LTM Limited (LTM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to LTI Q3 FY '21 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Sunila Martis, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, and over to you.

Thanks, Stanford. Hi, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss LTI's Q3 FY '21 earnings. The financial statements, press release and quarterly fact sheets are all available in our filings with the stock exchanges and on the Investors section of our website. On the call today, we have with us Mr. Sanjay Jalona, CEO and Managing Director; Mr. Sudhir Chaturvedi, President, Sales; Mr. Nachiket Deshpande, Chief Operating Officer; and Mr. Ashok Sonthalia, Chief Financial Officer. Sanjay and Ashok will give you a brief overview of the company's performance, which will be followed by the Q&A session. As a policy, LTI does not provide specific revenue or earnings guidance and anything said on the call, which reflects our outlook for the future or which can be construed as a forward-looking statement must be reviewed in conjunction with the risk the company faces. Let me now invite Sanjay to talk about the results. Over to you, Sanjay.

Thank you, Sunila. Hello, everyone. I wish all of you a very happy new year. I hope you're staying safe and healthy. Here's wishing that 2021 is a better and brighter year, and we get to meet and hug families and friends. When we last spoke in December, we did talk about how the events of 2020 have dwarfed all other challenges faced by our industry. We also talked about the opportunity available for those who prepared to take it. We see a massive opportunity on improving resilience, changes related to new operating models, direct-to-consumer interactions and workplace modernizations with our customers. We remain focused on 2 simple goals that we had outlined in the past as well: one, fulfilling our commitment to clients; and two, keeping our employees safe. The framework outlined by our 3x3 strategy detailed during our earlier earnings calls on customer-first thinking, resilience and operations and protecting our P&L will continue to abide our decision-making process throughout the year. Before I move ahead, let me take a minute to thank Ashok for his immense contribution to LTI over the last 6 years. He has been an integral part of the leadership team, and I have enjoyed working with Ashok to drive our dream and vision for the company. He is a committed leader and will be remembered for his positivity, strong growth focus, balanced views, emphasis on governance and ability to take tough -- the decisions. Like all great leaders, he leaves behind a world-class team and robust systems and processes in the finance function. We respect his decision to pursue his professional goals and wish him success in his role in a different industry with a NIFTY 50 company. I and all the leadership team will be celebrating and applauding his accomplishments in the future from the sidelines. Let me now walk you through our headline numbers. We delivered revenue of USD 427.8 million, a growth of 5.8% quarter-on-quarter and 8.5% year-on-year. In constant currency terms, this translates to growth of 5.3% and 7.4% on a quarterly and yearly basis. All the pillars of our revenue growth strategy, that's growth accounts, invest accounts, new account openings and large deals, have performed well this quarter. We had 2 large deal wins this quarter. Those of you who tuned into our Analyst Day last month would recall us talking about our win with Injazat. Injazat is part of the Mubadala Group and is currently partnered with G42. This makes them the #1 cloud provider in the UAE with significant cloud and AI-led operations capabilities. Our partnership with Injazat is to provide digital transformation services in the UAE. We'll start with infrastructure, applications and ERP services for 50-plus clients. The deal tenure is 6 years, and the deal value is estimated at USD 204 million. Our second large deal win is with a Global Fortune 500 energy company. LTI has been chosen as primary partner to create and consolidate a business-aligned IT services delivery platform across the organization and reduce total cost of ownership. It's a 5-year deal with net new TCV of $74 million. Our win [ looms ] continue to be busy, and we are seeing broad-based demand across the verticals. We added 22 new logos during the quarter. I'm also happy to state that we added a new Global Fortune 500 logo to our list of clients, taking the total Fortune 500 customers to 69. The Grit Alliance, as introduced to you last month, gives us a great framework to have some incredible conversations with our customers. This framework brings together our IT and the combined grit of LTI and that of our customers to programmatically help them navigate the new normal. We are also constantly thinking about building and scaling differentiated capabilities for the future. The 2 separate units that we carved out for cloud and data products will be critical growth engines for LTI in the next 3 to 5 years. We are already working with some of the largest companies, helping them get more from cloud and data leveraging our IT. Some of these investments we made over the years in both these areas are bearing fruit now. Testimony to that is the highest level of partnership we enjoy with all the hyperscalers. Additionally, LTI is now also an elite partner -- level partner of Snowflake, the data cloud company. We have become the maiden partner for Snowcase, a program that Snowflake is launching, to develop and market industry-specific solutions to accelerate the cloud data transformation journey of enterprises. On the data product side, our global banking and financial services company would use 3 product licenses of our Mosaic ecosystem, AI decisions and catalog, to bring about efficiency in the reporting with the regulators. Mosaic will serve as a unified data analytics platform, enabling consolidation of all credit risk models and will be hosted in a hybrid cloud setup. Thus demonstrating the comprehensiveness of our platform as well as the ability to compete and win against top product companies. As part of the deal, LTI will be one-stop shop, providing the product IP as well as deploying integrating and testing services. Let me now provide you with some color on the performance of our verticals. On BFS, we grew 8.4% quarter-on-quarter, Our top clients continue to grow and we also see good growth from some of the new logos we have added during the past quarters. We see 3 growth drivers for our business here: one is the investment in core infrastructure like accounting, reporting and governance, which is predominantly data-driven; second is the investment in building for utilities like Google Pay, et cetera; and third, our investments in platforms to support retail wealth because of the global stimulus and liquidity. Public cloud adoption is also seeing a lot of traction and will be a long-term growth driver here. In Q3, in partnership with Temenos, we also launched a digital banking platform in the Nordics region. This is a very strategic partnership for both the companies where we would create a joint sales effort to capture the market. This cloud-based SaaS platform will modernize legacy core banking systems, enabling financial institutions to be more agile and scalable while reducing operating costs. Banks will also be able to leverage the platform to launch new products and services faster. Moving to insurance. Insurance vertical saw a marginal sequential decline. Some of the onetime COVID-related commercial concessions have tapered off in Q3, and we will see some recovery in this vertical in coming quarters. Manufacturing grew 9.6% quarter-on-quarter. H2 is stronger for this vertical due to presence of higher pass-through in one of our India engagements. The quantum of pass-through revenue remains similar to the previous years. I also want to share with you a key client resonation that we have received in this vertical. LTI has been recognized by Honda in the Outstanding Category as a supplier providing the most value. Energy & Utility vertical was almost flat quarter-on-quarter. One of the large deals win that we have announced this quarter with a net new TCV of $74 million is from this vertical. We remain cautious on this as sector spends would continue to be remain -- to be impacted in the near future. CPG, Retail & Pharma grew at 4.7% quarter-on-quarter. The Global fortune 500 clients, which we have added belongs to this vertical. We are developing a centralized master data governance system for finance leveraging SAP for them. This would enable streamlining and accelerating their financial reporting, whilst bringing about data consistency and accuracy. High-Tech and Media grew 5.8% quarter-on-quarter, Injazat falls into this category. Others, which include Defence and professional services, registered 11.4% growth quarter-on-quarter. Its growth is being driven by the scheduled ramp-up in our earlier announced deals. Talking a little bit about outlook, we see our growth momentum continuing into the fourth quarter as well. Our pipeline remains healthy. We are seeing broad-based opportunities in the marketplace, and we continue to execute. We have closed a couple of large deals in this quarter, and we are excited about the incredible conversations that we are having with our customers. We remain on track to deliver high single-digit growth for FY '21. With that, let me hand it over to Ashok. Ashok?

Thank you, Sanjay. Hello, everyone. I hope all of you had a great start of 2021. Let me begin by thanking Sanjay for his kind words. I feel privileged to have been a part of the LTI team during this period. I would also like to thank all of you, the investor community for your continuous support and trust in us. Let me now, one last time as the CFO of LTI, take you through the financial highlights for the third quarter of FY '21, starting with the renew numbers. In the third quarter FY '21, our revenue stood at USD 427.8 million, up 5.8% sequentially and 8.5% on a year-on-year basis. The corresponding constant currency growth was 5.3% quarter-on-quarter and 7.4% year-on-year. Reported INR revenue of INR 31,528 million, was up 5.1% quarter-on-quarter and 12.2% year-on-year. Now coming to profitability. EBIT for the quarter was INR 6,502 million, translating into an operating margin of 20.6% as compared with 19.9% in the previous quarter. Our margin benefited from our programmatic focus on enhancing productivity, further improvement in our offshoring mix and efficiencies in SG&A. These factors helped us more than offset negative impact from lower working days in quarter 3. Reported profit after tax was INR 5,193 million, which translated into a PAT margin of 16.5% this quarter compared with 15.2% in quarter 2. Increase in operating profit and exchange gain have contributed to this improvement. Where we stand today, we feel comfortable about our FY '21 net profit margin guidance. Moving on to the people front. Utilization without trainees was at 84.1% as compared to 82% last quarter, and utilization, including trainees, was at 81.1% versus 80.5% in quarter 2. We continue to strengthen our workforce. And during quarter 3, we added 1,528 people on a net basis. The total manpower stood at 33,983, of which our production associates were 94.7%. In this quarter, attrition has come down to 12.4% versus 13.5% last quarter on LTM basis. Our cash flow hedge book stood at USD 1,296 million as at December 31, 2020, versus USD 1,030 million as at September 30, 2020. While the on-balance sheet hedges stood at USD 69 million versus USD 115 million last quarter. Moving on to the DSO. In quarter 3, the billed DSO stood at 63 days. The DSO, including unbilled revenue, was at 93 days, an improvement of 1 day compared to quarter 2. For the quarter, the net cash flow from operations was at INR 6,049 million, which was at 116.5% conversion of the net income. At the end of the quarter, cash and liquid investments stood at INR 38,560 million compared to INR 35,472 million as on September 30, 2020. The effective tax rate for the quarter was 25.8%. Earning per share for the quarter stood at INR 29.7 as compared to INR 26.1 in quarter 2. Diluted earning per share was INR 29.5 versus INR 25.9 last quarter. On LTM basis, diluted earning per share was INR 103.5 versus INR 95.5 in quarter 2. With that, I would like to open the floor for questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Sudheer Guntupalli from ICICI Securities.

Sanjay, even for FY '22, are we confident about industry-leading growth or growth in the leadership quadrant? We understand that LTI is little mathematically disadvantaged from a high base standpoint in FY '21 compared to a number of other industry players. But how do you see the outlook, especially in the backdrop that barring the $278 million we announced in the net new deal wins in this quarter? In the previous quarter, deal wins have also been slightly lower than expectations -- your own expectations, how do you look at FY '22 outlook?

Sudheer, the good thing with you is, you actually gave a lot of answers inbuilt into it. But I want to again reiterate our commitment, our aspirations, our dreams for the company. And that is to be in the leader's quadrant of growth, if not be the leader. Mathematically, many things are -- it will fall more or less the way you have articulated, but we are very excited about the conversations. We are excited about the large deal pipeline. We are excited about tremendous opportunities and growth in new accounts, invest accounts, growth accounts, the large growth accounts as well. So where we stand, we want to keep our focus on being seen as a growth company, focus our investments, focus on business, invest in creating new capabilities that we can take to our customers and I continue to drive growth from the leadership quadrant.

Sure, Sanjay. And regarding the large deal in UAE, actually, projects in this geography may have a different rhythm margin and working capital profile. Any risk that we potentially anticipate here going ahead?

Sorry, you're going in and out. Your question is, is there any risk? Is that the question, Sudheer?

Yes. In the large deal in the UAE, actually, projects in this geography have a different margin, working capital profile and different rhythm of execution. So any risk that we see?

I don't think so. Margin, and I think I would request Sudhir Chaturvedi to say a few words on the deal.

Yes. So as Sanjay described in his commentary, the deal is across multiple areas with Injazat. So the first is the bestshoring of existing operations from an applications and infrastructure perspective. The second part is the journey to cloud. So all of these fitness clients are on a journey to the cloud, and we are the partner for that. The third is the ERP modernization that is -- many of these clients are on the ERP systems, which will get modernized in the future. So the multiplicity of the different types of revenue streams and the nature of work gives us confidence that there is good growth. And obviously, when we do any large deal, we are very conscious about the margins that we do that at. And the same parameters apply in this deal as well.

Sure, Sudhir. And Ashok, one last thing. Conversations with you have always been very insightful. Congrats and all the best for your future endeavors.

Thank you. Thank you, Sudheer.

As a penalty, we should make Ashok answer all the questions today.

The next question is from the line of Vimal Gohil from Union Asset Management.

I just have one question that is on our strategy with respect to hyperscalers. We've heard a lot of industry players talking about how they are improving their partnership with all the hyperscalers and LTI too has been quite vocal about the same so. If you could just highlight what is different about LTI here versus peers at this point in time?

Look, I think we were one of the first ones to invest in building capabilities on the hyperscalers. We did an acquisition of Powerupcloud, which gave us a lot of [ born ] in the cloud capabilities early on. It's a complex journey that you take your customers from infrastructure, from app modernizations, from ERP, moving on to cloud and their ecosystem and start looking a lot differently. So we created a separate unit, which focuses on cloud and actually created 4 different units within that: one for AWS; one for Microsoft; Google Cloud; and IBM as well. The net result is that we are at the highest level of partnership everywhere. We have also created partnerships with companies like Snowflake, which are data on cloud scenarios. We are one of the first ones, if not the first one to have a partnership probably the hottest company on data on cloud today on planet earth. And our focus is to continue working on fewer things help, create specific solutions for customers in the verticals because verticalization and digitization is very key as they move on to the cloud journey as well. A case in point, which I can give you when it relates to what we have done with Snowflake. One of the companies, the large company separating one division and creating a separate company on its own. We did their entire system soup to nuts, including their ERP, including their data in flat 9 months. With building these capabilities and focus on those verticals, we are able to accelerate their journeys to be independent, tend to be functional and efficient a lot quickly.

Fair enough. If I could just push in one more question on margins. What are the costs that you see that will normalize going ahead? Are there any structural savings that you've seen in this pandemic, maybe work from home, benefits of work from home or other costs that you feel that probably could not be at the same level as they were before the pandemic.

Vimal, if you look at last 5, 6 years, our story has been very consistent. The way we look at the company is to look at it as a growth company with stable margins in the band that we talk about, 14%, 15% band, and invest back into businesses. There are many levers. And we want to operate -- we're doing that, we want to operate as efficiently as possible, making sure we don't leave any wasted money on the table. What it does is, when you grow faster, it gives you more opportunities and gives you incredible opportunities to save more money on the -- increase your margin. And we want to fund it back. So continue to work on this virtuous cycle to be seen as a growth company, to be in the leaders' quadrant, keeping the margins at the stable band of 14%, 15%. That's where our focus will continue to be.

The next question is from the line of Sandip Agarwal from Edelweiss.

Congrats on a very good execution. I wish stay safe, stay healthy and very good new year to the whole management team and also congrats Ashok in his new endeavor. Sanjay, I just have one strategic question, and I don't want to put any numbers or any quantitative details. But if you see the last 5 years of Indian IT industry in the next 5 years of Indian IT industry, how do you see what will be the future, both from the industry perspective and from our perspective in the sense that do you think that the level of growth slab itself will move up quite substantially? Or you think it is too early to call on that? Secondly although Sanjay, you explained very nicely the hyperscalers part. But can you -- at least give some more sense that the initiatives which we have taken till now, they are at which stage in terms of integrating completely with the client ecosystem. So if you can throw some light on that? That's all from my side.

Thank you, Sandip. Again, you're going in and out. Let me see if I understood your question. First question was on the future of technology companies in 5 years depending on -- dependent on what we have seen so far. Look, things are changing very rapidly. A lot has been written. I have done nothing else, but technology worked for the last 30-plus years. IT industry has been written off many times, and we have always bounced back. The investment, the government support, the bright people that serve this industry have always had ways to come back and bounce stronger. Now if you look at the opportunity in the marketplace, it is incredible. Look at every industry, they need to do -- adapt to new normal, do many things differently. They need to save money from operations. They need to fund these transformations for a retailer to operate where you do more online, a CPG company, a manufacturing company to direct -- to connect directly to customers. You need investments for the insurance company to operate in a model whereby they are doing remote claims, remote subscription of policies. You need to have the ability for banks to onboard clients completely in a remote model. So I think the opportunity is where you can continue to work with the customer, understand the problem efficiently and solve for the future. You need to be able to help -- do workplace modernization because everyone is working very differently compared to a year back. So I think opportunity is there across the vertical if these start to innovate That applies for the industry, that applies for us as well. What has separated and what has worked for us is our incredible focus on capability building, focus on fewer things, keep going deeper and deeper and keep bringing back to our customers. So I think opportunity is bright for the vertical as such. Now coming to your second question, I'm not sure what did you want on hyperscalers, but we are at the highest level of partnerships. We are doing incredible conversations with our customers as we move them on to cloud -- deal cloud is part of literally everything that we do with our customers. Not sure Nachiket, Ashok, if you want to I couldn't hear the second question loud.

It's Sanjay, I think in there...

Are you still there? Yes.

Yes, I'm there, I'm there.

Did we answer it? You want to ask the second part again?

No, I think I am broadly clear. Thanks a lot for that clarification, Sanjay. And once again, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ask a question.

The next question is from the line of Mohit Jain from Anand Rathi.

I have two questions. One is regarding your top client revenues. Now if we plot this, let's say, over a longer time frame, 4 to 8 quarters, it appears that the top clients are not contributing that much to growth in absolute terms versus the non-top 10, far growth story is different pre-pandemic and post-pandemic between the 2 set of clients there now that client concentration obviously has come down, but it's more in the comfortable range. In terms of outlook, do you expect top clients to also start contributing to growth at the company level? Or do you think these guys may remain relatively at a lower number compared to the non-top?

Look, this year has been a sort of aberrations of sort. But if you look on top 10 clients, top 20 clients, there were some impacts because of COVID in the start of the year. And we need to look at it from a long-term perspective. So look at full years, FY '16 to FY '20, CAGR for top 20 clients have all shown double-digit growth. We don't give top client numbers separately. But if you look at top 10 -- the top 5 clients, they have grown, I think, at 10 plus percent. Top 6 to 10 clients have grown at around 11%. Top 11 to 20 accounts has grown at 16% CAGR for 4 years. I think if we look at income, we continue to -- we don't see a problem with the top accounts -- for 20 accounts, we still believe there are opportunities. We need to keep investing in capabilities, taking new offerings to them, finding new ways of opening centers -- cost centers with them and bringing new ideas to them. We are optimistic. But obviously, they will -- given the size, given where we are, obviously, we have to keep opening -- the other -- keep working on the other 3 aspects of our business, which is invest accounts, which need to grow faster; we have to open new logos, and we need to crack open large deals as well. These 4 things always go hand-in-hand for us.

Okay. And sir, second was on this Mosaic deal that you spoke about in the remarks, also in the press release. Is there a license revenue component in that? And what is the nature -- or what would be quantum of license revenue in such deals?

We do not give the quantum on licenses. But Nachiket, why don't you give some color? Sudhir, you give a color on the deal.

Yes. So this deal, yes, it does include a license component. And as I think Sanjay mentioned in his speech, the deal is about growing a platform to consolidate all of their risk models and reporting -- regulatory reporting on this platform. The deal that we have signed includes the platform licenses as well as the services to integrate that into the bank's ecosystem and working with them to continue to build out the models. And we expect that as this particular portion is successful, there will be future opportunities of consuming this platform in other parts of the bank as they see the value.

So right now, this piece of revenue, the license, so to say, is getting clubbed into enterprise solutions, is that correct.

It is -- it would be in the data part.

Ashok?

Data part.

Yes.

Yes, in the data segment.

Yes.

The next question is from the line of Vibhor Singhal from PhillipCapital.

I hope am I audible? So my first question was just...

Yes, you are audible.

Sir, basically, I just wanted to get your -- about deal flow number that we have reported. So it's a very strong number of $278 million, but just wanted to basically pick your brain on how -- I mean, the kind of factors that we are following in terms of reporting these numbers? These have been quite sporadic, slight low number that we reported last quarter. I understand it was boosted by a large deal in this quarter. I mean is this a number which we can compare on a Q-on-Q and Y-on-Y by basis and use that to basically project our revenues forward? Or I mean, what exactly is the -- I mean, methodology that we are thinking about reporting these numbers every quarter?

Vibhor, I don't know what your question is. Methodology is very simple. As we close the deal, we report to you. So in this last few quarters, there were not as many deals. But this quarter, we closed 2 deals. As far as the revenue realization on these deals will come. It is always shown into the deals. We only report net new TCV. That's an important difference that you will see with us. And specifically on these 2 deals, you'll start seeing the revenues coming from Q1. Not sure if I understood your question or, I answered it.

Just to add, Sanjay, I think we give only on large deal net new, just to clarify. It is not the overall deal inflow for the company. So that...

Right.

So I think that's probably answers last part of my question. So maybe a related part would be the volatility that we have seen in the deal flow numbers this year, so last quarter was significantly lower than the number that we reported this. Is it the basically a peculiar thing about this year itself being shut by pandemic and all? Or do you believe there's a seasonality impact to it, which would probably be there in future year as well?

No, large deals, the goal is a matter of when you close them.

When you close them.

And also where you participate and the deals that you're participating in. So it would vary by us -- services company, one company to another. In our case, we report only net new TCV. We talk about in the Analyst Day. Sudhir did talk about the large deal pipeline, overall, large deal pipeline that continues to be robust. We have seen a few deals in -- during the 2020, which got delayed or extended or decision-making was a little slower. We would have expected some of these deals that we announced to close a little earlier. But such is life, this has happened in the past. I won't give too much cadence to it.

Sir, just one last question on the margins front report historically high margins for this quarter. I understand there's a lot of positives -- tailwinds helping us and we'll probably have headwinds coming down in terms of salary hikes and maybe travel costs coming back. Do we expect margin profile to maybe dilute a bit over the next coming quarters because, [indiscernible] is coming back and what -- and would there be any kind of a band to which we could guide that we will be able to maintain our margins despite all the headwinds that we are expecting in the coming quarters?

Vibhor, obviously, you talked about the wage hike, which we have given effective January 1 covering 97% of our employees, which will have an impact. We also, during our Analyst Day, talked about further investments in sales and marketing. We talked about investments in cloud and data units -- data product units. We have made investments in the Nordics SaaS, partnering and buying the licenses and creating an infrastructure for financial services companies to operate on a SaaS platform in Nordics. All these are done simply because we have to invest into the business to drive up future opportunities with the customer. So as we have guided for the last 5 years, we want to be in the narrow band, stable margins, 14% to 15% that margin band and focusing on investing in capability building and in businesses as we go along to drive the top quarter [indiscernible] growth. That is where we feel comfortable. That's where we wanted to be.

The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja from JM Financial.

I had a question related to our [indiscernible].

This is the operator. I'm sorry to interrupt. Sir, may we request you to use your handset, please. You're sounding a little distorted.

Sure, sure. Yes. Am I audible now?

Yes, sir.

So much better than -- please, everyone use their handsets, please.

Yes, am I audible now?

Much better. And please, everyone use their headset, please.

Yes. Am I audible now?

Go ahead, Manik. Yes, yes.

Yes, sir.

Yes. So I basically -- especially offshore -- so what we've seen in this year is that we've seen [indiscernible]?

You're coming in and out. Manik, you're going in and out. We can't hear you. We can't hear you.

I'll try once again, is this better now?

Yes.

Now we can hear you.

Yes.

Yes. So my question was related to the trend that's we've seen related to the offshore revenue proximity, we've seen that increase significantly or sharply this year as compared to the trend seen through FY '18 to '20. While it is good to see that, just wanted to understand what's driving that? And do you think that with the work from anywhere essentially gaining more currency, we could be headed for a phase wherein clients would be open to paying based on skill-based pricing rather than location-based pricing?

See, obviously, work from home and during 2020, the ability for us to expand and as all the services companies have expanded their offshore ratio is there because everyone is working from home as far as we can have some overlapping hours. And if you can work efficiently, yes, why not? You want to go where the best talent lies. But if you really look at our 5 years, 6 years profile from the IPO time or even before, we were typically at one of the lowest on-site ratios as with other company. And in the last 5 years, I think we have always mentioned that we want to do more from offshore. We want to have cautious calls on using technologies to deliver even more value for our customers, bringing the best talent to bear in our model and not be dependent on immigration, visa, et cetera, as well, which comes in on and off again. So this has been a conscious journey, obviously, aided by what 2020 and COVID has brought on. But I think we are at a good number. We want to keep it at that number. I think we'll continue to -- the most important thing for COVID is customers, the work and moving to where the good talent is. And I think we are at a number where we can continue to keep optimizing here and there, but we are happy where we are. Nachiket, if there's anything you want to add on that?

No, Sanjay.

So Sanjay, does that mean that from an offshore perspective, we probably see better pricing as well, should that be the expectation?

I wouldn't worry about pricing too much. It's -- I don't know whether there is one thing or the other to look at. I think it's hypercompetitive out there. It's about what value you can create. If you are doing things very differently, if you have accelerators, if you have product platform, you can win more or you can price yourself better. Again, bottom line for us is, how do we win more, how do we accelerate the growth so that we can continue to invest back in the business.

The next question is from the line of Sulabh Govila from Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on another large deal win that you announced. My question is regarding construct of our 4 growth engines that we talk about. So on an average of last -- for few years, if you were to attribute the contribution of each of these 4 engines to our overall growth profile, what would that be? And has that contribution changed materially over the years? Or it's largely been in the same ballpark? So while I understand that these client accounts were moving from one bucket to another, over a period of time. But if you could provide any color on those lines, that would be very helpful.

Now -- Ashok, is there a way for us to quantify this?

So more or less, I would say that they are similar, minor variation year-on-year happens. Sometime existing accounts mining is helping you more and new accounts are contributing slightly less, or sometimes large deal, depending on what type of and when the flow happens. But over the down 4, 5 years, there is a good amount of, I would say, trend has set in for LTI. And more or less, they contribute in the proportion. And that helps us also to kind of predict and forecast our performance internally that how we are going to perform based on these 4 parameters.

Sulabh, if I can just state with -- if I can take with a different -- how we look at revenue as we do our planning for the year. Suppose you want to grow by a fictitious number, let's just say, 20% growth, then the top accounts of 20 accounts, which by its -- by their nature, have been accounts for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and you have seen a lot of growth in there, will typically grow at, let's say, between 12% to 15%, right? 20% in the company growth that you want to plan. The invest accounts are typically accounts where you've had them for 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, but there is tremendous opportunity for us to expand and explore there based on the investments that we are making. These are the accounts which probably have been need to grow by 30% to 35%. In any year for a company of our size, we look at $100 million, $150 million coming from net new logos to look at. This gives us a trajectory. And when we -- and large deals actually change the trajectory and move it to a totally different plane of trajectory and growth. That's how we look at the businesses overall.

Hey, thank you for the comprehensive answer, Sanjay, that's very helpful. My second question is a little bookkeeping question for Ashok. So if you could highlight on the increase in CapEx that's reflected in the cash flow this quarter, it's quite a bit of increase that is there. So the investments that you've taken this quarter, if you could highlight those.

So I will just look at the specific number from work -- to enable work from home. Of course, we are buying end-user laptop equipments, et cetera, and there are investments on some of the security parameters. But give me 1 second, if there is something outside of this, which we have invested, I don't remember off hand, but let me -- so these are the basic, a lot of laptops and other investment has gone into making this more efficient.

The next question is from the line of Divyesh Mehta from Dolat Capital.

Can you share the free cash flow for the quarter and for the last 9 months?

Ashok?

Yes, sorry?

Free cash flow for the quarter and last 9 months.

Okay. So I think we published that. It is in the factsheet, but -- okay. And just for the completeness of previous question also, we club our sale of assets and investment or purchase. And the CapEx number, which is misconstrued there, all the sale of our investment which we do from mutual fund, they also get clubbed there. And the -- so I'm answering previous question right now. And so the way factsheet is there, both these line items, it is just not CapEx. It is all the buy and sale of -- so net investment which cash has got generated and got into the mutual fund is also clubbed there. So that is where that $3,766 million, you see the number previous question, it's basically -- we had the cash flow which kind of invested into mutual fund, and that is reflected there. So that is why I was slightly surprised that I don't think that we have done any major CapEx in this quarter. As far as free cash flow for the quarter is concerned, we had INR 560 crores -- INR 561 crores free cash flow. And for the 9 months, this was roughly more than INR 1,500 crores, about INR 1,600 crore free cash flow.

The next question is from the line of Nitin Padmanabhan from Investec.

All the best to Ashok. My question is on -- I have actually 3 questions. The first one is on Injazat. Do we have any new recognition in the current quarter? And by when do you think it should reach a full revenue run rate that we have sort of estimated?

Sudhir?

Yes. So we are in the transition period now. And as I said, right, so there are multiple revenue streams at Injazat so we'll see perhaps some. But we will start to see the pickup from next quarter -- from Q1 onwards.

Sure. The second one was on, let's say, the overall utilization, not only for us, but for the entire industry, is like at significant highs. And in that context and the kind of demand that we are seeing, it appears that there will be a lot of hiring, and -- how would you think about the salary inflation that would happen going into next year? And would you think that margin management, not only for us, but for the industry itself, would be slightly a little more difficult going into next year, considering the wage pressures?

Nachiket?

Yes. So from a utilization standpoint, I think you're right. For us as well as for everyone, utilization is probably slightly higher than where we would like it to be. And yes, there is definitely an increased demand from all the players in the marketplace. But I don't see that having any significant impact to our overall model, right, because we'll have to look at portfolios. There are different market-based cost elements for different skill sets. We are also doing a lot of up-skilling, cross-skilling as well as our fresh graduate intake is going to be higher than previous year as we start to build that capability within our organization as well. So we'll manage that as an overall portfolio. We don't see that to have a material impact on our ability to manage our margin.

Sure. And the third one was with regard to the -- obviously, there's a large opportunity in front of us. And at the same time, I think the industry itself is at a different level of margins today. And we also have this situation where I think clients are trying to fund their investments. Do you think it's -- from a strategic perspective, I want to take a call to really look at helping clients, fund those by maybe the pricing or any of those things to start accelerating growth, considering the sort of solid margin uptick that we've seen, was the third question.

I lost your question midway. So your question is -- can you repeat in short?

Yes, sure. So what I was suggesting was considering that margins are at an all-time high and clients are trying to fund new investments. Do you think it's time to start investing in deals at the expense of margins to really accelerate growth? Is there a call that one would take strategically is that how we think about it? Or am I thinking wrong?

Okay. So Nitin, I think it's all a balancing act. And if you look at our story for the last 5 years, we have been very particular about being seen as a growth company. We want to be in the leaders' quadrant, we want to invest back in the business, we want to build capabilities, we want to bring -- improve our win ratios, et cetera. But it's all about our balance. We look at our portfolio level, we look at our company and what the priorities should be, and make selective decisions on where we want to be. That's not to say we see a need to just buy a bad business, so to speak. So it will always be a balancing act. We look at opportunities for the value creation for customers and for the company and our shareholders in the long run.

Sure. Sanjay, one more conceptual question, if I may. Is post GFC, I think the entire industry was heavy on time and material. And this time around, I think it's the other way around. There's more fixed price. And with this whole shift to offshore, how much of this actually passes on to clients? And how much of that is sort of retention from an industry or even our perspective? And do you foresee clients asking for some sort of cuts, at least from an industry perspective going forward? How would you just broadly think about it? Or do you think the notion is wrong?

I think, Nitin, there are many constructs. There are time and material ever present, there's is fixed price, there are transaction-based, RU-based pricing, there are function points, there are storyboards delivered. There are many constructs that would continue to be there. And there will be many places where you'll use one versus the other. I think what customers are looking for is total cost of ownership, how can you bring it down? How can you launch my product platforms a lot faster than what we typically did in the past? And that is where the journey is typically taking for them. So we'll continue to have those conversations. We continue to invest in businesses and continue to build capabilities and bring those values for the customer.

Sure. Thank you so much, Sanjay. This is very helpful. And all the best to you, Ashok, as well.

Thank you.

The next question is from the line of Mukul Garg from Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

Sanjay, just following on to Nitin's question on margins. If you look at your Q3 exit margins, you are at 16.5% PAT margin. Now we understand that there will be an investment into a team building with more fresher intake. So given the double-digit industry rating growth, which you will have in FY '22, the gross margin should not be the factor for the margins to go back to your 14% to 15% range. So should we kind of assume that your -- the sales and marketing cost next year will be probably closer to what you guys used to spend in terms of percentage of sales back in 2016 to '18 period versus what you have seen in the last 2 years? Is that the right way to kind of look at increase investment, it would be mostly -- there will be a meaningful pickup there?

See, I think, Mukul, we talked about some of this. We have salary hike from effective January 1 on Q4 that will have an impact. Higher utilization at these levels is not -- we wanted to be brought down. So we will hire more people. We already talked about increasing the investments in sales and marketing. World is a different place, and we need to do a lot more at these times. We talked about new units and investments that we need to make for data products and cloud kind of investments. These are all new areas. We talked today about and during Analyst Day, Sudhir spoke about investments in Nordics SaaS, all these take investments. But these -- and some of these take time to fructify and bear the fruits like we are seeing on data products today. And that is what we will do. So I hear what you're saying, but our wish and desire will be to be in that narrow band that we want to update it and funnel and full strong growth on top of it.

The next question is from the line of Ashwin Mehta from AMBIT Capital.

I wish you all a very happy new year and all the best to Ashok. One question to you in terms of -- if you were to look at over the last 2 quarters, our growth is largely offshore volume led. And given that traditionally offshore utilizations have been lower than on-site. Is largely the utilization improvement offshore-led? And has anything changed for us to maybe run at a much higher utilization offshore versus in a scenario where people were tied in to a particular center and now there is work from anywhere?

Nachiket, do you want to take this?

Yes. So our utilization improvement is actually both on-site and offshore. Both the utilization has gone up, resulting into the total utilization going up. And the main sort of contributing factor for the offshore utilization going up was not related to work from home, but a sharper recovery in our business in Q3, right, which is what -- how the [ billability ] for the resources picked up much faster. And we are kind of now hiring aggressively in the market to make sure we kind of get into the comfortable levels given the planned growth we have for FY '22 as well.

Okay, okay. So would we be running at, at materially higher on-site utilizations, given that there have been very little volume growth there? And as things normalize from a COVID perspective, do you see that also coming off as you go into, say, the second half of the next year?

Our on-site utilization has actually been in the same sort of a traditional range. We had seen a drop in Q1, Q2 with COVID-related impacts, and that's sort of gone up again. But it is in the same veins that we have traditionally operated in. So we don't see any -- the offshore leverage in any way helping our -- or impacting our on-site utilization levels. Some bit of investments in our U.S. delivery centers that we had talked about last year as well. We'll have some temporary fluctuations in our on-site utilization. But we'll continue to maintain in the same band that we have traditionally done in our on-site utilizations as well.

Okay. That helps. And just one follow-up. In terms of the 4Q wage hike, what is the range of wage hikes that we have given? And what is the impact that we see in terms of margins because of these wage hikes?

Okay. So the wage hike offshore is about 7% to 8% -- 6% to 7%, and yes, in some cases, slightly more. And on-site has been 2%. The impact on P&L is 160 to 170 basis points for quarter 4.

Thanks, Ashok and all the best on your next endeavor.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sanjay Jalona for closing comments.

Thank you. Today you asked some very good questions. Stay safe, and we'll see you again next quarter. Take care. God bless.

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of LTI, that concludes this conference. We thank you all for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.