Persistent Systems Ltd

NSE:PERSISTENT

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Persistent Systems Earnings Conference Call for the Third Quarter of FY '25 ended December 31, 2024. We have with us today on the call Dr. Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Managing Director; Mr. Sandeep Kalra, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Vinit Teredesai, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Saurabh Dwivedi, Head of Investor Relations.

[Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I now hand over the conference to Mr. Saurabh Dwivedi. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Thank you, Amit. Good evening, and good morning to everyone on this call. We are grateful for your participation and for spending time with us today. Before we continue with our prepared remarks for Q3, we would like to show you a short video that our team has put together.

[Presentation]

Hope, we were able to add a unique and interesting element to your experience of our analyst call today. Now let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Sandeep will begin with an overview of our results and commentary on business. Vinit will take you through the financial details and some of the key operational metrics for this quarter. I will then provide an overview of our key deal wins and awards and recognitions in the third quarter of financial year '25. Sandeep will come back for a quick summary of the prepared remarks, post which, we will open the conference for questions.

Let me also remind you that as part of our prepared remarks and during Q&A, we may make certain statements which are forward-looking and may involve significant uncertainty. Persistent does not take any responsibility to update such forward-looking statements and your discretion is warranted while making any investment decisions. With this, let me hand over to Sandeep for his prepared remarks.

Thank you, Saurabh. Let me start with wishing all of you and your loved ones a very happy and a prosperous new year. Coming to our financial performance for Q3 FY '25. We achieved a healthy revenue growth of 19.9% year-on-year and 4.3% quarter-on-quarter to reach USD 360.2 million in Q3 of fiscal 2025. This marks our 19th sequential quarter-on-quarter growth.

Please note that this growth is net of the furlough impact that we saw during the quarter. In constant currency terms, the growth for the quarter came in at 4.6% quarter-on-quarter. In rupee terms, the growth for the quarter came in at 22.6% year-on-year and 5.7% quarter-on-quarter. The EBIT margin for the quarter came in at 14.9%, translating into an EBIT growth of 25.5% year-on-year.

The profit after tax for the quarter came in at 12.2%. Vinit will provide detailed color on the financials and the margin movement later in this call. Coming to the order book for the quarter. The total contract value, TCV, for the quarter came in at USD 594.1 million with the TCV of new bookings coming in at $333.6 million. The annual contract value component of this TCV is $428.3 million, out of which the ACV from new bookings contributed to $195.6 million.

As always, these TCV ACV numbers include all bookings, renewal as well as new across all existing and new customers. Please note that our revenue conversion on a quarterly basis is a function of our annual contract value bookings done in previous quarters as well as the conversion from multiyear deals booked in previous years, which are included in our TCV bookings that we report on a quarterly basis.

Coming to the client engagement size. Let me now give you a color on our client movement across various reported categories. We witnessed healthy year-on-year growth among our client buckets with our top 5 customer revenue up by 31.7%, top 10 up by 22%, top 20 up by 18.7% and top 50 up by 21%. The contribution from top 10 customers is 40% in this quarter compared to 39.3% in Q3 FY '24.

In this quarter, we reported 189 customers with trailing 12-month revenues of over USD 1 million compared to 176 in the same quarter last year. All our top line buckets have shown good growth in this quarter. On a year-on-year basis, the number of customers in the $1 million to $5 million bucket increased by 4, those in $5 million to $10 million bucket increased by 3. Those in $10 million to $20 million bucket increased by 7. Those in the $50 million to $75 million bucket increased by 1. And finally, the customers in the $75 million plus category increased by 1. All of this movement is a demonstration of our ability to scale customer relationships significantly over a period of time.

Coming to the details on our geographic performance. In terms of year-on-year growth in U.S. dollar terms, North America revenue grew by a healthy 21.1%. India revenue grew by 12.1%, Europe grew 10.3% and the rest of the world grew 66.5%, although on a low base.

Now let me give you this quarter's performance from an industry segment perspective. This quarter's growth was led by Healthcare and Life Sciences, followed by Banking and Financial Services industry verticals, which grew by 52.6% and 22%, respectively, on a year-on-year basis. Software, Hi-Tech and Emerging verticals saw a growth of 3.2% year-on-year. I'm pleased to share that our Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical crossed the $100 million quarterly revenue run rate this quarter. With this, each of our industry verticals have crossed the $100 million quarterly run rate threshold.

Coming to an update on the interim dividend. I'm pleased to share with you that the Board of Directors has declared an interim dividend of INR 20 per share on face value of INR 5 per share.

It is our endeavor to maintain a consistent dividend payout ratio while we augment our growth through capability-led acquisitions. Moving on to the progress we have made on our AI road map. As we've articulated in our earnings calls in earlier quarters, our AI strategy is built around 4 foundational pillars: pivoting to an AI-led platform-driven services approach, engaging with customers increasingly on outcome-based business models, leveraging our partner ecosystem, making strategic inorganic bets to bolster our capabilities wherever we have white spaces.

As we progress on our AI-led platform-driven services road map, I'm proud to share that we have filed 20-plus patents across various categories, including Core AI, Agentic AI, Personalized AI, Repository-level AI and Productivity Measurement. Let me describe a few of them in more detail. Our core AI patents address fundamental challenges in AI and software development life cycle. by optimizing workflows, such as Internet traffic management, data compression and intelligent routing, enabling scalable and high-performing AI solutions.

Our Agentic AI patents power intelligent collaborative ecosystems by enabling the creation, orchestration and customization of AI agents, leveraging in-memory integration and persona-based configurations. These agents dynamically collaborate to automate complex business processes from streamlining supply chains to managing customer onboarding and so on.

Our personalized AI patents enable customer-centric personalization of data, providing personalized recommendations while maintaining strict data privacy. These patents are a demonstration and reaffirmation of our commitment to innovation and transformation of our service offerings through an AI-led platform-driven approach.

Let me now give you more specific details about our AI for tech platform, SASVA. Persistent's AI for technology strategy is delivered through SASVA, our generative deterministic and secure AI-powered digital engineering platform. SASVA enhances end-to-end software development life cycle, delivering more value and faster time to market for our customers while boosting our employee productivity and predictability of outcomes.

I'm pleased to share the recent enhancements to our SASVA platform, which include the integration of autonomous AI agents and the enhancement of its robust quality engineering capabilities. SASVA's latest quality engineering or QE capabilities, simplify complex processes, reduce testing times, improve defect detection and accelerate software delivery through features such as actionable insights, automated test creation, multi-cloud testing, GenAI-driven code validation and legacy framework migrations.

SASVA now incorporates the integration of autonomous AI agents designed to revolutionize workflows by performing complex multistage analysis and seamlessly executing end-to-end tasks. These agents can dynamically interact with multiple data sources, tools and platforms, ensuring comprehensive and efficient task completion.

To give you an example, in a multistage analysis, these agents can automate the entire bug fixing workflow. They can identify issues from a GitHub repository, generate code patches using AI-assisted workflows, create comprehensive test cases to ensure functionality, validate the fix against predefined parameters and prepare a full detailed full request with complete contextual information for seamless team collaboration.

These enhancements enable us to deliver improved solutions in product engineering, application development maintenance and application modernization, aligning more closely with the need of our customers. Now coming to our AI for business vector. Our AI for business vector is driven by our investments in our platforms, iAURA and GenAI Hub. The iAURA platform offers a complete set of solutions and accelerators to streamline the data life cycle, including modernization, operations, quality and insight generation.

The latest version of iAURA powered by Agentic AI, enhances business workflows with improved personalization, contextual intelligence and strong privacy safeguards. iAURA simplifies operations by integrating disconnected systems, addressing gaps in data management and its inhuman in the loop capabilities, enhance workflows in areas like incident management, platform administration and so on.

The GenAI Hub introduces new features aimed at improving the creation and deployment of Agentic AI workflows. The latest updates built on its enterprise-ready foundation offer smooth integration with tools and frameworks such as Auto AutoGen, CrewAI and Langflow to simplify complex workflows. With these additions, GenAI Hub enables advanced workflows in areas such as precision oncology, loan underwriting, credit assessment, customer support, clinical research and incident management to give you representative examples.

These capabilities enhance traditional operations by delivering AI-driven solutions that are focused on achieving better outcomes. Coming to our strategic acquisitions and partnerships. In the previous quarter, we had talked about our recent acquisitions of Arrka and Starfish as key initiatives to bolt on to our AI road map. On one hand, we are integrating Arrka's capabilities onto SASVA, iAURA, GenAI Hub kind of platforms to ensure that we are incorporating AI governance into the solutions we are building for our customers. And on the other hand, we are also integrating data privacy as part of our key offerings across our industry verticals and service lines.

With Starfish, we are building integrations and partnerships with communication platform providers like NICE, Five9, Amazon Connect, Google Contact Center AI and others while building out our integrated AI platform for contact center modernization. We are seeing good traction with our customers for contact center modernization deals, and we'll share with you as our wins in this domain materialize in the coming quarters.

Coming to our hyperscaler partnerships and engagements. In this quarter, we have continued to build on our strong collaboration with all hyperscalers and joint development of solutions with their teams. As you would have seen in the video at the beginning of this call, earlier this month, Microsoft organized the Microsoft AI tour in Bengaluru to demonstrate industry-wide AI adoption use cases by Indian enterprises. Across the country, 6 companies were selected for demos with just 2 from the IT services industry.

We presented contract assist, our GenAi-enabled contract management solution built on Microsoft and OpenAI stack at this event, and we are very proud to say that this was featured by Satya in his keynote address. Contract Assist simplifies workflows, enhances collaboration and reduces operational complexity, enabling enterprises to achieve greater efficiency in managing contracts and deriving meaningful insights for them.

Last quarter, we co-hosted the Google Gemini Summit in Pune, featuring top leadership from Google Cloud Platform and Persistent. We have partnered with Google to co-develop healthcare and life sciences innovations in AI, knowledge graphs, biomedical imaging and computational drug design. One of the outcomes of this partnership is the launch of Pi-OmniKG and advanced AI-driven craft solution developed with Google Cloud technology.

This solution empowers healthcare and life sciences organizations to accelerate biomedical research, streamline data mining processes and deliver insights with greater speed and accuracy. We are proud to say that Google's Health AI Group has officially listed Persistent as a preferred implementation partner for creating applications using Google's foundation models.

Additionally, this quarter, we also earned prestigious accolades, including the Google GenAi Exchange Hackathon Winner 2024 and the 2025 Partner All-Star Award for artificial intelligence.

Coming to AWS. We continue to build on our AWS partnership with a selection as 1 of the 12 partners globally for AWS' exclusive game changers program for showcasing how industries are being transformed with GenAI. As a part of this program, we had the opportunity to feature some of our success stories at AWS ReInvent 2024. One such success story was for a sports technology company, which was facing challenges in delivering actionable insights about player performance at scale.

By integrating generative AI with their existing sensor data, we were able to provide personalized insights and recommendation about players' performance. Coming to our partnership with Salesforce. We continued our commitment to excellence and innovation in the Salesforce ecosystem while crossing the milestone of 1,000 Salesforce AI associate certifications. We are partnering with Salesforce agent force using our SASVA platform and are working on multiple proof of concepts with leading customers in healthcare and life sciences space.

One of these proof of concepts is with a Fortune 100 healthcare company where we have implemented an Agentic chatbot for their diabetes care product to improve customer experience. As we look forward into the future of technology services, our endeavor over the next several quarters and years is to transition increasingly towards platform-driven services and shift our business model to outcome-based engagements. The strategic pivot will leverage our proprietary IP as well as IP built in collaboration with hyperscalers and other ecosystem partners.

In summary, we are pleased with our performance in Q3 FY '25. I would now like to invite Vinit to give a detailed color on the quarterly financials and related matters. Vinit, over to you.

Thank you, Sandeep. Good evening and good day to all. Thank you for taking time out to join us today. Let me now take you through the financial highlights for the quarter gone by. Q3 FY '25 revenue stood at USD 360.2 million, registering a year-on-year growth of 19.9%. In rupee terms, it translates to INR 30,622.8 million, a growth of 22.6% year-on-year. The impact of furloughs on the revenue was approximately 100 basis points, in line with our expectations.

This quarter, we have integrated the financials of our acquisitions, Starfish, Arrka and SoHo. All put together, their contribution to our revenue was about 35 basis points in Q3. Our acquisition of SoHo is a part of vendor consolidation exercise with a large customer. Most of the revenue was already included in our existing run rate prior to the acquisition as a part of the subcontracting arrangement.

EBIT margin came in at 14.9%, 90 basis point improvement sequentially and 35 basis improvement on a year-on-year basis. In rupee terms, EBIT for the quarter was INR 4,557.3 million, translating to a growth of 12.2% quarter-on-quarter and 25.5% year-on-year.

Let me now give you a quarter-on-quarter EBIT margin walk-through. Let me first start with the headwinds. There were 2 major headwinds for us in this quarter; furloughs, which impacted our margins by 60 basis points and lower quantum of earn-out credit versus the previous quarter, which resulted in a headwind of 100 basis points. The quantum of reversal for this quarter is INR 152.24 million.

Coming to the tailwinds for the quarter. Our utilization has improved from 84.8% in Q2 of FY '25 to 87.4% this quarter. Another key improvement that has played out in this quarter is with respect to rationalization of contractor costs with a large healthcare customer.

Our plan to offshore the effort of this engagement is proceeding along expected lines as we continue to grow the revenue with this customer. Both these factors, that is the improvement in utilization and rationalization of the contractor cost, coupled with the operational initiatives have led to a 140 basis point improvement in our EBIT margin.

Strong dollar has led to a cross-currency tailwind of 50 basis points this quarter. Lower resale revenue and improved pricing has helped our margins by 40 basis points. And finally, lower ESOP costs this quarter have resulted in a tailwind of 20 basis points. All these headwinds and tailwinds put together resulted in a net increase of 90 basis points in our EBIT margin sequentially, as mentioned earlier.

Other income, net of finance cost was INR 118.4 million as against INR 176.9 million last quarter. There was a foreign exchange gain of INR 144.7 million as against INR 106 million in Q2. Effective tax rate for the quarter came in at 22.6% compared to 25.2% in Q2. Based on our revised estimates, we expect our overall ETR for the year to remain in the range of 23% to 23.5%. Profit after tax was INR 3,729.9 million, growth of 30.4% year-on-year. This translates to a PAT margin of 12.2%. Adjusted for stock split, earnings per share was INR 24.30 per share in Q3 of FY '25 compared to INR 18.90 per share same quarter last fiscal, a growth of 28.4% year-on-year.

Excluding cash from capital employed, return on capital employed for Q3 FY '25 came in at 38.1% versus 35.8% same quarter last year. Total cash and investments stood at INR 246.1 million as of 31st December 2024. In this quarter, billed DSO came in at 64 days, an improvement of 4 days and unbilled DSO came in at 22 days, an improvement of 2 days compared to Q2 of FY '25.

I would like to make a clarification on OCF to PAT ratio that was reported at 108.3% for Q2 of FY '25. We had a reclassification error, which now has been corrected. As a result of a correction, our revised OCF to PAT ratio for Q2 of FY '25 stands at 80.7%, while for Q3 of FY '25, the OCF to PAT ratio was at 84.4%. It is our endeavor to continue to improve our cash flow conversion, and we will share our progress in this regard in the coming quarters.

Forward contracts outstanding as of 31st December were INR 300 million at an average rate of INR 85.30. Now let me give you some key operational updates. At the end of Q3, our total headcount stood at 23,941, an increase of 605 from Q3 of previous fiscal year. Trailing 12 months attrition this quarter came in at 12.6% compared to 11.9% in the Q3 last year, and it continues to be within our acceptable range.

I'm pleased to share with you that in line with our endeavor to maintain a consistent dividend payout ratio, the Board of Directors have declared an interim dividend of INR 20 per share on a face value of INR 5 per share for the financial year 2025. We are pleased to inform that ICRA has rated persistent as AA+ stable. This credit rating will serve as a key enabler in Persistent's bid pursuits with larger clients who often require vendor partners to demonstrate strong financial robustness as a part of their selection criteria.

The AA+ stable rating provides a credible assurance of Persistent's financial health further enhancing the company's ability to secure strategic engagements and expand its footprint in the enterprise market. Coming to ESG updates for the quarter.

Persistent has achieved 2 prestigious recognitions from the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. We have been named winner in the service sector at the third ICSI National Awards for Business Responsibility and Sustainability, which highlights our dedication to upholding the highest standards in corporate governance, compliance, sustainability and ethical practices, ensuring transparency and accountability across all levels of our organization.

We have been also recognized as the best governed company listed segment medium category at the 24th ICSI National Awards for Excellence in Corporate Governance, an accolade that underscores our steadfast commitment to the highest standards of corporate governance, compliance, sustainability and ethical practices.

We are happy to share that Persistent has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index with an impressive score of 85 this year, placing us amongst the global leaders in sustainable business practices. This recognition reaffirms our dedication to uphold highest ESG standards, create long-term impact and positively benefit all our stakeholders. Persistent's near-term and net zero emissions target by 2050 have been approved by Science based targets initiative under their net zero standard criteria.

Let me now hand over to Saurabh for commentary on key deal wins and awards and recognitions we have received during the quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Vinit. I will now talk about key deal wins for Q3 by industry segments. Let me begin with Software, Hi-Tech and Emerging Industries, our largest vertical. Persistent was selected by a U.K.-based private equity-owned leading software company to transform its R&D operations, which include a portfolio of multiple SaaS products. This is a 5-year $50 million plus deal with SASVA license and customization at the core -- as the core tenet for transformation of product engineering for the customer. Our SASVA-led product development approach, along with day 1 readiness for key differentiators in us winning this engagement.

The benefit to the customer includes standardization of development processes through product-centric scores, rapid and reliable product modernization, leading to annual recurring revenue growth and optimization of R&D costs. Persistent was selected as an engineering partner by a leading IT service management, observability and database performance solutions provider to help alleviate business risks arising due to geopolitical volatility and undertake talent pool globalization. Persistent's 3-plus years of relationship with the customer, coupled with strong knowledge of the product, helped us win this engagement.

Our SASVA-led AI-infused engineering practices will benefit the customer by accelerating the road map of its IT service management product, leading to improved product management, fixing of product security issues and revenue and margin enhancements. Persistent was selected as a data engineering partner by a food services and facilities management leader to standardize data handling across the organization and initiate data centricity as a strategic initiative. Our differentiation demonstrated by iAURA, along with our exceptional stakeholder management with the customer were key factors that helped us win this deal.

The benefit to the customer includes modernization of the core platform for the facility management business and reduced efforts in integrating it with their ERP and HR management systems.

Coming to Banking, Financial Services and Insurance. Persistent was selected by a leading American financial services company that provides financial recordkeeping, tax advantage savings and retirement plans to modernize its legacy systems. This is a 7-year $150 million-plus deal and is the largest transformation deal signed by Persistent till date. Persistent's existing engagements with the customer in the infra space and demonstration of SASVA and GenAI Hub capabilities were instrumental in winning the engagement. The benefit to the customer includes modernization of its legacy systems, reduction in technology debt and improved developer productivity to SASVA-driven build and release processes.

Persistent has been chosen as a technology partner by one of the largest global payment technology companies to revamp their enterprise gateway services, a key entry point for all payment rails. Persistent's deep expertise in payments, coupled with our differentiated delivery experience to the customer has helped us win this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes improvement and optimization of gateway performance, ensuring scalability, reliability, efficiency with low latency and millisecond response times to support services such as real-time authorization and clearance.

Persistent was selected by one of the largest U.S.-based insurance companies to provide enhancements to the automation of insurance and claims processes within the company. Strong insurance domain knowledge coupled with mature automation practice helped us win this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes development of innovative solutions, accelerators, frameworks and GenAI based approaches for higher ROI on automation initiatives.

And finally, within our Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical, Persistent was selected by one of the largest healthcare companies in the world,to modernize their platform focused on patient care and pharmacy. This deal initiated a new relationship for the U.K. geography with the customer. Our track record of delivering outcomes in modernization projects and our engineering heritage were key factors in us winning this engagement.

The benefit to the customer includes improved patient experience, reduction in technology debt and improved business agility. Persistent was chosen by a global leader in specialty injectables, drug compounding and anesthesia to replace their legacy contract management system with a new revenue management solution. Our strong relationship with the customer, coupled with their confidence in us as a dependable delivery partner led to this being a sole-source deal where the customer did not float an open bid to other vendors.

The benefit to the customer includes alignment of the new solution with legacy dashboards while providing cost reduction in license cost and improvement in system performance. Persistent was chosen by one of the largest global contract research organization to migrate their applications from MuleSoft to Azure Data Factory. Our existing relationship with the customer, coupled with SASVA-led approach for migration were key factors in us winning this engagement. The benefit to the customer includes enhanced developer productivity, improved code quality, reduced project time lines and delivery well ahead of the deadline, redefining the approach to large-scale migrations with improved operational efficiency.

Moving on to the awards and recognitions for the quarter from leading analyst firms. This quarter saw us get continued recognition to cite a few. Persistent earned top honors in the 2024 ISG Star of Excellence Award for superior customer experience, including the prestigious Overall Award. Persistent was the only company in 2024 to win in 4 different categories based on the voice of the customer. Persistent was named a Leader in 2024, ISG Provider Lens, Generative AI Services, Global.

Persistent was recognized for its ability to empower enterprises with tailored AI strategies, strength in guiding clients from initial exploration through strategic deployment and deep AI expertise coupled with modern engineering practices. Persistent was recognized at the 16th TISS LeapVault CLO Awards in 4 categories, including Gold for Best Corporate University, Silver for L&D Team of the Year, Silver for Best Employee Engagement Program and Silver for Best Chief Learning Officer of the year.

Our Founder and Chairman, Dr. Anand Deshpande, has been inducted as a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering during its annual convention 2024. Our CEO, Sandeep Kalra, was featured in Business World's article, Sandeep Kalra saw a 2 billion power play for Persistent Systems outlining his bold leadership and disciplined strategy. The feature highlights Persistent's AI-first approach powering its verticals and sub-verticals and its forward-looking vision.

With that, let me hand over to Sandeep.

Thank you, Saurabh. Before I request the operator to open the floor for questions, I would like to provide an update on our annual planning exercise, known as the hurdle. The hurdle concluded about 2 weeks back. This was a comprehensive exercise that took place in Pune and saw participation of over 350 of our senior global leaders across sales, delivery and our enabling functions. During this exhaustive exercise, we not only planned for financial year 2026, but also reviewed our progress towards our aspiration of achieving $2 billion in annual revenue by end of FY '27.

We remain confident in our trajectory towards this near-term aspiration and as a team, have set our sights on our next aspiration, achieving $5 billion in revenue by FY '31. To support this audicious, ambitious goal, we have developed a strategic road map that includes categorizing our 3 core verticals into subverticals with a focused plan to scale each of them meaningfully over time.

Additionally, several key initiatives have been outlined, such as doubling down on our top 100 customers, which give us roughly about 80% of our revenues, expanding alternate channels, including private equity and sourcing advisers and enhancing our focus on global capability centers as they become even more relevant in our ecosystem. All of these efforts will be driven by our commitment to infusing AI into every aspect of our vertical and service line offerings, as we highlighted earlier in this call and leading with the platformization of services.

We'll provide further insights into our road map to our aspiration of $5 billion by 2031 over the next several quarters. With this, we conclude our prepared comments. Operator, please open the floor for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Mehta Bhavik.

Two questions. Firstly, one of your peers have highlighted that they have faced headwinds because of productivity benefit being asked by one of the hyperscaler clients. And obviously, Persistent works with all the hyperscalers in the world. So have you also seen any such ask from the clients, which could drive some headwinds on revenues and margins over the next few quarters?

And the second question is, if I look at the utilization has gone up sharply and even the headcount has gone up. So what level of utilization you are comfortable with operating at? And how should we think about the headcount additions going forward?

So thanks, Bhavik. So I'll go reverse gear on this. Utilization is, yes, it is at 87% plus as of this point in time. We are comfortable keeping the utilization in 85% band. As far as the headcount addition is concerned, obviously, in the shorter run, that means that there are contracts that we are working on to fulfill and the pipeline also, the confidence reflects in that. So I'll leave it there. As far as the headwinds are concerned, look, if we are able to use tools to provide better productivity to our customers and so on and so forth, that should also reflect in more business over a period of time.

I am not going to comment on what our competitors said. We are confident if we use our tools, things like SASVA, things like iAURA, GenAI Hub et cetera, we have seen if we are adding more value to the customer, the customer lets us take better value out of that. It is not a race to the bottom where we have to necessarily develop all this IP, deliver more value and pass on everything that is not the way we are looking at it, and that's not the way our customers are looking at it.

Next question is from is Abhishek Bhandari.

Good to see broad-based growth in this quarter. I have 2 questions. Sandeep, first to start with you. While I understand third quarter is generally heavy on renewals. But if I look at the ACV and the new business ACV, the growth rates on a Y-o-Y basis from a deal perspective appear to be a tad weaker one. They are now mid to single digit, 9% and 7%, respectively. So is it because of certain timing issue in terms of closing of projects? Or is this on your expected line? And if you could also comment on the pipeline, you answered that?

And the second question is for Vinit. So Vinit, we have probably exhausted all the traditional levers in terms of utilization and optimization. So going forward, how should we think on the margin improvement? I remember the comment that on a year-on-year basis, you want to be as close as possible to last year number in FY '25, you will probably end there. But on a go-forward basis, say, call it, FY '26 and '27, aligning to your medium-term aspiration of 200 basis point improvement in margin, how should we think on the [indiscernible]?

Sure. So I'll take the first question, Abhishek. So if you look at our revenue conversion, I made that comment earlier in the call as well. Our revenue conversion is a sum of our ACV conversion and the TCVs that we have announced over a period of time. Even if you look at some of the deal wins now. So we announced a deal win where we announced a $150 million plus 7-year deal, and that could only go up with time. So if you look at deals like that, there are -- at least in the last 5 years, there are at least 45-plus deals that are multiyear deals, where you may not necessarily see the renewals come in the ACV side of it.

And if you look at the backlog of Persistent, it has been increasing over a period of time. We don't announce backlog. We don't intend announcing backlog in the shorter run. All I can say is if you look at our growth, the layering of the TCV is what is basically giving us the revenue growth consistently over the last 19 quarters. So we are comfortable with whatever the ACV growth is. We'll always aspire to do better and we are confident in our growth journey. We don't comment on the pipeline that much, but the pipeline remains healthy. I will not quantify the pipeline. Vinit, over to you for the margin commentary.

So Abhishek, yes, your point is absolutely valid. The utilization is at a peak level. But I will also say at this point of time, it's not -- while our comfortable band remains to be in the 83% to 85% range, it's not that in the short run, this utilization is going to come down to that level. We are comfortable at least in the short run to continue with a little bit of a high utilization levels. The second is on the cost optimization part, there are many other levers that we are still working upon. I'll give you 1 or 2 examples. One, in terms of pricing, we are working with multiple customers in terms of implementation of the [indiscernible] clauses in terms of getting some change requests. Wherever possible, we are also going and basically trying to get nonlinear revenue as more and more AI levers get utilized.

The nonlinear revenue is another factor which can help us in terms of improving our margins. And last not the least, the SG&A still -- as you see that our SG&A is if you compare it to the peers is on a higher side. So there is a scope of optimization that is still available there. So these are all the factors that we'll continue to do that. And finally, at the end of the day, as we continue to grow, a lot of these problems will also -- the margin problem will also get sorted out.

So I'll just add one thing there. So Abhishek, I'm sure you are one of the best analysts out there. You can see your spreadsheets. If we were to deliver 14.5% for the full year, that means an exit run rate at a different level. That exit run rate for the year becomes an entry run rate for the next year. Then couple that with whatever Vinit said, and as we mentioned, the more we bring IP/differentiated capabilities, we are able to get a differentiated pricing. And if you were to look at our pricing with respect to the industry, we have been able to, over the last several years, command a premium. So all of that put together, along with our disciplined operational execution, as much as we do disciplined execution on the revenue side, we are confident of whatever we have said on margin trajectory, and we'll let the time pan out.

The next question is from Sandeep Shah.

Congrats on good execution. Sandeep, just wanted to understand entering FY '26 or CY '25, are you worried about demand in the healthcare with the change in U.S. administration because some of your peers are highlighting the same in terms of uncertainty.

Okay. So if you look at it, I'll give a philosophical answer first, and then we'll come to this. So macroeconomic environment, all of these other environments, look, they are given to everyone. How one reacts and how an organization reacts and that is where the maturity comes in. If you look at the last 4 years, we've gone through COVID, where we grew despite the sector not growing. We came through post-COVID where we grew even at 35%, and we had 5 quarters of 9% sequential. We saw post-COVID where people talked about macro being bad. Even this last quarter gone by, a lot of people said whatever it is.

So all we can say is even when there is a tough environment for a particular sector, there are going to be opportunities if you are able to analyze the sector, if there is pressure on that sector, there's -- for IT services companies like us or technology services companies like ours, there's a cost optimization opportunity. When the market becomes better, there's a revenue enhancement opportunity. So are we worried? Worry doesn't get us anything. We are keenly looking to see what happens, where does it throw up opportunities for us? How do we kind of partner with our customers, get even more closer to them, especially our top 100 customers who give us 80% of our revenues. And so we are relatively confident we will sail through this as well. We have to just analyze as the Trump administration settles in, what are the actions? How does it impact? And how do we partner with our customers for their success. So I'll leave it there.

Yes. And just a last quick follow-up on what you said. So in terms of pipeline and the deal wins, the proportion of cost takeout versus discretionary, are you witnessing any tilt towards discretionary?

So it's too early to say. I can only say that the mood is changing in certain business cycles or certain business places where people are more buoyant about the investments that may happen in the U.S. because of the government policies and so on and so forth. But it is too early for that to convert into pipeline and into closures. So we'll have to give it a little bit of time. The mood is buoyant, but nothing to reflect in discretionary coming up big time. We will wait for another quarter to 2 quarters before that. And so far, it is business as usual. We have to find our own opportunities within the things.

And just a last clarification. The margin aspiration to improve by 200, 300 bps in medium term remains, right? Because there are no comments in the opening remarks.

Yes. Because see, if you look at the exit run rate, as I said, to Abhishek, if you analyze our things right now, and I'm sure all of you can do your mathematics, 14.9% is what we delivered. There were headwinds and tailwinds. There were furlough impact of 0.6%. Even put your mathematics together, hopefully, that bodes into a margin improvement for the next quarter, that becomes an entry run rate for the next year, and then we have to execute. So that should give you confidence on what I'm saying.

The next question is from Vimal Gohil.

An excellent quarter. Sandeep, my question is to you. Just wanted your comments on the autonomous AI delivery that you spoke about, which is, again SASVA-led. Very encouraging also to see tailwinds coming through on that. While you have shared that how do the benefits that we get to partake with the clients. You already shared that aspect. I want your comments on what happens to the long-term planning of headcount addition for the company going forward? What kind of headcount are we looking to add? What -- how will the pyramid change? How will the on-site/offshore ratio get impacted on that, basically, the operational aspect, how will that change?

I'm smiling because this is a longer discussion. But if you look at it in a very short distinct, look, we have been a leading technology services company. We have led by adopting technology ahead of our peers. So that would mean that we will need to have a 2-tiered economy within the company. There are people who are focused on market share gains here and now. And there are people who are focused on building platforms for the future, which everyone in the company will embrace. Our learning and development will gear up. They will basically take the platforms that we are building, whether it is our own IP, whether it's the IP built on our partner ecosystem, the hyperscalers or specialized partners and then train the rest of the manpower.

So the pyramid, et cetera, is going to change over a period of time, not necessarily next quarter. But over the next several quarters and years, you will see the pyramid concept fading away. You will see more outcome-driven kind of business models evolving, at least as far as Persistent is concerned, you will see us partaking more value, not passing on 100% of the benefits and just getting a race to the bottom. So you will see a number of these changes. But we'll let the things pan by. It is going to be a multiyear journey.

While we all talk about Agentic AI, while we all talk about how we are progressing, for enterprises, beyond a certain set of enterprises who are technologically savvy for others to adopt it will take months and quarters and years. So from that perspective, all the comments that you have said are valid, but we see an opportunity because we don't have the innovators, [indiscernible]. We don't have to worry about legacy. We don't have hundreds of thousands of people.

We can happily nibble at other people's market share by going and disrupting what they do by 100 people over a period of time, maybe we can do it by 50 or less. So there's enough opportunity for Persistent. We are not worried about any of these things. We have to invest ahead of the curve better than the others. So that's where we are, and that's why we even are looking at a very differentiated journey over the next 6, 7 years. So I'll leave it there.

Just one bookkeeping question for Vinit sir. Anything to be -- anything noteworthy on the provision for doubtful debt this quarter?

While we call out obviously, when we don't call out, it remains within the normal range. So there are no any material pluses, minuses that are happening.

The next question is from Ravi Menon.

Sandeep, congrats on really broad-based growth. On the deal wins as well. You spoke about it at a micro vertical level. I just want to understand the seasonality of those bookings. I mean last year, Q3, I think we had some really strong bookings. This year, again, Q3 is very strong. What drives the seasonality in Q3?

Sure. So you are aware of Persistent business mix very well. In our fact sheet, if you look at it, 80% of our revenues come from North America, predominantly the U.S. So if 80% of our revenues come from a geography, which is financial -- the financial year is driven by calendar year. So calendar year ending in December means most of our larger renewals, et cetera, which are annual renewals happen in the October, November, December quarter. So you see a spike in the renewals. That combined with whatever we do on new, whether in existing or net new customers, that is basically the sum of the entire bookings that we do. And if you look at traditionally last several years, you will see Q3 being seasonality-wise, more stronger for us on the bookings front.

And you're talking about some sort of pickup that we might see is likely. And this year, I've heard that decisions about budgets are yet to be made probably will be made only by February. Is that right? And would we then likely to see a bump up in bookings in Q4?

So look, if the budgets get decided in February that by the time that has an impact on pipeline, that has an impact on bookings, et cetera, it will be a little bit more time. But look, we are building the business on an ongoing basis. And if you look at our trend over the last several quarters, our year-on-year, the revenue part is increasing. That's a combination of the bookings that we do now.

And as I said earlier, over the last several years, whatever backlog we have been able to create. So it is trending in the right direction. But from a market perspective, I think it is too early to celebrate green shoots, victory and so on. One has to just focus and with our own capabilities, mine our own customers and cultivate the right new logos.

Next question is from Manik Taneja.

Congratulations for the broad-based performance in the current quarter. Sandeep, you touched upon the fact that we are looking to pivot to a software or an operating or change in the commercial model. Do you think this can help us decouple from the typical headcount led growth in our business?

And the second question is that does this also accelerate the margin expansion journey that you are striving for given some of the productivity or the efficiency gains that you will see from this initiative?

Yes. So good direction. So if you look at it, yes, that is where the industry -- the people who adopt the AI part and are able to leverage it and build differentiated service offerings, IP, et cetera, will go. So there definitely will be a decoupling. But again, my only caution would be, please don't expect it next quarter, next to next quarter and so on. This is going to be a multi-quarter, multiyear journey. And it will also need certain amount of investments to be done. And while we have said, on one side, we will do margin optimization, the play for differentiated tech services companies, let's say, 5 years, 7 years from now would be the margins would look very different from what they are right now. And that is the opportunity.

But in the short run, while we optimize our margins, we'll keep investing to build those differentiation so that we can ride that wave, we can decouple the headcount growth to -- from the revenue growth and hence, have more revenue per employee, profit per employee over the next several years. And then obviously, what you're saying is where we would be.

The next question is from Abhishek.

I hope I'm audible. Sandeep, you mentioned that you're very confident of your FY '27 $2 billion revenue run rate -- revenue aspiration. That's pretty much a giveaway of what to expect next 2 years in terms of growth. My only question is, does this -- I mean, does this include any inorganic contribution from here on? Or given the order backlog we have, you are pretty confident of achieving it organically?

Okay. So let me paraphrase. So $2 billion by 2027 financial year-end is an aspiration. What we are saying is this, we are on that trajectory. We don't want to be overconfident. Having said that, when you're running a large organization, and today, we have become a semi-large organization, we have 24,000 of us. A few years back, we started saying our aspiration is $1 billion. We met that in time. Then we started saying $2 billion, we are on that track.

And so we are also aspirationally ambitious people. We want to do the right by our customers, but we also want to grow. And we see an opportunity that AI is giving us to compete against the biggest, whether it is the largest in the U.S., Europe or India. And so we want to move the goalpost on our aspiration. And that's why we have moved the goalpost so that we have a bigger picture for all of us, a bigger career path for all our employees and team members globally.

And so it is not a giveaway that we are saying that it is guaranteed that we'll be $2 billion by '27. We still have a lot of work to do. All we are saying is we are confident of the trajectory. We'll be at it. We'll deliver that, but our bigger goalpost is now $5 billion by 2031, which will make us one of the fastest-growing tech services company. Should we be able to achieve that aspiration, which we will give our best. Now the other part of inorganic. Inorganic has never been a revenue acquisition game for us. It has always been a capability buildup kind of thing for us, whether it is Arrka is just a 20-people acquisition. But in the data PVC domain, which is paramount in today's AI kind of a thing.

Any services company that does not focus on that cannot go to the customer and straight face talk about implementing AI solutions. Similarly, Starfish was a very small acquisition, but gives us a totally new addressable market in contact center optimization. So our foray will be like that. The only place where we might do a slightly scaled acquisition is Europe, where we are at 8% to 9%. Our aspiration is 12% to 15%. So outside of that, you will see us stick to our knitting, do focused acquisitions and investments, giving us technology to become even bigger, better version of ourselves much more differentiated than our peers. Hopefully, that answers.

The next question is from Vibhor Singhal.

Congrats on a very solid performance yet again. Sandeep, I just want to pick your brain on the FY '31 target that you have said. I know in the subsequent quarters, you mentioned you are going to come up with a proper road map to it. But just on the preliminary thoughts, I mean, what will it take for us to do differently from what we are doing at this point of time to reach that goal? I mean can we continue doing the same that we are doing and reach that? Or do you see some different kind of opportunities?

For example, a lot of your peers have called out this big opportunity in the ERP refresh cycle. Is there anything that -- something of that sort that we are looking to do? Just some color on that would be helpful. I'm sure you would come with a detailed plan later on, but any preliminary thoughts would be really helpful. Then I have a follow-up question for Vinit.

Vibhor, we have 2 minutes in the call. So I'll just give a very -- so essentially, look, doing more of the same doesn't get us different results. So obviously, we have to gear up differently. We have scaled verticals to nearly $0.5 billion across verticals, give or take. Healthcare and Life Sciences is at a $400 million run rate right now, $100 million a quarter. Financial Services is just above that, Tech above that. So first and foremost, each of these verticals is an ocean. Dividing that and creating 12 to 15 subvertical growth engines starting from there, focusing on the top 100 customers going much deeper in the top 100 customers, mining them effectively, bringing the net new engine at a different scale through sourcing advisers.

Our private equity. Private equity is a very scaled play for us, very differentiated play for us. We all understand. In Persistent, there's a set of people who understand private equity like nobody else in our industry does. Very few companies in our industry understand private equity like that. So there are many such things, many such motions, but we'll leave it for another day because there's hardly one minute left. If you can ask the final question to Vinit, then we'll try and wrap up the call.

Sure. Thanks, Sandeep. Vinit, just on the earn-out reversal provision that we have taken. So have we seen the end of it? Or do you believe there could be more of it in the next quarter or something else spill over into FY '26 as well.

At this point of time, and I think I mentioned this in our last quarter's call also that our anticipation is that this will end by the end of this financial year.

So Q4, there might be still something more, but in Q1, there won't be?

As of now, yes. That's what.

So with this, let me close the call with a message that we are positive about our growth prospects as we move into the next quarters. We continue to work with our customers proactively engaging and partnering with them to help develop solutions for their forward-looking strategies.

Thank you, all of you for spending time with us on the call today, and we look forward to connecting with you again in 3 months' time to provide an update on our ongoing progress. Thank you. Operator, we can close the call.

On behalf of Persistent Systems Limited, that concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines and exit the webinar. Thank you, everyone.