Conference Call between Hexaware Technologies Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 Earnings and Outlook. Listen in to the full transcript

Call Participants: Vinay Kalingara - Head, Investor Relations, Raj Srikrishna - CEO & Executive Director, Vikash Kumar Jain - Chief Financial Officer, Ram Singampalli - Chief Operating Officer

Introductory remarks from Vinay Kalingara

Good evening to all of you! Welcome to the Hexaware Technologies conference call. As always, there's a full disclaimer in our press release and the investor deck, we shall take that as read. Any non-GAAP numbers mentioned are to be read in conjunction with the GAAP numbers. Please refer to the note, which is included in the investor deck for that as well.

Key Highlights

• We have a slight drop in revenue in Q1 of over 1% in constant currency which feels like a reasonable outcome given the circumstances. It does represent to the strong growth of 17-18% depending on the currency .There is 2-3% of sequential impact driven by Covid.
• EBITDA likewise has a decline of little bit - it can be called out because of Covid impact of similar range of 100 to 120 dips. 
• We actually had one of our best quarters ever. Month 1 & 2 jumped and saw the quarter really well but then it came to a pretty sharp stop in March
• We did kind of pause in hiring towards the end. We have growth addition on freshers so that portion hiring still continues and in aggregate, we were flat 
• At EBITDA level, there is a 100 bps positive impact. At PDT level, there is actually a 30 bps negative impact which goes ultimately into our EPS
• In this quarter, we also have some of policy adjustments from a PNP perspective
• Last quarter, we had a substantial one of adjustment because of the end of the program so that leads to a little bit of roughage on QoQ basis 
• Q1 quarter is worst from our calendar perspective. We had a utilization drop which is actually 100% on account of Covid. Else the utilization would have improved. We expected an improvement from Q4 but instead it went down and all of that was on account of Covid
• We actually had increments in the quarter. These increments were of course given out before Covid became what it is. So that was done very early part of the year and it has an impact
• There were other costs- this is the cost of managing Covid itself in terms of managing work from office, holding develop cost to ensure health for our employees
• There were some negative impacts on EBITDA for this quarter. I don’t have a commentary on GAAP to non-GAAP. It’s same as what we have been doing for the past number of quarters
• I don’t have special commentary on the depth of customer relationships. The trend is, what we have seen for the past many quarters but across each customer bucket, we have more clients and our client concentration risk has come down substantially and at this point, what used to be revenue share from our top 5 clients may be one and a half years ago, is now coming from our top 10 clients
• We had a great beginning in the quarter in terms of new deal signings. Actually the full strength is not even reflected in a number. There is a shift in strategy to focus on land and expanding high-quality accounts but land and expand strategy does not even show up as a large booking but it’s highly valuable to us 
• While Europe has been on a roll for sometime, we see that reflected in the numbers, we admit substantial investments in ramping up and re-doing our US hunting and let me clearly say that we actually used to run our infrastructure business to take over additional role of running and setting up
• One of the positives from the following situation is that attrition fell down. We have been trending downward on attrition for a number of quarters. That trend continued but there was a little bit of sharp drop in March. We actually expect to see this go down quite a bit further in the coming quarters
• On the other hand, utilization went down, we expect it to go down a bit further and start being normal in Q3 and Q4 
• Our next focus is how do we maintain and improve on trusted relationships during this period with customers and if that means chopping a bit in utilization, so be it
• Some commentary on Geographic vertical and horizontal cuts for the quarter and will also talk about what we see in some trends going forward - You will see here that kind of APAC had the first impact and the full quarter impact. We were able to see an early impact in America and almost a full quarter impact on but there are a lot of there underlying strength in the Europe business  because of which we still grew
• North America had the latest impact, the last impact from the year perspective but because many ways the sharpest impact and that impact will carry through into Q2
• From a vertical perspective, there were a couple of verticals that actually grew through this quarter and we actually expect to see that strength going in to Q2 as well.