<dhhead>CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE</dhhead>
REVENUE PERFORMANCE & KEY METRICS
The last twelve months marked a period of resurgence for the Company.
We closed the full year with revenues of USD 333mm revenue and net income of INR 4,888mm,
each up by 17% over the previous year, exceeding industry average growth for a second
successive year. There was marked progress on key measures: client concentration reduced
with our top ten now at 60%, our lowest; the number of $1m+ clients stood at 44, our
highest; our $3-10mm revenue cohort of clients doubled to ten, another high and we added a
record eighty new clients. Automation and Analytics services at $71mm now represent twenty
percent of a much larger organisation, and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) or
managed services is now at our highest ever contribution. Your firm grew to be the largest
and most diverse it has ever been, with over 16,000 colleagues across the globe. The
market recognised our progress by according us a "unicorn" USD 1bn valuation
during the year.
LEADING WITH PRODUCTIZED
SERVICES, MANAGED SERVICES _BPaaS_, AUTOMATION AND ANALYTICS
Your Company’s focus on productized services including Creative,
Content & Commerce, Trade Lifecycle (TLC), Customer Experience (CX), Client Lifecycle
(CLC), Field Tech Operations (FTO) and Finance and Accounting Operations (FAO) to
mid-market clients, helped power sales efforts by providing resonant
"arrow-heads" to acquire new client relationships. Each of these service lines
grew as we added new logos and increased our footprints at established clients. Notable
highlights of the year included the opening of our Milan innovation hub and expansion of
Phuket to support our Creative services; the growth of our digital banking services; the
doubling of onshore consulting driven by our first large multi-country CLC consulting
engagement and being selected - in the face of intense competition - Care Partner of the
Year by our largest and most sophisticated client in CX. Our focus on productized services
also meant an increased share of Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) where we leverage
our deep domain, execution experience, technology platforms and industry partnerships to
deliver value-added, high return on investment services. These services continued to help
us create longer-term stickier relationships.
Automation and Analytics – a key focus area for us – grew to
$71mm in revenue. In automation, growth occurred was across low-code/no-code, intelligent
automation and in our platforms such as Compliance Manager, DocIntel, M360, Merchandiser+,
Workforce Manager, and Fluid4. An increasing number of organizations turned to us for
consulting, development, and testing support. We broadened our partnership with IIT
Delhi’s Technology Innovation Hub (IHFC) and NASSCOM COE for Data Science and AI to
help us drive innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics process
automation (RPA). Notable awards included those at NASSCOM AI Game Changer and RegTech
Insight for Compliance Manager, at CIO100 India for Intelligent Automation, and at Data
Management Insight for Roboworx.
Analytics experienced success across industries, but most notably in
luxury, B2B and banking. We acquired fifteen new logos, and invested in our services suite
comprising digital analytics, data engineering and consulting; in our product platforms
such as eMatch, eRange and M360; and in expanding industry partnerships to include names
such as Microsoft, Amplitude, Funnel.io and Alation. To cap off our commercial success, we
were voted one of India’s "Best Firms For Data Scientists To Work For" by
Analytics India Magazine for a second consecutive year.
Finally, I am happy to say that our purchase of Personiv proved very
beneficial for your Company. That business grew twenty per cent over the past year, added
twenty new logos and approached a USD 40mm run rate. We successfully integrated the
various Personiv business elements into our core business units, and witnessed growth
across all service lines. Our new Philippines capabilities became core to the firm and we
moved new business there, providing a new low-cost alternative to India for any clients
reconsidering India concentration.
FOCUS ON PEOPLE
In FY ‘23, we grew to over 16,000 employees, adding talent across
business process management, analytics, and automation services. I am happy to share that
our pool of women talent expanded, with women today comprising 37% of our global
workforce. Two-fifths of external hires last year were women, thanks in part to hybrid and
remote work arrangements. We launched an external mentoring program for our high
potential senior women leaders, which led a just under twenty percent representation of
women in top leadership roles - our highest ever.
We adopted a global HR platform last year to provide a unified support
experience across our entire global family. This brought all people functions such as
recruitment, on-boarding, learning, rewards and performance onto one platform, easily
accessible to employees across different parts of the globe. This in particular helped us
transform our end-to-end learning journey, with thousands of virtual classrooms and
curated learning assets across a range of cutting-edge technologies and industry domains
now available anytime, anywhere. Our managerial development programs dwelt on leading
teams in a digital world, driving innovation and developing a better understanding of
emerging technologies. For the third edition of our firm-wide ‘Skill of the
Year’ program, we partnered with the University of Toronto and certified 1000+
employees on ‘Low-Code/No-Code’, to bolster firm-wide technology and automation
capabilities. Such innovations in learning and career development meant that we were
awarded a Brandon Hall Award for Excellence in Learning and Development for the fifth year
in a row - this time in ‘Best Advance in Custom Content’.
OUR SOCIAL, SUSTAINABILITY, AND RISK MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
We maintained our focus on community partnerships and volunteering
efforts returning to physical mode allowed us to make a deeper impact. Our themes last
year were employability, environment and education and out many colleagues volunteered
time in ARTSHALA to paint and transform walls of government schools, upcycle notebooks
from waste paper, and create learning aid materials for school teachers. We supported our
CSR partners to adopt green energy infrastructure and build climate resilience, and
planted more than ten thousand saplings across the country. You should feel proud that our
combined efforts changed fifteen thousand young lives for the better. In ESG - our
facilities in India almost doubled the share of electricity generated from renewable
sources to 32% in FY23, and we are happy to report our full compliance with the statutory
requirements of the NGRBC (National Guidelines on Responsible Business Conduct)
principles. We have also published our first BRSR (Business Responsibility &
Sustainability Report) in line with SEBI requirements.
Last but not least, resilience and risk management stayed ever top of
mind. We focused on information security efforts aimed at data encryption, remote data
management, endpoint detection, and user activity monitoring to reduce risk to the firm.
We continued to nurture a strong balance sheet with a thoughtful approach to capital
allocation - an important consideration for all our client and employee-colleagues. We
remained consistent with through our capital allocation policy of returning excess cash to
shareholders and in FY23 returned USD 40mm through a buyback.
A NEW BEGINNING
We are today a company approaching USD 350 million in revenue and have
ambitions to grow substantially. We recognise that meeting these aspirations needs senior
leadership with the experience of building businesses of such scale. I am therefore happy
to announce that Kapil Jain joins us as CEO this year, taking over executive
responsibilities from our two co-founders, PD Mundhra and Anjan Malik. Kapil has spent his
past two decades at a major Indian IT firm and his experience in the IT / BPM industry
spans delivery, sales, transition, marketing, alliances and M&A, each across a wide
breadth of industries including capital markets, consumer and retail. Kapil has
previously built business of a size similar to that which we aim for,
and brings relevant experience across clients, products, services and technology. His
joining substantially strengthens your firm’s leadership in an environment of
accelerating technological disruption
A LOOK FORWARD
December 2022 marked the fifteenth anniversary of our public
listing. We were a USD 30mm revenue company when we listed in 2007, and are today nearly
USD 350mm – an almost twenty per cent annual growth rate. On this journey, we have
learned from the best – our clients. And what a rarefied group they are -
three-quarters of our revenue derives from Fortune 500 clients and almost sixty of our
clients are over $10bn revenue enterprises. These relationships are incredibly
long-tenured – over a hundred of our clients have been so for over five years and
over thirty for over ten years – remarkable in the fast and fickle industry in which
we operate. Our deep and meaningful relationships, and culture of service, ensures that we
enjoy the trust of the most senior offices at our large enterprise clients
We are today the most scaled, global and resilient that we have ever
been. But we continue to demonstrate the agility and hunger of a much smaller
organization. We hope that like us, you feel incredibly proud of what we have together
built, and are super-excited about the future. I thank you for your ongoing support.