Thanks, Romil. Good day, everyone, and welcome to LTM's Q1 FY27 earnings conference call.

Today on the call we have with us Mr. Venu Lambu, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, and Mr.

Vipul Chandra, Chief Financial Officer and whole-time director. We will begin by providing a brief overview of company's Q1 FY27 performance, after which we will open the floor for Q&A.

During call, we could make forward-looking statements. These statements [consider the environment?]

, carry risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in today's call. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement made on this call.

I now turn the call over to Venu for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Vikas. Hello, everyone.

Firstly, thank you for joining us on a Saturday evening. Our profitable growth journey in the AI era is off to a good start, with our lead industry segments delivering strong quarter-over-quarter growth.

Our New Horizons program continues to deliver significant progress, contributing to the overall margin expansion. Our deal win momentum remains strong.

I will share more details on this later in the call. Before I turn into the quarterly numbers, let me briefly recap the strategy we set out at our Investor Day 2026.

We committed to becoming an AI-centric organization, reorganizing around AI, building a comprehensive AI ecosystem, and steadily shifting our revenue mix towards AI-led work. This quarter, we delivered many proof points with measurable business outcomes in line with our strategy.

We now operate through three lines of business: IRON, iTransform, and Business AI. IRON operates and secures our clients' technology estates with an AI-infused approach.

iTransform delivers large-scale transformation, modernization, and differentiated experiences through AI-led software engineering, data, interactive, and enterprise platforms. Business AI reimagines the core business process and clients' business model through domain, data, agentic, and SLM capabilities.

Foundational to our lines of business is Blueworx, our AI ecosystem. It brings together our AI-led offerings and deployment capabilities with future-ready talent, domain-specific SLMs, and growing library of pre-built agents supported by new AI-native business models and expanded GTM partnerships.

Through this structure, we deliver four distinct types of AI work: Enterprise AI, which embeds intelligence into enterprise technology stack; Business AI, which reimagines core business processes and business models; Industrial AI, which infuses AI into our clients' manufacturing process and supply chains through connected products and solutions; and Creative AI, which transform our clients' creative content, design, and experiences. Three lines of business, four types of AI work, one ecosystem: this is how we outcreate with AI.

I'm happy to share that our AI revenue across Creative, Industrial, and Business AI together contributed approximately $150 million on a quarterly run rate basis. Let me now share the financial performance for Q1 FY27.

We reported revenues of $1.22 billion, delivering a 0.3% growth on a sequential basis and 6.4% growth on a year-over-year basis in constant currency terms. We're pleased to report that our EBIT margins came in at 15.5%, a 40 basis points sequential improvement despite wage hikes.

This also translates into 120 basis points year-over-year improvement reflecting strong execution. Our order book continues to be stable at $1.7 billion, including two large deal wins.

Let me now turn to some of our notable deal wins this quarter. In IRON line of business, we were selected by a US-based insurance company to modernize infrastructure operations to an AI-led delivery model, enhancing resilience, stability, and operational efficiency.

We expanded our relationship with a global business travel management company to transform its IT operations, application services, and consolidate its infrastructure to an integrated IRON model. In iTransform LOB, we were selected as a strategic vendor by a US-based multinational organization as part of its effort to consolidate its IT services landscape through our IRON, iTransform, and Business AI LOB models.

We will help them to reduce complexity, optimize costs, and accelerate transformation. This is the same large deal we referenced during our Investor Day last month.

We were chosen as a transformation partner for a leading global automotive manufacturer to consolidate and modernize its technology landscape through an AI-led model, improving operational efficiency and simplifying IT operations. We were selected as a strategic data transformation partner by a major global industrial manufacturer of climate and energy solution to consolidate its federated data ecosystem into unified enterprise data platform, enabling data monetization and building a single source of truth.

We were selected by a US-based financial payments company to advance its technology transformation agenda through an AI Insight platform, cloud migration, and modernization initiatives. In Business AI, we were selected by a European consumer company to reimagine its existing sales excellence process and deploy an AI-powered data and decision intelligence platform to improve pricing, promotions, and sales effectiveness.

We were selected by a global industrial conglomerate to deploy an AI-driven platform that automates end-to-end proposal management, improving speed, quality, and consistency of client responses. Our Blueworx Voicing SLM continues to gain momentum with our clients.

We completed 17 unique implementations in the past 12 months, including two key wins this quarter. The first one, a leading US leisure travel company selected Blueworx Voicing to automate member verification and resolve routine inquiries autonomously.

The second one, a global financial administration company adopted Blueworx Voicing to migrate its customer service operation to an agentic AI-driven voice and intent automation solution. These engagements follow the outcome-based commercial construct.

Let me now share updates on our industry segment. Starting Q1 FY27, we have consolidated our reporting under four industry segments, namely: Financial Services, Consumer, Technology and Services, and Production.

All numbers referenced next represent growth in constant currency terms. As I had indicated about Financial Services returning to sequential growth, I am pleased to share that the segment delivered a strong 3.2% sequential expansion.

On a year-over-year basis, the segment declined by 2.5%. Tech and Services segment also reported a strong growth of 3.4% sequentially and 10% on a year-over-year basis.

Production segment reported a decline of 5.7%, mainly on account of falloff in seasonal pass-through. Over a year-over-year basis, it delivered a very strong growth of 5.3%.

Consumer segment declined by 0.7% sequentially and grew significantly by 18.2% on a year-over-year basis. The quarterly decline was due to the delayed ramp-ups and delayed projects in India and Middle East.

With our large industry segments reporting strong sequential growth, it sets a strong foundation for the year ahead. We are also encouraged to see the growth momentum broadening across client categories, with our top 5 and top 10 customers recording sequential growth of 4.5% and 4.3%, respectively.

I am pleased to share that all our client categories expanded both sequentially and year-over-year. On a year-over-year basis, we added one client in the $50 million+ category, taking the total to 15, and 11 clients in $20 million+ category, bringing the total to 52.

We continue to see consistent external validation of our capabilities by industry analysts and partners. This quarter, we received several recognitions.

I will call out few of them. We received the Golden Peacock Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence 2026, recognizing our leadership in enterprise-scale AI adoption and innovation through our Blueworx ecosystem.

We were recognized as a market leader in the HFS Horizons: Next-Gen IT Infrastructure Services 2026 report. We were recognized as a leader in the ISG Provider Lens: SAP Ecosystem 2026 report.

We received the Google Cloud Partner of the Year 2026 awards for Media & Entertainment and Infrastructure Modernization in North America. We won the 2026 Databricks Global COE Partner of the Year Award.

We won the Talent Acquisition Innovation Award at the Financial Express HR Awards 2026. Please refer to the fact sheet for the complete list of recognitions.

This quarter, we continue to strengthen our Blueworx ecosystem. I would like to share with you some of the key highlights.

We launched Blueworx IRON for integrated ops, Blueworx Databricks for data transformation, and Blueworx Right Logic for cybersecurity remediation. We launched Blueworx Currency, our new commercial construct that offers outcome-based pricing for AI services.

We expanded our Blueworx Studio footprint with a new facility in Bengaluru. We launched AI 1000, our strategic workforce transformation initiative with a goal of developing a pool of 1,000 forward-deployed engineers.

To accelerate our SLM development and deployment to clients across key verticals, we participated in a strategic investment round in Uniphore, the business AI company. Uniphore unlocks the agentic enterprise with a complete, composable AI platform spanning agents, models, knowledge, and data.

This investment will strengthen our previously announced partnership with Uniphore in delivering industry- and domain-specific SLMs. We signed partnership with OVHcloud in France to accelerate the deployment of sovereign AI cloud in Europe.

I would like to now share a few proof points on four types of AI work that we are delivering. In Business AI, for a global specialty chemicals leader, we built an AI-led growth insights engine that unifies how team asks, analyzes, and acts on insights across brand, pricing, and market share to form a centralized agentic intelligence layer.

For a US-based multinational organization, we built an end-to-end generative engine optimization strategy and grew impressions, clicks, AI mentions, and improved LLM-driven traffic by 33%. In Creative AI, for a leading real estate company, we generated 2 million+ views across 10 video assets by scaling marketing campaigns and creatives through AI-led content generation, cutting time to market by 75%, reducing asset production costs by 50%.

For a global beauty brand, we produced organizational change management content through an AI-led content generation approach, accelerating consistent enterprise communication to 4,000+ researchers and scientists in their research and innovation division. In Enterprise AI, for a global energy major, we consolidated a fragmented monitoring landscape into a single agentic operation intelligence platform, cutting operations cost by up to 40%, reducing alert noise by 85%, and auto-remediating over a third of recurring incidents.

For a global hospitality leader, we modernized a mission-critical revenue platform by pricing rooms across 10,000+ hotels. Our agent-led human-in-loop model eliminated 400+ vulnerabilities per application with zero downtime.

In Industrial AI, for a global power management leader, we created a digital twin and closed-loop robotic connection through our INX physical AI platform. This delivered 97.4% defect detection accuracy and 67% less downtime with clients realizing ROI in the first iteration.

For a global automotive leader, we deployed an ML-driven predictive solution on their laser blanking line that detects process instability before it causes downtime, enabling 70% accurate early alerts with actionable operator recommendations. With this, I would now like to hand it over to Vipul for an update on financials.

Thank you, Venu. Hello, everyone, and thank you once again for joining us on a weekend.

We hope you have reviewed our integrated annual report for FY26, which provides detailed disclosures on both financial and non-financial metrics and highlights our ongoing commitment to ESG principles. Let me now walk you through the financial highlights for the first quarter of FY27, starting with our revenue performance.

Our Q1 revenue stood at USD 1,224 million, reflecting a growth of 0.3% quarter-on-quarter and 6.4% year-on-year in constant currency. The corresponding dollar growth was 0.1% quarter-on-quarter and 6.1% year-on-year.

Revenue in INR stood at ₹11,608 crores, up 2.8% quarter-on-quarter and 18% year-on-year. Our EBIT margin expanded by 40 basis points sequentially to 15.5%, primarily driven by operational efficiencies from the New Horizons program in addition to forex benefits.

The EBIT margin also shows an expansion of 120 basis points year-on-year from 14.3% in Q1 FY26. This expansion has been possible due to the concerted focus on margin improvement initiatives under the Fit for Future program last year and continued under the New Horizons program this year.

Profit after tax for the quarter stood at ₹1,469 crores as compared to ₹1,341 crores in the previous quarter, an increase of 9.5% quarter-on-quarter and 17.1% year-on-year. The PAT margin came in at 12.7%, up from 11.9% last quarter.

The movement from EBIT to PAT includes the impact of higher investment income, losses on cash flow hedges, and a one-time gain on the recognition of the value of our investment in Voicing.ai. The effective tax rate for the quarter was 25.8% compared with 26.3% in Q4.

Basic EPS was ₹49.5 for the quarter as compared to ₹45.4 in Q4 FY26. Our total DSO for Q1 stood at 85 days versus 84 days last quarter.

The OCF to PAT ratio stood at 79%, down from 96% in Q4, while FCF to PAT was 63% versus 75% in Q4. Normalized for the one-time gain, these ratios would have been 88% and 70%, respectively.

Cash and investment balances stood at around USD 1.5 billion, or ₹15,021 crores, post the payout of the final dividend for FY26, compared to ₹15,445 crores at the end of Q4 FY26. Return on capital employed for the quarter was 29.8% versus 29.2% last quarter.

As of June 30th, 2026, our cash flow hedges stood at USD 4.71 billion, and hedges on the balance sheet were USD 318 million. Utilization excluding trainees stood at 86.4% for the quarter compared to 85.7% in Q4.

The head count at the end of Q1 was 87,886. Fresher additions stood at 1,308.

For the quarter, our TTM attrition remained stable at 13.3%. As an update on our previously announced intention to acquire Randstad technology and consulting services business in Europe and Australia, we have submitted the required applications to regulators across various countries for approvals, and the process remains on track with our planned schedule.

I'm pleased to share that CRISIL reaffirmed LTM's long-term and short-term credit ratings at AAA Stable and A1+, respectively. While the company received a CRISIL ESG score of 77 and a core ESG score of 83 in FY26, placing it in the leadership category, CRISIL's highest ESG recognition tier.

I'm also happy to share that at the Businessworld CFO World Awards 2026, LTM has received two prestigious honors: Excellence in Financial Reporting and Excellence in Crisis Management. These recognitions reflect the strength of our governance framework and our focus on risk management.

I now hand it back to Venu for the business outlook.

Thank you, Vipul. Let me now turn to our outlook for the year ahead.

Our order book remains strong and broad-based. The pipeline continues to build across our segments, and we are converting that into sustained deal momentum.

Our AI pivot is now delivering tangible proof points for our clients. Our three lines of business, four types of AI work, and one Blueworx ecosystem are helping us deliver AI impact to our customers, and this is reflected in the nature and the size of deals we are winning.

The productivity-linked pricing conversation we have had with some of our large clients are now behind us. That transition is complete, and we see this as a source of strength going forward rather than a headwind, as it has strengthened our strategic positioning with this accounts.

Taken together, the order book, the AI proof points, and the completion of this client transition gives us confidence that our growth will accelerate through Q2 and into the second half, alongside further expansion on the margins. Thank you.

The floor is now open for Q&A.

Hi. Am I audible?

Yes, Sulabh.

Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the growth seen in the top client buckets. My first question is on the outlook, just trying to better understand.

In the first quarter, on a QoQ basis, there was a underlying business momentum that you saw if you adjust for the seasonal pass-through element and the macro-related headwind that was there in the Middle East. Is it fair to assume that that sort of a business momentum should reflect from 2Q onwards, specially with the deal wins sustaining, or are there any additional moving parts which can change the trajectory, particularly for 2Q?

Sulabh, firstly thanks for the question. Look, I think the positive news is that some of our biggest segments are in the growth trajectory, and I expect that to continue as we go into the next quarter.

Barring the seasonal movement, the aspect that I called out on the Middle East and the India ramp-up, unless there is no escalation which is beyond our control on the geopolitical situation, the rest of the market segments, which has got a great start to the year, should continue even for Q2. I don't see any issue with any of our global industry segments.

Understood. Then secondly, with respect to the sales head count, there has been some moderation over the last one year of about 8% to 9%.

Just wanted to understand, is this more on the support side due to efficiencies, or have there been some actions in a particular geography that has led to that?

It is related to the enabling function, the support function. If you recall our strategy, we did articulate that we want to grow faster and also embrace AI within our own internal usage, and we're seeing the benefits of it, how do we run our internal IT, how do we run our finance, HR, support functions, operations functions, and so on.

Those productivity benefits are visible when you see those changes.

Understood, sir. Thank you for taking my question.

I will get back into the queue.

Thank you, Sulabh.

Thanks for the opportunity. Just one question.

What is the nature of demand that is being served by subcontractors instead of our own employees because that's one element that's gone up by 130 bps QoQ and almost 320 bps YoY?

Vipul, I will take this one and you please add further to it.

Sure.

Right. Ashwin, it is essentially related to a vendor consolidation exercise that's happening with some of our customers, especially the customers where we have a deep relationship across a couple of verticals, where the clients are asking us to transition the tail vendor to be part of a leading vendor in the vendor consolidation exercise.

As a part of that, the approach is usually you transition it from the tail vendors, and then you convert that into our end-state model over a period of time. I see this as spike due to those kind of engagements, but not an indicative of any specific trend.

Over a period of time, you should see a decrease in that, and when it moves into our end-state model.

A follow-up to what Sulabh asked. On the SG&A side, what you seem to have indicated that there seem to have been SG&A efficiencies that have come in.

Earlier our expectation was that SG&A would go more closer to the 11%, 11.5% of sales level. Do you see that happening now, or given the efficiencies on the other side, the SG&A should be kind of stable at these levels?

We would expect it to remain stable at these levels. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're not touching the sales.

In fact, we are investing a lot on sales, especially on enablement side, one of the things that we've initiated is the training of our sales organization on the new AI way of selling, as an example, there's a new competencies that we're enabling them so the productivity of our sales people are actually moving in a positive direction. I'm really encouraged with those responses, the way we are pivoting there, and all the efficiency that you see is to build an AI-driven organization for our internal operations.

That will remain steady for times to come. I don't expect any variation on SG&A.

Sure. Thanks, Venu, and all the best.

Yeah. Vipul, you want to add something on to this, please?

I'll just add one thing, Venu, that the SG&A will not or is not likely to go up to the 11%, 11.5% range. Quarter-on-quarter, some amount of variation from the current levels can happen because we are continuing to invest in our sales build-up.

To that extent, there could be some minor movements up and down from time to time. Overall, the 11% to 11.5% range, I think we have kind of been able to achieve efficiencies which have caused this change to be more, I would say, sustainable.

Okay. Thanks, Vipul.

Thank you for the opportunity. You saw good growth in BFSI, high-tech, North America, and even in top five customers.

Client mining data was also good in higher client tiers. However, there was a drag in Consumer.

Do you expect the drag to continue in further quarters, or is it expected to worsen? Some qualitative commentary on that vertical would be helpful.

Look, I think, if you look at it, firstly you look at Consumer, it has grown 18.2% year-on-year basis. That's huge, right?

The quarterly decline is pretty much related to some of the large deal that, as you're aware, we are dealing with in India with the tax department. During the war situation, the shipments of certain hardware delivery, and also the challenges around the memory chips and everything to build an AI-centric model that got delayed, and once, I'm assuming now, the shipments will get accelerated, I don't expect that trend to continue, and the decline is very marginal for the kind of growth we have year-on-year, I'm positive and optimistic about Consumer's growth momentum.

Thank you. The next question is on growth from North America.

Do you feel that the growth was broad-based during the quarter and you are comfortable that things have bottomed out and growth momentum would be sustained going forward?

Absolutely. Look, our Tech and Services, which is hugely North America-centric, grew 3.4% sequentially, and double-digit on a year-on-year basis, I'm confident of that continuing that momentum.

The Financial Services also is back to a sequential growth, and it's showing a great demand traction in the Financial Services. I'm optimistic about the continued momentum in North America, absolutely.

Okay. Last question is on the utilization front.

Do you believe that you are already at an optimal level and you would need to step up hiring going forward? Also, what are your hiring plans for freshers this year versus last year?

Vipul, you want to take this, please?

Sure. I think in terms of the utilization, we have previously articulated that we are targeting to stay somewhere in the region of 86% to 87%.

We are currently in the middle of that range. Again, quarter-on-quarter, you may see some variations up and down, but it's a comfortable range for us to be in.

Coming to the freshers hiring, I think we have been continuing with our fresher hiring and deployment. In this quarter itself, about 1,308 freshers have been added.

We'll continue to add freshers as we go along. I think from our strategy point of view, it is important to continue to build the AI-ready talent.

To that extent, this initiative will continue. Though, as we had called out in our strategy, that the shape of the pyramid, etc., over a period of time will change from the traditional pyramid to a more diamond-shaped structure.

I hope that answers the question that you're asking.

Yeah. Thank you for taking my questions.

Can we move to the next one, moderator?

Thanks for the opportunity. Just wanted to understand what percentage of revenue comes from Middle East, and when you have given an outlook about growth to accelerate in the coming quarter, are we expecting even the geopolitical issue are largely behind or may have some impact in the coming quarter as well?

Look, firstly the Middle East numbers is less than 3% for us. That's on the first part of the question.

The second part of the thing is that, as I mentioned in the outlook commentary, we are reasonably confident about growing in the subsequent quarter and continuing that momentum for the second half of the year. Geopolitical is what it is, right?

I can't say that it is end of the situation of geopolitical thing. You never know what arises next week and so on.

Keeping that aside, the fact that some of our big businesses are growing, our North America has got a great traction built up, and the productivity topic is behind us, the transition is complete in our top clients, our top 10 clients have got a great momentum not just for this quarter, in terms of the pipeline that they have built up for the next quarter. We will deal with anything that comes about in the quarter with regard to the geopolitical, which none of us can predict what it is.

What is most important is that our growth verticals, our growth businesses, our big-size businesses are in the right position.

Venu, when you say growth to improve in your outlook comments, are you talking organically and that too on a QoQ CC terms?

My commentary was on organic, because whatever is inorganic, as Vipul mentioned, that is expected to close sometime, probably at the beginning of Q3. My commentary was all organic.

Okay. Out of many large deals which we have won, the income tax deal has got delayed.

Which you expect may start ramping up 1Q to 2Q, right?

Yes. Whatever was the delay ramp-up, I'm expecting it to start ramping up in Q2.

The larger issue about hardware shipment timelines and the memory prices is something that still need to see how it navigates over the next one or two months. Whatever was got delayed from a Q1 perspective, I expect that to appear in Q2.

Okay. Thanks, and all the best.

Thank you.

Thanks for the opportunity. Couple of questions.

First, just want to continue on this income tax-related deal. How to understand ramping up that part?

Do you expect it to be very gradual or it would be very sharp ramp-up as and when, let's say, you source the hardware and some of the issues relate to supply chain get addressed? Second question is about fresher addition plan.

We added around 1,300-odd employees freshers in quarter one. How to understand for full-year plan perspective?

Third question is data-related. On non-controlling interest, we reported this quarter gain.

Can you help us understand what played out there? Thank you.

Yeah. Why don't we start from the third one.

Vipul, do you want to pick that up, while I pick up the first two ones?

On the non-controlling interest gain, I think we did speak about it very briefly when I was giving the financials. There is a valuation gain

We lost Vipul?

Okay. There is an increase in the non-controlling interest participation because of the Saudi JV that has been ramping up in its business, and also there was a valuation gain that we experienced in our investment in Voicing.ai, which also has been done through one of our subsidiaries in US, and as a result of which, the contribution from the subsidiaries has gone up in this quarter.

All right. Thank you, Vipul.

Let me take the question with regard to the ramp-up. Look, as I mentioned, the Q2 will be higher than Q1 when it comes to that particular project in India that you referred.

Now in terms of the speed of ramp-up, I don't know how you define gradual, fast, and so on. There is a project timelines which we have to deliver.

That's in the common interest of us and the client, and we're working towards delivering to that schedule. There are some element of shipment visibility we have of the hardware that is needed to make our software services work on that.

We expect that delivery to happen in the beginning of Q2, so that'll make us realize a lot of milestones that we have a commitment towards our customer. That's how I see it.

The whole idea is that if we can come back to our original project schedule between Q2 and Q3, which is of a common interest for both us and the client, then we are back on the project.

The last part, if you can address fresher,

and in this

any risk, because of the, let's say, pricing fluctuation, any risk we carry in this deal from margin perspective? Oh

yeah, sorry. First I'll address the freshers, then I will pick up the pricing-related thing on that.

We added 1,100+ freshers this quarter, and I expect the same numbers to continue. In fact, we would love to champion a lot of freshers program.

That's one of the things that we are really encouraged by the results. Last year we had more than 6,000+ freshers that came in, and when we launched our exponential engineering capabilities and AI-native skills, we were really encouraged with that cohort of talent that came into our organization and that brought in an AI-native skill sets which we can harness and give them a lot more opportunities.

We're going to look for every opportunity to accelerate our freshers hiring. At the minimum in the first quarter we did 1,100, right, and I'll explore all the opportunity to accelerate that faster.

At the outset for the year, you can assume that on an average, the same number of freshers that we will add on a quarterly basis. With regard to the pricing and margins, look, we have not factored anything on that aspects, because it's a known issue.

It's not something which is related to LTM delivery or LTM cost. It's an issue that impacts broadly across the sectors.

The client is conscious about it. It's not just us, there are a lot many other parties who are in that supply chain who are having those conversation.

We are reasonably confident it'll get addressed. At the moment, we are not calling out any impact with regard to the margin for that project.

Thank you.

Audible?

Can you Can you speak a bit louder, Girish?

Am I audible now?

Yes.

Okay. Venu, you mentioned that growth is going to pick up from 2Q onwards and strengthen through the rest of the year.

Will it mirror some of the growth you saw in the first two quarters of FY26? Or it'll be better or worse than that?

Girish, our endeavor is, and I think which I have publicly sort of stated that our endeavor is when we made the Q4 commentary, is to keep the growth momentum the same as we go into the FY27. The foundation was 6% growth that we delivered in FY26.

That's the base foundation. Our effort is to improve further on that.

That's the direction we are going. In the short term, I see good traction on all the segments that I called out, especially some of our large segments which we are very encouraged with.

That same momentum should continue Q2 and as we go along into the second half. If I had to put one-line summary, I will definitely say the expectation is that it will be better than FY26.

Okay. Venu, we've had some deployment companies being created in recent quarters by both AI labs and also the hyperscalers.

Some serious amount of investments have gone into them. Are you coming across these players in the market, or you also have relationships with them?

How is this kind of working out? They are potential competitors, they're also partners to you.

Is there kind of split of business? How do you go to market here?

Great question, and I would say sort of, Girish, would call that as a new ecosystem, right? We are accelerating the partnership with the new ecosystem.

Our investment in Voicing was the foundation to start building that ecosystem. Today we announced the investment in Uniphore, which is a business AI company, which essentially has a platform on which you can build SLMs.

We made a strategic investment in their fundraising round. That's the second part of the building block of the ecosystem.

The most important one and the largest ecosystem building blocks are the relationship we have with hyperscalers. Right, with all of the hyperscalers, we have a relationship which goes more than a decade.

We successfully partnered with them during their digital journey, during their cloud journey, and the same partnership is strengthening in the AI era as well with those hyperscalers. We are one of the largest users of Copilot, as an example, right, both for our internal use and the kind of work we do for customers.

The same thing that we work with Google Gemini as an example. We work with AWS on a similar set of products and services that they have.

We strengthen with all these hyperscalers on that partnership. The third element is the AI labs, right?

With AI labs, we have proactively initiated skilling our people. We set up a center of excellence which is related to all of the AI labs that are there in essentially the two of them.

I should be able to share more update in the coming week on that, we are in the final stages of announcing some strategic partnership with one of the AI labs soon.

Okay. My last question is regarding the split between IRON, iTransform, and Business AI revenues.

What was the number for 1Q FY27?

I'm not sure whether we shared in the fact sheet, Vipul. Not privy to that.

Is anything that you want to share, that's I think

we have only called out Business AI, Creative AI, and Industrial AI combined revenue in our opening remarks, which is a quarterly run rate of about $150 million+. Enterprise AI we have or IRON and iTransform, we have not specifically called out because it is basically becoming a bit all-pervasive, it's very difficult to kind of segregate that out from the normal revenue and IRON and iTransform revenue.

IRON and iTransform are more the way we are delivering our services to our customers. In a way, AI is everywhere in the delivery of services today in some shape or form.

That's the core services reimagined with AI, and the remaining three types of AI work which we started to quantify, and that's why I included it in my initial briefing, about $150 million run rate for this quarter.

Thank you.

Hi. Am I audible?

Great. Thanks.

Hi, Venu. Hi, Vipul.

Wanted to just check, first of all, the news around the FDE army of engineers being deployed by the hyperscalers. Microsoft announced around 6,000-plus FDEs and invested $2 to $3 billion in that entity.

How does that compete with your work around what you do for Microsoft, and, of course, the AI deployment? Do you see it as a competition or do you see it as a symbiotic relationship where your work will actually go up in terms of AI deployment?

No, great question, Sumeet. I'm glad that you asked that question.

Firstly, let's look at the opportunity that AI has in reimagining the business process, right? There are so many data points that has been quoted which runs into sort of a trillion-dollar new addressable market spend that's available for the industry to capture.

Now, we have moved from the phase of what I call as an AI creation phase to AI deployment phase, right? This year, the buzz was around AI creation.

What does AI do and what kind of models are there, what are the features of the model, and so on. I think now the conversations have moved from an appreciating the AI creation, which is absolutely has touched all kind of innovation levels.

Now, when the rubber hits the road, is the AI deployment conversation. Now as those conversations gets real, there is a strong demand for FDE engineers in the ecosystem.

If you count the number of FDE engineers that are available globally, trust me, they are in few thousands, right? They're not in hundreds of thousands or 200,000s of software engineers.

No, they're very, very small number at the moment in the market. The market needs a large population of FDE engineers to accelerate the adoption.

That's the first hypothesis. Now the second is the hyperscalers who are investing and building the FDE capability, we have been through a similar kind of journey in the cloud where there was a cloud professional services that most of the hyperscalers built it and they still have it, and we ended up working with them.

We ended up working with them on two fronts: either they became our customer and we delivered services through them to their customers, right, or we actually partnered with them in some of the large deals. I'm really excited about these announcements that has been done hyperscalers, and one of the hyperscalers, you know that we have a very strong relationship.

We are already in the thick of the journey in sort of helping them to deploy some of the new AI workloads, as I call it, especially on the new products. I see this more as an opportunity for us than as a threat, especially the context that at the moment, there are very, very handful number of FDE engineers available in the global ecosystem, and the world needs more of that.

No, right. That's very helpful, Venu.

Just another question, more of your long-term journey, that five-year target you have given to double your revenues. Of course, right now, we are struggling in maybe 6% to 8% kind of a range.

What kind of areas are you looking to actually boost your growth to double digits? Otherwise, I think that five-year target will just be aspirational.

No, no,

look, I agree with you. I think we shared the strategy, and that we intentionally have kept a very bold and ambitious goal because we believe there is opportunity that lies in the marketplace, and we're going through an initial phase of transition in the market towards that.

If I just do a quick recap of the strategy, right, there's so many elements, but in the context of this question, I will cover only two or three things. First is we said, let's also think about growing in the European region faster than North America.

North America is important for us, it's the biggest market for us, we'll continue to grow, but we have a lot of white space that's available in the European region, and the structured deal that we did will lead us to accelerate our European journey from Q3 and beyond. Second is that there are white spaces in the Asia-Pacific market.

Even if I look at the market segment point of view, even Asia-Pacific is going to be a big white space for us, and with this acquisition, we get inroads into some of the marquee clients in that region. There are spaces like that in the market which we believe there are still white spaces that exist, and we can make sure that we succeed in those white spaces, and the deal that we announced was in line with our strategy.

That is one part of it. The second part of it is that the newer capabilities we are building in.

Look, the three types of AI work that I spoke about is at $150 million quarterly run rate, but if I look at the opportunity that lies ahead of us is huge. If you can grow more on those three types of AI work, and on the first type of AI work, which is Enterprise AI, use that to get more large deals, but deliver faster growth on these three types of AI work, is again another growth impetus that will add to the aspiration.

The third one, I would believe, is that we're navigating all this with the limited appetite on the discretionary spend of the clients, right? It's not that the discretionary spend is at its glory, right?

We are still navigating whether it's a geopolitical situation or the economic scenario that keeps changing from quarter to quarter. I'm hoping that that will not remain the next five years.

While the change is the new normal, but there are a lot of backlog of projects where clients are waiting to get their situation better so that they can spend a lot more. There are three or four more such factors like that which will add us the growth impetus towards our five-year ambition, and the acquisition that we made was the first step towards that, apart from all the things that we do organically.

Got it. Maybe one last question, if I can squeeze in, the AI deflation which is hurting the industry, and of course, you guys have seen it in your top accounts, in high-tech and in financial services.

Can you just flag how much portfolio of your overall company has actually seen through that deflation, and how much is yet to see, or is it that only with the top customers you saw that, but in the rest of the client engagements, you are not going to see much of that AI deflation which will pull back your revenue growth ambition?

Look, I think that chapter, as I called out, is behind us, right, because I've been consistent in my earnings that the productivity headwinds in top accounts in top segments is what is material. What happens in the smaller accounts and smaller engagements is really not material because you anyway have so much work to do in those accounts, it doesn't impact the growth parameters as such.

While on a transaction level, it may give you an deflation impression, but there's so much of work to do, when you add up both, it becomes net positive. The concern for us was in the big accounts in the big segment, when I say concern, we were navigating that journey, that's behind us.

I don't see that playing out for us in this year. In fact, this year, our focus is a lot on sort of grabbing all the early opportunities that is visible in the AI era.

Right? The speed is still not at the acceleration phase on the AI adoption.

The AI adoption with clients are still lagging the narrative, but as and when they start accelerating that adoption, with all the capabilities, we'll be there for it. Vipul, if you want to add something more to this, please you to add.

No, I just wanted to add one point only, that in the last earnings call also, we had called out that we had started on this journey the earliest, and we are out of that phase now, as Venu has said. I think that should give the comfort to you in terms of how much of our revenue has gone through, because most of our top clients have actually gone through the phase.

Got it. That's very comforting.

All the best. I'll get back in the queue.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for the follow-up. Vipul, just wanted to understand how do you see margin in the next three quarters because we are expecting some acceleration in the growth on a QoQ even organically, and is there any investment banking, legal-related cost for the Randstad partnership and the M&A which we announced in this quarter?

Okay. In terms of the margin progression, I would say that our organic margin is going to continue to grow and expand because of the initiatives that we have been taking since last year, and we are continuing with them in this year as well.

I think growth pickup will only contribute further to that. We had also, I think, highlighted that the deal that we have announced is a 360-degree relationship that we are starting with Randstad, which has got three components, and one of the components was the IT business that we are going to do for them.

The second component was where we are outsourcing our talent sourcing to them, and the third component was the takeover of their technology and digital business in Europe and Australia. There is no investment banking cost also in that transaction because it was a direct transaction.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. This large deal which we announced from the Randstad on the IT services side will also come in the second half along with the M&A closure, or it can start from 2Q itself?

It is already started.

Okay.

We are starting the ramp-up on that already. So 2Q onwards, we should be ramping up on that.

This last question, with Randstad likely to come in the second half, you believe second half margin may have some headwinds and could be lower than the first half margin?

I think we had called out when we had announced the deal also that we don't expect any major impact on the margins. We should be able to deliver similar margins as last year or better.

I think we are on track for that, and as I said, our organic margin will continue to expand, and upon consolidation, we should be able to deal with the initial impact, if any, and once after that, the synergy should start kicking in in a quarter or two for the next year.

Okay. Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks.

I had two questions on margins. There was a improvement in BFSI margins, segment margins QoQ, any specific reasons?

The second question is regarding the margin walk. I don't know whether you discussed this, Vipul, but can you tell us what the margin walk was between 4Q and 1Q?

Okay. On the BFSI side, the margin improvement is primarily on account of the revenue growth coming back in and the utilizations, etc., improving.

We should continue to see that happening as we go forward as the BFS, or the financial services continues to start showing a growth further. As far as the second question is concerned, can you just repeat the second question once, please?

I kind of lost track of that.

The margin walk quarter-on-quarter.

The margin walk is in terms of the 40 basis points improvement sequentially, as I called out, is attributable to the operational efficiencies driven by our New Horizons program, as well as some amount of forex impact, and which was offset partly by the wage hike.

Can you put some numbers to that, please?

The wage hike impact we had already called out last quarter. It was expected to be around 1% or so, but largely the forex impact and the wage hike impact have kind of cancelled out each other.

You can say that the net improvement is basically on account of the operational efficiencies coming from New Horizons.

Thank you.