HCL Technologies Limited (HCLTECH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

December 8, 2022

National Stock Exchange of India IN Information Technology IT Services investor_day 205 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Meenakshi Benjwal

executive
#1

Good afternoon, and welcome to HCL Tech Investor Day in this beautiful city of New York. Thanks to all of you who joined us in person and thanks to hundreds of those who joined us virtually. I'm Meenakshi Benjwal, Head of Americas Marketing and your host for today. Please note that there will be some forward-looking statements for the purpose of this forum. So do take some time to review the safe harbor statement on the Investor page of our website. To kick off, I have the privilege of inviting our Chairperson, Roshni Nadar Malhotra for her opening remarks. Roshni?

Roshni Malhotra

executive
#2

Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you so much for being here today and for everybody who's joined online. I hope you all are well. Let me first start with reiterating the five strategic objectives, which I have earlier stated for HCL Tech to demonstrate leadership through differentiated services and products. We constantly look to innovate our service and product portfolio so that we can deliver differentiated value to our clients to support their digital transformation and big win in the market. Our recognitions in engineering, cloud, digital and software and leadership quadrants are a testament to our innovation. To be the employer of choice in professional services across key geographies, especially in a lot of the countries that you just saw in the video. Our people are our biggest enablers of our ability to deliver differentiated solutions to our clients. HCL Tech takes pride in being an employer of choice for multigenerational talent in our chosen countries. We're deeply focused on supercharging our people leadership and continue being a magnet for top talent across the world. To be the preferred digital partner for Global 2000 enterprises in chosen markets, 70% of the global technology spend comes from the Global 2000 enterprises. Our objective is to be a strategic partner for these large clients and deepen our relationship with them. To weave our ESG goals into business strategy, it's about the solutions that we can offer to our clients. It's about localizing, it's about how we can supercharge our contributions to the communities that we operate in. And finally, to deliver superior total shareholder return over the medium term. Over the last 10 years, HCL Tech has delivered the highest TSR among Tier 1 Indian service providers. This is something that we're extremely proud of. Over the next few hours, you will get an insight into how we are working towards these strategic objectives. I have always believed what makes HCL Tech unique is our entrepreneurial DNA. We have pioneered three segments of the industry, engineering, infrastructure and products; and we continue to reinvent our approach to business and our people. The HCL Tech supercharging progress brand relaunch has been a year in the making and it's central to the fresh momentum we're going to need to win and achieve the strategic objectives I have stated. Our rebrand positioning was born out of self-reflection and discussions with many of our clients and how they view us. HCL Tech is the leading differentiated challenger as clients deeply focus on their digital transformation programs, while constantly looking for efficiencies to fund their digital programs. Our comprehensive breadth and depth in cloud, digital engineering and products is extremely compelling, as is our people-centric and purpose-driven culture. The HCL Tech Board continues to listen keenly to our investors, shareholders and all stakeholders. All valuable feedback is strongly considered for all decision-making. The Board is extremely diverse with more than 30% women directors. And our members bring rich experiences, networks and knowledge for multiple industries ranging from tech, finance, education, health care and much more. More than 60% of our Board are foreign nationals based in critical geographies and our largest growth markets. Our Board is absolutely confident in our leadership and their ability to execute on our strategic direction and objectives. So I'd just like to end by saying thank you so much for your trust. Thank you for being here today and wishing you all happy holidays. Thanks. [Presentation]

Meenakshi Benjwal

executive
#3

May I please now invite our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, C. VijayKumar, also known as CVK. CVK?

C. Vijayakumar

executive
#4

Can we just remove this podium? Thank you. Good afternoon. It's wonderful to see some of you in this room and several of our investors, analysts on the virtual medium. Welcome to all of you. What a lovely day it's in New York. And great, great to have you. Over the next 30 minutes, maybe I'll spend about 20 minutes giving you a little flavor of our business and growth strategy. You may not be very surprised with a lot of things because we've had an Investor Day a few months ago in Mumbai and a little bit of an update from where we are. But we would highly encourage questions and any perspectives that you would like to share, we would greatly welcome. HCL Technologies, it's -- we now go to market as HCL Tech. We focus on four key areas in the whole technology services space. Digital, which is truly the business applications and the value chain transformation, application management, modernizing applications for cloud, cloud native, that's the digital focus that we have, which includes analytics, SaaS, all of that is our digital focus area. Engineering is one of our longest and the largest service line, where we focus on product engineering, building products for some of the top brands in the world, platform engineering. A lot of companies continue to modernize their platforms to deliver more competitive advantage for themselves. So we are in the forefront of engineering. And cloud is all pervasive whether it is cloud native applications, modernizing applications onto cloud, the data insights and the entire foundation on which the digital transformation of some of the largest corporations are built are based on the cloud foundation. So these are three engines which are firing on all cylinders and our software business is a turbo engine, which is in the process of getting made. It's really work in progress. We'll talk about it later. We partner with over 50% of the global 500 companies in a very meaningful way whether it is for a digital foundation or engineering services for some of the big technology companies or entire managing end-to-end life cycle of their IT landscape, application modernization and things like that and very well-recognized by all analysts, whether it's Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Everest, 20-plus recognitions in the leadership quadrant. We're also -- we've always been a very people-centric organization. It's very pervasive in the way we behave, the leadership behaves, the responsibility that the leadership takes on taking care of our people has been of primary importance for us. As a services business, I think people are talent as our most important asset, and we work enormously and very, very thoughtfully and purposefully to energize our people. Last year, we were ranked as the #1 employer among all professional services firms globally by folks. This is a phenomenal recognition. It has the who's who of the professional services world and we were #1. And this is the recognition that we are so proud of, and it really reflects who we are as a company. And the social work, the corporate CSR, the ESG initiatives with what we do in the communities where we live, operate is also won a number of populates. And the governance and the whole leadership transitions would happen, whatever has happened in HCL has been an industry case study, right? And that's also been well-recognized by a number of accolades. With 220,000 people in 54 countries, but a lot of our clients, prospects and even the new people who join us after the experiences, they tell us, HCL Tech is one of the well-kept secrets in the industry. But with 220,000 people and in 54 countries, how can we be any longer a well-kept secret? So we have consciously looked at enhancing our visibility in the market over the last 12 months. Now -- client references. That was the biggest engine of growth. But now we are becoming more visible given that we serve so many large enterprises. We have so much of presence all across the globe. We had a people-centric culture, as I talked about. We also had a very entrepreneurial culture where innovation was important, challenging the status quo was important for our leadership and employees. So we fine-tuned our purpose and brought together a more sharper purpose statement, which is to bring together the best of technology and our people to supercharge progress for our clients, for our people, communities and the planet. Our supercharging progress captures the essence of what we do. We interviewed a number of our clients. We talked to a lot of our people. We truly believe supercharging progress captures the essence of what we do. And more importantly, it captures the aspiration of what we want to do more of for our clients, people and all of the stakeholders. For example, in a digital business, we supercharge progress for our clients by accelerating the IT operating model transformation, which is so pivotal in their digital transformation. In our digital foundation business, we delivered highly reliable technology infrastructure for over 200 of the Global 500 companies. In our flagship engineering services, we accelerate the product road maps. We accelerate the product releases. We accelerate the time to market for our customers by really helping them in their R&D for almost 50 of the top 100 companies, which are spending big in R&D. Similarly on the people front, whether it is for a leadership, mid-management or even entry-level talent, which comes into our company. The opportunity universe is so big. We create an enabling environment to find their spark. For example, we've launched a program 5 years ago called TechBee. And today, we have over 10,000 TechBees, which are the high school students, very bright top of the pyramid students from the high schools, for whom we've given carrier opportunities, very compelling new technology work they've been trained to do. And we launched this program in the U.S. about 18 months ago. We already have 250 apprentices from the colleges who are really thriving and really growing in our ecosystem. That's really supercharging progress for our people. And the work that we do in our communities and planet, for example, we recharge water 21x more than what we consume. I mean, no other company in the world has done such a phenomenal work on water. This is just about not only conserving water, but it's about going to the communities, working with the communities to clear up water bodies, distilling, number of community initiatives, which is driving it. And we're becoming more visible. So if you're wondering why the New York Jets and Giants are doing well this season. we are supercharging them, right? We are the official digital transformation partner for MetLife Stadium. We're also the digital transformation partner for the New York Jets and Giants really to funnel and enhance the fan experience. And if you saw the last Formula 1, you would have seen HCL software logo on the Ferrari car. So we are also a partner with the Ferrari Formula One cars. So we're getting a little more visible. I think the story needs to be better told and that's really what we are doing. Now coming to the strategic objectives. Roshni mentioned about we pioneered three service lines in the global sourcing industry, infrastructure, management, engineering and very recently, the software products. So this is a journey and the entrepreneurial culture and the innovation which drives our people, we are constantly pushing the envelope to continue to differentiate ourselves in every service line that we compete in the market. For example, in the digital business, most -- some of you would know, we were not such a big player in the software application business. Every time, every last 10 years, it was engineering services or infrastructure services, which added significant incremental revenues. But in the last 2 years, we're positioned as a differentiated challenger with cloud becoming the central theme of a lot of transformation work. The operating model change is a theme which we have really differentiated. So similarly, where we have already strong leadership position like digital foundation, we are an undisputed leader. But even there, we are pushing the envelope to be better in software-defined networks to be better at workplace, deliver better employee experience in a hybrid world. So in every service line, we are trying to continue to push the envelope to be differentiated so that we can win big, we can really continue to maintain our leadership position. The Employer of choice. I think the passion of our employees is something which when our customers visit us and they've started visiting in big numbers now post-COVID, like last week, we had 70 customers who had visited us in just one week in about 15 of our centers in India. So when they come and visit us, they engage with our people, and they go back and say, we saw a zing, which is very different than what we have seen with a lot of your peer group. So I think the passion of our employees on the ground is very visible. And we really want to further this journey to become an employer of choice in professional services across all geographies. And we have a multigenerational workforce from baby boomers to millennials to Gen Z, the aspirations, the expectations of what they want from the company. And some of them are looking at what is the purpose in every town hall I get asked about our purpose. So what we are doing for community, what is your ESG goals. So I think we're bringing all this together and really becoming a very vibrant organization for talent across multiple generations. And to be a partner, a digital partner for Global 2000 enterprises or 2000-like enterprises because there are several not listed companies, which are also very big. 70% of the global tech spend comes from this Global 2000 enterprises. So we are channeling all our energy to really become strategic partners, get deeper and deeper into some of these large clients. And there are certain chosen geographies. There are 15 countries, which contributes to about 85% of the total tech spend, and we are very sharply focused on these 15 countries. We are meaningfully present in about 6 or 7 of them, the remaining 7 or 8, we have very less market share compared to the market share on the IT spend of those geographies, and there is a focused strategy to go after it. And weaving all this into our ESG goals, whether it is building sustainable products, delivering sustainable solutions for our customers or the localization journey. We are one of the few companies where for most of our programs, we don't import people from India. We hire local talent. We have the engines to train, upskill them and deploy them on projects. Our dependence on visas have always been the lowest, which is really a commitment to localization, not just in the U.S. but all other geographies where we operate in. And delivering top quartile return. As Roshni said, we've delivered top quartile return among all the top 5 India heritage providers, we delivered the highest. Now 5 months down the line, if I take the top 8, which is the 5 India-based -- India-headquartered players, 2 U.S. headquartered players, which is Accenture and Cognizant and 1 Europe headquartered player. If you take these 8, last 10 years, total shareholder return, HCL Tech has delivered the highest total shareholder return. And we are very proud of that, and this is a journey that we want to continue and deliver top quartile shareholder return. What are the market opportunities? It's a very big market. $1.5 trillion is the global tech spend expected by 2025. And it's growing at a very healthy rate of 9.5% CAGR. And this is -- you can really kind of segregate them into six themes. And if you add up all the themes, it will be a little less than -- a little more than 1.5 because there are some overlaps. The first and foremost is cloud transformation. By 2025, more than 50% of the tech spend is going to be driven by cloud as a platform, either cloud-native applications, modernizing applications on cloud, leveraging data and AI on the cloud platforms. It's going to be a huge opportunity. And we are really in the early phases of really leveraging the big cloud opportunities. You might see a huge growth among the hyperscalers, but hyperscalers have two big segments. One is really digital native companies and then the rest of the enterprises. In the last 10 years, the biggest growth happened through the digital natives. The enterprise adoption of cloud is probably -- about 1/3 of the real estate or tech estate is on the cloud. And 2/3 needs modernization, needs migration to cloud, retiring data centers and a lot of high-velocity applications needs to be built on cloud. A lot of your data needs to come together on cloud so that you can leverage the power of machine learning, AI and all the algorithms. So cloud is the biggest opportunity for continuous modernization and innovation. The second aspect is data and application modernization. It very closely follows the cloud. And today, there is so much of legacy applications in the big companies. Mainframe modernization is one of the biggest opportunities, which a lot of companies are struggling with and they're looking for the right solution providers who have proven capabilities to deliver the outcomes that they want. Security is a very big topic where there is more than $100 billion spend, it's growing close to 8% CAGR. Digital engineering. This is about really -- one is product engineering, platform engineering, but it's also about connecting the physical world with the digital world whether it is retail point of sale or whether industrial IoT or smart metering, bringing all of those assets in the physical world into a digital world is one of the biggest transformation that we are seeing, especially in the asset-heavy industries. And we are really harnessing this as a good business opportunity. Digital workplace, it's again about hybrid workplace, how do you give your employees the best experience, all the tools, capability, collaboration, all of that. It's becoming more and more complex in a hybrid world. It's no longer just a laptop and whatever e-mails, but there's so many complexities which are coming in a hybrid world. And the central engineering is a big piece, which needs -- for very large organizations, it's very complex, and we are really in the forefront of helping customers there. So digital workplace is a big opportunity. And enterprise software is unique to us. It's a $300-plus billion market opportunity, which we are addressing. It's a good growth market. It's growing in double digits. We will -- we have a strategy, which is work in progress. We are modernizing products. We are really playing into a big part of the digital enterprise software market. So all of this is about $1.5 trillion with almost a double-digit growth rate over the next 3 years. So the opportunity landscape is immense. And for high-quality providers with a proven track record of execution, tremendous client references, stable leadership team. This is an amazing opportunity to continue to grow and really enhance our business. With all these opportunities, the way we segment our revenue is three segments: IT and Business Services, which is a big part of our revenue, 72% of our revenue comes from IT and business services. To put it in a simple way, digital and cloud is really what this segment is about. Have we positioned as a leader in cloud transformation? I'll show you some of the leadership recognition soon. We're also pioneering the integrated deals, whether it is transforming application and infrastructure landscape, operating heterogenous infrastructure and application landscape. We won about 30 deals in the last 18 months, which really brings together a proposition, which is getting infrastructure application, application support, application modernization, all through one common operating model, that's where we are positioned as a differentiated challenger in the product operating model. This operating model transformation is what we're talking about here. And in the digital process operations, it's a very niche service, and we participate in a few chosen areas. So this contributes to 72%, which has grown about 15% in constant currency in FY '22. The second segment is ER&D services, which is about 16% of our revenue. It's, again, a very large spend close to $1 trillion spend, but only 10% to 12% of it is really outsourced to engineering service providers. So we would call this as about $90 billion of addressable spend, growing at about 16%. It's again a great opportunity for us. And here, we do a few things. One is product engineering, software platform engineering and then connecting the physical world to the digital world, which is IT, OT integration is one of the key services here. And our positioning is we've had leadership in this for over decades. And we're recognized as a leader in all quadrants in the top right corner. So it's an undisputed leadership. We are the largest a number of R&D engineers developing technologies for the top 100 companies in the world. This is bigger than most technology companies' workforce like even Microsoft and bigger companies, the number of R&D engineers are very comparable to the number of people who are developing technologies for multiple clients. And software, HCL software is -- we used to call this as products and platform, but we have rebranded it as HCL software. This is a business which we are very proud of for the client base. 240-plus of the G500 companies are our customers. And we have very good products. Some of them did not have the right investments. Now we are in the modernization journey and kind of growing the business. This has been a flat business over the last couple of years, especially from an organic growth perspective. But we have some very compelling value proposition. We have the products for digital transformation, which are positioned as a platform of trust. You will hear about it a little later in the session. And again, the entire intelligent automation, digital operations assurance, we have several products. Some of them were built internally as a part of our larger IT outsourcing business. And some of them we have acquired as a part of our -- building this business. The third element is the data and analytics. We have one of the lowest total cost of ownership products available for data warehousing, hybrid cloud data warehousing solutions. So I think this -- there are uniqueness that is very compelling offerings in this. It's in the early phases. We expect this to become a good growth business in our portfolio. Now all of this is powered by -- all these three segments are powered by our ecosystem partnerships. We have strong partnerships with all the top 10 technology companies, including all the hyperscalers, SAP and Dell and Cisco, Intel. We have one of the most robust ecosystem program. We have a senior leader for each of the ecosystems, who works across the multiple service lines to bring the best of what the ecosystem provider has and really match it with what our customers require and really bringing them together is what we really accelerate. CloudSmart again, is a proposition because we have three service lines. CloudSmart brings everything together. You will -- we'll have a session on that later today. And again, ridesharing has been there for a long time, but we are a lot more focused on near shoring, especially in the last two quarters. The demand for near shoring has really skyrocketed. We believe our near-shore strength from about 15 locations with about 15,000 people in those locations will double in the next 2 years. And again, we're fine-tuning all this with a very passionate employee value proposition. A few business updates as to what has changed in the recent few years. Strong growth areas across services. For example, our digital business has contributed about 50% of the incremental revenue in the last year. In fact, the last 2 years, the highest incremental revenue contribution has come from our digital business. Traditionally, we were firing on infrastructure and engineering. But with all the investments that we have made through the Mode 2 and all the capability building that we have done, and the differentiation in creating the product operating model, this has really become a very, very strong, powerful service line for us, where we are positioned as a differentiated challenger. Our digital foundation continues to grow on the back of two things, public cloud transformation, which is really migrating a lot of traditional data centers into public cloud. Our digital foundation was always an asset-light business. Unlike the IBMs and other companies, which is now Kyndryl, where they had invested in data centers, hosting, we never did any of that. We focused on services. We built an asset light, a very profitable and growing infrastructure business, which is now really getting accelerated through cloud transformation and the workplace transformation. A couple of other things are like network and security, that's also driving growth here. Engineering Services, 1/3 of that is digital engineering, which is really a software platform engineering and modernizing existing platforms using modern technologies. This is again growing at about 20% plus in the last 2, 3 years. You will see -- you will have a session on that later today. Software business, while it's going to take its time to get into a great growth trajectory, but one of the reasons that we acquired these products was to really get access to global client base. And we are already seeing synergy of this client base. One of the large deals that we won last quarter, is going to deliver $125 million of ACV from -- in FY '23, FY '24. So again, it's a very large deal, and it's really -- we were invited to the deal because we were already a vendor in their system for the software business. And we've seen many such threats. So we think this is going to become another source through which we will continue to grow our pipeline, our bookings and then finally, the revenue. One of the challenges that we've had is our fresher induction was not as much as what some of our peer group have. So over the last 3, 4 years, we've done enough exercises to see how can we improve our profitability and move towards being the best-in-class profitable companies in our sector. So I think one big theme is to really increase the freshers. And this is something we have done well. We added 30,000 people, fresh talent last 12 months. And we're already compared to about 20,000 in the previous 12 months. So there's a 50% increase. This is a journey. We probably will have to double it in the next 2 years for us to reach the right level of freshers that you would need to maintain your cost structures and to deliver industry-leading profitability. Another focus area, as I talked about earlier, was to really focus on G2000. So 85% of the growth in the last financial year came from 50 customers. And 40 of these 50 customers are either a Fortune 500 or a G500 company. And of this, 35 of them are existing clients, where it's through cross-sell, upsell and really bringing the power of our entire portfolio into our client base. We've helped scale these accounts, and 15 of them are new logos, which have also delivered strong incremental revenue. And as I see with a little more macro backdrop, I think cloud-led digital transformation is definitely continuing to see a lot of momentum. A lot of big companies have committed for big consumption capacity with hyperscalers. If you see the booking numbers of all the hyperscalers, they have strong bookings, but converting them into revenue requires a system integrator like us to really get our hands dirty and do the migration or modernization. So I think that's a committed spend, which they're already committed to a certain amount of dollars based on the booking. Now we are really helping clients to really leverage this what they've spent by really consuming the cloud capacity. So that's a big theme. We are really frontrunners in that. And of course, there is so much of cost optimization opportunities. The number of midsized and large deals in the pipeline has significantly increased due to the cost optimization opportunities. When the consolidation is, again, a continuing theme. I mean a couple of days ago, there was an ISD session. And what we heard was there is about $120 billion of vendor consolidation opportunities in the next 3 years or next 2.5 years. And it's really consolidating from boutique vendors, consolidating from some of the struggling large tech services companies. And this is an absolute sweet spot for us, right? So I think that's another area where we think we will really win in a big way. We have a pretty disciplined capital allocation policy now more than 75% of our net profits, we have committed to return to our investors over the next 5 years. Again, this is not only vendor consolidation, there's opportunity to upsell and cross-sell in our client base is also phenomenal with the power of -- the breadth of our portfolio, I think that's again a big opportunity. Now I'm sure all of you are a little bit concerned about the macro backdrop. We continue to see decent bookings in this quarter, and we will -- we have a good pipeline, which will deliver decent bookings. I expect it to deliver decent bookings in the next quarter. The -- some of the macros, like, for example, the furloughs and some drop in discretionary spend in tech, telecom and a few verticals, it's a little bit more than what we expected at the beginning of the quarter, like in October when we announced the results, we had a certain assumptions in play. We see it to be a little bit more, but we think it's really -- December is phenomenon because of more furloughs. We still believe we are in good shape to meet our guidance. We've given a narrower guidance of 16% to 17% constant currency growth in services. Given the narrowband and given the macro feedback what we have today, I think we will probably be at the lower end of our guidance -- and which is true even for the company level, which is services plus software. Our guidance was 13.5% to 14.5%. We expect it to be towards the lower end of the guidance. We've delivered 18.5% year-on-year organic growth in the first half. It's really coming off a very, very strong momentum in the first half. And this was something which is very interesting. You will see six magic quadrants here. Gartner has nine magic quadrants. And the three that is not here is SAP, Oracle and Data and AI. But moving forward, they're retiring the SAP and the Oracle and the data and analytics is getting merged into the top quadrant, which is a public cloud IT transformation. Because any meaningful data and analytics program is really built really leveraging the cloud technology. So they've combined everything. They have a public cloud IT transformation services. And they brought all the software capabilities, whether it is building software platforms or business applications into one mother-of-all magic quadrants called is custom software development services. And then there are four more, which is hybrid managed services, network services, workplace and mobility. Now moving forward, these are the six Magic Quadrants from FY '23, Gartner is going to track. And if you see, there is one thing which is very unique about all the six quadrants, HCL Tech is the only provider in the leaders quadrant in all the six quadrants. This is really big. There's no other service provider who is in the leaders quadrant in all the six quadrants. And this is the most -- this is the six quadrants that Gartner is going to continue reporting in the future. So we are very proud of this. It's really driven by our ambition to be differentiated really create very good client showcases in each one of these areas. And it's really -- Gartner drives it through our clients' feedback and the breadth of our offerings. So this is really the proof of all the innovation and the passion that we have in building very, very compelling service offerings. And this has really helped us deliver one of the highest services growth in the industry. If you look at the last 5 years, FY '19 to maybe half of FY '23. We've had about 11.8%, 16%. COVID year, we had pretty much no growth. Then last year, we had about 15%, and now it's about 18%. You look at -- we represented the overall HCL Tech growth. And within HCL Tech, 85% of our -- 88% of our portfolio is services. And if you were to just put a focus on HCL Tech's Services, it's had a very, very good growth trajectory. The purple line that you see, 9%, 12% core was almost flat, 14.9% now, 18.9%. This is predominantly organic growth. In fact, the last 2, 3 years, it's 99% organic growth. So we have a very compelling story. We are really growing very fast. We are focused on organic growth as the biggest -- organic growth, capital-efficient growth and improving profitability in a sustainable manner is what we are focused on. Looking ahead, of course, brand awareness, we would -- don't want to be a secret. We want to be better known. I think we are really putting a lot of effort to drive that brand awareness in all the markets. We also want to align our portfolio to the spend patterns of our clients. We were a little more indexed on engineering and infrastructure, given the tremendous momentum in our digital business, which is our application business, we are getting more aligned to what the wallet spend of our clients are. If you take the ratio of the spend across service lines, I think our portfolio will very, very closely resemble what a top 100 client's portfolio spend is. Cloud, I talked about is really at the core of all our service offerings. We want to capitalize on the momentum cost by cloud. It's going to be more than 50% of the spend by 2025. And we are a very strong player with proven track record, great partnerships. I think that's something which we are very focused on. Digital engineering, again, the new normal for the tech industry, whether it is AR/VR or AI, machine learning, 5G, softwarization, all the digital engineering capabilities, there's a separate session on that. Again, that's a big, big focus area for us and emphasize more on the bigger accounts, strategic and growth accounts, whatever we've defined as our go-to universe, focus on cross-selling, upselling in all our clients to really increase our client pyramids. Today, we have about 17 $100 million customers and more than 45 $50 million customers. We really want to continue increasing that large client category. Ecosystem strategy, both the hyperscalers, SaaS providers is, again, a big focus area. And nearshore delivery centers and increasing entry-level hiring is, again, a very important area to focus on, primarily to expand margins, to provide a more compelling solution set for our customers. A lot of customers are not necessarily looking at a pure onshore offshore solution. They're looking at significant presence in nearshore, especially due to all the geopolitical tensions and this is a strategy which we are doubling down on. That's pretty much what I had, and I want to close it with what we do on sustainability. I did talk a lot about this, like water recharge 21 times. We want to be net zero by 2040. We are among the top rank 25 out of the 1,074 companies in the software and services sector on the ESG metrics and Sustainalytics. We have a simple framework of ACT, PACT and IMPACT. We need to act in a responsible manner. We need to partner with the stakeholders to deliver the impact. That's really our sustainability framework. We have a leader for sustainability who drives it. And we were one of the first to launch a sustainability school like we have a sustainability school running where all the employees can really enroll and get themselves fully familiar with all the sustainability prerogatives that are there today. And it's our people love it. And that's -- kind of that brings me to the end of the session. And thank you, and I look forward to interacting with all of you. Best for the evening.

Meenakshi Benjwal

executive
#5

Next on the agenda is a session on creating value from our Chief Financial Officer, Prateek Aggarwal. Prateek?

Prateek Aggarwal

executive
#6

Wait for a minute or so. Let people come back. Just a bit of a break. Okay. All right. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for making it in person. These are the days you look forward to meetings in person, and thank you all for making the time. So I'm going to talk about numbers, obviously, and try to not focus too much on the numbers, but on what we are trying to do to generate even better numbers, right? More than half of my slides will be talking more about that. Just -- yes. So let's get the numbers out of the way very quickly. As you can see on the left-hand side, we have the total company revenue, which we have grown at a CAGR of 12.1% in constant currency in U.S. dollar terms, also 10% round number over the last 5 years, 4 years from FY '18 to FY '22. I prefer to go with the financial years since that is the metric which most often we follow. And at the bottom of the left-hand side, you have the services revenue, which is like CVK mentioned, 88% of our business. That has also grown in double digits in constant currency, 10% exact and 8.1% in U.S. dollar terms. When you look at EBITDA on the right-hand top corner, that has grown at 12% in U.S. dollar terms. As a percentage, it's increased from 22.3% to more like 24% in the last financial year. And EBIT, the operating margin has gone from being around 19.6%, 19.7% in the first 3 years, increased to about 28.5% in the COVID year, and came down a little bit back to 19 -- 18.9% to be precise. That has increased at 9.1% CAGR over the last 4 years. And the net income, the 7.5% over 4 years. And when you look at the earnings per share in the middle, helped by the rupee conversion that 49.77 is rupees, and helped by 1 buyback that we did during the period. So that CAGR is at 12.5% in rupee terms. And the best story is the OCF, which has grown at the fastest compared to every other metric that we covered at 15.1%. A quick look then on the last 5 quarters coming to the near-term. As you can see on the left-hand side, our revenue growth in the purple is the services growth of 19% and 18.9% in the last 2 quarters. It has been sustaining at double-digit 13%, 16%, 17% and so on over the last 5 quarters. And even at a total company level, if you see the last 4 out of those 5 quarters, it's around 15-odd percent. And our EBIT has been flattish around 19% to 17%. We hit a trough of 17% in the last quarter, that was June quarter, but followed with a quick bounce back to 18% and hopefully, helped by our good seasonal quarter of P&P coming up in December, we should hopefully increase that further. And net income has been in that range of 14% to 16%. Again, it has its seasonality in December and March, but that's how we have performed in the last 5 quarters. Our guidance continues to be 13.5% to 14.5% in constant currency at a company level. This quarter -- last quarter, we actually published a service guidance as well separately at 16% to 17% in constant currency. And the EBIT margin expectation is to be in the range of 18% to 19%. And how do we reach the 18% to 19%? These are the prime margin levers. I mean our near-term, short-term target and aspiration is to go back to that 19% to 20% range that you saw in the first 3 years of those 5-year graphs that I showed you. And these are the 4 prime pillars on which the margin story is built. At the very left, you have the realization improvement, which we did a fair bit of it in the last quarter itself. We got 100 basis points. And we intend to continue that as the newer deals become larger as a component that helps. And we are also getting some improvements in the existing deals itself. Fresher hiring has been a great story in the last several years, 4, 5 years, actually. On the trough, we have increased by roughly 40% to 50% every year. We did last 12 months, 30,000, and we intend to do 30,000 for the full financial year as well. And utilization and operational levers like training and deployment of both the freshers and the existing people that we have are the other levers and right shoring, again, CVK also talked about near-shoring as well as in India, the Tier 2 cities is something which we have really leveraged a lot in the last 5 years. I get now to the 3 key messages I want to leave behind with you. And that is about cash generation. ROIC is the second one, which I'll come to in the next couple of pages. And then the third is capital allocation. So we feel proud about this saying that there're not too many companies in the world who can promise next couple of years I'm going to generate operating cash flow at 120% of my net income. We are one of those companies who can do that. And on the right-hand side, I've tried to explain in sussing terms how and why we would be able to do that. And that's simply because, first of all, I mean, we have done that in the last 3 years, if you see FY '20, '21, '22, and in the last 12 months, we have delivered 121%, 158%, 125% and so on and so forth. And in the next couple of years, also because of the high amortization charge that we have in the P&P business and in the company overall, that itself is $200 million to $225 million a year. And then there is the minimum alternate tax that there is a P&L cash charge that we take, but when I'm actually paying out cash, it's roughly about $100 million lower in actual cash outflow terms. So that $300 million, $325 million is really what gives me the confidence and the certainty to be able to generate that level of OCF. The second thing I want to focus upon is return on invested capital. This is something we have focused a lot as a company in the last couple of years. And as you can see, the light blue line at the bottom, that is capital efficiency, simple metric, revenue divided by the average capital deployed. And average capital deployed is over a period of 5 quarters. So that's how we measure it because there is so much of amortization of the capital deployed happening and so on and so forth. That's the real correct way to do it. And we were at 2.11 as a capital efficiency metric. We went down to 1.76, 1.73 at a company level, and then we have gone back to 1.92 and 2.04. But that 2.04 optically -- I mean, really is lower than 2.11, but when I come to the next slide, you will see that in the 2 businesses Services and P&P, we are actually doing the best in the last 5 years. It is just that because of the mix, we are still 2.04, but hopefully, we'll be back to 2.11 and beyond. And that is denominator factor [indiscernible] return on invested capital, and that has been trending at [indiscernible] 27.4% and 27.7%, we have pulled back to almost close to 29%. And that is one of the biggest focus areas, which we try to improve every quarter and every year. Moving on to the next page. This is the services picture, which is 88% of the business, and the software picture on the right-hand side. And again, starting with the light blue line, which is the capital efficiency, you can see, in the services business, we have been around 2.5-ish. And now we are touching 2.76, which is like a 10% improvement in the last 12 months. And on the software side, you can see we -- as we were investing in FY '20, FY '21 itself, where half the payouts of the IBM deal were happening, June 2020 and June -- sorry, June 2019 and June 2020. So FY '20 and '21, even though we were investing those $900 million per annum, we were still improving 0.54, 0.59, and now we are running 0.67, 0.68. So that's the way we planned those payouts of the acquisition itself. And while we were paying IBM for the acquisition, we were also still not investing. It was investment out of the proceeds of [indiscernible]. That's how we could stick at 0.54, 0.59 actually improving the capital efficiency. And therefore, when you see the purple line now, the ROIC, as far as services is concerned, we have been consistently, over the last 3.5 years, running at 35% plus. The COVID year, we actually -- I mean the last year, FY '22, we actually touched 37.4%, but running at a steady level of 35%, 36%. And as far as software is concerned over the last 5 straight years of heavy investment, we have still been able to return a 14% kind of ROIC. And mind you, return on invested capital is an accounting metric, right? It is after taking the charge for the amortization charge. So it is not an IRR. As I come back later in -- after our software business presents their story, the IRR is actually 18% plus over $3.5 billion that we've invested in this business. So that's the second one. So the first is the OCF, operating cash flow. The second is ROIC. And the third is capital allocation. Now you will remember a lot of -- you have been part of the HCL family as shareholders for several years. This is the promise we made in October of last year, where we said FY '22 to FY '26, both inclusive 5-year term, we are going to return payout minimum 75% over this percentage of net income over these 5 years. And you can see how the dark blue line has increased. So we were at 27% in the first 3 years of that 5-year period, improved to 57% and then 88% was the last financial year. This year, given the INR 10 per quarter per share dividend that we have been declaring, we are already at -- running at 78% on the trot every quarter. And therefore, if you see the headline takeaway, 88 average dividend yield of 3.8% and free cash flow yield of 4.9% is what we have been generating. That's basically from my side. Happy to take questions either now, or we have 30 minutes at the end as well. Okay. I guess towards the end then. Thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#7

I have the pleasure of now inviting our President for Digital Business Services, Anand Birje. Anand?

Anand Birje

executive
#8

Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. You probably would have much had talk Prateek all afternoon here and skim through all the numbers and the graphs and no -- and Prateek is nodding his head. So this session in the next 3 sessions, we're actually going to really elaborate on what CVK spoke about our core lines of businesses, our service offerings and our software. And really, what's the secret sauce? Why are we becoming increasingly relevant, why are we differentiated while so many enterprises, especially when they are making difficult consolidation choices, working with HCL, sometimes replacing vendors from clients, augmenting vendors, challenging vendors. So we'll talk about that, starting with digital business, which I run and lead across the world. I'm based in the Bay area, and let me tell you a little secret. The weather in New York is better than any place in the country right now. Bay area was really wet. Most of us were in Seattle last week meeting with Satya and his team in Microsoft, CVK was there. It was snowed in, in Seattle completely. It looked like New Jersey or Chicago, I don't know what. And this looks amazing. So there we go. Demystifying digital a little bit, right? Everybody talks a lot about digital. It's become kind of D world. Sometimes people don't know what it means. Does it really mean anything? The fact is, there were secular trends of transformation across enterprises for the last many years. If you look at the bottom trends, all enterprises were talking about getting closer to their customers, to their partners, becoming more closer with their employees, leveraging data and becoming more insight-driven enterprises, leveraging cloud, as CVK said, cloud is the enabler of everything in transformation. But then many actually double-click on each of the industries. Especially over the last 2, 3 years, post pandemic, every value chain, every business process in every industry is getting, we thought of reimagine, recast and technology is the driver of all of that change. So I'm not going to go through all, but if you look at it, even the most complex heavy-asset, heavy-regulated industries from financial services, manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, consumer goods, life sciences, every core value chain of every industry in how they're interacting and delivering their products, how they're manufacturing their products, their supply chains, how they price their products, how they rethink in terms of their customer engagement, their employee engagement, really, every aspect of their business is getting rethought of, right? And the one thing that has changed is everyone has realized that is not a onetime change. Digital is not about implementing a set of projects, and now you're suddenly done. It's really reconsidering and relooking out every value chain all the time. In some cases, the value chains of business processes are continuous velocity. CVK used the word continuous modernization because there are certain of these value chains where you can't stop. Look at what's happening in the supply chain industry, right? Or supply chain value chain, which cuts across so many industries. Every bit of the supply chain from last mile delivery to how warehousing is happening, to how planning is happening, what the routes are, how pricing is happening, every bit is getting changed and on a high velocity basis, which means it's a continuous change. And this is true for most of these value chains. So value chains across every industry have become high velocity. And that's creating a need for enterprises to become continuously innovating and continuously modernizing. CVK used this word, operating model transformation is actually the most tectonic shift that's happening in the enterprise. And very little has talked about it for some reason. What's really changing is every enterprise is realizing that they can't meet once a year and decide what functional changes to make and what business transformation to enable and what technology adoption to enable. It's become a continuous process. Progressive enterprises are already doing it, right? The digital natives, that's how they were delivering and creating businesses where continuous adoption of technology was delivering continuous business value. And now every enterprise, the most -- as I said, most traditional regulated enterprises are trying to move to this, what we call, product-oriented model, which means every value chain is treated as a product, and they want to continuously deliver change to that product. And that's creating all kinds of changes. They're rethinking vendors. They're rethinking what vendor sets we want to work with. Most importantly, are we working with partners who bring modernization at the port? Are we working with partners who can work across tax, which means modernize my applications, which is where all the business process resides, modernize my data so that I can become more insight-driven in my business processes, and modernize the underlying infrastructure and the foundations. And so there's a lot of both boutique vendor consolidation, boutiques, which had risen all over the world saying, we're the cool digital partner is doing CX transformation, design, just 1 particular part to being able to do this at scale on a continuous basis across the enterprise. So operating model transformation, and we'll elaborate this a little bit further. Cloud and SaaS adoption, CVK talked enough about it. It's really the enabler to all of this, right? And then as I said, industry-specific value chains. All of these 3, and sometimes all the 3 together, are creating really, really different motions over the last 2, 3 years, and that's been our enabler of growth. Gartner came out with this picture and really captured everything that we have been talking so far, right? If you look at how enterprises were consuming services to where they're trying to go, and by the way, they're now line refers roughly to where the progressive enterprises are. That's where retail, CPG, telecom, retail banking perhaps is. If you take life sciences, oil and gas, utilities, some of the more heavily regulated industries, they're probably almost closer to the Y axis and think about where the journey is going. So there's still -- we are very early stage of this inflection point is the point we're making. Everybody is trying to move to this continuous product operating model, enabled, of course, by the adoption of cloud at all layers of the enterprise. This is roughly how we go to market, our set of services that we bring together that we call our digital business. Obviously, the tip of the spear is helping enterprises reimagine their value chain. So we brought our design practice and our process consulting practice together to really be able to design or redesign enterprise value chains. But that's not where we stop, right? Most companies really focused on consulting and strategy, and there are other companies who only do transforming that into execution. We really lead with the ability to execute the reimagination, which is modernizing your applications, modernizing your data as you move to continuous operating model change. Traditionally, a lot of our peers, a lot of the competitors who're good at support of applications, support of data, that's kind of where most of the industry grew. There was a commonly used term called ASM, application managed services, it's actually the bulk of traditional providers' businesses. We challenge that model. And we're saying, you just can't be good enough to support. You need to be able to continuously modernize. And only then you'll be able to enable the enterprise to move to this continuous operating model change. And by the way, as I said, the last 2, 3 years, every enterprise is actually moving away from traditional ASM type of engagement to this continuous operating model change engagement. And data is at the core of all of this. So we brought our data, data engineering, data management and data analytics capabilities closer to this because you cannot rebuild enterprise applications or rebuild business process without bringing data to the core, right? And again, leveraging cloud across all of these things. If I have to kind of quickly summarize our differentiators, as I said, #1, our experience in helping enterprise move from this traditional operating model to a more agile, continuous operating model. We were lucky, you can say in being part of some very early-stage journeys over the last 5 years of progressive enterprises. And the ability to bring those experiences now to enterprises and other industries who're going through this has been a huge sort of capability for us. Unique strength, integrating applications and interest services. You're going to see the next session from Jags Gattu, really our strength in infra services and our unique strength in app and data modernization services brings a full stack perspective to how this transformation needs to happen. Transforming value chains, adopting all of this, of course, with cloud as the enabler. And CVK talked about our ecosystems partners, really all of our partners see us as a unique provider who has the most balanced portfolio across all of the stack and really a modernization bent [Indiscernible], right? So we're not status quo partner, we are a challenger partner. And of course, globally, the ability to deliver globally and continuously scaling talent globally. So where is the proof in this pudding, right? So 62 renewals that happened over the last 2 years. CVK has already talked about the fact that this business contributed more than 50% of our net new revenues over the last 2 years. And last 4 years, we've seen this momentum coming. 62 Renewals that happened, which is about 98.4% of renewals, we've probably lost one customer who actually came back and now is scaling up with us, happened with this lens that they were renewing partners who are modernization-driven. Nobody is renewing partners if you're a status quo partner. More important numbers on the right, 78 net new customers where we did not exist, and these are all Global 2000. These are not SMB enterprises; chose us either to replace their incumbent traditional partners or they brought us in as a challenger and have grown with us over the last 2 years, especially as they were modernizing their applications, their platforms, their data, their analytics. I took some examples. I won't go through each of them in the paucity of time. But essentially, if you look at each of them and if you look at the colored line at the bottom, some of them, we were a vendor 3, 4 years ago in some of them on the right you see and these are across industry. We were nonexistent even 2 years ago. We've gone from 300% growth in 1 of them, $0 to $50 million within 3 years. This is actually -- we're going to see a video of this. This is -- we can name it in the center at Stanley Black & Decker right here in Connecticut, where we became the biggest modernization partner. Think of what happened to them just as an example, right? A tools company, post COVID, everybody stopped going to Home Depot and Lowe's, their business online expanded 300%. Their supply chains were transformed. Their pricing had to be rethought of. So every value chain we discussed, they've gone through modernization of that. And so they really went from multi-vendor to a single-vendor strategy across their applications, infrastructure and data stack. One of the world's largest food and drink conglomerates, G200, actually G100, they're really trying to become more data and insight driven. They brought us in for massively modernizing their data stack on cloud, on Azure Cloud, across all their industry businesses, business units and all the value chains. Really, it's one of the largest Microsoft-powered BI and the largest Azure implementations in the world for data. So there's many examples, as you can see where our growth has been nonlinear, all powered by sort of this challenger statua. CVK talked already about the partnerships. The one thing I would say is, almost all of our strategic partners, we have become either a premier top 3 partner for them, in some cases, a unique partner advisory board level partner because they see us truly as a modernization-driven partner. You can see some of the list points here. CVK again talked about the analyst ratings, some more, if you look at them very specific to digital services in industries, across applications integration, APIs, CX lenses as well as data and analytics lenses, you will see leaders quadrant tradings from -- consistently from analysts across the last 3 years. So in summary, really, our digital business, which is our consulting application services and data analytics business continues to be a large growth business for us, really SaaS, cloud-enabled data analytics, everything that is modern services or modernization services is almost 55% of our revenue. So we carry less a legacy, and the modern stack is really increasing in terms of our percentage of business. strong renewals. At the same time, the ability to challenge customers, the largest of enterprises, and the vendors in them to really become a modernization partner An IT operating model change, as I said, is a tectonic shift. We've been early in that shift and our experiences from our engagements are very valuable to customers. And we think this is an inflection point in the market. I kept it short so that we can move forward. We'll be here all day and answer questions at the end of the session. Thank you. I'll -- are we playing a video after this? Or are we just moving along? Okay. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#9

May I please invite Vijay Gantur, President, Engineering and R&D Services. Vijay?

Vijay Gantur

executive
#10

Thank you. very nice day, everyone here, and everybody online. I know it's not easy to keep the online folks engaged, but hopefully, you'll get to give some questions for us to take care of what you have on your mind. I'm going to talk about a business which is probably not so well known because it's less covered by analysts, but it's getting more traction and analysts are covering more of this space, so you'll hear more about it. We are a little ahead of the game there with the digital engineering capability that we have built [Indiscernible] . And of course, we've been in this space for many years doing traditional engineering. And traditional engineering is about building products, which are full product from soups to nuts, including the chips to the board design, to the physical casing and then the full product and the software on top of it. So that's the distinction, the traditional engineering and digital is to then make it more connected, more relevant and more useful to the current context. So I'll give a little bit of understanding of this market space. Over a $1.6 trillion is the total R&D that customers spend on. And this has been growing at about 5% CAGR. And if you look at of this $1.6 trillion, the digital engineering spend is today at about 27% in 2019, and we expect it to be about 31% in FY '24. So you think about that mix and the growth in that is being driven by the digital engineering spend, which is growing 12% CAGR and the traditional one at about 4%. Now while this is the R&D spend, what is really outsourced is about 9% of this R&D spend is outsourced. And that 9% is serviced by 2 stream of providers. One is Captives, people having their own development centers or engineering centers across the world. And that's growing about 6%, and that is expected to be about $66 billion. And the blue bar at the bottom is the engineering outsourcing, which is growing at about 8%, and that's expected to be about $80 billion. So that's the lay of the land as far as the market is concerned and how it's being served today. This is how we have performed in terms of the last few quarters in terms of our revenues, growing from $417 million quarterly to $529 million, growing at about a clip from 10.3% to 20.7%. We have gained market share in this market by about 44 bps, close to being 3% of the market being served by our engineering and R&D services business. In terms of the proposition that we have, there are 2 things that we do for our customers. One is to make sure we can get products and platforms to market faster and be able to serve customers' needs or create new needs in new markets. The second is to monetize. So the R&D investment to actually generating revenue, how do we make sure that time can be shortened? We talked about the traditional engineering. There are 2 things in the traditional engineering, product engineering, which is what I described, and operational technologies is about then once the product is in the field, or in the manufacturing process, what is that, that comes into play in the entire build-out of the product and then the sustenance of the product. Digital engineering about creating smart and connected products and all the technology that goes about it. Most of the enabling technologies that are here are -- many of which we have invested in and a few we are investing for the future. AR, VR are digital twin are examples that we are investing for the future. And rest of it, IoT, 5G, cloud, blockchain, additive manufacturing, are technologies that we have invested in to enable digital engineering. This has created us a positioning in the market, which we think is very unique. We are the only provider, which have leadership presence, both in the digital engineering and the overall engineering, including traditional engineering by Zinnov, and we are the #2 player from Everest that just concluded their top engineering services provider research. IDC, you look at other ones, digital twin AR/VR and some of the PLM capabilities. These are niche capabilities, and in all of these 2, we are recognized for our leadership position. This is our -- these are some of our big bets. And these big bets talk about what are the priority verticals? We have 3 priority verticals that we've been focusing on last few years, which is the automotive segment, semiconductor and the technology segment. We have added 2 more segments, rail and energy utilities. These are segments which our vertical teams or ITBS teams have presence in, especially E&U, and now we want to go cross-sell into that segment engineering services. That is first part of our strategy, which is to identify high-growth verticals and make sure we invest in those verticals to grow them. The second part of our strategy is about digital engineering. There are 5 of these, which we have already invested in, and they have ongoing revenues. And today, they contribute over 1/3 of our revenues. These are Industry 4.0 softwarization, which essentially is about platforms and products, which are now being converted to being on the cloud and being connected. And 5G is very nascent. We build products for customers on 5G and help service providers monetize those. SIPS is our semiconductor platform services, which is about building future's chips, and I'll talk about a few examples of that, which are 5-nanometer and less. And also, there's a big need in the semiconductor industry in terms of fabrication. You're seeing fabs come up everywhere across the world, and a lot of governments want self-sufficiency in semiconductor production. And if semiconductor fabrication is not happening, then a lot of downstream products, including cars and many of your appliances are not getting produced at scale. So it's a big supply chain issue. So every country, every region wants to become independent and self-sufficient. And this has given us a big opportunity to get into cloud -- sorry, into the fabrication space. We are also into the semi equipment manufacturing space. We work with semi equipment manufacturers. These people are the people who help fabs build out. So a lot of the equipment that goes into the fabs are built by these semiconductor equipment companies. So we work with, not only design companies, and also we work with the semi equipment. Now we're getting into the fabrication space. That is the SIPS. And we are investing in 4 new technology areas, digital twins, AR/VR, AI technology and sustainability. AI tech is very broad, but we are more focused on some parts of this AI technology, which is about ethical AI and reasonable AI. And that's the area where we think, in the future, there will be a lot more opportunity and we are in some early stages of those investments with some revenue streams. Lastly, if you look at our revenue overall as a company, CVK talked about rebalancing, how the spend is. Today, our Europe revenue is about 12% and India revenue is about 13%, right? And that's not how the market spends. The spend in Europe is close to 25%, and we want to move to that level. Japan, we are the early adopters and early -- sorry, early innovators there, and we have a reasonable market share in Japan. And we want to see other areas where we see opportunity, which is Taiwan, South Korea and India as a market, we have not addressed as a product engineering market, and that's the market we are going after. So overall, the left-hand side of this is a part of the strategy that we have executed on and the right-hand part is where we are going to execute on. I'll now talk about a few examples so that you can correlate the work we do. These are examples of high-growth verticals. The first one is about our software and Internet space. This is a company, which has been in -- it's a Fortune 500 company, has physical products, but not connected user experiences. So we built a global team for this company to ensure their products and user experiences become seamless. And this is across the world, in Romania, in Canada and in India, and they want to see how much more -- how much more capability we can build so that they can go faster with their digital transformation. This is the #1 priority for this customer in terms of getting customer connected experiences and uniform experiences across all of their products. The second one is a global mobile manufacturing company. This company has been in this space, has provided a lot of operating systems and support for many other mobile manufacturing companies. However, their differentiation is now not in the software because that software is available to everybody. So they are now looking at and building innovation and coming back into the silicon. So their silicon capability is something that we are working with so that we can enhance it, and we're doing some 5-nanometer chip designs with this company, and we built a global team to be able to get their next-generation mobile chips out in the market. The third one is in the automotive space. This is a company that has -- used to have obviously manufacturing capability, but we've built a connected factory platform for them so that they can exactly know what's going on in their manufacturing flow. This has created a reasonable impact in terms of efficiency, cost efficiencies in their manufacturing. So these are some examples of work that we do in our high-growth market segments. Coming to digital capabilities and how we have applied it. I talked about softwarization. I talked about data engineering. I talked about 5G. And we also talked about capabilities that we are building for the future. It's not like in any project or program the capability that we put in or the customer need is one. It's usually a combination. So you will see those examples here. The first one, we actually got some report out of this company. It is a company that is in the space of beauty, and they are a leading provider. And during the pandemic, their market obviously got disrupted because it was a very touch and feel business, and try and buy kind of a business. However, they've been able to transform themselves into a seamless omnichannel experience between online and in-store. And this past Black Friday, they have had the highest online sales. And the platform that we've built along with Google has now scaled up to be able to serve this market and continue to deliver the personalized or hyper-personalized experience that customers are demanding. And that's coming from their analytics capability. So this entire platform build, we worked along with a [Indiscernible] partner, along with our Google ecosystem relationship, and put it together. And the customer is seeing benefits of it. I think these kind of transformational changes you may have seen in other spaces, but it's now coming into space or verticals, which are becoming mainstream. So Anand mentioned about we are in a different stage for different verticals in terms of moving along that spectrum and journey. That will throw up much more these kind of opportunities, platform opportunities in the future. The next one is about leading renewable energy company. And this is to be able to build a gateway, which is at the edge, to be able to get all the data, analyze all of the data and then help field failures reduction by a few percentage points and create operational efficiency. And this is an example of where, not only the remote gateway is important, but all of the data collection and quality of data and analytics on top of it becomes important to deliver business benefits. Finally, a biotech company. We work a lot with medical and life science, health care companies in this space. And we built an end-to-end clinical trial solution with them, which is not only about collecting patient data, monitoring that and ensuring their end-to-end clinical trial becomes more efficient, and that has reduced effort and time saving for this customers. So you will see a lot of technology deployment that is helping customers transform to their business and make it more efficient. These are a few examples of -- I won't go into the details of this, but these are examples of markets that we want and expand into different markets. The first one is from Europe, and it's an IT/OT example. The second is from Japan, which is 5G case study about what work we have done to be able to build a higher compliance and safety standards. The last one is a payments bank, which has become an integral part of a telcos offering today. And this has led to going to many sections of the market, which was unbanked becoming banked. So I've given you a sense of 3 things, the verticals that we are investing and the verticals that are growing. And second, I talked about the digital engineering capabilities for today and for the future. And third is about market expansion. So to summarize, we are in a market that is growing, led by digital engineering, growing at about 12% CAGR. We have gained market share in this space. This whole market, like I said, is expected to be about $80 billion or so. Second, market access. We've been in this business for over 3 decades. And we have relationships with top 100 R&D customers, almost 63 of them we work with, and we add 1 or 2 every year. And these are relationships that are very deep and take time to build, and the trust is important because it's a core of their business, the products and the platforms that run their business. And we value this the most. And I think, this is the biggest entry barrier for somebody to get into this business, especially when it is involving both physical product and software products. And in terms of technology investments, we've had several engineering labs across the globe. We are there in many new geographies as we're expanding, and we're putting new technology labs and COEs invested. The biggest thing is about the impact that we've been able to create for our customers, over $150 billion of revenues that our products that we've built along with the customers. I didn't talk about the patents that we generate, over 2,000 patents that we have built, where HCL Tech employee's name is on that patent along with the customer's name. While the IP is owned by a customer, the patent is generated by HCL and 1/3 of the world our products touch, and we take a lot of pride in that. So overall, this is the business that we are in, a very differentiated business, a high entry barrier business and a growth momentum business that we are working in. Thank you all. Can I have [Rachel's] video, please? [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#11

Moving on to the update on our digital foundation business, inviting our President of Digital Foundation Jagadeshwar Gattu, Jags.

Jagadeshwar Gattu

executive
#12

Good afternoon. It's always exciting to talk about when you are a market leader in this space. So next 20 minutes, I plan to give you some insights into the business and growth strategy of the digital foundation business. If I look at the spend perspective, the Gartner says, in the next 3 years, the digital foundation is going to be a $530 billion industry. It's growing at 6.3% CAGR from '23 to '26. When I look at the -- when I give dive this particular spend, there are basically -- I see as 2 categories. One, which is a traditional spend which is primarily catered around how do I drive automation, how do I drive cost optimization, how do I bring efficiency in the way we run the operations. And we see that this particular spend is growing from 3% to 6% in that range. And the second category is more about the growth services, primarily around when customer wants to do more of a digital transformation, speed to the release of the products and those areas and security and some of the modern next-gen technologies. And this particular category is primarily growing between anywhere from 8% to 15% in that range. So if I look at the technology-wise, what is the trends in this particular area from a technology perspective? There are a couple of trends we are seeing in this particular area. One, primarily the number of hybrid clouds, hybrid clouds and hybrid workloads moving. That's triggering a downward effect of how the security is getting impacted, how the network is getting impacted. This pandemic also created another trend, which is more of a hybrid workplace. Again, the hybrid workplace also created downward impact on the security and the network transformation. If you see both of them together, creating these trends, which are accelerating the overall transformation from a change perspective, how enterprises are seeing and getting the change in place. And the third, we see that there is a desire to bring IT and OT together. And that is also triggering some of the transformation in the network side, implementation of the 5G and WiFi 6, all these technologies coming into the picture. And lastly, there is an operating model shift in terms of their customer desire to convert these organizations into more of product-based structures, which is triggering into SRE, PRE kind of skill set, multi skill set that is what it's triggering. So with this kind of situation, we see that there is a clearly opportunity-wise we can continue to see a good demand in all these areas. So if I -- before I go talk about deep into the growth strategy, where all the areas we can grow, let me spend some time to talk about what we have done very well so far. In the last few years, we've been a trusted adviser and partner for managing transformation of large complex IT environments. About 40% of G100, we today, we deliver services for them. If I take an example of a large -- 1 of the large oil top producer, we're actually providing services close to 45 countries, touching refineries, touching a lot of things and preparing them to prepare for a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Again, another one example, large-scale M&A integration. As they're acquiring, we're almost impacting 300 -- 240 different locations, bringing them seamless integration of how the IT is getting integrated. And another one, if you see that now the trend is more about how can we provide an experience -- employee experience. Customers are realizing that the satisfied employee is going to convert into a satisfied customer. And that's where 70% of our customers already into an experienced agreements. It is not any more traditional ITSM-based service delivery. It is more of an experience-based delivery is what is happening. And if you see 1 of the Fortune 50 multinational consumer goods corporation is -- has created 1 shop to go to for all their employees. Whether it is in IT services or admin services, their travel services is the one place to go, and that's the transformation which is happening. When I look at the landscape of all our customers, we have about 98% of the renewal. The primary foundational reason is, there is almost automation -- 10,000-plus automation artifacts we have created. Those artifacts are helping us to bring that customer satisfaction. And the value is a theme when we actually put the employees in front of these customers. It's about close to $2 billion value we have generated. Lastly, an example is, a semiconductor organization, as they continue to onboard M&A activities, but their IT spend is not going much because we completely eliminated their service desks. We completely eliminated their -- using automation as a technique, right? So if I see -- and I think this is kind of touched -- CVK touch about some of the recognitions. We are pretty much #1 in all quadrants from a DF, Digital Foundation perspective. Not only the Gartner, there are other -- like IDC and the Everest Group, we are rated as the #1 leader in that particular area from a security perspective, workplace perspective. Apart from the analysts, we also got a number of OEM partners recognizing as the best partner in this particular space. When I talk about the growth vectors and aspirations, in the last 4, 5 years, we've been growing almost 2x of the market, right? And looking at the opportunity-wise, we have an aspiration to become 2x to 3x in the next 3, 4 years. So that's our aspiration. Let me expand into what all the various opportunities we have within this space. If I take the potential growth through the expansion of existing customers, today, we get about 16% to 17% of the revenue from existing customers as an incremental new revenue. And we plan to increase that up to 20% to 21%. And that is almost like a 35% growth with the existing customers. And the second is, the HCL focus on some strategic countries like Germany, France, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, we see continuously to 40% to 50% growth in the DF side. And that should add sizable growth in those countries. And there's about $70 billion to $80 billion potential market, which is first-time outsourced is coming from. Out of that $530 billion we spoke about in the first slide, there's about $70 billion to $80 billion is primarily coming from the first-time outsources or consolidation of these vendors for those customers, right? So there is a potential opportunity, which is there. And obviously, another area is the next-gen operating models in the hybrid cloud, SD-WAN experience and dynamic security. And these areas are also triggering some momentum. Apart from these, we see that there's about $100 billion addressable renewal opportunities are coming up in the next 3 years. When we look at it, our win ratios are, about 40% is our win ratio. When we go after these deals, is about 40% is our win ratio. So there is a sizable number opportunity to increase it. And finally, there is a strong partnership to ride along with the hyperscalers. And then, Siki is going to talk about the propositions that we have put together on the cloud space. So in net-net, when I look at this opportunity-wise, I clearly see that there's about 2x to 3x growth -- market growth opportunities are there in this particular space. And this is another interesting one, right? This is primarily to play with the margin profile perspective. If I look at today, the margin profile is, 80% is the traditional services we deliver, and about 20% is the growth services. When we talk about the growth services, because of its nature of niche skills, nature of the specific high-level value services, consulting services, the margin profile is much better. So when I see the next 3, 4 years, this mix is going to continue to change. We'll end up about -- if I look at FY '26, we are projecting 65% is going to be a traditional services, and about 35% is going to be a growth services. That should definitely change the profile -- margin profile mix of the business. So that's the reason I think we continuously see that the cloud services, employee experience services, cybersecurity continue to make a movement. If you -- if I think about the top area of concern for our CIOs and IT leaders, the security is a big top concern. And that's where we continue to invest and put the right focus to bring that 2x to 3x margin profile. Here, I want to give you some ideas about various products and framework and accelerators we have created under each of the service lines. If I see this -- take example of in the hybrid cloud VelocITy, this is a framework which we have developed. There are a lot of one-click solutions, hybrid cloud transformation journey solutions are there, which not only help the customers from a cost perspective as well as VelocITy point of view also. And the next one example is the flex space. Flex space is in the digital workplace side, where we are tied up with the partners like HP and Dell and other guys, where we build the end-to-end solution from a PC perspective. Based on the persona, we deploy correct PC and correct experience. Not only just deploying the PCs, but we also measure the experience of the person, individual is getting that way, end-to-end ownership of that particular solution is in place. So here is the collection of frameworks, reusable components and accelerators is what we have built. If I summarize, Digital Foundation is the largest IT spend segment, so we are excited about that. There's a clear opportunity. And also, HCL Tech is rated as the best in the industry from an analyst perspective. And whatever is the current 2x growth we have achieved in the last 3, 4 years, we're going to have at least get into a 3x kind of situation. And we wanted to be continuously a trusted partner for our clients in the cloud transformation journey. So with that, I would like to [indiscernible] replaced. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#13

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll be taking a 5-minute tea break. We'll resume our program shortly. Thank you. [Break]

Unknown Executive

executive
#14

Thank you. Please take your seats. May I please now invite -- please join me in welcoming our Executive Vice President and Head of CloudSMART, Siki Giunta. Siki, thank you.

Siki Giunta

executive
#15

All right. How are we doing? Okay. Let's talk about cloud. So if I counted how many times we mentioned the word cloud, I actually stopped at #20, and I'm going okay, I'm going to tell the story. I just was at the re:Invent AWS conference last week, and that was the first post-pandemic conference, 80,000 people, and it keeps growing. I remember when I went the first time in 2010, we were 6,000 people in the same room where we do the conference today. And it was vibrant. It was inquisitive people, more courses, a lot of hands on. In 2 hours, AWS announced something like 25 new announcements. So this is the market that is going to fuel HCL Tech business and is on the trajectory to $400 billion by 2025 as per Gartner. So let's analyze this market. This market is at the base of the digital transformation. The other interesting thing about the cloud technology, trends, market, whatever you want to call it, it is a long stretch market. The first invoice of cloud services was released on April of 2004. And we are still at only 20% to 30% of the enterprises using cloud technology or having applications in built-in cloud technology today. So we have a long, long digital transformation market. And as well as we mentioned today, it is the connecting tissue for our businesses, for our foundation business, for our digital business, our engineering business and software together. The other interesting evolution is that the market is morphing. We used to talk about cloud computing and as a cloud computing. Actually, that's already a trend that is past us. We have platforms. We have cloud and data that it is really the best matrimony that we can see for the business. I will tell you some good example that we have implemented data on cloud for our clients. But now it's coming this new set of clouds, what we call the multiplicity of cloud that are industry cloud. We'll talk in a minute about our own industry cloud and what we do it for our clients. Sovereign cloud is going to be data-centric cloud. And we see the cloud is -- used to be a technology disruptor. Now it is a business disruptor, is imperative for our clients. They want to grow, to have fast time to market to implement any type of cloud technology. And what's the HCL Tech answer? We have CloudSMART. It's a platform, is a strategy, is our offerings. And we'll go in great details on what it is that we are building and evolving and modernizing all the time our relationship with the ecosystem. Cloud is the place where the ecosystem happens. And again, I talk about AWS. I'm going to tell you, there are 17,000 solution in the marketplace of Microsoft. And if you put in the Google and AWS, the ecosystem of solution is vast. And that's a prime perfect position for system integrators company like ourselves and more based with the ethics and the characteristic of engineering because the next phase of cloud is not anymore the PowerPoint phase of clouds. The next phase is doing it, is showing -- is show-and-tell, is simulation, is hands on marketing, and it's perfect, perfect moment of growth for HCL Tech. So let's talk about CloudSMART. CloudSMART, again, is a platform. It's a technology platform where all our business foundation transform -- digital transformation and engineer. We all come together. We use the same services. We have one very important scope is to really connect with our clients and look at the undisclosed needs that they have for their transformation. So cloud is changing as well HCL Tech go-to-market and business. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago, you were familiar with HCL Tech that it was a lot of RFP business, a lot of very traditional engagement model. Now we are there. We meet with our clients. So you saw the video of Rachel Barber. Yesterday, I was on a workshop, CloudSMART workshop with Rachel for IGT, and we were doing ideations on how cloud technology could transform the experience in the casino for their clients. In a virtual and physical environment, we talked about metaverse implementation. We talked about how the existing system could be integrated to this new dimension. And the beauty of it is that now we are going to go straight to the labs. Another important piece of our CloudSMART platform and strategy is the adoption of around 50 innovation and cloud-native lab. And this is where really hands on we come with a client is the physical and the virtual experience. We can do it. We have it in London. People can come 2, 3, 4 days or we can do a hybrid, some people in person, some people on virtual. We can replicate most of our clients' environment, and we maintain a live labs for all our environment. I cannot leave talking about CloudSMART if I don't talk about our ecosystem of partners. We have a tremendous relationship with the 3 hyperscalers. They are as well our funnel of opportunity. We have strong go-to-market integration with solution together. Yesterday, for example, IGT was -- AWS was our partner there. And as well, we innovate. We build industry solutions. We test their evolution of technology as we go along. So it's the combination of our partners, how we work moving away from PowerPoint to show-and-tell and connect to the lab supported by our ecosystem partner. But the best of CloudSMART happens at the client site. Cloud is electricity. If you don't put the light up, you don't see it. So this is how we put our light up. Here, it's this continental time, the very interesting combination of data aggregation, business experience to the driver. While we are providing this solution, we actually finish our smart tracking solution that is going to be used as an industry solution in other cloud environment. We increased efficiency of 20% of their tracking of their vehicle. In terms of dollars, it's in the millions of dollars that they can reproduce. Our partner there is AWS. I'm going far end because adhere on ourself and myself is the Merck implementation. This is a great example like IGT, years and years of relationship. And there, 17 years of relationship where we run their trial system from the bottom of the infrastructure to the top of their application. They came together, and they realized that their trial system was not up to the speed of the market. So they say we need to modernize it. And you see lately, clients don't want to just lift and shift and move things in the cloud because they really absolutely take the same technical decks to the cloud, and that will increase the cost. So we together sit down and say, how can we redesign, modernize the trial system that we maintain that will increase your time to market or Merck time-to-market and reduce operation cost for the future. The idea as well is to create a platform where new capability can come on a fast and agile way. The last one is Unitywater. This is adhere to myself too because it really combines 2 things of HCL Tech. It is water preservation, that is really community is at the heart of what we do all the time. If we can marry these 2 things working with the clients, and in this case, we actually integrated their SCADA data, their user data. Their experience of their clients was not that great. And when we integrated all in our intelligent data platform on Azure, we were not just able to improve the client satisfaction, but we were able to reduce data -- water burst. And this is really reducing data and wastage of data. In this same project, now we can take the same machine learning and analysis and provide it to another client. So this is at the heart of what we do. And as you know, we have a great program for the World Economic Forum. We invested $50 million to create new solutions and to fund new way for us to preserve our freshwater from the heart. Now let's talk about what do we do. This is a very comprehensive end-to-end type of solution set. And in the -- it is built on the ability and the track record of us doing it for a long time. But in the last 12 months, we have taken these offerings. We have redesigned them in the cloud-native for each of the cloud providers. We have implemented simulation technology so that we can really guarantee the quality of what we produce for our clients. We can guarantee the margins that we want to deliver in our rate cards, and we have implemented concept like 50-50 human to machine. And we want more and more implement automation because automation does allow us to provide better predictable quality to our clients. We have redesigned the round book. And the other byproduct of redesigning what we do is that we have now the ability to demonstrate in our video of simulation to the clients what the service is because saying I am going to do a great service for you without telling them exactly how that's going to be executed, sometimes doesn't really do the job of what we want to deliver. But only if you have an engineering background, if you're ready to put in discussion whatever you knew before to redesign it for the future in a continuous modernization. So we are not bringing technical deck to our clients. We are not bringing technical deck to our solution. We cover the entire spectrum of data of applications, large ERP. And I'm happy to announce that today, HCL Tech with Intel and Mavenir, we are launching a new set of solution and operation for private 5G. And as you know, with the clarification of the edges, especially indeed a sovereign 3 situation, a private 5G network is going to be what is going to allow our clients to implement and collect the data required by these intelligent devices. The entire solution is based on a strong managed service, and I'll just talk about our revolutionizing of our ASM. This is one of the characteristics. We are revolutionizing our managed service supports. And on the side, based on this horizontal solution is our industry solutions. So let's talk about what it is, an industry solution. An industry solution is built normally on a specific cloud provider. Because cloud is delivered in a vector, you have to build it in an aging environment on AWS or Microsoft Azure on a private cloud, but it has to be native in nature. And normally, you take the horizontal services that are presented, and then you redesign them to maintain market demand. For instance, for the first example, here, we had a lot of data and analytics and very poor performance of maintenance. We put it together in a digital platform, and we have been able for this medical company to be able to reproduce a better outcome for medical device. The same solution that we can take it and reproduce it to another -- for another client. Another great example where we have not really listed now is in retail. So we have built a retail store solution where we can navigate the store, look where there is an empty shelf and dynamically order and push the supply chain for the market. So this is our methodology. We look at the market, than decide and approach normally with a cloud provider, and then we find the clients, we initiate, we create the first MVP, and that becomes an industry solution. Today, we have around 100 of what I call architects to implement and realize industry solution from financial services to health care and manufacturing. Now let's talk a little bit what it is our differentiator. First of all, we are recognized as the leaders. And here, I wanted to give you the representation of the first Magic Quadrant. Boom, we were in the leadership position. Second Magic Quadrant, Gartner opened the aperture, inviting more people, making possible for people to qualify still in the middle, still growing. We are committed to our strategy. We are committed to our delivery. For IDC marketplace, they're very clear that our multi-cloud scalability and ability to deliver in quality is what's making the difference because it is very easy to say to be a leader. I'll give an example. To do a Magic Quadrant, you have to give solution architects hands on, we all do our own -- we do a presentation and everything else. It's an hands on environment. That's a plus for us. But we normally are able to bring between 2x and 3x the number of clients for them to talk than the rest of our competitors. And the beauty of it is that we got a lot of good positive feedback even from the analysts. The other pillar of why we're different. Consistently Google, Microsoft and AWS consider HCL the partner of choice and HCL Tech to work together. We were at Microsoft yesterday -- last week. And the first company that they call and say, I want to try -- there's some new power apps in HCL Tech. We bring the engineering. We bring the expertise. And the good thing is we have the relationship to be able to say we build something together, we can take it to the client. And the client trusts us because they know we run their life, if we bring something new is of quality and of commitment. And why this is -- this success is there, and I don't think there is any limit because we keep thinking and rethinking of how we can be the constant scalable leader innovative with innovation at the core. First of all, continuous industry focus. The world is going to go industry. Payment platforms. We talk about banking, online banking, trial manufacturing for health care. Any type of manufacturing, the cloud needs to be speaking to their data and to their user. Continuously, work and nurture our ecosystem of partner, work together for innovations. Again, we bring the passion of ESG to the core. We -- the first one, though, we ask the tough questions to our cloud providers. So where are your sustainability data? You're going to have to share it with us. So we're going to be the integration platform that can provide data for our clients on their sustainability. And cloud is 1 of the biggest components, but we need the data from our cloud provider. We know how to integrate the data for normal data center and usage. This element is going to be so important in the next years to come. U.S. government is going to require it. It's going to require for clients to measure their sustainability, their road map and their road map of improvement. And the last thing, obviously, is our people. We are committed to 150,000, not just trained, not just certified people in HCL Tech to sustain this growth but as well, teaching them agile development, teaching them how to work in a faster and better way. They actually -- our people is the bedrock of what we do every day and their continuous curiosity for wanting to learn something. So cloud is the secret supercharging power for HCL Tech. I'll play a video from our partner, AWS, and then I'll take any questions if you have it for me. Please play the video for Chris. Thank you. [Presentation]

Siki Giunta

executive
#16

If you don't have any questions for me, I'll give the stage to the magic duo for software at HCL Tech. Thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#17

Thanks, Siki. That's our Chief Revenue Officer, HCL Software, Rajiv Shesh; and Chief Product Officer, HCL Software, Kalyan Kumar, KK, for their business update on HCL Software. Thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#18

So we'll play the video.

Unknown Executive

executive
#19

Yes.

Unknown Executive

executive
#20

So the heart of the impossible.

Unknown Executive

executive
#21

Let's play it once more. [Presentation]

Unknown Executive

executive
#22

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And for those 65, 70 people in India, good morning. Thank you very much for staying on for this presentation. So there are 4 things that we're going to cover in roughly about 20 minutes, and we'll take on a few questions. The first thing is that -- we talked a little bit about the purpose as to why we got here and what we--where we are. So we'll give that. While doing that, we'll give aspects of how we are positioning ourselves now -- then I'll have KK, our Chief Product Officer, talk about how our products are now positioned, what we're doing there, what's the kind of innovation. The third thing that we're going to cover is give you an update on -- there were 6 priorities that we had talked about in the month of May. We'll give you an update on those 6 priorities where we are on those 6 priorities of ours. And finally, I'll request Prateek to come and talk about how we are doing financially. So these are the 4 things we want to cover. So starting off, as CVK mentioned, the reason -- we made these journey and acquired products from IBM and build this portfolio was primarily with 2 key objectives. One is to get market permission that we are credible provider of enterprise software. And second is market access. This is where we are right now. So you've got 6,800 customers, who have a significant amount of investment or tangible investment in HCL software. 67 of them -- when we talked in May, there was 66, now there's 67 of them which are in Fortune 100. We are covering from the 54 countries that our people are based in 132 locations in which we are serving our customers through business partners, 7775 of them, and this is a key priority area for us. And we've got a software sales team of maybe 750 people, covering and engaging with customers globally. The interesting thing is that some of our products are pretty well known already, which is AppScan, Big Fixed Commerce, Unica, et cetera, and it's a great position to be in. So it's been a good solid journey from 2019, and we believe we are well on our pathway to meeting these 2 objectives. So this is how we are going to market. Basically, we've actually simplified our messaging, and we're saying that we're going to market in 4 basic pillars. The first one being digital transformation. And where we've taken a position of platform of trust. So very, very happy to record that the Cyber Monday and Black Friday, very, very large volume of transactions went through our solutions. And there was not even 1 second of stoppage, continuous availability of our platform and one of our customers did highest ever transaction that they ever did on this platform. So this is gaining currency. So that's Digital transformation is one area. Second is AI and intelligent automation. This is an area which was a foundation of our infrastructure business. And now we are taking to market as a solution to a broader portfolio of our customers. The third is data and analytics, where we have the fastest data platform and we are challenging some of our business partners in the -- in our digital analytics services business, in cutting their bill by half. So it's the fastest performing data warehouse that we go to market with an enterprise security, where we are providing security to more than 100 million nodes. So these are 4 areas, KK.

B. Kumar

executive
#23

Yes. I'll just chime in on a few things and give you a perspective on what we're trying to do with the solution offerings. This is close to about 75 -- 91 products which exists today, and we're consolidating them and putting them into the sport solution areas. And how we're really doing this is by 3 things. One is simplifying the portfolio. The second is moving as much of our products into a cloud or a SaaS model, and it's very important to differentiate why cloud versus SaaS and talk about that in a minute. And the third is making sure it's easily accessible, consumable and deployable both by our customers and through our partners. So if you really go down and see what we have done is we group products into the following domains. So on the DT space, we have a very unique ability to help a customer acquire a prospect, manage the prospect life cycle, help them do the transaction and then do post-transaction service. So we actually had separate products. Now we're bringing all of them together on our now platform as commerce, marketing and CX Cloud and really infusing all these pieces together in a completely consumable model. But the customer still has a choice to take this and deploy it in a cloud native as a service model, which means they could still deploy it in their tenant in the cloud or in the data center or consume it as a SaaS service. And we've got a very interesting testimony, we'll talk about later about how they're using this. Similarly, we're grouping a lot of the solution stacks together and be able to make towards -- we've got a very solid installed base of products. We've got customers who are running very complex mission-critical systems. So we have to first get them to a certain level of comfort and confidence so that they start to upgrade to the newer versions of the product. And we are giving them choice to now to that, either on-prem, in a hybrid environment or on a cloud. Once we start grouping these pieces, the 4 solution areas as Rajiv talked about before. That's how we are really positioning and taking this stuff together so that we could clearly simplify that either we are helping you solve a business technology use case, help you automate the way you're on your IT, help you get better insights from what data you generate and finally, help you secure both from development up to operations. So that's really effectively what we're really trying to move the portfolio together. And from a transaction model, we're looking at 4 key things. And this is something where we strongly believe that -- we should take the customer a choice of how they want to consume the technology. So license, subscription, app store type experience is one. We think giving them as a service choice, not just for SaaS, but give them a cloud-native option, which means you can do pure SaaS or you could deploy it in a cloud-native architecture because many customers are committed to very large spend on hyperscalers where we can help them retire some of their consumption using our software in their marketplaces. So hence, we're part of the AWS, ISC accelerate program, the Google marketplace program and similar the Microsoft Azure market business that allows them to consume the software in different mechanisms. And the third is MSP, is very, very important as 775 partners. We've got a very strong focus on how do we work with GSIs, MSPs. They constitute about close to 75 of the 770. These are specialized service providers, large global systems integrators and regional integrators, how do we enable them with the software capability in a different consumption licensing model, not try to shave a lot of large licenses to them, but give them more outcome-based pricing. So we're trying to work on that. And the last is we've got some unique ability to do OEM and embedded licensing, which means we'll start announcing some of these things early next year, but you'll be surprised some of the large providers, both OEMs as well as ISVs are embedding our software technology, obviously, white labeling our consuming it as part of the platform to offer different capabilities to their customers. So this is how we're really bringing the portfolio together in sort of multiple buckets of the 7 areas, which we have across the fishing. So CX and DX, multi-experience application development, secure sovereign collaboration because we have -- we think there's a unique place around sovereign cloud and sovereign collaboration, secure DevOps, AI Ops and data analytics as the whole portfolio. So one of the things which is very, very important in the software business is how do you get your brand positioning done? Because many times, this is a business where you need some level of recall, some level of association. So one of the first steps we did after regrouping the portfolio is to identify a partner whom we could really build our joint brand positioning with. So in November, we announced a partnership with Scuderia Ferrari and this is a very long due diligence where both sides did due diligence because Scuderia Ferrari is such an iconic brand where they spend enough time doing due diligence on who they want to partner with and vice versa that we wanted to put because of the value integration and also what we could do and the partnership entails 3 things. One is we are a team partner. Second is some of these technologies are getting into the Scuderia Ferrari team. And we're going to start announcing some of these things at the right point in time, including embedding some of our technologies, maybe in the FY '25 timing to the car itself. So you'll see some of those pieces. So there's a very clear road map over the next few years of what we're going to do. Just to give a quick preview on what we've been trying to do with them. So to quickly give you an update on what we've been trying to do since the last 6 months. I think we didn't have an update in the last investor meet. So first, if you see there is a fundamental shift in the brand positioning. So there's a huge difference. Once HCL Tech rebranded, we made sure that we connected with what the larger rebranding was happening, but to create a distinct identity and positioning for software. So that's a new brand launch. It's got high proximity to HCL Tech, but stands out differentiated. And the reason is because in this business, we will end up dealing with a very wide segment of customers and partners and we wanted to create a brand amenity. Obviously, we did 3 brand activations. So one is with Scuderia Ferrari as a team sponsor. You want to hear about ECN. I'll not steal the thunder. They'll talk about as a customer and a partner, what we're doing together to activate a very interesting market around sports. And obviously, in partnership with HCL Tech marketing team, we activated some of the launches around the MetLife Stadium and the larger brand don't happen. Big focus of this as to how do we help drive brand positioning and lead generation, which we can funnel it back to our business partners, a sizable chunk of our business is partner driven and have a section later. Rajiv will talk about why we are focusing so much on the partner because it's like how do we multiply and reach out to a larger customer base. So in the last one month, we've got 2 billion media impressions. We are like nothing nonexisting before. So I think from there, we got managed to get 2 billion media impressions on HCL software, about 1.5 million social media impressions, and we've got quite active. We've got 169 net new active leads in the last 1 month just by activating this even though this is a soft brand launch because our major brand launch is happening in next year. So I think there's a lot of focus around this will continue to go and invest on the same. Rajiv, do you want to touch on the 6 initiatives?

Rajiv Shesh

executive
#24

Yes. So just a couple of other points, KK. I mean a question that keeps getting asked is why Ferrari, why Formula 1? Basically, the whole idea is that it's tech. If we look at such collaborations, we've got to be in tech. So that's why we said this is the place to go. And if you -- some of you watch the Abu Dubai race, Leclar did pretty well, ended up second, Ferrari was second. And we've said that, look, our name is going to be on your card, so let's be on the podium. So it's tech and they go to use technology. And this is along the lines of the 6 key themes that we had talked about in May when we got together. We said first thing is that we need to have a differentiated execution strategy for the products that we engage in. So we've got 95 products. We need to execute differently on different products. The second is that we said we need to have increased focus on indirect channel. And we'll give you an update on what we've been doing in that area, shift to as a service model, and we have talked about our CX set of products to be the first set of products in which we will start working on as a service strategy. The fourth thing that we said is that we want to leverage HCL Software customers. And we've got a large number of them, 6,800. Can we actually see if these customers can be leveraged to create services opportunities? And -- we gave it an internal code name called Project Alina based on Helen of Troy, and we'll give you a quick update on that. Increased profitability on our IP partnerships. How do we actually drive that together and drive an increased renewal focus? How do we renew our business with the large installed base that we have? So here's a quick update on that. So if some of you recall that we talked about 3 horizons in which we are looking at our product, Horizon 1, 2 and 3. Horizon One being those products, which are primarily on-premise software, where our strategy was to retain that installed base and maintain that base of customers. In the month of May, we had talked about that that's 44% of our business, which is growing at about 12%. That was the situation in FY '22. Horizon 2 constituted to about 54% of our business, which was growing at 12%. And these are the numbers that are in the first half of this. So we made one change. We were investing in our digital transformation platform and that we moved from Horizon 1 to Horizon 2. Yes. So as a result of it, what we see right now is Horizon 1 products are -- represent 31% of our product mix, if you look at our H1 performance, which is still de-growing at about 10.2%. And Horizon 2 products now represent 66% of our business, growing at 5.1%. But we need to look at these things over a period of time. We thought that since we had mentioned these numbers in the month of May, we should be owed to you to give you an update as to how we are moving along that trajectory. KK, you want to

B. Kumar

executive
#25

Yes, Rajiv. Think the key is that as we shift to the right, we're going to move more and more from very large license SMS to more subscription, more consumption base. So that shift would also mean that as we move in this model, the way it will morph into revenue is going to take its own time. So you can't see just quarter-on-quarter, but able to spread it over the next 6 to 8 quarters to start to see how the shift is happening because -- and some of the acceleration would happen based on as and when the Horizon 3 products bored on top of Horizon 2 and then give you that momentum. And that doesn't mean that we are not investing on this. We are still continuing to put the right upgrades investment, but giving a road map for customers from here to move into that. So our goal is to make sure that if you are here, we'll give you a complete path. No customer left behind. The whole model is that no one gets left behind and you get an alternate path to migrate and modernize. Unlike many software companies will come and go and say we'll not give you a road map. So we are making sure that there is a clear upgrade path.

Rajiv Shesh

executive
#26

We had talked in the month of May as to how our products were doing on peer insights, right, on the Gartner Peer Insights, how are we doing? So our products were a favorite of a large number of customers that we wanted to get on the magic quarter. So very happy to report that the way we are executing on the product development and the strategy there. And are now our products are beginning to hit some interesting places on the MQ as well. So our commerce product now has moved from a niche to a challenger segment. Our secure DevOps products are now in the leaders segment. Our enterprise security products are now being recognized by IBC, which covers them more broadly as a leader in their respective segment. So we are steadily making this progress. And now what is happening as a result of which is we have started getting a lot of proactive inquiry and a very, very interesting feedback that we get from customers is that when they actually engage with us and evaluate our product. We actually beat our competition 60% of the time. So our Unica product regularly beat Salesforce and Adobe in the market when it is evaluated. So these good things are happening. And with this moment in -- movement in the MQ, we believe that we will...

Unknown Executive

executive
#27

A couple of interesting points. Most of our products, which are in Horizon 3 are mentioned in the Gartner Cool Vendor analysis, so emerging and cool vendor. So what's really happening is that we are hitting most of the right buttons on what is the potential new areas. One is obviously to make sure we earn our right to be in the challenger and the leader on the core MQs. But on the emerging stack, we are making sure that we are segmenting our products and investing in the right spaces.

Rajiv Shesh

executive
#28

Yes. So this is the second thing is partners. So we got our partners in a beautiful place for Camp No. I mean some of you may be aware, it's the famous Barcelona football club. That's where 86 of our global partners at C levels got together and we gave them a full view of what we are doing on our product and bringing our brand out. So it was remarkable, the kind of feedback that we got, remarkable. We simply -- our partners are now engaging with us to build account plans and business plans and all of that to take us. The interesting thing is if you look at our pipeline today, 40% of our pipeline is coming from partners. And we are seeing that trend grow. And we are now committing ourselves that there can be large parts of the geographies because if you remember, we addressed 132 countries, and we are going to leverage business partners in a very, very big way to address those markets.

Unknown Executive

executive
#29

And just 2 callouts here. we had very -- so just amount of commitment in this is that we had the farthest someone traveled to this was from Canberra to come to Barcelona. -- and which really shows the commitment we are like 5 Australian partners come in, so which is really a fact that they believe in what we're really trying to do. And the second is we also announced a very forward-looking integrated partnership, an OEM partnership with solar wins where -- and this got public around that time where they're going to license some of our technology and embed it into their software stack. And we're going to take some of them and put it into ours, especially in the integrated IT operations space, especially on observability, both on the enterprise and also on the telco cloud space. So you'll start to see that some of the work that you're trying to do is also to build ISV partnerships where we have the strategy called Build, Buy and Ally. So what we build, what we buy and then where we ally with the right partner set to be able to play on the ecosystem.

Rajiv Shesh

executive
#30

So very quickly, -- the other 4 priorities that we have listed, which is moved to the SaaS model, very happy to report that on CX now we've signed 3 multiyear, multimillion dollar deals that span across years which are services as a service delivered. So we're beginning to see momentum. Renewal focus is a long-term journey, and we think that all the customer success investments that we are making. We are likely to see results of that over the next 3 to 6 quarters. We have restructured some of our contracts and IP relationships. We've started seeing evidence of improved margins this year. and we see the full impact of that occurring from next year. And leveraging the installed base, we had suggested to our Board that we will generate about $1 billion of pipeline there. We are well on that path. And as Prateek mentioned that we've signed some very large contracts and CVK covered that they will have big impact of that in our business. We have a customer testimonial, an interesting one. Some of you who follow cricket, you would realize that it is the most data-intensive sport. There are 50 data points that are captured on every ball that is bowled and 73 data points are captured on the camera that is installed in a day. So we said that, is there an opportunity to stress test our systems and we implement the technology. So we've got a --

Unknown Executive

executive
#31

This is scenario where we are taking our entire CX suite, and it's been deployed to reach out about 120 million fans. We are engaging and collecting about 1 million ball data a week, and we are running real-time analytics, which can help the commentators because this whole model on European cricket is they want to take cricket and make it into entertainment. And you'll be surprised, this is the world's largest active fantasy league platform now, which is currently using this and green eleven is the primary enabler for European cricket. So you hear Kasman Funder, CEO.. [Presentation]

Operator

operator
#32

Thank you so much. I would like to invite Prateek to cover the financials of what he thinks about our investors getting their money's worth. Prateek, over to you.

Prateek Aggarwal

executive
#33

Yes, yes. Last but not the least, the numbers, right? So after all, the Ferrari and European cricket,so the numbers. So as you all know and kind of keep asking about the $3.5 billion that we invested in this business, what became of it is on this slide. So we are generating a $1.4 billion revenue stream. In the -- what we used to call P&P segment, we've rebranded it HCL software. $1.4 billion is the revenue and about 2/3 of that is support and subscription recurring in nature. And that 24% is the EBIT, EBITDA is much higher. And of the $3.5 billion, about close to 70%, 69% approximately is what is already back in the bank in hard cash. And we are tracking well above the hurdle rates that we had set for ourselves, a range of 12% to 15% in IRR terms post tax in U.S. dollar terms, I'm not talking rupee terms. And we have generated -- IRR is always a calculation where you take the terminal value. So if you take a range that 18% can go 20 plus also, if you value at a little more reasonably. If you take a conservative value of the terminal value, then it's around 18%. And the synergy benefit, the biggest one is what we talked about in the last quarter. The largest deal we announced was $125 million annual contract value, which came to us, of course, due to all the heavy lifting that the solutions and the people and all the things that we could convince the customer, but we got the entry only because we were a vendor to that customer in our software business. So that's how we sum up the financials of this business division of us. Thank you. And as we come towards the end of the session today, and we will, of course, have a Q&A session, it's my pleasure to invite all of you, including the ones online. If you can make it 2 weeks later 22nd of December, the MetLife Stadium is hosting Thursday night football game between New York Jets and the Jacksonville Jaguars, right? It's a bit of a run twister for me. But I'm sure lots of fans. And we have a suite there. We would like to welcome you and enjoy that game with us. I just thought I'll extend that -- and we'll have a video now talking about the MetLife arrangement that we have. [Background music]

Unknown Executive

executive
#34

Yes. Before the Q&A, I wanted to introduce apart from the speakers, there are a few more HCL Tech leaders here. Jill Core, she's our Chief Marketing Officer. She joined us about a year back. She's really been the brain behind all the brand transformation that we are undergoing,Jill and team. We have Ram, who's our new Chief People Officer. He's also based in New York. We have 3 of our vertical leaders, Srini. He runs the Global Financial Services for us, which is close to $2.5 billion business. Shrikanth Shetty, he runs our life sciences and health care. Rajiv and Shrimati--she is chartered. She built all our new wishes all the nearshore location strategy, which is in India. And she now is running a new business which we are incubating or education tech, it's called Edu Tech. And we have Shirali, who is also part of our finance organization. He is the finance operations head and Shriram from the Srategy Ofice and Raj from my CEO office. And we have Meenakshi, where are you? Yes. She is a host, she's kind of put the entire event together. So thank you, Meenakshi and team. So I think I covered everybody. Abino, she is-- works as the Chief of Staff for Roshni in her office. He's here. I think I covered everyone. Sanjay Mendiratta, our Investor Relations, whom all of you are very, very familiar with. Yes. Yes. So over to you for questions. I know it's been a little very long day for people in India, but -- we'd love to have questions from any of you.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#35

Just want to honestly share a perception that some investors have both of the industry and up at sea. So what's happened over the last 20 years is that IT services has transformed from being this growth engine to a free cash flow engine for investors, most of us, we look at it as a total shareholder return situation, dividends, free cash flows and thank you very much for putting that emphasis in your slides. But the other thing that we seek is simplicity. And to that end, HCL's singular decision to go into the product space, with the IBM portfolio has injected a level of, I would say, opacity, complexity that requires nuanced approach from all of us. And we all struggle to understand how this is impacting not just the year, but the quarters. And essentially, it it's a headwind to our objective of simplicity from this industry and from the investments we make. So my question to you is -- do you look back and regret that decision given the amount of management time and effort that has been put in into sorting this portfolio out? And what should we expect from HCL in terms of inorganic adventures in the future?

Unknown Executive

executive
#36

Thank you. I wasn't surprised by this question anyway. So we've been asked this pretty much every analyst call in some shape and form. Absolutely, no regrets. This is a decision which will prove itself. It will be transformational for the company. I have absolutely no doubt. It's a bold bet, and we have taken bold bets in the past. And to when we started the infrastructure business, we pretty much had the same questions across the entire investor base. And today, the biggest companies are going after the most commoditized data center hosting and kind of asset takeover deals. So the industry follows us. Today, including Accenture is acquiring companies and engineering services, it's one of our flagship portfolio. I think the fundamental rationale is coming from Services business at some point, will commoditize. There's no doubt. I don't know how many of us will be in the industry to see that. But -- like every other industry, there is going to be a disruption moment for tech services industry as well. So why not prepare yourself with additional growth engines. That was the fundamental hypothesis. And we had a lot of pedigree because we build products for so many big companies. Of course, building products is not the same as running a end-to-end software business. So we--It takes a lot of management time. I think it's a long-term bet, and I'm very convinced it will deliver good growth. It's already generating the synergy, the client access that we have, it is generating the synergy. And I mean, if it was distracting us, which we could not manage. -- why would we deliver the highest growth in the services business. So it was a time when it needed intense focus. But now I think we have 2 of our very tenured very, very strong leaders running it. They run it pretty much independently with convergence that from a finance at Prateek's level and overall as an organization at my level. So I think it's like 1 more business, $1.2 billion, $1.4 billion, 12% of our portfolio. It's not going to see growth immediately. It's very profitable. We've returned that. Aeady most of the money is back. And these product transformations can be a huge value creation in the future. Of course, it's not answering your simplicity question, but to create something disruptive, create something new, you need to introduce a little bit of complexity. I think it's going to create a good growth engine for us. It's in the medium term. Okay, other end, I think we've made it a little easier because we are returning more than 75% of our net income, and in fact, we did 88%. So no big acquisitions. I think we feel very good portfolio mix. There will be small capability tuck-ins. I think there is a completely interesting opportunity if the macro deteriorates, there is some huge consolidation opportunities maybe yes. But generally, I don't see a big ticket won.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#37

I think we are focused on organic growth that CVK talked about in his session as well and ROIC, which I kind of talked about and cash flow and the capital allocation policy is a 5-year policy. So gives you that medium-term outlook.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#38

Sticking with software for a moment. Are there medium term, margin or ROIC objectives that you've previously discussed with the market that you can highlight for us?

Unknown Executive

executive
#39

I don't want to sort of put a number out there, but I've shown you the trend across the last 5 years. We'll continue to pursue that trend. So ROIC, hopefully, should keep improving and capital efficiency should also improve because every quarter, we are charging off more and more of the intangibles. So the direction of travel is very clear. No specific numbers per se.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#40

Ok, if I may. So as you described the evolution of complexity of services as your clients' businesses stay dynamic. And Karan, you touched on AI, you touched on autonomous touched a few different hot product areas, service areas. How do you ensure that there is an adequate staffing bench of trained personnel who can understand what your client themselves can only understand in a somewhat limited way. Your clients themselves are sort of just flash lighting their way into where there -- the segments are going. How do you go out there and provide -- or attempt to provide expertise with the language that they themselves have not fully figured out. I'm just curious to know how the back engine on training works and to be able to provide a credible business development face to the client?

Unknown Executive

executive
#41

Yes. There are 2 or 3 -- 2 or 3 responses. One -- if you take our engineering and R&D services, we are really developing cutting-edge technologies for our customers. right? That's our first visibility. Like today, we are talking about Metaverse, but our teams have been working on metalworks, engineering and development projects for at least last 24 months. But that's just 1 example, whether it's ARR or 5G a few other technologies. We've been working and developing these technologies. So we get we get a lot of heads up. We get a lot more practical understanding of how some of these technologies can be applied. The second thing is we have a very strong ecosystem partnership. There are 3 dimensions to it. One is, of course, the large tech companies, hyperscalers, OEMs partnership. And then we tend to test a lot of technologies that they developed in our last power head of with deployment in the customers. We have 30 labs across the world where we deploy new products and tests. This ecosystem has got 2 other dimensions. We partnered with a number of start-ups. We have a couple of investments in the venture funds, who invest into a lot of start-ups. So they also feed into it. We create innovation days for our customers, for our employees when they come. And then we are also part of some of the very good forums like cloud computing foundation and number of forums like Quantum Computing today, we -- some of like KK who is our CTO. He is one of thought leaders in the Quantum Computing forums. So these are 3 different dimensions. For this, we constantly look for technologies which are going to scale, time is ripe and then build a bench capacity to engage with our customers. So I think it's a multidimensional option. It's really worth well for us. You want to add something?

Unknown Executive

executive
#42

I think as the technology develops, what we see, we incubate in our centers of excellence for these technology areas. And as CVK has said, we see the technology first in large tech companies and where we -- they are building products. Now by the time it takes a year or 2 to get to like a medical device, life sciences, health care, then next to asset-heavy industries. So there's a progression of the technology into different spaces. So as the technology progresses, there's a tail -- sorry, a gate approach, tollgate approach that we take to ensure that technology is maturing and the business opportunity is there and accordingly invest. So at the start, you may just have SMEs 5, 10, 20. You see the deployment and you say, okay, next year, I have to scale this to a few hundreds of people the SMEs do something more. So there's an approach in the COEs. There's a maturity model in COEs for the technologies and some will fall off. It's not like every technology that we get on will work with false out, then we deinvest and invest.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#43

[indiscernible] CVK in your opening comments, you had also indicated or talked about slightly higher furloughs, just in kind of a recent month. Just to get a sense of industries, regions and does it impact our ability to get a better price negotiation because wage pressures been there for a while.

C. Vijayakumar

executive
#44

So I think my reference to it was with the -- it was with reference to what we saw in the beginning of the quarter in October when we announced our quarterly results. We have guided, whatever 12% to 14%, we increased our guidance from 13.5% to 14.5%. So we had certain assumptions, which help us to drive 16% to 17% services growth. We'd assume some parallels, but we had a range, but what we are seeing is a little higher. And the industry is, of course, mostly BFSI is a segment which is a little more impacted by purpose, followed by the tech companies. So I think that's where we see a little bit more. But we feel pretty confident about hitting the range. It's a narrow range. So we will hit the lower end of the range. We feel comfortable. Does it change anything on the realization increase? Yes, the bill rate announcement was a very successful strategy 6 months, 9 months ago. And we were fortunate that we got the best out of it. And in fact, I think Prateek could announce that 1 percentage point, we increased our profitability due to billing rate enhancement. So we got out of the door a little early. We got whatever we can get done. I think in this environment, it's going to be tough, except for some niceties.

Unknown Executive

executive
#45

Anything on the online side. No. Okay. Yes, sure.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#46

I have a question on the intensity of vendor consolidation over the next 3 years. You've been hearing about vendor consolidation for the last 10, 15 years. And somehow HCL Tech would always a name would pop out every time there will be something going on. I'm wondering if given what's going on, the next 3 to 5 years do you or maybe next 2 to 3 years, do you expect the intensity of vendor consolidation to be higher than what we saw in the last 3 to 5 years? And if so, how do you plan to stand out in getting that business versus the other top 3 to 5 vendors that you have in India? And just wondering how much can vendor consolidation contribute to the overall growth of the company as well for the next 2, 3 years?

C. Vijayakumar

executive
#47

Sure, I'll do my best to answer that. I think vendor consolidation intensity is going to increase. Due to one simple reason that today, we are in a unique market situation where at least 3 of the top 10 vendors are really struggling. If you really look at the customers' mind map, there are vendors who are really on the lower quadrant. So that's definitely an opportunity for more consolidation. There are vendor considered more risky. The viability is under question mark, leadership is under question mark. So we hear this all the time, and that's one, one big trigger. And I think that's also the reason ISG is talking about $122 billion of vendor consolidation over the next 2.5 years. That's why. I think the whole digital transformation and all the modern skills. There are lots of boutique vendors who kind of came into existence. Some of them were acquired by bigger companies. But I think customers are now looking at -- when they want to scale their transformation programs, they're looking at vendors of global scale. So we constantly come in in our existing customers and other to consolidate some of the long tail of vendors. So I think that's -- one is due to boutique vendor consolidation and also customers are looking at risk. I mean, too many vendors also causes a lot of risk, especially on GDPR, lots of new regulations on privacy and security, third-party risk and things like that. So that's also driving. I personally think -- it's in the right best phase of vendor consolidation, is kind of the operating model change. Yes. operating model change is another very, very big team, where application support and application development is no longer being looked at two independent horizontal boxes. Because of the velocity of changes, it's the DevSecOps model where these two come together. So an ASM vendor, an AD vendor, you see 2 different vendors and a lot of clients. I think that's going to integrate. And the infrastructure and application vendor landscape is also integrating due to cloud. So I think that's another opportunity where more consolidation will. How much will we gain from it? I mean we are really in the highest mind share in terms of our capability to execute. I think maybe there are just 4 or 5 vendors in the top 10 who are really reasonably got higher mind share. And I think HCL Tech has very, very strong client preferences and our ability to execute on the breadth of our portfolio. All goes very well for us to gain from this consolidation efforts. But I don't have any specific guidance on how much we will gain. But we see it as a big opportunity.

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