HCL Technologies Ltd

NSE:HCLTECH

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q1 FY '22 Earnings Conference Call of HCL Technologies Limited. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sanjay Mendiratta, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

[Sanjay Kumar Mendiratta, VP & Head of Investor Relations]

Thank you, Margaret. good morning, and good evening, everyone. A very warm welcome to HCLTECH's Q1 Fiscal '22 Earnings Call. Trust you all are safe and in good health. We have with us today Mr. C. VijayaKumar, President and CEO, HCL Technologies; Mr. Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Apparao, Chief Human Resource Officer; Mr. Anand Birje, Senior Corporate Vice President, Digital and Analytics; Mr. Vijay Guntur, Corporate Vice President, ERS; Mr. Darren Oberst, Senior Corporate Vice President, Products and Platforms; Mr. Rahul Singh, President, Financial Services; along with the other members of HCL leadership team to discuss the performance of the company during the quarter, followed by the Q&A.In the course of this call, certain statements that we made are forward-looking, which involve a number of risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements made herein are based on information presently available to the management, and the company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made in the course of this call. In this regard, please do review the safe harbor statements in the formal investor release document and all the factors that can cause the difference.Over to you, CVK. Thank you.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Thank you, Sanjay. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I hope all of you are safe and are keeping well.The past few months have been tough, especially for our India-based family, as the second wave of pandemic raged across the country. During this time, the well-being of our employees and their families got our undivided attention, and we left no stone unturned to support their health and overall welfare. We offered a wide range of services to our employees, including hospitalization support, isolation facilities, ambulance services, doctor consultation, medicines delivery, life coaches, mental health support, tie-up with food delivery services for those self-isolating and family and many others. Very sadly, we lost some of our colleagues to the pandemic. To support the dependents of our deceased employees, we put in place a special family assistance program.As we speak, we remain very focused on all the preventive measures and have launched a massive vaccination drive for our employees across the country. Today, close to 70% of our eligible employee base are already vaccinated, and we expect to cover 100% of eligible team members in this quarter.Coming to the financial performance. Q1 revenue came at $2.72 billion, which is 0.7% sequential growth and 11.7% Y-o-Y growth. All the numbers are in constant currency, unless called out otherwise. Geographically, Americas and Rest of the World posted a good revenue growth of 13.5% and 20% year-on-year, respectively. Europe had a bit of blip sequentially but remained Y-o-Y positive at 5.1%. We don't read too much into the sequential blip in Europe as the booking and pipeline in the geography remains very healthy as the continent comes out of the pandemic impact. To leverage these opportunities, we continue to strengthen our leadership in Germany and France that remains part of our global 5 focused countries identified for accelerated growth. We also announced country head appointments for Spain and Portugal and are scaling up our presence in these geographies as we are seeing strong traction for our digital transformation propositions in this country. We are investing in deepening our sales and solution capabilities on site, both in terms of employees and delivery centers, centers of excellence, more so in Europe, as we called out in the last quarter, as a medium-term investment strategy. This, when combined with the strong pipeline and bookings we are seeing in the region gives us confidence that we will have handsome growth in the upcoming quarters.In terms of segments, Engineering and R&D Services posted a stellar 4.3% sequential growth and a 10.7% year-on-year growth, respectively. What we see as a big positive is the revenue momentum in Engineering and R&D Services, both in Europe and Americas, led by digital engineering demand in high tech as well as life sciences. We're already seeing green shoots of growth from the asset-heavy industries as well. With this, the outlook for ER&D services looks strong in the upcoming quarters. IT and Business Services was flattish sequentially but remained very healthy at a year-on-year growth of 13%. Our digital business, which comprises of digital consulting, application services and data analytics, led the growth in this segment which we believe is one of the highest, if not the highest, among the peer group on a year-on-year revenue growth metric.We continue to see significant participation by HCL in existing clients' digital transformation spend, thanks to our strong Mode 2 digital propositions. This is reflected as our $50-million-clients growing from 35 to 37 and even a very smart growth from an LTM, last 12 months, compared to the previous LTM 12 months and $20-million-clients growing from 96 to 104 this quarter. And many of these clients are G500 clients, and some of these deals are normally not included in our large deal count communications. This is high-quality growth based on great client satisfaction and strong relevance of our propositions and are executed through predefined rate cards and are not new deals. Even such rate cards when signed first time are not mentioned in our communication but they make significant contribution to our growth. P&P segment had a 1% decline this quarter while it grew 6% year-on-year. I would like to call out that our renewal rates in the P&P segment remains very healthy with net value terms [ at above ] 100%.We would also like you to notice that some of our ERS product offerings are grouped under this segment starting this quarter. We have carved out a unit. It is called Industry Software group, focused on building next-generation products in 5G telecom, manufacturing and enterprise AI. We've also reclassified earlier quarters as well to have a fair quarterly and year-on-year comparisons.We have a track record of delivering business value, and this portfolio is leveraged by leading global manufacturers across automotive and aerospace industry, high-tech and telecom service providers.Also, to keep the growth objective in mind, we exited the IP partnership with CFT, which was a stagnant revenue stream, and we concluded that exit end of June this year. Moving on to the mode-wise growth. Our Mode 2 business saw double-digit Y-o-Y growth of 29% and a healthy quarter-on-quarter growth of 2.3%, led by cloud and digital transformation services. The Mode 2 quarter-on-quarter growth would have been even higher, except for one professional services, security engagement, which, for business reasons, we agreed with our client to transition back to them. Mode 1 and Mode 2 -- Mode 1 and Mode 3 have posted a strong year-on-year performance of 8.1% and 3.6%, respectively. In terms of industry segments, our life sciences and health care vertical continued its aggressive growth trajectory with a 5.4% sequential growth and a 22% year-on-year growth. We see a lot of opportunities in this vertical across all our business propositions, including digital transformation, workplace and digital engineering services. Financial services and technology and services verticals posted the next best performance with 2.9% and 1.6% sequential growth. Telecom and media grew 17% year-on-year, reflecting strong medium-term recovery in this segment.On the margins, we continue to execute well, keeping our operating margins within the guided range at 19.6%. Later, Prateek will provide you a detailed walk of the margins.Our booking performance was a real highlight of this quarter. It remained in high gear in this quarter with a new booking of $1.66 billion, which is a robust 37.4% year-on-year increase. This was enabled by 12 large wins across segments, geographies and verticals. Some recent large deals we announced in the cloud and digital space are those with The Mosaic Company, the Fiskars Group , McLaren Health, Hitachi ABB Power Grid and UD Trucks. I also want to call out a large deal we signed with a U.S.-based energy company to operate and transform its downstream order-to-cash services end-to-end and midstream operations by leveraging HCL's commerce and digital experience platform from our software portfolio. This deal is a great proof point of how our services and product businesses work together to win significant client value and also win large deals. We are confident there are more to come of this kind. With respect to this particular deal, HCL will bring process efficiencies, industry-based practices and innovation to deliver additional value to the client's operations. In addition, HCL will provide analytics and assurance services around access management to the client's application and IT assets. With regard to our P&P business, we continue to see growth, both Q-o-Q and Y-o-Y, in the new license bookings. We continue to see our pipeline growing to new levels across the breadth of our services business. The pipeline continues to have a positive trajectory in our P&P business as well. To support this growth, we continue to invest in a world-class sales and support organization, both internally and by hiring from the top software companies globally. Both in our bookings and in our pipeline of our ITBS business, we continue to see convergence of infrastructure and application businesses as integrated deals. In the last 5 quarters, we've closed at least 15 integrated deals, and the momentum is just picking up. And this is multiyear deals. We continue to see acceleration in cloud business reflected in the multiyear deals, covering themes like migration and implementation of cloud smart strategy, management of large hybrid cloud landscapes, cloud consulting, et cetera. Industry-based approach of HCL cloud smart will help accelerate customers' cloud journey and benefit realization through both rapid application and infrastructure modernization, increased data security and governance. We have migrated 100,000 instances to cloud through our IPs, blueprints and certified resources in the last 12 months. We also launched a data-driven experience framework that will drive next-generation customer experiences designed by a cross-functional team of marketers, technologists and data scientists. The framework enables enterprises to create real-time personalized experiences at scale and add the agility and speed required for implementing changes due to the evolving trends. The framework sits on top of HCL's ADvantage Experience platform and omnichannel ecosystem that provides a conversational and data-driven capability for marketers. In our P&P business, we are about to launch HCL Now, which unlocks the full potential of HCL's products and service capabilities on a cloud platform of client's choice. It gives our clients the flexibility to control their data, mix and match among different tools, and to build their own solution architecture. The cloud-native as a service offers enterprise-grade availability, unlimited scalability and flexibility built from the ground up as cloud-native managed on public cloud of client's choice. It gives access to experts on demand empowered and enabled by our cloud and HCL product experts that reduces the risk and cost while transitioning to a cloud-native architecture. Clients are starting to see the scale benefits of digital transformation, be it delivering user-friendly offerings more efficiently and cost effectively to customers while breaking down silos and enabling employees to work together using collaborative tools. Such benefits make digital technology in partnership with human ingenuity and resilience in what we call as The New Essential. The propositions designed by HCL for this transformation of a global enterprise is the most elegant part to long-term sustainability. As we expand our global market participation, we recently onboarded local country leadership for South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan to accelerate growth in emerging pockets of Asia and in Mexico, Brazil, Spain and Portugal. These countries, what we call New Frontier countries, would grow our business in the medium term with its strong economic growth and digital adoption in these countries. This, combined with the markets we called out as focused countries, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Japan, where we deepened our participation a few quarters back, this should diversify our revenue profile. We continue to strengthen our capabilities in our key markets where we lead, like U.S., U.K. and Nordics, to sustain the advantages we have.As we look at our delivery talent, I'm happy to share that HCL was recognized by the Great Place to Work Institute as one of India's Best Employers in the Nation Builders category as well as one of the Best Workplaces in the Mega Employers category for 2021. Such awards and others, like being in the Forbes Top 30 globally last year, makes HCL a top employer of choice for tech talent. In terms of talent ramp-up, we've added more than 7,500 employees during this quarter, while demand for technology talent continues to remain very high. We hired 3,500 freshers during the same period. Our attrition was 11.8% on an LTM basis, while it is inching up a bit but thankfully at a lesser speed than the overall industry. We continue to act proactively to control this aggressively, be it through special allowances and retention bonuses for super niche and niche skills and increase our reliance on freshers, not just in India, but globally. Our onshore fresher hiring should also help us to reduce our dependence on visa talent even further and on-site subcontractors to the next optimal level. We will be implementing annual increment cycle, as planned, with a special focus on 0- to 5-year talent. Looking ahead, I remain very positive of the market and the opportunities arising rapidly in the cloud and digital space, which we are really in a great vantage position to leverage. We remain optimistic about our growth trajectory because I believe we are uniquely differentiated through our combination of solution and services mix, strong client relationship, employee commitment and a market-aligned investment focus. We remain very confident of good Q-o-Q growth for the rest of the year, enabled by the 37% year-on-year booking, preceded by an all-time booking of $3 billion in the previous quarter and also 7,500-plus net hiring during this quarter. Before I close, I also want to bring to your attention our #1 ranking by leading investment and financial services group Edelweiss in their ESG Scorecard and Ratings. This is an emphatic validation of the hard work Team HCL has invested on this very important agenda over the years, and we're taking this opportunity to reiterate our commitment towards building a truly sustainable enterprise, which makes a positive impact on both people and the planet.On that note, I will hand over the floor to Prateek to provide more details on our financials. Over to you, Prateek.

[Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, CVK. But before I get to the financials, I want to share with the people on the call a pretty momentous occasion. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all the people on the call, and I hope you're staying safe and keeping well. The momentous announcement today has been that Shiv Nadar has handed over the baton of the Managing Director to CVK, as we fondly call C. VijayaKumar, CVK. Shiv, himself, has been elevated to the position of Chairman Emeritus and Strategic Adviser to the Board. Roshni, of course, continues to be our chairperson, and CVK has been today appointed as the CEO and Managing Director of HCL Technologies. Congratulations, CVK, and wish you all the very best in your new role. I will now get to the -- some more details of the P&L. As we have already covered, just reiterating a few numbers. Revenue stood at $2,720 million [ or ] $2.72 billion, up 0.9% on the quarter and 15.5% on the year in U.S. dollar terms. The growth in constant currency was at 0.7% Q-on-Q and 11.7% year-on-year. Q1 EBITDA came in at 24.5% in U.S. GAAP terms whereas in Ind AS it is at 25.2%. The reason I call that out separately is because the rest of our peers publish their results in IFRS, and there is a GAAP difference between U.S. GAAP and Ind AS, so -- and IFRS. And therefore, 25.2% is the right comparable versus most of our peers. Q1 EBIT came in at 19.6%. It was down 77 basis points on a sequential basis and 93 basis points on a year-on-year basis. Net income for the quarter was at 16% of revenue, up 83 basis points quarter-on-quarter. And in rupee terms, it was higher by about 8.5% on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Mind you, the quarterly comparison is after excluding the milestone bonus, which was paid in the previous quarter, March quarter, of about -- close to $100 million. And net of tax, it was around $79 million. HCL continues to have a very robust pipeline, highest ever, and we continued the strong booking momentum even in this quarter. This quarter's bookings came in at $1.66 billion of total contract value, TCV, which I would like to remind everybody is only the new deal wins during the quarter. It does not include any renewals at all. So the $1.66 billion was a 37.5% increase on a year-on-year basis. This is further backed up by this very strong net hiring that we have been doing in the last 3 quarters, actually. Just to give you the numbers of the last quarter and this one, we hired a net headcount of 9,295, let's say 9,300 as a round figure, and this quarter is 7,522, which brings the total across the 2 quarters to about 16,800 in employee terms. Over and above the 16,800 were third-party contractors whose number also went up by about 3,000 over the 2 quarters. And therefore, in the last 2 quarters, if I include the third-party contractors as well as the employees, we have increased our net workforce by about 20,000 within the short space of 2 quarters. During the quarter, as CVK covered briefly, we had to -- HCL had to fight the challenges that were posed by the second wave of COVID, especially in NCR, where we have a large population, as most of you know. And the headwinds that, that threw at us was both in terms of revenue as well as the cost from employees being on pandemic leaves, which we gave to our employees as and when they required, either for themselves or for their family members, so that they could take care of their loved ones. We focused largely on 2 broad areas. So the first one was the COVID care support, and the second one was what we call the family assistance program. So as part of the first one, the impacted employees and their families, they have been supported with medical infrastructure of all kinds, for example, in terms of reserving some hospital space, isolation beds, ICU beds, procuring oxygen concentrators and moving them to where they were most required, insurance top-ups on exhaustion of insurance limits and so on and so forth. The list is pretty endless. And as far as family assistance program was concerned to support the dependents of the colleagues that we unfortunately lost, which included compassionate allowance, jobs for -- potential jobs for their spouse, if they were willing or if they were -- they required training, we are providing that as well and continuing education for the children of the employees. So all in all, it was almost a war effort fighting the COVID menace. HCL also launched vaccination drives for the employees and their dependent families, and we have been able to reach a decent percentage of the eligible population and continue to make strides to reach 100% this quarter.So getting to the numbers in some more detail, the revenue was impacted by about $7 million, which, in growth terms, is something like 25, 26 basis points due to the impact from COVID-related leaves. The impact was, of course, higher to start with, but we could battle down some of that by redeploying resources. And to give you a quick walk, for the EBIT, the EBIT contracted by about 77 basis points. And there was a gain of -- from ForEx exchange changes of about 19 basis points, 20 basis points. And last quarter, we had higher amortization, which was about 60 basis points benefit for this quarter because it was a hit last quarter. The drop was primarily driven by pandemic. It was a drop of close to 90 basis, which had 3 components. So the first one was the impact on revenue, which, itself, hit the EBIT by about 20 basis points. The second one was the leave cost because these leaves are over and above the entitlement of the people. This was a special pandemic leave. So that costed us another 24, 25 basis points. And the third component was all the COVID support costs, which was another 45 basis points. So all these 3 factors put together constitute the pandemic impact of about 90 basis points. Over and above that, we had other hiring and retention costs given the demand and the supply gaps that we have. That was about 35 basis points. And the last factor was really the investment in new markets and higher R&D spend, which was another 30 basis points. So that gives you the movement from -- of 77 basis points from the last quarter to this one. I will now move on to profit after tax, the net income. The net income was -- I mean, apart from all the other factors, there was the effective tax rate for the 3 months, which was at 21.7%. The normalized number for this quarter is about 23.5%, really, but we had the benefit of about $10 million due to the conclusion of an uncertain tax position which came in favor of us during this quarter. So that $10 million added to the profit after tax for the quarter. The other notable happening during the quarter was the unwinding of the IP partnership with CeleritiFinTech for banking products. As CVK already talked about it, their revenue was running stagnant, and we preferred to get out of it rather than invest more. You may remember, there was a $25 million second payment for the intellectual property which was due to be paid coming up in this year. And instead of paying that $25 million, we negotiated an exit instead. This has given us a decent IRR on that investment over the years. And the work that we have been doing on those products will be transitioned back to them over the next 2 quarters, and this part of the revenue stream will come down to 0 by the end of the financial year. The fourth quarter will be pretty much 0. We have successfully recovered our investments, as I already mentioned, including the $25 million otherwise payable, and this has been appropriately reflected in the balance sheet. This quarter continued to be a good cash-generation quarter, in line with the profit after tax or net income. We generated operating cash flow of $447 million and a free cash flow of $403 million during the quarter which is, respectively, 102% and 93%, respectively, of net income. Last 12 months operating cash flow is at $2,230 million [ or ] $2.23 billion and free cash flow close to $2 billion at $1,986 million. And those numbers are 129% of net income and 115% of net income. Our OCF and FCF yields remain amongst the highest among peers at 6.2% and 5.5%, respectively.Our balance sheet continues to be strong with gross cash at the end of the quarter at $2,584 million, which is up 32% year-on-year, after making the payment of the milestone bonus of about $100 million last quarter and the special dividend payout during this quarter of $588 million during the quarter. This is the INR 10 plus INR 6 per share that we declared in the last Board meeting. The last thing on the earnings per share. Last 12-month diluted EPS has come in at INR 49 per share, which is up 1-3, 13% year-on-year. And the last 12-month diluted cash EPS is at now INR 60, INR 6-0, which is an increase of 5.1% year-on-year. And the Board declared a dividend of INR 6 per share at the end of this quarter. That is all from my side. Moderator, back to you, please.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Pankaj Kapoor from CLSA.

[Pankaj Kapoor, Research Analyst]

Yes. CVK, my first question is on the revenue momentum that we lost because of the wave 2. As Prateek quantified, it was just about $7-odd million. So the growth itself was slightly weaker. So would you -- how -- what would you attribute this to? You also mentioned a professional services contract that was given back to the client. If you could quantify the impact of that. And going forward, how do you see the quarter shaping up? Do you see some bump-up happening in the second quarter because of the loss of momentum picking up in the 2Q and a more normalized second half? Your thoughts on that, please?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

So Pankaj, in Q1, generally, it's a seasonally weak quarter for HCL. So we were -- we probably expected maybe another 60, 70 basis points more than what we delivered. I think we delivered 0.7%. Maybe we -- our initial plan was to be between 1.3%, 1.4%, and that was because of the large deals that we signed in Europe were pretty much signed towards the last end of the quarter and then some of the transitions were going to take a longer time, and slow revenue realization was expected. And of course, being the last quarter of last year, there was obviously some completion of projects and things like that, so which caused a little bit of bump-up, and it was a one-timer impact. So those were the 2 aspects. And then, of course, there is 60, 70 basis points reduction due to, one, of course, COVID impact was -- the pandemic leave impact, as what Prateek quantified, but there is also some slippage in some milestones and things like that which cost a little bit. And then we talked about the professional services which is one of the partnerships that we signed. There is some part of it, which we jointly agreed it is better it is done in-house for the client, and we transitioned. So that's really the Q1. Now obviously, this will have a positive impact in Q2. So I expect a strong quarter in Q2 and a fairly normalized growth in the second half. And we will -- we are continuing to be confident of the double-digit growth that we talked about in the beginning of the year. And I think the right way to look at it is the headcount ramp-up. Obviously, this is all driven by demand. And sometimes the revenue realization takes a little longer. It depends on the ratio of your freshers versus laterals that you ramped up. So those kind of factors drive some kind of timing of revenue realization.

[Pankaj Kapoor, Research Analyst]

Understood. And just going back to the previous quarter also, you mentioned the pipeline continues to be at a record high. And this time also, we spoke of a record-high pipeline. So how do we look at the actual conversion of this pipeline? Are decision-making taking longer, which was the reason why maybe there was some lower order booking -- actual order booking compared to the previous quarter? Or is the pipeline getting more [ concentrated ] by these smaller size deals and which is the reason why there was maybe a kind of moderation in the business?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. So Q4 is always the peak. And if you look at even the previous year, Q4 was one of the best-ever quarters. So that way, comparison of Q4 to Q1 from a booking perspective would not be right. The right comparison will be Q1 of FY '20 and Q1 of FY -- FY '21 and Q1 of FY '22. You may say that Q1 of FY '21 was a pandemic-driven first quarter. But even if you compare to the previous year, it's about 37% higher. So I think booking momentum is very, very good in this quarter. And the pipeline is high, and we will again book very strong deal wins in this quarter. I'm pretty confident of it.Now all of this, at some point, will have to translate to revenue. So I'm pretty confident of good growth in the rest of the quarters. But the highest pipeline that we have, I think that augurs goes very well for FY '23.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Gaurav Rateria from Morgan Stanley.

[Gaurav Rateria, Research Associate]

My first question is for CVK. It will be helpful to get some color on how the renewal deals are shaping up. And also within these strong new deal wins that you announced, how much was due to very strong pipeline and how much is due to a better win rate for HCL, let's say, versus last year?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Gaurav, I do not have specific numbers on the win rates. But generally looking at it, I feel our win rates have gone up significantly in the last 2 quarters. I would want to make that as a qualitative commentary. The qualified pipeline is of very high quality, and we do believe we will have very strong win rates. Now -- I don't know what was your first question. I missed your first question.

[Gaurav Rateria, Research Associate]

Yes. On the trends in the renewal deals because most of the deals which you announced of large deals are the new deal wins, right?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes, yes. The new deal wins is what we announced. Renewals, it's -- renewals are as usual. I don't see any major concern. Usually, we renew 95% of our revenue. 95% to 97% of our revenue gets renewed. So that trend is definitely pretty intact, very positive renewal trends.

[Gaurav Rateria, Research Associate]

Yes. Second question is on the sales and marketing spending. It has picked up in the current quarter. You quantified that as well. But is that largely done and reflected in the current quarter numbers? Or do you think this buildup will further happen over the coming quarters once -- and then you'll reach kind of steady state with respect to all the investment, all of which you talked about last quarter?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

I think it's -- there is some more way to go till it reaches a steady state run rate. Because new countries, we onboarded leadership. I'm sure there's going to be more cost. Products and Platforms, again, I think we are pretty much done with the capacity that we've planned. And some of the new geographies and engineering services, some solution and CoE buildup on the digital engineering side, they are still work in progress. Next 2 quarters, I think, it should kind of stabilize.

[Gaurav Rateria, Research Associate]

Okay. Last question on -- what would be the impact from the transition of work back to the client? And is it fully reflected in current quarter? Or do you expect some more impact to come through in the next 2 to 3 quarters?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

I think it's largely reflected. There could be a marginal impact in the next quarter.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Sandip Kumar (sic) [ Agarwal ] from Edelweiss.

[Sandip Kumar Agarwal, Vice President]

Wish everyone good health. CVK, I have only one question which is interconnected, so it may look like multiple questions, but it is actually only one question. I wanted to know what is the challenge in [Technical Difficulty]

[Operator]

Sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Kumar (sic) [ Agarwal ]. Your voice is breaking up, sir. In the meanwhile, we'll move to the next question. The next question is from the line of Sudheer Guntupalli from ICICI Securities.

[Sudheer Guntupalli, Research Analyst]

Yes. CVK, congrats on your elevation, and all the best. My first question. This is the second consecutive quarter of core growth. And any way we dissect and look at the data, Q-o-Q or Y-o-Y or segment, et cetera, the numbers look very weak versus our own historical average performance in the June quarter. Despite the massive benefit we would have gotten from a low base in June '21, IT and business services would have grown roughly 11% year-on-year, ex DWS. And surprisingly, this is lower than many companies outside the IT sector, where, let's say, physical processes like footfalls or paperwork processes in case of banks, et cetera would have gotten majorly disrupted due to the second wave lockdowns. So when you think about the reflationary environment we live in and growth becoming the commodity everywhere in the world, just, CVK, your thoughts on what has not gone right or what is not going right for HCL.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. Sudheer, honestly, I strongly believe everything is going right and that the growth itself is a factor of the nature of deals that you win. I think the right way to look at our numbers is really based on the headcount ramp-up. All of that will translate to revenues. Some of that is taking time. Other than that, whether it is the strength of our proposition, scale-up of our large clients, largely driven around digital business and the engineering business, all of that is very, very strong. Agreed, a couple of quarters, compared to the industry, our performance is muted. But it's very strongly supported by the bookings, and I think we will recover very smartly as we go into the next few quarters.

[Sudheer Guntupalli, Research Analyst]

And one question, if I may. Second wave had a pan-Indian impact within even cities like Bangalore, Bombay, et cetera seeing massive contagion at different time lines. And our competitors who have sizable delivery operations in these cities seem to have not called out a double whammy impact, both on revenue and margins, like the way we are calling out. Of course, one company flagged off second wave issue but that's more driven by Passport Seva Kendras, et cetera where physical presence of people is needed. So why are we calling out a higher impact? And second thing is COVID support costs also, most of the other companies would have also incurred COVID support costs in terms of supporting their employees, so on and so forth.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Sudheer, it's very difficult for me to comment on this aspect in comparison to others. So maybe we spend more on taking care of our employees. That's quite possible. And the second aspect is, I think, I don't know how everyone is treating the pandemic leaves. We gave pandemic leaves not just for our employees but also in the situation where the family members are unwell. And this leave was over and above the regular leaves. So maybe different companies approached it differently. I don't want to comment on others, but we have shared with you very transparently on what the impact on us was.

[Operator]

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

[Mukul Garg, Research Analyst]

CVK, just wanted to focus on the P&P business. The quarter -- the growth this quarter on a Y-o-Y basis slowed down to 6% versus almost, I think, mid-teens kind of a growth a few quarters ago. If you can help us, A, was there any impact of the product discontinuation on this? And, B, on an overall basis, how is the growth happening in the P&P side? You recently had a launch of Domino v12 also. And if you can also mention whether you had any impact from the recent tough migration at IBM on the node side given that they are the largest user of the e-mail in the globe.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes, Mukul, maybe I will ask Darren to respond on the year-on-year growth. But before that, just to kind of set the context, our outlook was to grow low single digit this year in our P&P business on a year-on-year basis. So that should be the reference point.But Darren can provide more color on product discontinuation and the new launches and the impact of various initiatives. Darren, over to you.

[Darren Oberst, Corporate Vice President of HCL Software]

Absolutely. Thank you. So the current quarter was actually a strong quarter for us in terms of new license bookings. And as we've highlighted over the last couple of earnings calls, that's the key area of priority as we continue to ramp up our direct go-to-market We completed 2 years from the date of the closure of the large divestiture with IBM. Our top priority in the first several quarters was in customer transition, stabilizing renewals. We have incrementally been focusing on more new license, more growth. And again, we've seen that reflected in the investment we've made from a go-to-market point of view. In terms of the overall growth rate, as CVK said, we are in line with the expectations that we've set to the market that this would be sort of in the low to mid-single-digit growth business. Again, over time and over a number of quarters, we do see significant potential to grow above that and to get to company norms in terms of growth. But that is the growth rate that we would expect for the business today. We did launch, as you mentioned, Domino v12, along with a number of other pretty significant releases in AMJ. This continues just a pattern for us over the last several quarters of investment, modernization, innovation, new capabilities in our portfolio. There's a lot of new stuff coming this quarter as well, again, things that we believe will be impactful in continuing to improve our growth rate. Finally, you mentioned IBM. It's not our place to comment on any of our customers, and so there's really nothing that we could say about that, other than perhaps just to allay any concern that there's some sort of financial impact that would be dimming our growth. That certainly is not the case.

[Mukul Garg, Research Analyst]

Sure. I had one question for Prateek...

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

I also want to add that we also discontinued our SaaS offering, I mean, as I mentioned, we had announced it a year back, and we also mentioned it in the last quarterly call. So that also has certain impact. And there was a conscious call to discontinue the SaaS offering, and those clients are migrating to on-prem for these solutions.

[Mukul Garg, Research Analyst]

Sure. I had one question for Prateek. Prateek, this was on cash usage. You currently have about $2 billion in net cash. If you take the Q1 run rate, you probably will add another $1.6 billion in the free cash flow this year. How is the management actually looking at the uses of this cash? I know you indicated a INR 6 run rate last quarter, but this will imply that we will pay out between $800 million to $1 billion to shareholders in FY '22. What factors are making it difficult for the Board to increase payout given that you have doubled your net cash in the last 2 years?

[Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer]

Mukul, that we have doubled our net cash is a factor of what it is today as well as what it was before, right, in a sense that our net cash had gone down pretty much after the closing of the acquisition. And then we had 50-50 kind of breakup of the acquisition of $1.8 billion, leaving aside contingent payments, which was $812 million at the end of June 2019 and another $812 million at the end of June 2020. So that is more -- I mean, $2 billion is, frankly, not much. We do need to build the cash on the balance sheet. By comparison with peers, we are, by far, much lower compared to most of our peers. So that's the statement on the cash balances. But as far as dividends are concerned, I think we already took a largish step in the previous Board meeting where we said, apart from the INR 6 which we declared for that quarter, and apart from the INR 10 which we declared as a special interim dividend to commemorate the $10 billion milestone of -- in revenue terms, we also confirmed that going forward we will maintain INR 6 per share per quarter, which is what we have maintained. To my mind, it is too soon in the day to keep changing on a quarter-to-quarter basis. I would assume the Board would probably look at something maybe in the last quarter or something like that is all I can say. It is obviously a Board decision. We take your feedback, and I'll leave it at that.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Ankur Rudra from JPMorgan.

[Ankur Rudra, Research Analyst]

Just one sort of overarching question on guidance. Last 2 quarters, you've had, as you highlighted, close to $5 million worth of net new deal wins. How should we think about this? And when should we think about this to account to stronger revenue growth? Are there any still remaining drags, any part of the business, either the legacy IT side, engineering or IT or anything else in the horizon which keeps you from articulating your growth bands more granularly?And as an addition to that question on, it's not a separate question. The ask rate at 10% is about 2% sequentially for the next 3 quarters. How should we think about your confidence of achieving or beating that?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Ankur, except for the Products & Platforms segment, where we specifically called out the growth profile and the mix of growth products and the declining products, we believe all other aspects of our portfolio is in very good shape in terms of the growth profile. Obviously, when we -- I mean, in FY '19, we still have a very large deal that had revenues in 2021. There is always a year-on-year decline when you do these mega deals. So except for situations like this and where we have taken conscious calls to exit a business like the professional services, I do not see any headwinds. In fact, all the aspects are pointing to a lot of traction in existing accounts, and those are not even into our booking because they are extensions of rate cards where we are scaling up.Obviously, in the current demand environment, it is not always possible to get fully ready billable person, so either it is freshers or we hire lateral talent with maybe one level low and then train them. So that is the approach. I think we are approaching this in a truly organic manner to create high-quality growth. And I mean the rebadging and all those transitions, it definitely has an impact in the subsequent years, not that we are averse to it, but I think we are happy with where we are. And I don't recollect the second question.

[Ankur Rudra, Research Analyst]

So the second question was how do you think about, the ask rate for your guidance is a double digit if you assume that is the bottom. The ask rate for that is about 2% CQGR. How do you think about that in terms of achieving -- your confidence about achieving that or beating that?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Ankur, I think the CQGR to get to a double digit is about 2.8% from where we are on a constant currency basis, and we're pretty confident -- and we will make up for the shortfall of Q1 and Q2, I feel pretty confident of that. And then our growth, some of these transitions will come into steady state, and all of that will deliver a pretty good growth in the second half.

[Ankur Rudra, Research Analyst]

If I could just put in one last. Is supply the main risk to that?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Supply is -- I think we are pretty confident of our current hiring numbers because we see the momentum, the recruitment, the multiple metrics that we track on recruitment across the globe. We are hiring between 8,000 to 10,000 people. About 2,000 to 3,000 -- or a little more than 3,000 freshers. So I think both our lateral capacity and fresher capacity, I do believe we will be able to hire at these levels for the next few quarters.Obviously, market situation is very high demand, and people have multiple offers. The remunerations are high. But I think the locations where we are and the work that we've done in the pandemic, how we've really handled our employees, I think it's created a tremendous amount of positivity. Our own attrition, while it is in step from the last quarter to this quarter, we believe it's probably -- may not be the best, but maybe second best in the industry. So all those metrics point us to a good ability to hire and fulfill. But the demand, if we could hire 15,000 people a quarter, we have demand. And if we can fulfill, then your growth will be much higher. But I think the right levels will be 8,000 to 10,000 so that we can scale up in a very manageable manner.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Sandeep Shah from Equirus Securities.

[Sandeep Shah, Director of Research]

Yes. CVK, just to follow up with what Ankur has asked. Now with the worst of Q4, 1Q soft growth being behind, what is curtailing us in terms of not giving a Q-on-Q growth guidance when we have a very strong track record of meeting guidance either on a Y-o-Y quantitatively or on a Q-on-Q which we have started from FY 2021? So what is curtailing us not to give a guidance for the next 3 quarters when we have a solid order book, both in FY '21 as well as in the Q1? And your comment indicates that even the 2Q order book would be even greater.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. I don't think technically there is a problem. It is more a conceptual thing. I think we believe giving very precise guidance on a quarterly basis drives a little more short-term focus. And we've consciously taken a call that we do -- we will focus on the mid to long term and not get very narrowly focused on the quarter. Like last year, we pretty much gave guidance for every quarter. So I don't think that is in the right interest of the long term of the company. So even precise guidance also in this environment, while there is very buoyant demand environment, but I mean like when we spoke during the quarter, in April, we did not realize the level of pandemic that we witnessed. So I think it's better to be a little bit cautious and kind of tell you the booking numbers, which is a true indication of what the future growth is. And that's the only certain thing, right? Booking is done and dusted, and that only has to be executed. It will show up in growth in one quarter or the next quarter. So...

[Sandeep Shah, Director of Research]

Yes, yes. That is well understood, CVK. So I think both booking and guidance are actually interdependent rather than being exclusive. But your comment has been understood as a whole.Second question, Prateek, whether this 90 bps which you call out as a COVID-related cost, that could be a tailwind in the second quarter. That is the way one has to see. And generally we split our wage hikes over the next 2 or 3 quarters; so in that scenario our margin may have upward bias on a Q-on-Q basis in Q2. Is it the right way of looking at it?

[Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer]

Sandeep, yes, you are right. We certainly hope and pray that we don't run into a third wave. Your comment sort of assumes that, but we continue to be prepared to handle any eventuality. We certainly don't hope that COVID comes -- a third wave of COVID comes knocking and such a devastating one as the second one. So yes, we would have other things to take care of, which is obviously the wage and salary increases, which would require their own deft handling in turn.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Sandip Kumar (sic) [ Agarwal ] from Edelweiss.

[Sandip Kumar Agarwal, Vice President]

[indiscernible] CVK, I have one interrelated question [Technical Difficulty]

[Operator]

Sorry to interrupt you Mr. Kumar (sic) [ Agarwal ]. Your voice is again not clear, sir.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Sandip, your line is not clear. We are happy to -- maybe you can send us a question, we can -- happy to respond back.

[Operator]

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

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

Yes. CVK, in the prior question, you basically said that you would make up for the shortfall of Q1 and Q2 and make it up in the second half. Were you referring to the calendar or do you expect the Q2 of this [ fiscal ] to be weak?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

No, Nitin, maybe there is some gap. I didn't talk anything about Q3. I said we would -- we are likely to make up for the shortfall in Q1 and Q2, and H2 should be a normalized growth numbers.

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

Okay. You're referring to the calendar, is it?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

This is the financial year for us because we just finished Q1, so...

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

So the expectation is that the Q2, which is the current ongoing quarter, will also be relatively weak. Is that the assumption? That's the clarification.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

No, no, no. We are -- in fact, it's the reverse. We -- what we said is we will make up the shortfall in this quarter, which is Q2.

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

Okay. We'll make up in Q2. Perfect. The second question was on the exiting Celeriti, how much of that would be an impact? And is that already baked into the low single digit kind of number on the Products & Platforms business?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

So we don't want to call out client-specific numbers. But I mean, the fact that it doesn't change anything in our guidance and outlook for this year. So you should just assume that we are soaking that in.

[Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer]

[indiscernible]

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

Last thing, I think if you look at the last quarter, you mentioned that the average tenures were 3 to 5 years, and you said the quality of the bookings are really good. How is it this quarter? And the second, when you speak about much higher quality of bookings, what is it that is better this time versus whatever we would have won maybe way back? Just your thoughts on both. One is the average tenures for the current booking and second is what is driving the better quality -- what are the quality aspect about.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

So Prateek, you were responding to the previous question. Maybe if you could just complete it, and then I'll answer to this.

[Prateek Aggarwal, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. No, I was just trying to add that there could be some quarter-on-quarter volatility, but our guidance on a full year basis, which CVK already mentioned, is not changing because of this.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Okay. Sorry, Nitin, just remind me of your question.

[Nitin Padmanabhan, Analyst]

Yes. My question was about, one, what is the average tenures of the bookings this quarter. You had mentioned that the quality of bookings in the last quarter is much better. So when you say improved quality of bookings, what are you referring to in terms of underlying characteristics?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. I think -- see, first is I'll comment on the tenure. I think the tenure was -- is also somewhat similar, but maybe more skewed towards a 5-year kind of average now than a 3 to 5 year in the last quarter. In terms of quality of booking, what I was referring to is if you do a large rebadging deal and it does a huge bump-up in revenue and then it brings you down in the next quarter, I mean we will definitely do the deals. But it's not -- I would say it's a slightly lower quality. Or if you have -- if you are to take over like a lot of data centers and assets, I think they are just onetime revenue or like the deal in Germany where we had to rehire 2,000 people, which we did not really do it because it was a distraction in a time when there is good organic demand and focus on building the business by just scaling people and talent that's much more sustainable in the long run. That's what I meant.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Rishit from Nomura.

[Rishit Parikh, Associate]

Congratulations, CVK, on the elevation. I just got one question on the TCV front, right. You've talked about getting aggressive into some of these newer markets. Have you started to see some of the contribution in the TCV? If not, when do we expect some of those investments to come through? And just a related question on TCV, right? I think we've seen an improvement in TCV in the last 2 quarters essentially, and you talked about general aggression in the market. So are these deals margin dilutive over the longer term? Or what's contributing to a sudden improvement in terms of TCV in the last 2 quarters? So what are we doing right? If you could just elaborate on that, that would be helpful.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. I think our win rates are better. That's definitely one. And these geographies, I think I want to segregate this into 2 categories. One is what we call as focused geographies, which is 5 countries: Germany, France, Australia, Canada and Japan. I think there, there is already a good momentum, and our incremental investments will continue to deliver revenue. And they will, more or less, get into the run rate very soon. I think the 7 countries where we -- what we call as New Frontier countries, which is 3 in Asia: South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam; Spain and Portugal, Brazil and Mexico, I think it's a long haul because we have pretty much zero presence, and we are really building things from scratch. So I don't expect a meaningful contribution from that for the next 12 months or 18 months. But it's a good investment to make because these are the most -- some of these geographies are where there's enough business and we are not present. And also it will help us to serve our global clients in these geographies. If I take my top 100 client partner accounts, many of them have presence in some shape and form. So that uptick may come a little quicker. But truly, customers domiciled in these countries, it will take time. But Mexico is one area where we may start seeing results much faster because we -- even though we didn't have the leadership there, we put in a lot of effort otherwise. So some of that is going to show results a little quickly.

[Rishit Parikh, Associate]

And on these large deals, will there be a meaningful margin or it will be similar to company averages?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

See, I think that is really -- it's a question of the time line. Maybe the margins will be dilutive for the first year; in some cases, maybe even the second year. But we don't sign up to deals where we don't have a clear visibility of delivering company-level margins at least in year 3. So...

[Rishit Parikh, Associate]

And just one last question on the overall revenue, right? When you talk about the double-digit revenue growth, right, on an organic basis, when you look at it compared to peers, the top 3, it's a little softer. And this is despite an easy base in the ER&D business, right? And I know we've got a weaker piece in the product business for this year. But apart from that, any leakage that we should sort of know of which sort of keeps us from delivering similar to the peers or maybe even higher?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

No. I mean there is obviously some leakage which happens because not 100% of the deals get renewed. Sometimes, there is an M&A. Sometimes, they want to have much better pricing and which we are not able to. So usually 2% to 3% is lost in that -- those dimensions. Outside that, there is really no leakage.

[Operator]

The next question is from the line of Girish Pai from Nirmal Bang.

[Girish Pai, Head of Research]

Yes. CVK, in the earlier part of this conversation, you mentioned that the strong hiring and the strong order booking means that it augurs well for FY '23. So are you kind of hinting that you're actually seeing acceleration in FY '23 compared to FY '22?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Girish, maybe it's a little early to comment on it, but my sense is you are right. It's a very qualitative commentary I'm giving you, but it's not a guidance. It's not a -- I mean it's just a sense based on what we are seeing. I would see an acceleration in '23.

[Girish Pai, Head of Research]

Okay. CVK, last quarter, you mentioned that you kind of walked away or you were picky with your choice of orders. Was it specifically to -- with reference to the rebadging? Or was it because margins were lower for whatever other reasons? Or you had some issues in terms of talent not being available to execute those orders? And how are things panning out as we speak now? Are you still being picky with the orders, as we speak?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

No. I think, Girish, we never had a situation where we walked away from a deal because we didn't have talent. So maybe that's some wrong communication. So -- but we have walked away from deals if it meant taking over a lot of data centers, taking over a lot of assets or rebadging with no real long-term value. It gives you a huge revenue uptick in 1 or 2 quarters, maybe it stays for a year, but customer is going to merge all the systems into another system and then you have to deal with the people. Those kind of things, what we -- as a management team what we thought is -- in this environment, it's better to focus on building it very, very organically rather than spending a lot of management time on those type of deals. And it's case to case on when we find deals which we believe will not create long-term value. But obviously, it's a very competitive market. Somebody or other is interested. For them, there may be some strategic reasons. But if it didn't make sense for us, we would drop it.

[Girish Pai, Head of Research]

Just one last question, if I may squeeze this through. The P&P margins last year, EBIT margins were closer to like 28%, if I recall. They were down in 1Q to some 23%. Is this a seasonal issue? Or you think you can go back to that 28% number for the full year?

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes, yes. Girish, we explained it in the last quarterly call. But what's happening is, traditionally, it has delivered close to 28% to 30% kind of an operating margin. And we believe our sales team needed a little more scale-up, and we consciously decided to invest in it. And we took a hit on the margins. And that was also the reason why we slightly expanded our margin band, reduced with 20% to 21% to 19% to 21% because we are investing in a little more scale-up of the product business from a sales perspective, and then we are expanding in some geographies, and then we are investing in some digital engineering capabilities. So these were the reasons. I don't think over a period of time, that should -- once the sales investments are over, which I do believe it's more or less complete, as the sales picks up, I think it should flow into the margins. So I would expect the margins to inch up, may not be immediately but maybe in the next year.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, due to time constraints, that was the last question for today. I now hand the conference over to Mr. C. VijayaKumar for closing comments.

[C. VijayaKumar, CEO & MD]

Yes. So thank you for very, very engaging conversations and very, very good questions. So in summary, I think I very strongly believe we are doing all the right things for the medium to long term. And it may not reflect in exciting quarterly numbers but the outlook for the upcoming quarters, I feel, we will deliver a strong growth momentum. And long term, again, I continue to remain very positive. And I look forward to these calls in the future, and thank you for joining us today.

[Operator]

Thank you. On behalf of HCL Technologies Limited, that concludes the conference call. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.