Letter to Shareholders
Dear Shareholders
I am delighted to present our annual report for the financial year (FY)
2021-22. In hindsight, this year has been a representation of our resilience, innovation,
and the trust our people placed in us. We have remained steadfast in reshaping our market
approaches, expanding our enterprise capabilities in tandem with the ongoing exponential
change, and driving the culture of wellness for our employees during and after the
devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. I extend my deep gratitude to
our employees, partners, clients, and other stakeholders, who have shown their unyielding
support and cooperation throughout our journey that helped us maintain a strong
operational rigor.
During the year, we continued to set bigger and bolder goals for our
company. We marshaled our resources and expanded our streams of investments to build a
robust, fully-fledged center of excellence (CoE) dedicated to Web3.0 innovation. Relying
on our long-standing partnerships with the industry's top technology players, we
galvanized and supported multiple businesses in adopting Web3.0 and discerning the
potential of the technology to thrive in the upcoming era of the decentralized internet.
We initiated more meaningful advances in the cloud, block- chain, AI/ML, and data
engineering and turned related services into our mainstream offerings. The journey to
driving business success in these areas was a long and winding one, but we are finally
there. We have collaborated with many FORTUNE Global 500 companies and SMEs to help them
reap the prodigious benefits of the cloud, AI/ML, and data technologies, and we aim to
build on the momentum.
We are in the middle of a work revolution. This year, understanding
that our employees need a work-life balance while experiencing a sense of inclusion, we
pivoted to the hybrid work model where our people relished greater flexibility in their
schedules while feeling valued on the team. Our decisive approach helped in the emergence
of new kinds of creative collaboration at scale, which only grows more important as
technology
evolves at warp speed. Today, the industry faces hiring and retention
challenges, but we were able to weather these storms. Our focus on enabling an employee
value proposition—underpinned by our core values of people first, innovation, and
being agile—paid off, and we were able to add more than 500 new team members to the
Kellton family.
Besides our value proposition and shift to the hybrid work approach,
our efforts in bolstering employee health and extending a holistic care mechanism upped
retention and helped us sustain a productive workforce. During the lethal second wave of
the coronavirus pandemic, our Task Force did a commendable job in stepping up relief
efforts and ensuring critical supplies, including oxygen cylinders, our office vehicles as
make-shift ambulances, and medical kits, to those in need in the nick of time. We also
engaged with the local healthcare authorities to organize vaccination camps for our
employees and their families, offered telemedicine support, and enhanced insurance
coverage.
A large swath of FY22 was dedicated to upgrading the skill quotient of
our teams. Not only did we launch formal training programs, but we also provided
on-the-job learning opportunities that wholeheartedly catered to our employees' unique
needs and challenges. We cultivated learning moments as a departure from the
classroom-styled training to engage people in a personalized way, help them build skills,
and gain confidence to lead in the hyper-competitive marketplace. We pushed sizeable
investments in platforms, tools, and software to sharpen the skill edge of our employees,
build the technology leaders of tomorrow, and move the needle forward on our aim of
becoming a people-centric organization.
The main highlight of the passing year was the launch of our OneKellton
initiative. As a part of this ambitious move, we unified all our global delivery, digital,
and enterprise value pipelines to serve clients across the globe irrespective of their
geographical location. We enabled access to our global ecosystem of partnerships and
talent for customers worldwide while allowing our thought leaders to pursue global
collaboration. With every step closer to realizing our vision of One Kellton, we are
raising our full-year growth forecast and expect to power up our customer service as a
value center. We aim to cut redundant costs and expenditures and achieve a higher margin.
We have grown steadily during this financial year, and many
high-frequency indicators that we monitor are improving. Our revenues stand at f844 crores
with an EBITDA of f105 crores. Our EBITDA margins stand at 12.6%, which suggests an
increase in labor costs. The PAT margin is 8.3%, and the EPS, on the other hand, is pegged
at f7.39 per share.
• A top-line growth rate of about 8+% has been achieved.
• An EBITDA of approximately f105 crores was maintained.
• A net profit of 70.44 crores was generated at an 8.3% margin.
This year, we leveraged our existing partner ecosystem to push the
boundaries of technological innovation and enable lasting value for our clients. We
capitalized on our industry expertise and tapped into the proprietary resources of our
existing partners, including SoftwareAG, Adobe Commerce, SAP, AWS, Google Cloud,
Jitterbit, and Workato, to accelerate our clients' digital journeys. We secured new
partner relationships with Confluent, Snowflake, Sitecore, Qlik, Prismic CMS, and
Contentful to consolidate our service offerings, reinvent our go-to-market strategies, and
boost our revenue growth.
FUTURE FORECAST
As we enter a new financial year, we set the tone for buoyant growth
and profitability agenda. We are excited about the opportunities in the coming quarters
and know that we can meet any challenge with intensity. In FY23, as a company, I want us
to:
• Aggressively grow under the OneKellton initiative and remain
poised for a sharp revision in our growth projection numbers.
• Get on a hiring spree and increase our total headcount to over
2500+ employees.
• Branch out into more potentially lucrative markets of Europe and
pump investments to determine the proper avenues of transformative change.
• Be more equipped than ever to offer infinite possibilities with
technology as we aim to introduce and diversify roles in practice and delivery chains.
Having logged a steady growth in our previous fiscal, we attribute what
we have accomplished to our team. We are thrilled to be on this journey with our
people—employees, customers, and shareholders—and thank those who rallied
together and supported our brand with an unrelenting collaborative spirit. We will
continue to tap into the potential of new technologies and help our clients better prepare
for future disruptions. We will focus on establishing more people-centric strategies that
keep our employees safe, motivated, and undeterred by challenges. And last but not least,
we will continue to hone our shareholder approach with sustainability as its biggest
driver and generate long-term value for shared success.