hit all of the delivery commitments that we had made and more. And so I'll keep going just to talk about how we actually engage with our customers. And while we have a number of different models, one of them that we're most keen, if you will, is our digital factory model. And if you can think of one of our customers, and Ark had earlier talked about kind of the average size of our top customers, this isn't about doing one project for a customer. This is actually about doing end projects, working across end products at that customer. And to deal with that scale, to deal with that complexity, we actually need a repeatable model that we can actually deploy where there's consistency around engineering quality, around governance, around solution architecture, support and more. And seeing this model in action gives customers the comfort that we're actually watching over the projects and they can trust us to handle more complexity and more work. And so with that, I'll give another example. And so this is actually a customer that we started working with at the beginning of COVID, which seems like decades ago but I'm told is only a couple of years ago. So this is actually a customer where our first meeting was virtual. The entire ramp-up was virtual. This is a customer in the health care technology space, and they had a massive modernization push. On top of that, new regulations being pushed down, and on top of that, new requirements that they had not planned due to COVID. And so they came to us and really had a major push and said, "Can you help?" And so we went in a span of 90 days focused on architecture solution and experience. And in the span of 90 days, we're then ramping up a team of nearly 600 people globally, brought together in product squads to address a huge modernization push. And we've not only delivered for them and their customers, but we've actually grown at that account. And so then if you fast forward another couple of years, still fully virtual, still remote by design, then the war broke out. And the customer really understood what was going on. They stood with Ukraine, of course, as well. But what they were actually surprised is how quickly we were able to mobilize to move our people, to move delivery and more and to not only retain the customer, to not only get rave reviews from them about how well we had handled the situation, but they actually came back and confirmed their commitment to us going forward, and this is a top 20 customer, because they were so pleased with the quality of work, quality of delivery that they had experienced with us. So how do we do this? We've talked a lot about systems, about applications. I think Ark touched on it earlier, but I'll spend a little bit of time just talking about some of the systems that we use specifically around delivery, specifically for our customers. And this is not just about marking things as red or amber or green with kind of silly colors. This is actually true transparency so that we actually understand what's going on, whether we're zooming out at the account level or down to the individual level. And so one of those core applications is our delivery health monitor. And again, to be clear, this isn't just about reporting. This isn't just about saying what's going on. This is actually to create alignment to proactively manage issues and risks. It's also a way for us to engage not only our teams but our customers to make sure we have a shared vision on what's going on, where we're headed and what issues we need to be focused on. I'll move on to our teams application. And our teams application is for us to understand the various skills that we have deployed on a project on an account to actually group them together. We had actually built some functionality, not so recently, before the war, actually focused on succession planning. And so that functionality went from maybe we need to rotate someone 6 or 12 or 18 months out to actually understanding who had not only the skills but the knowledge in a specific domain, in a specific vertical, in a specific account. So we could actually understand the type of person that could take responsibility if someone was unable to do work. Another application that we use constantly is perf or performance. And so this is actually bringing metrics into delivery. So again rather than just painting things with the color, we actually want to understand the velocity of our teams, the quality of work that we're doing, the status of CICD and more and to give a single pane of glass to both our delivery managers and our customers so that we can actually understand what's going on, zoomed out at the account level, zoomed into the individual and the ability to look at teams and products in the middle. And then I'll talk a little bit about our productivity coach, and this is something that we're trying right now. But this actually then gives feedback both to individuals and managers about how they're spending their time, their ability to focus. It actually allows them to connect with other individuals if they need help. And it allows us to really not only understand efforts, but the actual output for that effort. And so these are new things that we're trying through our application portfolio. And so as crazy as it is, I gave a tour of 4, maybe 4.5 applications out of, at last count, 189. By this morning, it might be 190, I'm not sure. But it really speaks to not just our digital platform, but the connectivity between them that really allows us to deliver for our customers. And with that, maybe I'll turn it back to Pavel, who can talk a little bit about where we're headed next.

Thank you, Ethan. I did say that I am the chief technologist behind the new evolution of our digital platform. With Sam being remote, I may be the only person in this room who still writes code and ships code to production every day. If not, raise your hand, please. But that's how I and my colleagues, the technical leaders of digital platform that powers EPAM drive innovation. We do it by example, and from within. Eli talked about the global automotive company, and he mentioned cloud native and data-driven table stakes that the architectures will build today. What we built today is modern, cloud-native serverless, event-driven, elastic and distributed. Our data-driven analytics is powered by near real-time data [ link ] house. Our APIs and applications, the new one we built, run with four nines availability, they're designed for performance. The team that builds it, my team, it's the team that runs it. We don't have scheduled releases anymore. We practice continuous delivery. Sam talked about it, too. Internally in the product-led engineering, we practice what we call demos over deadlines. I call ourselves a highly performing team, but surprisingly, we do nothing different from what we recommend our clients to do. That's exactly that. Not all of the 189 applications are like that. Just like we help our clients disrupt their industries and themselves, we disrupt ourselves through new ways of working, through new technological enablement. My team right now, I have an R&D team, works on something we have a secret name for, which we call programmable EPAM. When we next time meet on an event like this, I hope a year from today, I'll tell you more about it, okay? And now Larry will tell you all about our people.

Thank you, Pavel. Thank you, Ethan. And thank you, all. It's great to see you here. I was also here in 2019, and it's great to see some familiar faces. Larry Solomon, Chief People Officer, I've been here about 5.5 years now. And I work out of our new town, Pennsylvania headquarters office. So I arrived by train Tuesday night and I got into an Uber with a pretty chatty driver. So I asked him where he's from after a few minutes, and he said I'm from Algeria. And after a couple of minutes more of talking, he says to me, I bet you're from New York City, I can tell. I said, yes, bingo, you're exactly right, I am born and raised in New York City. And he said to me after a couple of more minutes. He said, I bet you're Italian. And I said, well, that's one of the two common guesses, but it's not correct. I don't know how he missed that one, but it wasn't correct. But we got into talking and he said to me, said you know, people come into my car and they only talk about 3 things here in Boston. Sports, money and politics. And we spoke about all 3 for a few minutes, and I'm not going to get into politics here, that's for sure. And as far as money goes, we have our CFO here. He's a rock star, you can pepper him with all the questions about money after this. But sports is pretty safe and innocent, right? And for those of you that follow sports and the New York-Boston rivalry, the Bruins had a pretty good run this year. The Celtics are in the playoffs. Unfortunately, the Red Sox are in last place right now. My team, the New York Yankees are in the first place. And he said something to me very interesting. He said, there's something about the winning teams that regardless of the things that change year after year after year, there's a few things that you can see in the winning teams that remain constant year after year. And I thought that was a good tie-in to what I'm going to talk about because as you'll see on your agendas, the theme of my session here today is that the more things that have changed, and there's been a lot of changes, there are a few things, a few core things that remain the same, and it's true about our people. So this was the setup for 2022. Those of you that follow us know this. We -- this is pre-war expected revenue growth. We had a line of sight. We felt really good we were going to hit $5 billion in revenue. And we were planning to have an overall net production headcount increase of 15,000 people -- production people with an attrition target of 17%. And at that point, before the war, we anticipate or we projected that about 50% of our delivery capability would be outside of the 3 largest countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Boom. Terrible, terrible war initiated by the Russian government. Unsubstantiated, unprovoked, flat-out wrong. Our response. Obviously, the war is very, very personal to our leadership team, to our employees, to our company and to our customers, and we mobilized very, very quickly. Financial resources, human resources, technology resources, logistical resources. In the first week, we announced $100 million commitment from EPAM to support our employees and their families. 85 days and counting to the day, 24/7 support from our entire EPAM population. 10,000 EPAM volunteers. We didn't have to ask a single person to volunteer, everybody stepped up. And at this point, $500,000 of individual donations from our employees. This is just an example of how we mobilize into action quickly. And I can go on and on about some of the things that we did. And by the way, on this topic, if you haven't already seen to the left of the reception area on the wall, there's a digital playing of some of the outstanding things that we have done to help and support the people of Ukraine. Before you leave here today, I would ask you to spend a minute or two. I can't require you to do anything, but I can encourage you and ask you, please spend a minute or two in front of that wall and just look at the scrolling of how we've supported our people in Ukraine. In the first one, they're securing Internet access. Those are the Starlink satellite systems. I have an employee who is working for me, who got drafted into the military, and he told me that his chore for that day was to paint these systems in camouflage colors so that they can be deployed out in the combat zone and not easily detected. So what changed? It's somewhat obvious for us what changed, and Ark mentioned this. We've been through a lot of disruptions. COVID was a big disruption and yet another disruption now, the war. Our center of gravity, a major, major geographic shifting from the countries in Eastern Europe to other parts of our delivery network that Ark and Ethan covered. The pace of our operational response and our mobility efforts, it went from fast to faster to super-fast. We had no choice. We had no choice and a rapid deployment of leadership from countries in certain parts of Eastern Europe and elsewhere to other parts of the world, where we were growing. So we had a head start. We could take people, senior people, we could take assets, we could take training programs and quickly mobilize them into the new areas. What was the impact? This is a page out of one of our systems that we use to manage the employee life cycle. And as it relates to this, the great relocation, our mobility efforts exponentially increased on a daily, weekly basis, and we can tell step-by-step in real time, how many people are moving from where to where and what part of the mobility process they're in. Visa status and immigration status, whether they're traveling, whether they've been approved, what their new offer is in the new country, et cetera. This is a real-time picture from one of our systems that we use on a daily, daily basis. Utilization. Anyone that follows the services industry and services company knows utilization is one of the most important ways to manage supply and demand, right, at its simplest form, and then it's a percentage equation in the numerator, is the number of billable hours, chargeable hours, paid for hours. And then the denominator is available hours and it produces a percentage. And if it's too high, that's no good because your people are burned out, you're running too hot. And if it's too low, you're in some trouble. The remarkable stability of the Ukraine utilization, as you can see. And that red dot on the right side there is when the war started. You can see that the dip in utilization when the war began is less than the seasonal dip that occurred in December. The dip from the war in Ukraine utilization was less than our normal year-after-year seasonal dips. And the same is true with our overall EPAM utilization, remarkably steady, remarkably predictable, and the fact that we are running about where we expect it to be, plus or minus a point here or there, is just an evidence of the strength and the resilience of our people. We had people in the first 2 weeks of the war in Ukraine, this is a true story, of course, sitting in a bomb shelter, processing payroll with their laptops, trying to get any Internet connection that they could grab to make sure that our 15,000 people in Ukraine could get paid on a timely basis. They were processing payrolls sitting in bomb shelters. Our ability to rapidly scale. So this just goes back a few years, our recruiting capabilities, talent acquisition. And you can see the green line continued head count growth. This is the net headcount additions in the blue. And if you take a look at 2019 and you compare it with the size of those bars to 2021, in 2 short years, it's been a doubling, approximately a doubling of our net headcount adds. And you can discount the COVID year in between 2020 because it was a somewhat unusual or atypical year. So our ability to scale TA, recruiting. And one of the more important points of this page is if you go back and look at our Q1 activity in 2020, and then look at Q1 in 2021, when we were full boat recruiting in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. And in Q1 of 2022, we stopped. We stopped midway through. No activity in Russia, very minimal activity in Ukraine, very minimal activity in Belarus. And yet we were still able to hire people. We pivoted quickly, and we have been hiring people outside of the region and in the new regions that we spoke about today, Latin America, other parts of Asia, other parts of Europe. So through it all, coming back to the little discussion that friendly Uber driver and I had, we are a winning team. And you're going to hear more from my colleagues, Neel and Kate and Sandra in a few minutes here, a resilient team. And there are a few things that relate to our people that have remained constant throughout the adversity, throughout the disruptions. Our ability to pivot and scale with quality, talent acquisition, mobility, delivery that you heard about. Our underlying digital people ecosystem, which Neel is going to talk about. Our commitment to community and ESG, our focus on learning and education, which Sandra will take us through, and all in all, at the end of the day, our engineering DNA and our culture of the tagline that we're very proud of, results relentlessly. Or just simply put, we're just doing what we do best. It's just EPAM being EPAM. We're just doing what we do. We're doing what you expect of us. And I'm going to turn it over to Neel now to talk more about our digital ecosystem.

Thank you, Larry. So I'm Neel, I'm based in Boston, and I actually joined EPAM for an acquisition way back. It's been 20-plus years now. So Ark and the rest of the team have been talking about our digital platform. And we have hundreds of people working on our digital platform, and we invest millions of dollars into it every year. And the reason we do that is so we can run at the speed of our business, not at anyone else's. So we don't have any dependencies on external software enterprise vendors. So when the events in Ukraine unfolded, we were able to, in a matter of days, get the status of our people and their well-being using our digital platform. We also piggyback on top of our IT infrastructure to be able to provide hot lines so our people could call in and also enable our volunteer support teams. Our digital platform also gives us near real-time access to data about our people, and this enabled us to quickly make decisions based on the changing ground conditions. And I think I didn't change the slide, anyway, so this is a screen shot of Telescope. Hopefully, some of you have heard about Telescope, it's our flagship application. And this is what we use to gather information about the status of our people, and we have real-time dashboards. So using our digital platform, we actually built EPAM specific versions of Uber. So a car pooling application that help us to move people from the east side of Ukraine to the West and beyond as well. We also built an Airbnb-type application for sheltering people, for sheltering EPAMers and their families. We also built a relocation application because, as Larry mentioned, we have the great relocation. And it's like immigration in general, is very complex. So we enabled our people to an application to figure out where they could go next, what kind of documents they need and things like that. Larry also mentioned that we had over 10,000 EPAMers donating their time to help out with the consequences of the war in Ukraine. So we used our cloud sourcing application called [ plus.epam.com ] to actually channel all of these volunteering efforts. And I'm really proud of the team that we have that has helped develop these focused applications and pivoted very quickly to react to the situation at hand. So with that, I'll turn it over to Kate, who will talk about ESG.

Hi, everyone. Excited to be here today. My name is Kate, and I've been with EPAM for the last 10 years. And I'm going to talk a bit about our ESG pillars. And that's the wrong slide, but -- okay, that's the right one. Neel was talking about the digital platform and that this is our secret sauce, something that helps us run our business. And the same talented teams are getting together not only to come up with the solutions for our clients and for ourselves for the company, but they are also getting together to contribute back to the society and to come up with the solutions to support our communities and the environment. So there are a few examples that I've highlighted on this slide, but the one that I want to talk about, or the carbon footprint calculator, and that's a grassroot effort by the team who are passionate about environment. And they wanted to come up with the tool to help all of us to calculate our own footprint and to get, in a very interactive way, some [ themes ] on how to reduce it. It's been scaled today to be used internally in all of our locations to get information from our offices, from our travel systems, about our corporate footprint to keep [ trending ] on the environmental responsibility in our operations. Talking about that, we do really believe that IT industry will play a vital role in helping to transition to a low carbon economy. And we have, as a company, committed to the SBTi, like so-called science-based targets, to make sure that everything that we do, all of the programs that we run and our emissions are in line with the latest climate science and the Paris Agreement objectives. We also keep educating our employees, our communities, and kids around the world about the environmental issues. We do have a really long track of programs and even more partnerships that are focused specifically on educating kids. And on the previous events like that, Larry was sharing the details about our eKids program. But what I wanted to highlight today, and you can see like the recent examples of what we were focusing on, some of them during the previous year. But what I wanted to highlight today is that we use the same ecosystem, the same learning tool that Art was talking about. So [indiscernible] scaled this program is for kids. And as an example, just in a month, since we've started rapidly growing our operations in Turkey, we already launched a few classes for kids. We already are looking forward to start a few partnerships with the local schools and universities just in a few months. So more about our capabilities in learning and education will be shared by Sandra, a colleague of mine. So will pass it over to you.

Thank you so much. It's lovely to see you again. You look fantastic. Thank you for coming out this morning. I'm Sandra Loughlin. I joined EPAM 4 years ago from a career as a learning scientist and org psychologist. My role is to coordinate our education activities around the world internally and externally and to ensure that they are of the highest quality, and this is very important, deeply aligned to our business strategy. So I'm talking today about education. But really, it's about EPAM's resiliency and our ability to scale and our ability to maintain quality as we do that. I'm based in the DC area and love coming to Boston. I love coming anywhere at this point in the pandemic. As Ark has said for years, EPAM is an education company. And as you've heard this morning, we approach education, not as a check-the-box activity or as a nice to have, but as fundamental to our business strategy. We use it to drive growth, quality and results, both for ourselves and for our clients. Our business depends on growth, and that means we need to have an ever extending and expanding talent pipeline. If you know EPAM, you are -- and if you're listening this morning, you know that we are known for our quality engineering and our unusually highly skilled talent. Many people attribute this to the fact that a large number of our people come from Eastern Europe and the region's historically strong science and math focus. And that's true, but only partially so. What we learned a long time ago is that great engineers, great technologists can't be hired. You can't hire an EPAMer. You can only grow them, and that growth begins before they come into our doors on day 1. In Eastern Europe, we are an employer of choice for the best talent. We achieved this distinction in large part by engaging with prospective employees before they were in the community. They wanted to join EPAM and they were still in their universities or in other careers. With these bridge programs, which are proprietary, we call them Elevate, have been part of our talent strategy for about 18 years, and they currently include 163 university partners in 12 countries. Whenever we enter a new geography, Elevate leads the way. Because we know it is instrumental to our ability to attract and hire uncommonly skilled talent. In the last year, almost 98% of our entry-level technologists came in through Elevate. And we recently expanded this to career switchers, who now comprise almost 60% of our learners. As we continue to grow headcount and enter new geographies, we will keep using Elevate and other education activities to maintain our engineering expertise and our expectations of outputs for clients. In the next couple of years, we anticipate creating at least 50 new university partnerships in 20 countries, including Mexico, India and Turkey. And we've also launched programs to teach university professors in computer science and technology fields how to better educate the students so that when they come to us, they are even closer to what we need them to be on day 1. And last, but not least at all, as Ark mentioned, you saw the EPAM global campus initiatives. We are moving and expanding on this already pretty impressive effort by creating entire degree programs, Bachelor's degree programs in our core areas and establishing boot camps all over the world. Education also drives EPAM quality. It's not just before they get here. But when they get here, that the EPAMer is created. It allows us to continually attract, develop and retain best-in-class talent. After compensation, of course, research shows that the #1 reason technologist leave companies is because they can't grow, because they are not being invested in by their companies or they don't see clear progression pathways for their careers. We know this and for the past 30 years, have invested in creating the environment that not only supports people to grow, but helps them be motivated and have the tools to do it effectively. We have more than 17,000 unique learning programs in our portfolio. I think Ark mentioned a couple of them that are under our [indiscernible] suite. There are thousands and thousands more. And we have recently certified 9,000 engineers in emerging areas, particularly like in the cloud especially. I'm a learning person, and that means that I know that just because you offer training to people doesn't mean it creates any impact. And so as a company, we have gone far beyond offering education to our people. We actively combine breakdown silos within our organization to combine talent development and talent management. In other words, education and motivation, so that our people are constantly growing and on the cutting edge of knowledge. The result is that a person in a role regardless of where they are in the world, have the same skills, capabilities that are demonstrated by authentic assessments and verified with our people systems. Our approach makes our career progression transparent for our employees and helps them feel confident in their ability to grow. As a result, we have received a number of awards very recently. And historically, this is a -- literally a sampling, there are so many we couldn't fit on the slide. Our people around the world recognize the value that we create for them and they come back and create that value for us and talk about us in their geographies. Education also drives results. As we grow our EPAM Continuum brand, our integrated consulting offering, EPAM remains committed to delivering high-quality results for clients. Education has become a very powerful tool in that effort. Clients, especially executives and senior leaders are hungry for a partner to help them truly understand and manage complex transformation, digital platform data, the whole nine yards. By augmenting our advisory and delivery capabilities with education, we help clients understand where they need to go, and very importantly, see us as a trusted partner to help them get there. Since its founding a couple of years ago, our learning practice has educated over 300,000 of our customer employees. We have built a number of learning programs, including several that are specifically for executives and senior leaders. And we have a number of thought leadership pieces that are emerging in this space. We have also driven tens of millions of dollars in revenue toward EPAM and opened several new accounts and logos for the company. We are going to continue to invest in our activities, continue to lead the way and share with our clients and industries, the truly leading edge platforms and approaches that have driven our success as an organization to help our clients achieve that same success for themselves and their customers. So I'll turn this back over to Larry to finish it up.

Thank you, Sandra. So to conclude this topic, I want to come back to the same 5 things that despite the changes we've been through, some of these changes will change our company forever. But despite all the things that we've been through, these 5 things from a people perspective have remained constant with us. They're core differentiators for us, and they will remain constant going forward. Our ability to rapidly pivot and scale our digital ecosystem that Neel summarized for us and Ark discussed, our focus on learning and education, which is clearly one of the things that we are most proud of and one of the most important differentiators that we have from a people perspective, our culture of engineering DNA and our results relentlessly tagline, and we live it and breathe it every day. And last, but certainly not least, our commitment to our -- the communities in which we work and live and the overall ESG umbrella. We're a humble company. And I hope you've taken a little bit of that away today, and we're not overconfident, but we're confident. We've got this. We've got this. We can manage through this. We are managing through it, and we're going to continue. So I'm just going to conclude with the same line that I used in 2019 here in Boston and the same one before that in New York City. We've been dealt a hand of cards and all the cards aren't the best ones, but I wouldn't trade my hand in for anything with what we've got. We're going to now go into Q&A. So I would ask the leadership team to come up here and join me, and anybody else who wants to come up and answer questions with us, you're more than welcome to. Wow, it's some leadership team.

So we open up for Q&A.

Bryan Bergin from Cowen. Thank you very much for doing this and very impressive with what you've had to deal with here. So my question, it's clear you have obviously the internal methods, the tools, the IP here to train talent. You've done a great job retaining the current base of talent too. Can you just speak more about that funnel of talent, though, over the next couple of years to replicate that center of gravity that you've had in Eastern and Central Europe, just how long do you think that will take? Do you have to do things differently in a more dispersed base? And I think do you have to kind of open up the funnel a bit more as it relates to the skill sets you go after, going after earlier prospects, things like that, can you just dig in a bit more on the talent?

Ark and I'm seeing the Q&A. So but -- how long is it going to take? We've already started. It's already happening through a combination of the relocations that we're doing, not only relocations at the lower levels, but we've also been seeding our new countries with leadership from other countries, EPAM veterans that have been with the company 10, 15, 20 years and know how to get started rapidly. We don't have a waiting period of 3 or 6 months. So through a combination of our -- the great relocation and our rapid mobilization efforts, as well as our TA capability, where nowadays, you don't have to have recruiters on the ground necessarily locally on day 1 in order to scale up. So we've been able to lift and drop many of our assets into the new locations, into Latin America, into other parts of Eastern and Central Asia. And if you reflect back on that line -- on that recruiting line that I showed, our Q1 recruiting activity without the benefit of heavy activity in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, is already exceeding Q1 recruiting -- has already exceeded Q1 activity from the prior year when we were recruiting heavily. So that just shows our ability to pivot and rapidly scale up in the countries outside of Eastern Europe.

I think I just [indiscernible] because Larry was showing the slide with a net addition. And net addition, clearly, Q1 was dropping a lot, but -- because we stopped hiring in 3 countries. But it's not actually exactly the interpretation of what's happening. We cannot do it practically in this quarter because of this happening. So right now, exactly reshuffling happening, and we will be starting growing in other locations. So which -- we don't know that we will compensate right away 100% or 60% to 70%, but we will compensate. And also the experience which we received during the situation in Belarus. We have experience where we were moving 20, 50 people in very small countries, simultaneously rolling out like our educational programs through local universities. And we're building development center close to over 1,000 person in 12, 18 months. That's experience which we had already during the Belarusian stop. Now we have much more broader geography to focus and many more talent coming from our scale ecosystem and education [ MTA ] to target multiple locations.

Sorry, some of you can't see me, I'm behind the pillar. But first of all, a tremendous job, tremendous execution. I echo everyone's sentiments in this room. My question was on -- as you think about hiring over the next, call it, 5 years from 60,000 to hundreds of thousands, do you have a plan where some of your core competencies in countries like Ukraine and Belarus, you could continue to hire people out of those 2 geographies and then move them over to the adjacent friendly countries. So in other words, as you think about hiring, do you have this framework where you would continue to source talent and then just relocate them proactively.

Well, let me try to answer, and then [ Lawrence ] will correct me. But when you're asking about 5 years and plans, it's almost unrealistic question because what was happening during the last 3 or 4 years, it was completely unexpected. That's why we're talking about adaptability and being adaptive so often. Because it's impossible to make a plan for 5 years, period. So we will be exploring right now clearly new locations for ourselves, and we'll be watching real time what's happening. Okay. So -- but we do believe that with what we learned during the last 20 years, it would be possible to reapply and adjust to new talent pool. And from your location as well, I don't know like, people from Ukraine not necessarily want to relocate if war will be finished. We've even seen right now 2,500 people moved from Ukraine and probably 30% already moved back as soon as Kyiv was removed. But we still don't know what would happen. We don't know how situation will end up in Russia. We hope that situation in Belarus will be stabilized, okay? So -- but we know what specific groups like in many big companies like [ Corporate Carrier, like Advance ] you can select a very small number of people, which will be making the biggest impact. It's not about quantity moving on. So we need like to build local talent in any case.

The only -- just quickly, the one thing I would add, we have a capability within the recruiting organization hired to relocate. So we have a sizable number of recruiters that are actually working to relocate, to hire people from one country, and immediately, they never join that particular country, but they relocate with our assistance. We have a whole process supported by the technology that you saw here to land in another country. And it's a very effective recruiting channel for us.

Maybe a quick comment. We are already targeting specific skill sets and specific kind of rules of relocation, how we can accelerate specific selected places, for example, in Latin America or in Turkey, et cetera.

Thanks for all this info. It's been very helpful. I just want to dive in -- it's Darrin Peller, by the way, from Wolfe. I just want to dive in a little bit more on -- when we think about the geographies you're now moving into to diversify your workforce, the quality of those engineering talent and how that compares to what you're very, very used to, whether it's Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and then the cost to really not only keep them hired in the wages in those markets, but the onboarding costs there? Given that -- I'm not sure the EPAM brand is just quite as well known in those markets as it is in some of the core markets you were in before.

I think what we learned is that development of our brand was advancing a lot during the last years. We already touched multiple markets, and we see that our brand actually opening doors in the government to talk very, very quickly and it's the same on the market. So we do believe that this part is handled by this time because we have a #1 digital engineering brand in the world right now. So all other questions we kind of share it what instrument we have. And we will be applying. And that's why we don't know exactly the secret sauce how to handle this. We will have to do it like quarter-by-quarter, and then redirecting our investments. What I can tell you also like kind of it's all questions on the same topic. For example, we did acquisition in Colombia about a year ago. From the time we signed term sheet to the time we actually signed the final documents, 3, 4 months, we started recruiting there. What we recruited for EPAM was bigger than the company which we bought. So without infrastructure. We have actually a lot of system support how to do it very differently than we did it like 4, 5 years ago. And everything else, like it's a long answer, which we try to answer. I don't think we can answer in any [indiscernible] as if we know something we didn't share.

So it's Jamie from Susquehanna. You know that slide that Ethan had put up, which showed the before and after of delivery case study. Just to kind of bridge how investors think and what they fear about that slide. Do the clients ever ask you where your delivery is coming from? How often, if at all, do you have that conversation? Do they care? What's going on in their minds?

The question was how often clients ask about the location strategy and how often they speak to you about specific locations.

I think the short answer is that some clients, of course, do. Clients that are focused on secure perimeters and more want to understand where the people are, but more than that, what we're doing to secure the environments. Our approach has been to be very proactive to explain how we're doing everything from background checks, onboarding, security and more. And to also explain how we're setting up infusing kind of EPAM DNA into the new locations. And once we have those conversations, they're very supportive of it.

I think also a little bit different view on this question because it is important, but think about our history. Think about 10 years ago, 85% of the countries with Belarus was much bigger. Think about Belarus as a country default for Western clients to go doing work. The answer is not. But the answer also where's the best engineering can talent come in, not from country, in general, like some clients always will be saying we're not going to work in Colombia or not going to work in Belarus. Russia, clearly right now, or something like that. But it always will be some clients, which will be working in this whatever country because the talent is so huge in demand. So you have to prove that you can deliver. The location is still secondary, while a lot of clients will create preferences, but as soon as the demand generally available, then you will be able to direct where you can bring actually the solution correctly.

Two questions. First one is for Larry Solomon. In the numbers you discussed earlier about net hiring for the first quarter of 2022, the 2,500 net hires, you can infer from that because of the war hiring slowed down. And in the month of March, you might have hired net 500 people versus a year ago, of 1,000 per month. If that's true, you're hiring temporarily slowed to about 50% below the prior year. What I'm trying to understand is when would you expect to get back to the ability to be bringing on net 5,000 employees on a quarterly basis as you had done in the December 2021 time frame.

So those numbers were net hires, and they include the attrition that's happening in Russia and Belarus. Interestingly enough, if you exclude the attrition that's happening in Russia because of what we've discussed, our attrition is running within a point up or down of what is historically run quarter-by-quarter. We expect our hiring capacity to exceed what it was in the prior 2 years and where -- I can't get into specific numbers, because it's a little forward-looking, but we're already running at that capacity for Q2 and the forecast for Q3 as well, but I can't get more specific than that.

And the second question is just for Arkadiy. This whole war is a terrible disaster. But my question is about Belarus. When you look at the possibility of another problem happening there because somehow Russia forces Belarus to get involved and the world basically sanctions them, what do you think is the -- what's the likelihood of that negative event happening? What's your sense on the likelihood of it not happening? And if it does, how do you think you can react more effectively this time in Belarus versus what you've done in Russia?

I think Larry was talking about not being overconfident. And I think before war started, I was very confident that this war is never going to start. So with this, I don't have any prediction what will be happening with Belarus, if they will become part of this or not. But at the same time, when you're talking about preparedness, then think about like all these relocation strategies which we're talking. They related to both countries with a very expensive relocation already in Belarus. And Belarus was mentally -- people mentally were much more ready for this because they were trained for the previous 2 years. In Russia (sic) [ Ukraine ], it was too sudden happening. So we have a significant portion of the talent from Belarus, which is already on the move. So we hope that we would not need to exit the country right now. We hope that the government will be able to mitigate and not become active part of the world. But in general, we're ready for this as much as we can manage because like clearly next question will be what would happen if Ukraine, and anything can happen as well. That's what we're saying. We don't know when war end and we don't know what will be. That's why we need like to watch and see what's happening.

We have one more question. Jason?

Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. A follow-up on Latin America and your build-out there. It sounds like Mexico and Brazil, specifically are a big focus. And just wanted to understand the dynamics in terms of the war for talent in that part of the world because as we know, there's a lot of other digital IT services companies that continue to expand and are kind of more native to the region. So what are you encountering in LatAm specifically?

So certainly, it's a competitive market, but we've actually found people to be very receptive. I'll start by saying our focus originally what was Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, now Dominican Republic and now some other locations that we talked about a bit earlier. What we've actually seen is going into some of these new markets, both the type of projects, the type of customers, the type of work that we have, the opportunities for growth, for learning and development, the type of projects that we do, the type of talent that they can work with, actually, they've been very receptive. In fact, we just held a conference in [ Medellín ] this past weekend, Bogotá coming up this next weekend. And we actually had hundreds of people showing up really excited about the work that we do, about the opportunities that they would have for us. So no doubt, it's competitive, but right now, it's been at least receptive to start. Larry, anything you want to add?

Mexico and Colombia, we've already started to scale aggressively. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, some other surrounding countries, we're having active discussions. We've already started to seed some of those countries with talent. Ethan is right. I mean, so far, so good, I would say, once again, not overconfident but people seem to be receptive to the value proposition that we offer, which is you get the best of both worlds with EPAM. You got a large, stable public company, but you got a company that's entrepreneurial and growing quickly and still scrappy and gets into the details. And it resonates with a lot of people there and knock wood, so far so good. So we're going to continue it.

Maybe just a quick addition. We're also very excited about the talent in Latin America. They are ready for modern engineering. They require not too much training, and we believe this is a great place to scale. Thank you.

Okay. So why don't we take a 10-minute break. And then we've got 2 of our clients that are going to present. We do have some time during those presentations to ask questions, and then we'll conclude the day with another Q&A session with the management team. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back. Those of you who were with us in 2019 in our Investor Day, we updated you what we're doing for the financial services industry vertical. We talked about what we're doing for capital markets, for payments, asset and wealth management and also what we were doing for neobanks. And after our introduction on deep dive, we introduced you, Igor Tsyganskiy, that time the CTO of Bridgewater Associates. We'll little bit dive in what EPAM was delivering for Bridgewater. And we ask Igor to come back 3 years later to make sure that he updates you about what we're doing, how developed, how things are changed and what was the progress of EPAM since 2019. And now I would like you to welcome Igor who, at this point of time, he's the President of Bridgewater Associates. Igor stage is yours.

Hi, everyone. Can you switch over to the presentation, please? Here we go. So, Hi, everyone. EPAM has asked me to come back and give you an update on how our relationship is progressing. Just to set a little bit of the context for you. Out of all of our vendors, I would say we have 3 strategic partners. We like to call them partners versus vendors. One of them is Microsoft, another one is EPAM and the third one is AWS. And we have a second tier of vendors that we procure from, but the strategic relationship is pretty much on a different level. So we've started working with EPAM back in 2016. And since 2016, and these numbers include projections of us spending money this year a little bit. We've increased our spend 16x since 2016 and 2.5x since 2019. Resources staffed from EPAM is 3x by the end of the year in 2022. And the number of projects and areas covered grew from 12 to 19 in 3 years. And since the beginning of the relationship, it has grown from 9 to 19. And every year for the past 6 years, including this year, we're going to grow at the rate of no less than 35% per year, regardless of what is happening geopolitically with EPAM. So why am I saying regardless of what happens with geopolitical with EPAM? Because our partnership with EPAM has never been based on building resources in Eastern Europe. We have most of our resources that are EPAM based are in the United States and in Spain. We had some of the resources, I would say, about 10% of the resources were in Ukraine. Prior to the conflict -- right before the conflict we've partnered with EPAM to move some of the resources out to Spain. And right now, we maintain -- we are very committed to Ukraine and our staff there work together with EPAM to -- we work together with EPAM to make sure that our employees, the people who work for us and for EPAM that they're well taken care of as well as their families for both inside of Ukraine and outside of Ukraine. So for us -- and then all the other countries, we have minor folks there all over the world. But we are basically focused on the United States and on Spain strategically speaking. The rest of Europe is going to grow a little bit. So coming back to these numbers, when we think about the relationship that we have, we are focused on building solutions. So if you think about Bridgewater, not only we are the largest hedge fund in the world, but we do everything via software. So we are the largest hedge fund in the world that happens to be a software company. And so when we think about critical, critical areas, pretty much EPAM is now, although they have not been fully in 2019 in every single critical area of our business, whether it's core trading, core research technology as well as the strategic services that we've been building together called data factory. And we are now proceeding in building next generation of analytical services for Bridgewater called, Analytics Factory, that is focused on summarizing macroeconomic events all over the world. So with that, what I thought I would do is instead of giving you a long lecture, I would rather open it up for Q&A and finish by saying that we're mostly committed to EPAM through ups and downs. We have a pretty long strategic relationship, and the way I look at EPAM is the same way as I look, you've heard the back-end story of how they scale, people, so forth and so on. I'm mostly ignorant of that, right? So I look at EPAM as the same way as when I procure from Microsoft, when I procure from AWS. I think about Software as a Service, so I look at EPAM as Labor-as-a-Service, right? So basically, I need dynamic -- have dynamic labor needs. Sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, sometimes they need to shift. And I say, where do I need labor, what class of labor do I need and when do I need it. And then I have long-term contracts as well as NDA agreements and security agreements to layer all over that request, which is very similar as what I have of AWS and computing infrastructure, right? I say what computing infrastructure do I need, same thing for [ Pfizer ] -- where do I need it? When do I need it? And here's my long-term contract with you. So with that, I'd like to open it up for Q&A, which might be more useful to you.

Do you have an internal IT team. And so what kind of resource growth has it had compared to the 35% each year for the last 6 years.

Well, it's funny that you say that because EPAM has almost no presence in my IT team. So basically, at Bridgewater, I run all the developments, so meaning all the investment systems, all of the corporate systems. We used to have data centers we're now mostly in the cloud and all the IT. And EPAM has almost no presence in IT, mostly the growth has been in -- growth has been in all of our core development areas. -- right? And if I rephrase your question and ask a question of where are we growing more at EPAM or inside, I would say that it's in line between the 2. So we're basically growing at 35% per year.

So by core development, you mean the business units within.

Well, so for example, core trading systems. Okay, or core research analytics like we model the world. And by modeling the world and [indiscernible] the world, we decide on where to invest in every single most of the markets in the world and most of the asset classes in the world. So all that is driven by timeless and universal economic rules powered by a platform of systems that basically we build and we use a lot of EPAM staff to co-build that with us.

So if you had to highlight sort of your top 3 metrics that you sort of measure success, is it quality? Is it speed? Or what it was...

In different areas, it's different things. We started with why don't you just get us the capacity that we need, right? So we just basically need the flow of people in certain areas. And we measure success by having the right people at the right time, right? And basically not needing to worry almost like the cloud, in an essence, I don't need to think about anything other than having the right resources at the right time. So that's what we started with. And in 2019, I spoke to you about something we're building together called Data Factory, which is a fully managed service, and that service has by and large been built and done in production, which is a fully managed service that EPAM has built and now managing on a 24/7 basis, right? And in there, we have very strict SLAs on what it means to deliver data to us at the right time. Where EPAM focuses a lot more on the labor, like our involvement in labor is mostly -- this is Ukraine was Data Factory. We were doing it in Ukraine. So our involvement is risk mitigation, our involvement as being good partners and making sure that the people who are involved with our projects are safe and sound, right? And we're supportive of their families and loved ones. But other than that, the SLAs there are very different, meaning data delivered on time, so for example, we need to generate signals a couple of times per day, data needs to be delivered prior to that. And therefore, we have very strict SLAs when data needs to be delivered. How it gets delivered, really is up to EPAM. And so we've built that capacity together. We own the service, but they operate it for us. Other questions?

I know you mentioned very obviously, EPAM is a strategic vendor to you, but -- when you look at the services and the products that they're working on for you, is everything mission-critical? Or are there baskets of discretionary activity that in a sharp down turn you pulled back on, how do you think about that?

Yes. Let me think of how I want to publicly answer that question. There's obviously discretionary activities. That's why it's elastic in nature. But given the fact that we're growing, certain things might be going down, certain other things might be growing. So when COVID hit, for example, right? We went in and we made -- we, like I called Arkadiy, when it was 2020, let's say, February, right? So there was this big spike, market crashed capacity appeared when out and bought 18 months' worth of capacity really, really quickly and committed the spend. Now how that spend was blended? We definitely have some discretionary things. We definitely slow some things down because we're also a business, right? Certain things can go up and down, but I know the baseline of spending and what do we need to do. So now Bridgewater is involved where historically has been -- we have been a macro fund -- and we are now involved in basically building our next generation of capabilities, which is focused on reconciling micro events all over the world into macro signals. Doing that requires a lot more data, a lot more platforms, replatforming, pretty much everything we do. And so that's a lot more strategic in nature. And so that's not dynamic. There are other parts of the business that may be dynamic, but that's mostly of how do you manage? How do you manage the baseline spending? When I say 35%, that includes all that stuff -- kind of the same way as when I manage my AWS compute, there's definitely things that go up and down. And there are things that I know that I'm just growing at and I'm willing to commit capital on. And so when I say 35% per year, that's capital commitment, Think about it this way, right? So I commit capital and then how to use the resources is really up to me.

Ramsey El-Assal from Barclays. You mentioned redeploying -- needing to deploy about 10% of the Ukraine workforce to another jurisdiction. Talk about that process? Was it seamless? Did the project slow down? Did you have to look outside to other vendors to backfill temporarily? Or how was that -- where did that go?

We started that process in October of last year and November of last year. So basically, the process for us was mostly simple because we mostly did it before the crisis started, right? So basically, the process was that I allocated a certain amount of contingency towards conflicts. There was a possibility of conflict when you're running a mission-critical business, a possibility of a conflict immunes conflict, so you don't want to wait until the conflict starts. So we, by and large, move the people out that are necessary for mission-critical work by the end of January. And then we offer to anyone who wanted to go. So in that sense, it was seamless because it all started prior to that. And then we have contingency plans on what would happen inside of the country if there would be a war. So we offered everyone who want to lean Ukraine prior to the middle of February to leave. Certain people took up on that offer and left. Many people didn't believe anything would happen in the state. Those people who have stayed because of the contingency planning, and we've started our contingency planning back in, I would say, back a year prior to that. When we started the contingency planning, most of the people moved towards different parts of Ukraine, mostly [indiscernible] and like basically border of Poland, but I can't even tell you where they are right now. Sometimes they get on the phone. And the important thing is even during the worst parts of the crisis, we were operating at 75% capacity. Meaning it never went down below 75% capacity for our service. And right now, we're operating at about 80%, 85% capacity, given the fact that some people get drafted into the service. We know, I think the number of female to male in that project is like the largest anywhere in Bridgewater. So there were definitely bumps. It was completely insane. You get on the phone call, they're all working and say, I'm sorry, we have to disconnect because there's bumps flying. So to say that it's completely surreal. But because we move the mission-critical stuff over and everything else we can mitigate. And it was a tough couple of weeks, but that's all it was. And now everyone kind of settled down in that mode, and we're actually continuing to hire in Ukraine and I'm still improving net new hires in Ukraine.

This is an impossible question follow-up to answer, but do you -- are you guys do you think your experience was a typical experience or are most shops just based on industry knowledge I know this is specific to Bridgewater as...

Because you guys are public NOS. So no, I have no idea what other people are doing. So basically, that's the gist of it is, that's how we treat all of our mission-critical stuff. So we have a very standard approach of what it means to be mission-critical. That's the way I would think about it the same way as you have multiple data centers. And if the tornado is coming, do you wait or when you have multiple availability zones in AWS, when do you decide to shift workloads. That's why we're creating those 2 things, Labor-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. And the amount of automation at EPAM from what it means to move labor isn't the same, right? So I have not seen that anywhere else.

Are there -- is there anything that you wish you could have that EPAM would do better or differently or more?

The #1 thing for me is capacity. So I would say that 35% can easily be 50%, if they would be able to fulfill that, which I don't think they can and it would not be responsible to do so. But right now, that's my biggest issue. My biggest issue is basically growing the right personnel. When I say 35%, that's 35% that they are committing to grow by, which right now, someone asked me like, given all these things that are going on the stock market, everything else, like what's the state of the labor? And I would say the state of the labor is extremely volatile. In certain areas, it's really, really strong. In certain areas, you can start finding labor, but like volatile is worse than short of labor, right? And so for me, 35% is what I am committing to grow by that's why planning the projects, and what most of our discussions are on is can you find me better people in the areas that I need to more people sooner. That's my #1 issue right now.

Hello again. EPAM has always had a special place in our big heart for start-ups, companies that are looking to change quickly and also become disruptors and they also become disruptors in their industry. And they need often different kind of partners -- technology partners to take them there. And it is my pleasure to introduce relatively new clients for EPAM and ask Matt Beinke, the CEO; and Gerry Liddle, the Founder and Chairman, to come to the stage and tell us about their venture Raintree Global Holdings. Welcome.

Thank you, Regina. On behalf of RainTree I also want to take this opportunity to thank you for the invite and the opportunity to be here today. As Regina mentioned, we are a start-up and having a forum like this to share what we're doing is incredibly appreciative and thank you to Ark and the EPAM team for allowing us to be here today. Yes, RainTree Global Holdings. My name is [ Matt Beinke ] the CEO. And just a little bit of background, as was mentioned, it is a startup. We're piecing our team together now and getting and ramping ourselves up, EPAM is a big part of that. And my background, lawyer by education, mostly land use, government law, was involved in several startups, also spent over 20 years with a large residential master plan, real estate development company, both on the front-end land acquisition, entitling processing, government work, negotiating public-private documents that last decades. And in addition to that, the area that we're going to be discussing is something that in that world, at least in California, where I'm from, has been going on for over 25 years and has been just a flat out cost of doing business. And that is mitigating the offsets and the impacts of the real estate industry and development in particular. And what we're going to discuss with RainTree is how that is now evolving into every industry in the world and having to address their direct and indirect impacts on our environment. So where does my international involvement come in? I've also been involved. One of my partners created a nonprofit over 20 years ago. So have been dealing with a lot of international philanthropic efforts through an organization called the Wheelchair Foundation. And most of the countries that RainTree is starting to work with, and we'll move into here very shortly are countries where I've had some pretty good extensive experience with government officials and at times heads of state in those countries. So getting a chance to meet Gerry quite a while ago and now learning of his vision, he asked me to come on board recently. And for me, it was a no-brainer. This is where the world is going. And as Regina mentioned, RainTree is definitely on a path to be that disruptor. And hopefully, that leader of it. and no better person than Gerry Liddle, who is our Chairman and Founder, -- so I'd like to introduce him and he can walk through his vision. Thank you.

Yes. Thanks, Matt. Yes, we're pretty honored to be here today, introduced to EPAM less than 6 months ago, but it's been a very interesting journey. They're helping us really fill an important niche in terms of where we're trying to take this business -- as you can see on this slide, we believe we're a transformative and first-to-market carbon offset business. We are in the climate tech space. We have an ambition to make a difference in the climate challenge that the world faces today. I'm from Canada, product to the forest industry in Canada, where as some of you may know, Canada's largest forest products industry in the world. We, as an industry, growing plant, about 1 billion trees a year and have developed technology for growing and planting trees in regard to environmental projects. The underpinning of our business model is the development of technology for growing large areas of trees and reforestation in developing countries mostly. Our business model is connected to the Paris Climate Agreement and provisions within the agreement that allow large corporations to offset their emissions through investing in reforestation projects in a large scale. So our basic business model is to provide a bridge between the corporate community in the world today, which is making commitments to decarbonize and reduce their emissions and the developing countries in the world in regions of the world where deforestation has caused a significant problem in terms of climate and other issues relating to sustainability. As Matt may have mentioned, the market for carbon offsets is expected to hit $100 billion a year by 2030. And our business model is based on filling that need through the contracts with developing nations that are signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement. Restoring forest is viewed as very critical to climate change. The UN has a governing scientific body called the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has included that by restoring forests around the world, we could actually impact as much as 40%, 45% of the impact of climate change by restoring forests. In the developing world, the missing link is infrastructure in terms of ability to do that. So our business model is to bring from Canada in the developing world advanced technologies for achieving that goal. I and Matt and the rest of our team are part of a network of people in the science and business of horticulture and greenhouse production policy in terms of the climate markets and corporate governance. Our track records include growing and planting up to 1 billion trees. And this is what we call a bio center, which is a large-scale greenhouse type facility, which uses an array of technology, very common in the vegetable greenhouse sector today across various markets, greenhouses have grown significantly in terms of use around the world. EPAM is helping us in all aspects of our business development, and have helped us really fill an important niche in terms of how we're advancing the business, including what we refer to as our digital ecosystem, which is really the delivery of an array of software solutions across the business spectrum. As well as helping to develop the enterprise management system within the company. The software needs within the business are very complex, and EPAM is really helping us bridge that capability across a lot of very, very important aspects of the digital world. EPAM is also very focused on helping us build consumer engagement programs, a continuum group, which we think are rock stars in terms of the delivery of these type of solutions. And Matt, I think you're going to touch on this one.

Yes. To close the relationship that we've started with EPAM is critical for us. And it's allowed us to not just look at EPAM and Continuum as a consulting company. They're a strategic business partner for us. On the front end, we're starting small. We've got certain tasks, we have to complete to get ourselves in a position to do what we need to do to build the bricks-and-mortar bio centers and so forth on the front end. But the software and the future components are actually executing it and managing the carbon credits, both for our corporate buyers, which ultimately we believe will also transcend down into the consumer. This is not a philanthropic effort. The philanthropy side of this is a phenomenal effort by those that are doing it right now, but it's not enough, and it's just not even putting a dent in the need and all of us are reading the papers and reading online all the various corporate commitments and the dollars tied to it, and they're massive and significant, as you all know. A lot of these companies, I'm sure you guys analyzed. So -- it's not a feel good, do good anymore. It's a business requirement. It's going to be an industry standard across every single sector, just like in what was a relatively small world of real estate development, it was a cost line item for us, and part of doing business, regardless of whether the market was good or bad. And that's what you're going to see going forward in all these other industry sectors, some are already doing it now. But the scale is massive, and it takes a lot to manage that, not only as I mentioned, in the software side of the sale of the credit, but also the management of the trees and the property off-site and also the insurance backing those credits to make sure that those corporate buyers can be assured and guaranteed that those credits are real legitimate, marketable and secure. So EPAM, we see going forward all the way through that process and beyond. So this is a long-term relationship that we're very excited to have started and look forward to continuing well in the future. So thank you. I guess lastly, there's -- I'll make one quick little plug. On the bottom corner, you notice the Wheelchair Foundation, that's the philanthropic effort, I mentioned earlier, they have been involved in for over 20 years. And in light of what has gone on in Ukraine, we're in the process of delivering wheelchairs to those in need into Ukraine in these coming months thankfully. So, yes, we're -- any questions here?

Really I enjoyed what you're doing and work that you're up to. One thing I was wondering if you use EPAM to support is a biodiversity that you do when you actually create trees and plant them so that's not just a tree park, but you have a biodiversity to be able to produce what had been there. So creating a healthy forest that has the necessary balance across biology that used to be long. And you can't replace old growth forest, but you can at least begin to do that. And I don't know if EPAM has helped you develop certain tools or if there's AI that you could use to replicate that?

Happy to address that. The -- under the Paris Agreement, there are very now strict rules in terms of the types of projects that can be developed -- there are -- there's a requirement that at least 50% of what is done on a large-scale basis is biodiversity restoration. The reclamation of everything from mountain forest to coastal regions, it's a critically important part of it. The other 50% is -- can be agroforestry or commercial applications, but they have to meet very rigid requirements in terms of restoration that's related to -- it's got to be sustainable, permanent and additional, those are the underpinnings. There are the carbon credit and forest market has been evolving over the last 15 years. There has been questionable practices in terms of the standards and the quality of projects, the legitimacy of projects. Our initiative is really based on a very important monitoring and verification of that, which was actually what led us to the EPAM because it's a very data-intensive requirement globally and working with partners like, for example, Google, Google Earth and other agencies that can manage vast amounts of data, a lot of it satellite remote sensing data collection and management and EPAM has the capabilities. And in fact, there were really a few other potential vendors in the world that could do what EPAM could do in terms of helping to pull together all of those technologies and needs. The project that we're developing, the underpinning of the business is what we hope in the next 12 months will be more than 20 countries across the world that will be involved in the project and collectively representing what we think will be the largest forest restoration project on earth. And frankly, without EPAM, I don't think we could do it. It's a really important relationship. They're helping us bridge so many different areas. We have the technology in terms of how to grow trees -- we have the market relationships in terms of the developing countries. The financing from the corporate community is there, but the real missing link is the software and really to be able to manage all of that data and to bring it to market. We think that carbon offsets that are legitimate and important in the world need also to be branded and brought in the consumer markets. And that's something that EPAM is real, especially the Continuum group is uniquely positioned to help us do.

And I think to add to that the infrastructure that EPAM has, especially for a startup, is significant. There's skill sets, not only just locally but internationally, that EPAM has that we don't have to go higher and expand our business in that way too fast. And earlier than we would otherwise need to. So on an interim basis and who knows how long that interim basis is going to go on. It could go on for a long, long time. EPAM's capabilities being as large as they are as sophisticated as they are and the breadth internationally, we could never -- we couldn't replace that. That's why they're truly a strategic partner of ours and really helping us with our business development. It's been fantastic.

Any more questions? All right. Thank you. So in the balance of time, I'd like to have the management team come back up, and we'll just finish the day with a session of Q&A and then go from there.

This is Arvind Ramnani from Piper Sandler. I had 2 questions. One is if you can talk about any sort of client attrition you've had because of this -- because of the war. I mean, clearly, like I think some of the new logos -- sign-ups may have been slow, but have you had any actual clients who have kind of -- you basically kind of terminated their relationship with EPAM?

I didn't get the question who is talking.

Okay. Yes. And I repeat the question. I just wanted to get a sense on have you had any client attrition because of this -- because of this war, like have any existing clients said they no longer want to work with EPAM because of this war.

We practically didn't experience anything like this. So it was 1 client, which started and then stopped at the very, very beginning of the war. It was some clients which put hold and then come a couple of weeks later and starting to work. In general, impression was very similar to what we were experiencing in Q2, 2020 when COVID hit. But shrinked because during the COVID it was longer period like this. So definitely some clients like holding the extension of the program. You see that our guidance for Q2 practically flat, probably some new clients who are thinking but they are still starting. We're getting new clients as we speak right now. So there is concern, but this is back to what you were sharing. The demand is very strong. There are multiple attributes which driving demand, and even the impact on the region, which we mentioned different calculation from 300,000 to 400,000 people impact, actually creating still high demand. Clients -- and a lot of clients very committed actually and saying to us that they will be staying with us and we'll be growing and looking for some relocation of the people and as we mentioned, significant number of people relocating. And already, we have in new locations, people working in kind of hybrid teams with the same clients. That's all happening. There is no really stories like -- there is no stories where we have clients dropping at all.

And just a follow-up question on that. I know 70% of your head count will be outside Ukraine, Belarus and Russia by end of the year. But of that 70%, how many of them are like nationals from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Is it?

So we will tell you when this happens. But it would be -- as we mentioned, we don't know exactly the numbers. This is so, we have to work. I think in Q3, Q4, we will be able to share how many people actually relocate it and how big this seats component. It's going to be in thousands of people, how many thousands of seats will happen. We will let you know later.

I was wondering if you could talk about kind of the decision framework for reallocating people from those 3 countries to other countries. I imagine there's -- it's a lot of like personal factors, maybe some regulatory ones, and then also commercial ones? And just how you all go about making those reallocation decisions. And then to the extent that there were kind of cross-geography teaming. If there was that before the outbreak of this war, how you're kind of factoring that into where people move to? And I guess the last thing as a follow-up is, do you think there's actually any kind of opportunistic room for improvement that is -- obviously, it's a very difficult moment now, but is there an opportunity to kind of like bring the best leadership and the best talent to new geographies and accelerate kind of the cumulative learning curve in these new centers where you're trying to scale.

There's definitely opportunity but we will be talking.

So relocation is a very serious focus on a daily basis. As we showed in the systems, we actually have real-time trackers on the numbers. And -- we understand exactly the plan practically for every individual in this person is moving or staying what is their preferences in terms of countries. What we would like to have in terms of relocations versus sure he would like in terms of relocations. It's absolutely a huge opportunity from a point of view of targeting specific talent for us. We would be able to disperse this is unique in a way because we will be able to disperse talent ideally, again, if you find a mutual agreement, to countries like Latin America to Turkey to Serbia to other countries in Central and Eastern Europe to India potentially. And from this point, we see the engineering DNA. So we're exactly looking at this [indiscernible].

Questions on that side, do you have a question?

Maggie Nolan from William Blair. I'm wondering if you can talk about some of the challenges with the education program as the delivery footprint has shifted so significantly? And any specific changes there as a result of the shift?

[indiscernible] actually asked this earlier, the challenges are around rapidly making the university connections, getting the local footprint in place and then delivering on it. So our approach that we have taken historically has not changed. Our mechanisms, our programs, how we are attracting talent and getting them into our pipeline hasn't changed -- but each location is a little bit unique. And so we are partnering with our local people who are there, who know the region, we know the players, who know the culture, and we are kind of asking them for guidance on like how do we do this ? And here's our goal, here's our mechanisms, how do this the best way? And we're getting that feedback from them. And so it's like Larry said the more things change, like our locations change, but our approach hasn't.

I think I would add like really the change is starting to happen even before COVID on online component and asynchronous learning starting to develop very quickly. When COVID hit, it's accelerated all of this very, very quickly because in class education kind of started to disappear very quickly. And right now, we have much more flexible ecosystem to deliver in locations through expert network of our mentors and people who create content and people who are delivering online content, the proportion of in-class versus online is completely different than what's like 3, 4 years ago. That's why like, for us, it's pretty good kind of opportunity to scale. While still we have to understand local universities -- connection to local universities is still important and some personnel moving to locations from our educational system, which making this connection easy.

Maybe just addition on the interest. Again, post-COVID have a lot of cross-border mentoring, and we will be leveraging even more cross-border mentoring well. So this accelerates and scale the educational programs [indiscernible].

This is all about systems which we're showing because it's cross-border mentoring, cross-border interview, has wording like assessment, all of this really supported like in what we call -- we started anyway as an experiment. Now the whole EPAM becoming driven by this model.

And maybe one for Jason. Can you talk about the difference between assigned employees versus revenue-generating employees and how that may impact the model? Any anticipated structural changes there as you get to $5 billion, $10 billion?

When you say is assigned, are you talking about the BCP or the shadow resources we talked about or kind of, yes.

That's right.

So to be really clear on that. So we have taken certain resources and we have kind of shadowed or twined them on accounts. And it's to make certain that clients are comfortable with delivery, particularly when they're -- obviously having challenges in Ukraine and even some other geographies, okay? And then it's also just for us to make sure that we can continue to deliver. So these resources would be on an account, they would be charged from an expense standpoint, what I do for a living, but then we would not be billing for this client. Now for the purpose of the adjusted income from operations that we talk about, we have excluded the cost of those resources. So they're showing up in effective the GAAP financials, but not in the adjusted financials. And so as you see in FB is focused on this. [ BARS ] is focused on this, which is now beginning to take those resources and convert them to revenue driving. Now that we're not totally passed but increasingly comfortable with our ability to deliver. So those would show up within generally an acceleration of revenue growth, but not just a massive sort of profitability expansion because their costs have been excluded from adjusted IFO. So as general way kind of think about that, oftentimes, they're probably in geographies where rates are a little higher, so there probably is some uptick there. And so I would say a little bit of improvement in profitability but mostly kind of you'll see further revenue growth. And I don't know what we'll do over time in terms of to what extent those will become part of the model, but to the extent, I think what it really just speaks to is EPAM will do whatever it takes to make sure that we can continue to deliver. And we continue to be the company that gets the complex projects done, get them on time and with assured quality. And that's what has kind of gotten us to this point in time. And obviously, it's what we hope will continue to propel us to the $10 billion revenue target that EPAM talked about and Ark specifically talked about this morning.

Jonathan Lee from Morgan Stanley. I appreciate the depth and the breadth of color today. Given the sort of ongoing supply constraints, I want to ask about delivery and head count. Can you talk through the process of how you're identifying new delivery geographies or pools of talent where you're currently not operating in.

To be honest, some of it is planned and supported by a lot of data and a lot of analysis on labor rates and graduation rates of engineers. Some of it is opportunistic, both organic and inorganic. And some of this is a bit of luck also. But it's -- right now, it's a very -- as Vic mentioned, the whole mobility area. I mean we have to look very carefully at where our people can go, where we can open up quickly, what the tax rates are in certain countries, what the immigration laws are in certain countries, what the educational capabilities are in certain countries and also where our people are going to be comfortable. And when we're moving people around the world, especially from some of the countries that we're talking about here, we have to make sure that our people can land and be comfortable and work productively.

I'll maybe make one example to make it kind of land. Take Tokyo for example, this is 85 million people country near 60,000 graduates per year. So we can clearly deploy our educational system. We are tested and we can organically grow in the region. So that sounds kind of the good news.

And just a follow-up add.

I do just want to add just on the finance side is that in addition to all the things we talked about in terms of immigration and where people would like to go. Like everything else we've talked about today, we will run a full database of costs on all these different countries, right? What the salaries are, what the net pay is in the countries, what the incremental cost to us are, what the opportunities for various sort of tax opportunities with the local governments. And then we assess each of the geographies based on their attractiveness, not only to the employees, but also the cost effectiveness of those. And we've got a full-blown database across a whole range of different countries that we used to make these decisions.

Very helpful, Jason. How much of EPAM anywhere is factored into your current sort of outlook and the delivery strategy?

It's part which proved working for us. Again, we started this initiative way before COVID, COVID accelerated it. Right now, that's exactly what we said. We -- it's changing how EPAM [indiscernible] and eventually a lot of practices which we're testing there, we'll be applying to the whole EPAM because it's about efficiency, managing people in very different distributed setup -- and it's part of the plan definitely.

I have another question on utilization and pricing. So on utilization, you talked about the shadow BCP type resources. But conversely, are there resources that are doing double shift like a BPO type where they are working, I don't know, 12, 15, 16 hours a day. And more importantly, is that a material portion of your head count that's doing it right now? That's on utilization. And then on pricing, we've heard other vendors talk about rate increases at a greater frequency. So if typically, they go once a year, they're actually able to request and extract 2 to 3x per year in price increase -- would that be something you guys would be experiencing as well?

Yes. So just in terms of the -- I guess, the question around people working 15 or 16 hours a day, there definitely were examples of, let's say, people who might work for their client during the day, and then do some work for, let's say, Ukrainian resource that had to be moving from Kharkiv to Western Ukraine or something to make certain that again, we could have this sort of continuity delivery. But that wouldn't have shown up in a benefit to margin or something if that's kind of what you're trying to understand. But a lot of heroic activity to make sure that we could continue to deliver quality. But again, we'll just make certain that we maintain the customers and we talked about our ability to retain customers. From a pricing standpoint, while all of this is going on, clearly, there's a whole lot of conversations around different price points and different geographies and all that. And the environment that you are referring to, which is that there is more openness to sort of accepting price increases just because of the tightness of the market. Yes, that is facilitating all the things that we're doing. That's why we're talking about continuing to improve profitability throughout the year and to get back to something closer to what we have traditionally talked about as we enter next year. So yes, price is definitely an opportunity. And as we undertake all of this geographic transitioning those pricing conversations are occurring. They're occurring today. They'll be occurring in Q3, and then we continue to have discussions, of course, about price in the traditional geographies see when there is a movement.

Time for one last question.

[indiscernible]. So just a 2-part question. The first is just in this environment where demand is incredibly strong, can you just talk about how you prioritize new clients, right? Because I think the Bridgewater example would be an ideal case where they started with you small and have grown whatever the number 6x, 15x, not every client is going to do that. So how do you guys prioritize the new demand that you are seeing? And then the second part of the question is, -- no one knows we're going to go into recession or if demand slows, but to the extent certain of your clients do pull back, right? Are there some more discretionary stuff. What's the process of reallocating those resources to come free. Is there a kind of a -- is there a priority list already within the company? Like how -- just talk about how that process kind of works.

I think it's a simple question to ask. And there is no simple answer or single answer to this. That's why we were showing and kind of trying to convince you that we have enough dashboards and real-time information, and we're monitoring what's happening because like this priority is changing. Like during the earnings call, when we describe like Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, it's different priorities and this timing is also changing. So definitely, we can easily sometimes make a decision based on profitability, our ability to scale in specific location, Bridgewater, very specific account, large account, growing very fast, but with very specific demand. So that's why there is no answer to the question. Simple answer is, it depends. But we have all instrumentation to make as much as possible effective decisions in specific time and environment, at least we hope so.

Yes, I just think to address the second part of your question, our ability to work through the unexpected, the ups and downs. If you look at the team on the stage here as well as those that are on video, despite the youthfulness of the faces, there's a lot of experience of seeing that movie before, managing through ups and downs, managing through disruptions, wars, COVID, et cetera, not only within EPAM, but outside of EPAM also. So it's a unique leadership team, and it's tough to find elsewhere. But -- as I said before, we're pretty confident that we're ready for just about anything.

All right. So I think that wraps up our day. Ark, do you want to give a few closing remarks?

Yes, First of all, clearly thank you -- first of all thank you actually for opportunity for us to get together. So that's already worsened. And I think it would be very good to meet like in 2 and 2.5 years. I'd tell you the same continuation of the story, which we did today. So that would be very, very nice. Unfortunately, somebody asked me today what I'm thinking right now actually, [ Kevin ], I think. And I said I'm thinking about last slide from my deck. There is a question mark. What will be happening. That's what we don't know. This is an uncertainty of unknown in front of us. But the only thing we can convince you that we prepare it hopefully a little bit better than our other companies on the market. Okay. So that's what we hope, and that's what we're targeting. Again, thank you, and hopefully, we will meet soon in 2.5 years from now and with similar presentation. And thank you for the team because like you see how changing the phase is like 2.5 years ago, we have team here. There are a lot of new faces actually here as well who already was in the company. There are a lot of new faces in this [indiscernible ]. I think those of you who are wishing us for a long time, see how we're changing like very, very visibly and how transformation happening. So that's why with all this unknown, still there is a very, very strong hope without overconfidence. Thank you.