Thank you, Sagar. Good evening to everyone, and welcome to Q3 FY26 earnings call of LatentView Analytics Limited.

We are sorry about the delay in the start a little bit, but apologies for that. The results and presentation have already been mailed to you, and you can view them on the website, www.latentview.com.

In case anyone does not have the copy of press release and presentation or you're not marked in the mail, please do write to us, and we will be happy to send you the same. To take us through the results today and to answer your questions, we have the CEO of the company, Rajan Sethuraman, to whom we will be referring as Rajan; and we have the CFO of the company, Rajan Venkatesan, to whom we will be referring as Raj.

This is just to avoid confusion while doing the transcript. We will start the call with brief update on the business, which will be given by Rajan, and then followed by financials, which will be given by Raj.

As usual, I would like to remind you that anything mentioned on this call that reflects any outlook for the future or which can be construed as forward-looking statement must be viewed in conjunction with the risk and uncertainties that we face. These risk and uncertainties are included, but not limited to what we have mentioned in the prospectus filed with SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find on our website.

Having said that, I will now hand over the floor to Rajan. Over to you, Rajan.

Thank you, Asha. For a change, this time we are going to flip the order, and this is Rajan Venkatesan will go first, and I'll give the financial update, which will be followed by a slightly longer business update that Rajan will share, right?

Good evening, everyone. I think this is the first time we're doing a call a little later in the evening, that's also because the board meeting happened in the US this time.

Rajan and I are dialing into this call from the US. We're very happy to report a 12th consecutive quarter of sequential growth and very happy with the business trajectory that we've been able to accomplish.

On a sequential basis, dollar revenues grew by about 5.7%, whereas in rupee terms, revenue grew by close to about 8% in Q3. In line with our historical performance in Q3, you would note that this is a quarter that's typically strong for us seasonally, owing to one, customers looking to exhaust their budgets, but more importantly also contracts that we had stitched together earlier in the year, they need to get executed and delivered by 31st December, right?

Traditionally, Q3 has always been a strong quarter, and this year was no exception. We're particularly pleased by the strength of the financial services practice, which is continuing to sort of grow at an exponential pace.

The share of this BFSI to the overall revenue has gone up by almost 4% since the beginning of this fiscal, and that's a very, very encouraging sign. Specifically, a couple of the accounts that we had added close to about 12 months back are continuing to drive this growth, and we have been able to penetrate and add new statements of work across multiple stakeholders within these client organizations.

Rajan will later on give an update in terms of how does the future or the next year look, especially for the financial services practice. As we head into the end of the fiscal, BFSI will continue to remain strong and continue to deliver strong sequential growth even in the subsequent quarter, right?

The other good news is, of course, technology, which is our largest vertical, while there was a little bit of sluggishness in the earlier quarters, has also returned to a growth path this particular quarter. This was primarily driven by, I would say, year-end projects at a few of our large accounts, which led to this growth.

In our second-largest account, we were able to secure price increases. That also led to a little bit of the growth that you saw in this particular quarter.

CPG and retail, you would have seen that the results, while in the last quarter the commentary was very positive and bullish, in this particular quarter, the results were a little more flattish in relation to Q2. A couple of reasons that can be attributable to that.

One, there were a few one-time projects that we had executed in Q2 where we were expecting follow-on work to come through in Q3, which has not happened. They've gone on a bit of a pause mode.

This was with a large apparel manufacturer as well as one of the largest FMCG companies based out of Europe. In both these accounts, the projects that we executed did not result in follow-on work.

More importantly, I think for one of the large clients of Decision Point, which is the world's largest beverage manufacturer, while there were several projects in the pipeline, there were timing delays in terms of start dates for some of these projects. The good news is, of course, we've been able to win quite a few of those projects in Q4.

The net result of that is you were not able to see the benefit of these small value projects at this large beverage manufacturer in Q3, and that was the primary reason for the muted performance in the CPG and retail practice, right? In terms of headwinds and factors impacting growth, Rajan will talk a little more about some of the, I would say, ground-level feedback that we're hearing from some of our clients.

Overall, for this year, I would say we're on track to deliver that revenue growth of between 19% to 20%. We should end the year with revenue between $119 to $120 million.

If a few of the projects that we're currently working on, we're able to sort of execute them, we could even go past the $120 million. Right now, the confidence is to deliver revenues between $119 to $120 million, in line with what we had guided before.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the impact of the labor code. While you would have seen that revenue on a sequential basis grew by about 7.9%, payroll and benefits specifically grew by 11.1%, which was disproportionate to the growth in revenue.

A couple of factors that impacted the higher payroll and benefits cost. One, of course, was the impact of the new labor code.

Here, I would like to take a pause and highlight a couple of things. You would have noted that the total impact on account of the restructuring that we have done was close to about ₹4.6 crores, or roughly about 1.6%, right, in terms of EBITDA, and that's what we had reported even in our press release.

The reason why, actually, this number is much lower in relation to some of the other peers or, when they had put out their earnings, the impact for some of them was much, much larger, was, in fact, we had been proactive about this even earlier. We didn't sort of wait for this to come through and get finalized.

In April of last year itself, we had undertaken a significant restructuring exercise where the basic salary for all our employees was already brought up to 50% of the overall CTC. This was the primary reason why we were not as impacted as some of the other peer set, because of the proactive measures that we had taken.

Having said that, we are currently in the process of working with a consultant to restructure the components of compensation for all our India-based employees to ensure full and absolute compliance with the new labor code. We expect that this exercise will get done by 31st March 2026.

We do not anticipate any further negative impact on account of such restructuring. If anything, there could be a positive impact, right?

I also wanted to make that very clear. On an ongoing basis, the restructuring of compensation will mean that there will be an impact of between 10 to 15 basis points on our earnings going forward.

That's the level of incremental costs that we anticipate going forward, right? This was one.

The other one-off in this particular quarter, which I would also like to highlight, is in line with our sort of position to make the company a lot more nimble and future forward-looking, we also relooked at all the roles within the organization. We did realize that there was some level of additional capacity that was built up over a period of time, and there were certain roles that also did not align with our sort of strategy going forward, right?

There was a little bit of a rationalization exercise that we had undertook in this particular quarter where we let go of close to about 40-odd people across different functions, including enablement, delivery, and also growth and market-facing roles. There was a cost of close to about $200k that was also associated with this one-time restructuring exercise that we had undertaken.

These were the two primary reasons as to why payroll costs and benefits, the rate of increase was substantially higher than the rate of increase in revenue, but we expect this to stabilize and normalize in the coming quarter. Coming to SG&A, of course, this particular quarter, despite having a fairly large one-off expenses in relation to this being the 20th year since the time we were set up, and there were certain sort of employee engagement stroke gift-related expenses that were incurred in relation to the 20th year celebrations, which were a one-off, despite that, we have been able to exercise tight control on SG&A.

You will see that SG&A, compared to the previous quarter, came in at almost a 12% lower. This also, to some extent, was impacted or the lower SG&A spends could be attributed to lower travel, which is also a little seasonal, because in general, November and December tend to be slower periods in terms of business development-related travel.

That also contributed to the lower SG&A spend in this particular quarter. Going forward, we do expect even for Q4 SG&A to be in line with what was there in Q3, and therefore, if anything, you will see operating leverage play out, right?

In terms of investments for this particular quarter, we brought in Venky Ramesh, and Rajan will talk a little more about his portfolio. Venky, he'll be the Chief Client Officer for our Consumer, Retail, and Marketplaces practice.

He's someone who comes with deep understanding of the CPG domain and has worked in organizations like EPAM and Infosys in the past. We brought him onboard towards the end of November.

We've also continued to invest in client partners in line with our philosophy on deepening client relationships. We've added client partners across our Consumer and Technology practice.

We've also brought in an AI lead specifically for our Technology practice, and we're already beginning to see quite a few initiatives that are being driven by this new AI lead that we're bringing in. Rajan will elaborate a little more about the strategy on the AI side during his conversation.

Net-net, I think, all of this, the revenue growth followed by tighter control on SG&A meant that our reported EBITDA for this quarter came in at 22.4%. However, the adjusted EBITDA, which is adjusted for the transaction-related cost, came in at about 23%.

If you were to add back the one-time labor code-related restructuring cost, the adjusted EBITDA for this quarter would be closer to about 24.6%. On a full-year basis, we expect that our business EBITDA would be closer to about 24%, right, which is in line with what we had guided earlier in the year.

PAT and EPS for this quarter, of course, came in much better. You will see that the growth in EPS and PAT was much better than the revenue growth.

There was, of course, a small benefit that we also had on account of ESOP exercise. This is the last tranche of ESOPs that were given out pre-IPO that vested in this particular quarter.

In the US, typically, when ESOPs are exercised, this is a allowable tax expense, and we did see the benefit of that coming through in this particular quarter. That resulted in a lower tax outflow compared to the previous quarter.

Net-net, our EPS as a result of this grew by about 13% in comparison to the previous quarter. With that, I'm going to now hand it over to Rajan to talk a little more about the business and the strategy going forward, and we can later on open up for Q&A.

Thanks, Rajan.

Hey. Thanks, Raj.

Raj has covered quite a bit of the stuff, I'm just going to add additional points that I thought might be of interest. One of the things that we are currently undertaking is an exercise around rebuilding our consulting practice aligned with what the market expectations are.

If you remember, we have talked about our consulting capabilities and the work that we're doing related to analytics roadmaps and prioritization of initiatives in the past. This was being done with a team that was cutting across all of our industry entities, bringing in capabilities related to functional areas as well as work related to preparing those kind of roadmaps and doing the fuzzy problem-solving.

We have now reoriented the team to be a little bit more integrated with the entities in the sense that even if you talk about, say, supply chain skills or marketing analytics skills, we feel that there are differences between what needs to be brought to the table from industry to industry. Therefore, rather than just have a common team, we are rebuilding the team with a specific domain focus and expertise being the key criteria.

This is an exercise that will pan out over the next few quarters. The people that we already had, we had reassigned them into the different entities based on their dominant expertise.

This, we will update you more on this in the coming quarters. A second area is the entire Databricks strategy and how it has been executing.

Very happy that we are going from strength to strength there. We had talked about a significant bump-up in terms of the revenue coming in from Databricks-related work in comparison to last year.

We continue to see that momentum. We had four joint wins along with Databricks in the quarter and in the preceding months.

There are over 30-plus leads that have been identified that we're working on. We also continue to get funding support from Databricks for POCs where the client is looking for some initial investment right from Databricks or from our end.

Therefore, that is good to see that as well. Overall, I would say that we are on track for the $50 million target that we had from a three-year perspective.

A few things that we expect will happen over the next two years to help us get to that number: more focus on vertical solutions in the retail, consumer goods, manufacturing space around migration, around supply chain analytics, around RTM, right, and other vertical solutions that we are building. We are also expecting that the number of people who are certified and have core expertise will go up from 350 to 600 to 800, right, over that period of time.

We are adding more people into our on-site domain expertise required to support this growth, both from a go-to-market as well as from an architecture, solutioning perspective. Potentially, we will also look at acquisition opportunities in this space, specifically related to SAP, because given Databricks' partnership with SAP, that's one area that we are looking at in terms of are there good opportunities there where we can get a significant bump-up, right, in terms of the capabilities that we bring to the table.

A third point that I wanted to address is the diamond accounts strategy that I had talked about in the past. If you remember, we had mentioned that we have identified 25-plus diamond accounts, which we believe will give the main thrust for the growth that we're anticipating over the next two years.

This is a continued focus area for us. Of course, we are trying different approaches in terms of how we can not only expand the opportunity landscape, but also bring more focused content and value proposition, and then have a rigorous, disciplined process, right, in terms of executing towards that.

Raj talked about Venky Ramesh coming on board as the Chief Client Officer for the combined Consumer Goods, Retail, and Marketplaces practice. One of the things that he has been driving over the last couple of months since coming on board is to do a complete review of all the accounts that we have across Decision Point and LatentView.

In our discussions recently, we spent time on looking at our top six accounts, for example, where we believe, while we're currently doing only about $10 million of work, there is potential to do more than $150 million of work, right, in the areas that we have identified. These are the kind of things that there'll be a focus on.

CPG in particular, we see that our diamond accounts in the food and beverage space, in quick commerce, these are the areas where we will double down, right, in order to drive the growth. Overall, I also see that similar kind of a trend in some of the larger accounts that we have in Technology as well as in Financial Services.

Our top account in Technology, for example, even with one of the business units that we're working, we see hundreds of millions of dollars of potential in terms of what we can go after as a total addressable market and currently in the process of expanding the relationships right in each of those business units. Similarly, the account that has driven the growth for us in the financial services space, we believe that we can double our revenue there, and this could emerge as one of our top three accounts, in fact, in the next two years based on just this focused growth strategy around the diamond accounts.

The expectation and the intent also is that there'll be more integrated value propositions that will cut across multiple areas that will help us deepen the penetration and widen that interaction as well, right, across the different businesses, geographies, right, of our other clients that we're working with. Finally, I wanted to touch upon the AI strategy and the Center of Excellence.

If you remember, we had announced this at the start of this financial year in terms of putting our arms around all the work that we were doing, not only in the traditional AI machine learning kind of work, but also in terms of generative AI and agentic. Over the last few months, we have been doubling down on some of the pieces of work that we're doing and what it means for us in the coming months and coming quarters.

There are three areas that we have identified that we will focus on to drive the growth in this space. One is around conversational analytics.

We already have multiple solutions and products that we have built in this space. You will recall AI Penpal, Laser, the LegalGPT solution that has been built by Decision Point.

I've talked about these in the past. This is an area where we see continued momentum and thrust, and we will focus on this.

A second area is what we broadly call business process automation. This is a space that traditionally has been in the IT services and maybe even the process outsourcing space.

There is opportunity to bring a lot more of an agentic approach to doing this work. We are already doing a bunch of pilots, as well as production-grade projects leveraging these kind of capabilities.

I'll touch upon that in a minute. This is the second area of attention for us.

Then the third is around the general topic of governance, specifically on evals and observability. We believe that this will become important and significant in the coming quarters and years, especially as organizations double down on bringing in all the data that they have and applying the power of generative and agentic right to driving automation, efficiency, right, productivity, and so on.

Now, how are we going to do this? There is again a three-pronged kind of approach.

One is, of course, to build very, very strong expertise and capability in the skill sets and the areas that are needed to deliver on this. Second is a very intentional effort that we are undertaking across the organization in our diamond accounts in the specific entities, for example, on identifying the kind of processes and the areas where we support our clients where an agentic architecture can drive the type of automation and productivity benefits and efficiency gains that I talked about.

This is an exercise that's been underway for the last couple of quarters. This quarter, in particular, there's an initiative that we are doing in one of our top tech accounts called Velocity AI, which has identified over 10 opportunities that we are now engaging with the client on just in this one account.

In the retail marketplaces entity, we ran a hackathon that identified over two dozen opportunities, and six of them qualified for final presentations, and three of them we have now selected, where we're going to be initiating client conversations on how do we implement the agentic solutions that we have built. Similarly, across the organization, there is an exercise underway to identify more such opportunities.

The intent is to go and have conversations with clients on a proactive basis, telling them that the work that we are currently doing or work that's being done from a process automation perspective by others, here is a completely new approach using agentic architectures, which will drive that kind of benefits and get a leg up in terms of positioning ourselves for grabbing a larger share, right, of work that's being done in that area. Finally, the third aspect of how the AI strategy will pan out will be related to investments that we make in partnerships as well as maybe even strategic stakes in smaller organizations that are building very specific solutions.

Again, this is something that we discussed extensively in the board meeting yesterday, and there is good alignment on this approach. This is something that again we will expect to pan out over the next several quarters.

There are already multiple candidates that are on the table that we're evaluating. Each of them bring very, very specific solutions to areas that can be addressed using this generative and agentic approach.

We expect to make some of those investments in the coming quarters. Broadly, that's what we expect will drive the action in this space.

I know that's been a long introduction, but we wanted to cover the ground on some of the stuff. We will stop here to take questions.

Hi, sir. Congratulations for the great set of Q3 numbers.

You mentioned that four joint wins and 30-plus leads with DBX and also funding support for POCs. Can you quantify Q3 Databricks-linked revenue and also what is the expected conversion rate for this 30 leads, at least for the next couple of quarters?

Right. The conversion rate is a little easier.

We are seeing at least 30%, 30%, 35% success there. These leads, at least in terms of the early traction that we are seeing.

The good thing with Databricks is that while obviously there is a universe of opportunities that you can follow, they are also very, very focused in terms of how they want to take the Databricks solutions to market, and there's a lot of internal validation that happens before the joint approach and the proposition is built right for the particular opportunity. In general, I would say the conversion rates are better, right, than what we have seen with other partners.

For the four logos that we've won, I think this year, if I'm not mistaken, the revenue that's come in through the joint approach is close to $1.7 million. This is out of a total of $16 to $17 million that we are likely to do.

It's about 10% revenue coming in through the go-to-market action that Databricks is driving for us. I'm expecting that percentage will increase in the coming quarters.

Of course, the rest of the money has been on the back of accounts that we have won ourselves, or we've been doing work with them in the past, and we have either helped implement the Databricks environment or we have helped deliver use cases on top of our Databricks environment. That's a broad projection that we have, right?

In the expectation that that 16 to 17 million number, which is the overall Databricks revenue, that is the number that is expected to get to the 50 million mark in a couple of years from now.

Thank you, sir. Regarding your AI accelerators like Markeet, MigrateMate, some of them I've seen in your website.

Across this analytics, agentic automation, governance, what accelerators do sell repeatedly today? Is it fixed-price or subscription, or it's part of services?

Largely part of services at this time. In fact, you used the word accelerators as well.

Some of these are positioned as brick builder solutions, but in most instances, they are in the nature of assets and accelerators. The one solution where there is a significant chunk being delivered out of the box is the MigrateMate solution, right?

The migration work, we have built a fairly strong of accelerators integrated into the solution, so that makes the job a lot easier. While there is significant non-linearity because of the effort reduction, they are still being delivered as a combination with the services model.

We still price based on the overall effort. To some extent, the migrators and the accelerators help position us better in terms of the pace with which the project can be executed.

Okay. One general question, sir.

What prevents from our Indian outsourcing system integrators copying these accelerators? What is LatentView's defensible IP?

Actually, nothing prevents them. It is just a question of focused effort, right, in that area and the extent to which you're able to bring the combination of the domain, technology, the architecture expertise, and the strength of the relationship that you're able to build with the partner ecosystem as well.

It's just a combination of all of these things. In general, this hypothesis can be validated otherwise.

Smaller companies are able to act with a bit more agility on these matters, whereas it could be a more cumbersome process, right, in larger organizations. That doesn't mean that they will not be able to do these things or replicate.

There is obviously a need to continuously look at how we can stay at the leading edge in terms of the kind of problems that can be solved and how it can be addressed using a generative or agentic or any approach, right, for that matter, and how it can be built and integrated into the partner platforms and the solutions that we're working with. It's just a question of how quickly you can move, the domain expertise that you're able to bring to the problem, your articulation of the value proposition, right, in the conversations that you are having, and the extent of connect and relationship, right, with the partner itself.

It's a combination of all of these. Databricks, for example, they had identified us as one of the few generative AI partners, right, that they are working with, and we've done several workshops along with them.

It is not because domain expertise doesn't reside in other companies. It's just how well we are able to bring all that to bear very quickly using the new approaches, right, and the way we are able to articulate that.

That's what we hear from them, right, in terms of why they prefer to work with partners who are native to the AI ecosystem, for example. I think the same hypothesis will extend, right, to the other topics as well.

Thank you so much, sir. All the best for the Q4.

Thank you.

Congratulations, guys, on the good set of numbers. Just wanted to understand this Databricks $15-16 million, where would it be reported?

Would this be largely in CPG and our Industrials practice, because the growth in those two practices has been a little soft? Wanted to understand how they flow into our numbers.

Second is going forward as these businesses scale, as Databricks starts funding our projects and bringing us leads, again, would it be fair to assume that these two practices will actually lead growth for us, probably in FY27 or FY28? Just wanted some views on the same.

Yeah. Thanks, Srinath.

Right. Till date, the growth in relation to the Databricks revenue has been largely led by the work that we do in the consumer goods space, in the industrials space, and in tech itself, in technology itself.

As I mentioned earlier, it is not necessarily all revenue related to LatentView going in and doing a Databricks implementation. That piece of work will be a part of it, but in many instances, it's the delivery of analytics use cases on an existing Databricks environment that the client already has.

As we execute those use cases, there might be other additional data that move from whatever legacy or siloed ecosystems that they have, and we'll then take responsibility for moving that data and integrating into the overall picture. I'm expecting that the growth will continue in these sectors.

In fact, I mentioned that CPG, retail, manufacturing, right, these are sectors where we are expecting. The good news or the traction that we are seeing in the industrials manufacturing space is something that is giving comfort.

In fact, we won a substantial engagement with an auto component manufacturer, and we are seeing quite a bit of attraction there. In fact, after the next couple of days in the Bay Area, I'm actually proceeding to Detroit where I'll be spending three days.

There is a quarterly business review meeting happening with this client, and we're expecting that there'll be more work that will need to be done, right, on top of the Databricks environment. Those sectors, right, technology, consumer goods, manufacturing, these are the ones where we see further action in the coming quarters.

Just taking forward on this question, how do we understand in the current business between pure migration and say use-case-driven implementation of this suite of products within the customer who already have Databricks? How is this mix for us and how is it likely to progress over the next few years?

Our mix, interestingly, is the flip of what Databricks themselves are experiencing. In our case, only 20% or less of the revenue will be coming from the migrations, the hardcore migration work.

Much more of it really happens on the back of the analytics use cases that we deliver, right, closer to 80%. Databricks has also called out that while in fact, their own origins are more from an analytics, machine learning perspective, right, in comparison to other hyperscalers or even a Snowflake, they continue to see a lot of traction just in getting the migration done, and they're also making it a lot easier for companies to move data into their ecosystem as well as leave it there and do analytics, right, even without moving.

Their entire partnership with SAP, for example, is based on the premise that you don't need to necessarily move all that data at one shot or anything. You can continue to operate in an environment where a lot of that data resides in SAP, but you still use Databricks, right, for the analytics use cases.

On the back of all of this, I'm expecting that the 20% will get bigger. In fact, the MigrateMate solution is seeing traction.

This auto component manufacturer that I mentioned, for example, there is quite a bit of work around moving the data, right, into the Databricks environment. Several of the leads that I mentioned earlier, the 10 leads, are related to that as well.

My expectation is that that 20% will likely become 30%, 40%, right, in the coming quarters.

Thank you. Thanks a lot.

I'll get back in the question queue.

Sure.

Hello?

Pritesh. Go ahead.

Yeah.

Congratulations for the good set of numbers, and thanks for giving an opportunity. I just had a question on Raj commentary on indicated that there is some follow-up work in anticipated, but it has gone on a pause mode.

Just wanted to understand, would it be a growth headwind going in FY27? Along with it, one of the beverages company also indicated there is some slowdown.

If you can put a color on these retail and CPG part of the vertical. Pritesh,

if I hear your question right, you're you're talking about some of the firstly, the, the maybe the headwinds that we're seeing for some of our in some of the technology accounts. That's the one that that you were talking about.

The second one is around the sluggishness in in the beverage company. I'll I'll address the second one first.

See, in terms of the sluggish in terms of of the muted performance for CPG, retail in relation to the previous quarter, while when when I think the last quarter at least, the last couple of quarters have been fairly strong in terms of growth momentum for CPG and retail. Last quarter specifically, while there was anticipation because of quite a few, deals and opportunities that were there in the pipeline, right?

These were multiple small-value projects, which is typically the engagement model that we have with this large beverage manufacturer where we we we provide several point solutions or or, in fact, execute RTM projects for specific products products in specific markets. That's the nature of the engagement with the client.

There were multiple of such opportunities that were there in the pipeline, which, in reality, did not we were not able to close them out in time for us to to book the revenue. The good news is that these are now beginning to sort of get firmed up and signed up, and you will start seeing expansion in the CPG vertical in this particular quarter, especially Q4, right, because we've we've seen a lot of these pipeline opportunities getting closed.

Specifically in relation to the the the headwinds that we're seeing in technology, I wouldn't say it's a it's a broad-based vertical-specific issue. It's probably more a client-specific, I would say, condition or or situation that is playing out where one of the stakeholders that we work with in this, large account is re-evaluating the way they engage with contractors or or vendors.

They this particular person is someone who typically prefers to work with FTEs as opposed to contractors, and therefore, there is some relook and at at the way they're they're engaging with not just with us, with other vendors as well. I think this sort of pause and and wait condition will will will go on till about 31st of March, post which we are expecting that there will be enhanced clarity in terms of the way forward for this year, right?

What this meant is that there is some level of either consolidation and or budget cuts that have been enforced across the entire organization, and we we will see some level of impact from from from this to play out in especially in in Q4 of of of the current year for the technology vertical. On the positive side, while while there is dependency or there's a fairly large revenue dependency from from this particular stakeholder, there are multiple other threads that we have opened up in this large account.

These are in relation to people analytics. These are in relation to, some of even supply chain practice that that we're trying to get into, the devices practice.

There are multiple other threads that are going on right now, which should partially offset the drop in revenue that we anticipate from from from from this particular consolidation exercise. We expect the net impact of of of this to be in the order of, say, maybe, on an annualized basis between $5 to $6 million of of of revenue on an annualized basis.

As we plan for the next year, like I said, we anticipate that this shortfall, as we begin this year, will be made up by wins that we will get from other stakeholders. I hope that answers your question, Pritesh.

Understood. This is really helpful.

On the tech side, on the top two account, just wanted to, earlier also you indicated that we had some productivity pass-throughs or productivity benefits that we called out last quarter. That is there still on a, I would say, still impacting that top line, or you believe as we enter FY27, that thing will go away and incrementally we would start fetching volume from there?

In terms of productivity benefits... Sort of, yeah.

Let me take that question. The productivity benefits is not necessarily in terms of the revenue impact because of team size reductions at this time, because in general, even with, especially with tech accounts, we have been already proactive in terms of proposing the right kind of team sizes, right, based on what we already see as efficiencies that can come through.

It is still being the contracting and engagement is still being done in an effort-based model. The reduction or the revenue impact in this large account is mainly because of their changing priorities in relation to freeing up capital for investments that they are making, right, in other areas like data centers, for example, right, or LLM models, and so on.

In general, in the tech space, there is a bit of softness on lower-priority analytics initiatives, and they will pick only the most impactful ones, and every organization obviously has a spectrum of initiatives where they're trying to get as much benefit out of even nuanced decision-making as possible. That is what got reset a bit because of all the money flowing right into capital expenditure on the LLM and the AI infrastructure front.

I'm expecting some amount of normalization will happen, right, over the next few quarters. We're also pivoting on how even those investments that they're making can benefit their organization.

While they're building a lot of this for their own clients, it's also a question of how do they use it internally, right? I talked about this Velocity AI initiative that we are running, right, with this particular account, that is mainly aimed at identifying use cases where their investments and what they have built in terms of modern capabilities can be turned to their own business, right, running their business.

I'm expecting therefore some of that traction to come back as they make the pivot.

Understood. Given all these puts and takes, do you believe FY27 could be a year where we can replicate the similar growth what we are anticipating in FY26?

That's the intent. We did a ground-up exercise just preceding this board meeting, and we have received a set of numbers based on where the current set of discussions are leading to.

Now, we will be refining these over the next month and a half, right, before we wrap up the fiscal so that we are having more confidence, right, in terms of what we're able to project for the next year. Just the trajectory that is called for to get to that $200 million number will require a close to a 30% kind of a growth, right?

That's what we'll be targeting, but I'll be able to give you a better update on what the specific numbers would be, right, that we'll be able to provide as guidance when we get to the next quarter.

Understood. The last one on the severance pay of 70 bps that we incurred this quarter, so that will be a tailwind in fourth quarter, is that a right assumption?

That is correct. Yeah.

No, definitely, yeah, the severance of about $200k that was paid out will obviously not be recurring in nature, right? It will be a tailwind for the following quarter.

Definitely. Thank you so much, and all the best.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity, and congratulations on good set of numbers. My first question is on renewals.

Can you talk about how renewals panned out this quarter? Did we see the overall TCV intact, or did we see any pricing pressure and reduction in TCV in the renewal component?

In terms of renewals for this quarter, like I said, except for this one specific account, Aditi, where this is more a stakeholder-specific situation that we are currently handling, right, we have not seen any pressure in terms of either volumes for the next year going down, or requests for price reductions, right? In fact, in our number two account, which is also a tech account, we in fact were able to get a price increase, right?

Likewise with one of our largest industrials accounts, an account which is a $3 million-plus account, we were again able to secure a 5% price increase, right? Overall, I would say renewals for the next year continue to look fairly healthy with no big anticipated budget cuts as well as price reductions, except this one particular large account where, like I already mentioned, the impact could be anywhere between $5 to $6 million in terms of volume reduction.

This is just more of a, I would say, a client-specific issue where they're deciding to do either more work in-house or just eliminate some of these positions, right, because they're trying to restructure and bring things under a more central umbrella. Definitely not a case of us losing work to competition in this particular case.

It's just more a case of the company itself consolidating the work that they're doing. Apart from that, most of the renewals are already in the bag.

In fact, even with a large financial services account, while there was a big ramp-up that we saw through the course of this year, we have a fairly good degree of confidence in terms of our ability to scale this account. This year, we should end the year with about a $7 million revenue from this, 7 to 7.5 million.

We already have visibility for, I would say, clocking close to about $10 million-plus from this particular account for the next year, right? This is including renewals and extensions that are likely to happen through the course of the year.

Of course, these are also based off discussions and planning sessions that we're continuing to have with clients, right? All in all, I would say still fairly strong renewals, except for this one situation with a large account.

Got it. On margins, if we look at the nine-month FY26 EBITDA margins, excluding the one-time labor code impact and restructuring the transaction charges, it is around 23.6%.

You mentioned that for full year, you're expecting 24%. That means in Q4, the margins would be upwards of 24%.

Is my understanding correct? What would be the tailwinds, if that is correct?

That is correct. On a full-year basis, we expect the margins to be closer to 24%, Aditi.

There will be two specific tailwinds, right? One, of course, we expect that while we have been extremely conservative in our when we did the exercise, even though we have appointed a consultant to do a full-blown exercise on restructuring of salary components to comply with the labor code, and that exercise is currently underway, we have been conservative in terms of provisioning for the full impact on gratuity and post-retirement benefits when we publish the results for Q3, and that is the reason why there was an impact of almost 1.6% on the EBITDA.

Apart from this, the severance pay that I already did mention about, that would be a cost that we will not incur in the subsequent sort of quarter. Incrementally, you will also note that while historically Q4 is the period in which we incur substantial costs in relation to visa sponsorship, this year, given the changes in the visa regime and also the changes in the way companies are actually hiring people with work permits, we anticipate that the outlay towards visa costs also will be substantially lower compared to earlier years, right, or in fact, even the earlier quarter.

All of this would mean that the EBITDA for the next quarter could be closer to about 25%, right, between 24.5% to 25% just for the quarter, which will mean that on a full-year basis, our EBITDA will be closer to 24%.

Got it. On the restructuring part, I think the majority of the restructuring is in sales and marketing, because Q-o-Q drop in sales and marketing is higher.

You have also added talent in some of the high-growth areas. Can you talk a bit more about your thought process in sales and marketing investments and rationalization at the same time?

Sales and marketing, in particular, it is always a continuous process of evaluation and figuring out whether the people that we bring in, right, that we have are able to stay in touch and in pace with, right, what the market is expecting. This, given the dynamic nature of the space, the ability to solution along with the clients in a very consultative kind of a model is an important criteria.

There will always be a natural process of evaluating and then adjusting for that. The ramp-up that we have been doing over the last several quarters has been aligned with the diamond account strategy, right, that I talked about earlier, where we said that we need more people for the mining and farming, client partners, account managers, part of the entity organizations, as opposed to just pure hunters.

This is something that we will continue to evaluate. Two other areas which we are experimenting with, one is whether there is a regional construct, right, which is more geographic rather than an industry-specific kind of a model.

Second is the ramp-up that we are doing in relation to Databricks, as well as the AI Center of Excellence. We have been bringing in people at the front end, both domain experts as well as go-to-market people, who will support the execution of the strategy related to Databricks and AI CoE.

This again will be an area of focus as we move forward. There will be a slow uptick in the numbers as we see growth in revenue, but the churn and the reorganization is just the routine aspect of making sure that the team is effective.

Hi, is my voice audible?

Please go ahead.

Yeah. Just one question and two bookkeeping questions.

First one was basically in another couple of years from now, how do you envisage your vertical mix to be? Will it be more if there is some sort of flavor that you can provide?

On the bookkeeping questions, basically, what do you think would be your steady-state margins and steady-state tax rates? I think those were the two questions I had.

All the others have been answered as such.

Yeah. Let me answer the vertical mix question, and I'll pass it to Raj.

We have already alluded to the growth that we are witnessing in financial services, right, and even consumer goods, I'm expecting that there will be accelerated growth there, given the investments also, the renewed energy, right, with which we are approaching that space. Industrials, I am still a little unsure, because the general macroeconomic challenges have impacted that space the most.

Having said that, there are conversations in just a much, much longer sales cycle. In technology, we talked about the headwinds related to priorities that the tech companies have, at least the big ones have, right, in relation to the AI infrastructure investments that they're making.

We'll have to see how that pans out. Taking all of this into account, I would say that over the next couple of years, financial services and consumer goods will become larger shares of the revenue, right, that we'll be delivering, and tech will become slightly smaller because of some of the issues.

Industrials there is an opportunity to grow there if things become a little less uncertain, but that is something that I would have to wait before I comment on. Yeah.

Sushobhan, on the margins question, right, obviously, this year, like I said, right, and as is the case with even the last couple of years, what you would have noted is typically we begin the year with margins which are quite muted, primarily on account of one, we start the year with higher visa costs, plus all the impact of the wage hikes typically tend to dent the margin profile of the business at the beginning of the year. As we go along during the year, revenue growth that sort of pans out in Q2 and Q3 starts improving the overall margin profile.

On a full-year basis, we typically tend to track closer to about 24% to 20—so this year we had guided that 23% to 24% is the range in which we would like to operate, right? While in the past that range is probably 24% to 25%.

Now, while we will sort of deliver to that promise this year, our endeavor, of course, is, and which is what we don't want to lose sight of, is to get to that $200 million revenue, right, by 2000 FY28. Therefore, that will mean that we may need to make some investments early on in this year, right, and there are a few critical, I would say, senior roles that we will want to definitely look at as we look to build out the sort of the team muscle to deliver that 200 million.

This, coupled with also investments that will be needed on the AI CoE and R&D side, will also be very necessary for us to be relevant, as well as in some sense build solutions that are forward-looking, right? Those investments will also be necessary.

Third, of course, while we've been a little slow on the M&A front over the last 12 to 18 months, we wanted the Decision Point integration to be fully successful as well as us had to have some reasonable level of confidence on the valuation numbers, right, because you would note that the industry itself is going through quite a bit of a change and shift with revenue models being challenged, effort-based pricing being sort of, again, revisited, things like that. We've been very cautious in terms of spending dollars to acquire companies, but we anticipate that some of that will change now.

We will look at a multi-pronged approach of investing in inorganic ways. For one of it could be, say, investments in companies that are building very, very interesting agentic AI-based technology.

Two, we could also partner with some of these companies as opposed to investing, where we jointly go to market along with them. Third would, of course, be acquiring companies under the traditional M&A playbook, right?

Here we could also potentially look at larger ticket-sized deals, right? While I'm giving you a fairly long-winded answer to the question on margins, the reality today is that we need to make investments for us to get to that 200 million mark.

Right now, while we will end the year with about 120 million, there's an 80 million gap that we need to cover. Some of that will come through M&A, but then vast majority of it needs to come through organic growth, for which we'll need investments both on the innovation side as well as go-to-market side.

We'll be in a much better position to guide you on the full-year margins, right? We don't want to give out quarterly guidances on margins, because a lot of times investments are front-loaded and therefore they could have temporary impacts on quarterly margins.

On a full-year basis, what we will definitely aim to do is not substantially disrupt our margin profile, but you could potentially see some front-ending of these investments, which could mean a 1% to 2% drop in the EBITDA margins in the coming year, but those are necessary for us to get to that $200 million mark, right? The second question around ETR, again, this is more of a bookkeeping question, on a long-term, sustained basis over a three- to five-year period, I would guide you guys to model an ETR of between 26% to 27%, because those are, I would say, the maximum tax rates across all the jurisdictions that we currently operate in.

So 26% to 27% is safer to assume. These benefits, so-called benefits that we sometimes get from exercise of ESOP options also will continue to sort of keep coming down.

We do not anticipate any further benefit on tax from exercise of options. That number will keep sort of coming down, it will not have a meaningful impact on the overall ETR for the group.

You can safely assume that 26% to 27% will be the annualized ETR for the group.

Thank you so much for the elaborate answer. Just one last question.

This ESOP expenses, they do hit your EBITDA also, right?

They do. Yeah.

The ESOP... No, no.

The... Obviously, the ESOP expense hits our ETR, but there's a slight difference in the way ESOP is treated between India and the US.

In India, the differential between the fair market value of the share as on the date of the exercise and the exercise price cannot be claimed by the company as a allowable expense, okay, whereas the employee pays full taxes on this as part of personal taxation. The company cannot claim this as a payroll cost while filing for taxes.

In the US, it is slightly different, because for our US-based employees, whatever is the differential between the exercise price and the fair market value as on the date of the exercise can be claimed as an allowable expenses while filing taxes, right? That's the slight disconnect.

Every time we have an exercise, to the extent there are employees in the US who exercise shares, we're able to claim that as a payroll cost, and that reduces our overall ETR. While for the purpose of books, we will not be showing this as payroll cost, but only in tax, when we file for taxes, we'll be claiming this as an allowable expense.

There is a differential treatment over there, and that is what you see resulting in a lower ETR, especially in periods where the ESOP exercise window is open.

All right. We have time for a couple more questions.

We'll wrap up by 7:15 our time, which is like 8:45 India.

Yeah.

Hello, am I audible? Yes, yes.

Yes, thanks for the opportunity. My first question was, most pure-play analytics firms today, they appear largely interchangeable to the enterprise buyers with similar talent pools, partner certifications, and overlapping use cases.

From a client's perspective, what are the two or three tangible reasons to choose LatentView over the other pure-play firms? How does this differentiation further show up in the win rates, deal sizes, or wallet share expansion rather than just capability narratives?

I'll call out two things, actually. We have talked about this extensively in the past as well, right?

One is general, our relationship tends to be a lot more on the business side, right, rather than the CIO, CTO organization, because analytics use cases were typically driven by that. Therefore, there's a very, very strong connect with the business, like the business problem understanding, the context, and so on, which...

Yeah. It's really the connect and the domain understanding, because we largely work with the business sponsors and the stakeholders more than the CIO, CTO organization.

While it's an advantage, in some instances, it can be a disadvantage as well, because larger data engineering and IT initiatives tend to be driven more by the CIO, CTO organization. This is something that we are also understanding and navigating, right, as we move forward.

This is a differentiator, just a very, very close connect and proximity to the business side of things, right? The second is our front-row seat in terms of working with the top tech companies, right, in the Bay Area, in the Silicon Valley, who are in some sense, right, leading the race in terms of inventing the next new when it comes to AI and GenAI and agentic and all that.

That gives us a certain degree of credibility, right, in terms of how we are able to talk about all of these technologies and tools and approaches, right, being brought to bear on the problems, right, that they're trying to address. I would really call out these two.

Of course, there will be implications in terms of the profile of people, right, the training that we provide, how connected and close we are to the leading edge of everything that is happening, right, and all that. Then if you're able to marry that all with the nimbleness and the agility, right, that a smaller organization bring, and that is what kind of differentiates us.

As I answered an earlier question, right, even in today's call, this is not like rocket science or it's not like other organizations cannot replicate it, but historically, it has always been a challenge for larger organizations given the multiple things that they focus on or their own internal mechanisms and processes, and so on. Obviously, as long as we are able to bring these kind of differentiators to the table, we continue to stay relevant, right, and clients will reach out to us.

Yeah. Hi.

Congratulations on great set of numbers. My question is on the data engineering side.

We've displayed a lot of excitement for this stream of work. Wanted to understand the kind of growth that we've seen in this side of the practice, especially as we move towards doing more end-to-end deals.

Do we have higher share of work coming on the data engineering side leading up to predictive and the consulting side of the work?

Yeah. It's been on the ramp-up over the last several quarters.

It's also accelerated by the Databricks partnership. I mentioned how just as data engineering work, right, of getting the platform ready and, in some sense, creating that kind of an integrated picture across their multiple siloed ecosystems, right, that will be very important prerequisite for getting any kind of analytics done, right, leave alone generative and agentic.

Generative and agentic will mean that you need to pay attention to this even more. Right, I talked about how governance, evals, and observability will become important, right, in the scheme of things.

This will mean that there will be even more requirements around metadata, governance-related metadata that needs to be captured and utilized on any analytics, right, that gets done. It's not just about having some simple guidance and rules, but at the individual data element level, you might have metadata requirements related to who can access it, how long can they access it, for what purpose can they access it, when does it need to be deleted, whether it can be accessed in an aggregated form or masked form, right, or at a granular form.

Right, all of these things will dramatically increase the quantum of data and metadata that needs to be managed along with the complex set of rules and requirements surrounding that, which naturally means that data engineering will be a fairly important aspect, right, of the work that remains to be done. Even the entire business process automation that I alluded to earlier, that can be done only if there is a great degree of confidence and faith in the data that supports, right, the execution of the process.

Taking all of this into account, I would say that data engineering will continue to be a fairly significant component and piece of the work. When we get to that 200 million mark that we have been talking about, definitely 25% of the work, right, that we're doing should be in the data engineering space.

All right. We'll have to wrap up here

time constraints, but thank you all for joining today. I will hand the floor back to the moderator.