Mastech Digital, Inc

Greetings. Welcome to Mass Tech Digital Incorporated first quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jennifer Ford Lacey, Manager of Legal Affairs for Mass Tech Digital, Inc. Thank you, Ms. Forlisi. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to MazTech Digital's first quarter 2022 conference call. If you have not yet received a copy of our earnings announcement, it can be obtained from our website at www.maztechdigital.com. With me on the call today are Vivek Gupta, MazTech Digital's Chief Executive Officer, Jack Cronin, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ganesh Venkateshwaran, our new Chief Executive Officer of the Data and Analytics Services segment. I would like to remind everyone that statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial growth and liquidity projections, as well as statements about our plans, strategies, intentions, and beliefs concerning the business, cash flows, costs, and the markets in which we operate. Without limiting the foregoing, the words believes, anticipates, plans, expects, and similar expressions are intended to identify certain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those listed in the company's 2021 annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on its website at www.sec.gov. Additionally, management has elected to provide certain non-GAAP financial measures to supplement our financial results presented on a GAAP basis. Specifically, we will provide non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP diluted earnings for sure data which we believe will provide greater transparency with respect to the key metrics used by management in operating the business. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings announcement, which can be obtained from our website at www.masstechdigitals.com. As a reminder, we will not be providing guidance during this call, nor will we provide guidance in any subsequent one-on-one meetings or calls. I will now turn the call over to Jack for a review of our first quarter 2022 results.

Thanks, Jen, and good morning, everyone. I'm happy to say that first quarter 2022 was a continuation of our strong financial performance achieved in 2021. Considering that Q1 has historically been a challenging quarter for us, reflective of typical high project completions at the end of the previous year, and high benefit costs due to the repaying of payroll taxes at the start of the new year for Q1 2022 financial results were very satisfying. Revenues for the first quarter of 2022 totaled $59.8 million and represented an organic increase of 20% over Q1 2021 revenues. This revenue performance was a new record for our company as both business segments showed sequential revenue growth during the quarter. Our data and analytics services segment contributed revenues of $10.2 million, which represented organic growth of 15% over last year's Q1 revenues. Order bookings totaled $11.8 million. Backlog increased from last year, and our pipeline of opportunities continues to show promise. In our IT staffing services segment, revenues of $49.6 million represented a record performance and a year-over-year increase of 21 percent over Q1 2021 revenue. Activity levels continued to remain elevated during the first quarter as we increased our billable consultant headcount by 3%. Gross profits in the first quarter of 2022 totaled $15.9 million, or 24% higher than in the corresponding quarter of 2021. Gross profits as a percent of revenue in Q1 2022 was 26.7% compared to 25.7% in the 2021 first quarter. Gap net income for Q1 2022 was $2.3 million or 19 cents per diluted share compared to $1.2 million or 10 cents per diluted share in Q1 2021, a year-over-year improvement of approximately 90%. Non-GAAP net income for Q1 2022 was $3.3 million, or 28 cents per diluted share, compared to $2.2 million, or 19 cents per diluted share, in Q1 2021, a year-over-year improvement of approximately 48%. SG&A expense items not included in non-GAAP financial measures, net of tax benefits, or the amortization of acquired intangible assets and stock-based compensation. These non-GAAP items are detailed in our first quarter 2022 earnings release, which is available on our website. Addressing our financial position on March 31, 2022, we had outstanding bank debt, net of cash balances on hand of $4.8 million, no borrowings under our revolving credit facility and cash availability of $35.5 million, which excludes $20 million of additional term loan capacity under our our current credit facility accordion feature. I'll now turn the call over to Vivek for his comments.

Vivek Murthy Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Jack, for the detailed financial review of our operating results for the first quarter of 2022. Let me start by saying that I'm very pleased with our Q1 2022 financial performance. As Jack mentioned, first quarter is historically and seasonally a tough quarter for both of our business segments from a financial perspective. However, this quarter was different. Both of our business segments were able to execute at a high level during the quarter despite several external challenges. Our IT staffing services segment achieved record results in both revenues and gross margins, and our data analytics services segments achieved solid revenues and bottom line results. I'm particularly proud of our data and analytics team who collectively kept the ship sailing smoothly without the benefit of having chief executive oversight in this business segment during the quarter. I have a couple of comments to make around the workforce environment that we are facing and about an exciting new service offering that we recently rolled out to the market in our IT staffing services segment. On a macroeconomic basis, we continue to deal with the great resignation and the challenges it presents to all businesses around the globe. At Mass Tech Digital, we have made it a priority to not only retain our top talent, but also to opportunistically seek out new talent that is currently in the market today. Like most services companies, we are squarely in the people business. We see the potential of adding and upgrading our talent base as a positive side of the great resignation, and we will continue to treat this challenge as an opportunity at Mass Tech Digital. Next, I want to give you an update on our new service offering, offshore staffing. At our last earnings call in February 2022, I said a few words about this new service offering that we introduced to the market in the latter part of Q4 2021. Offshore staffing is largely a step-up variant of a very successful mass remote offering. As we are all aware, COVID-19 forced companies to rethink the advantages of having employees, including their contingent workforce working remotely, and by doing so, gaining access to the best talent available beyond self-imposed limitations around geographic locations. The adoption rate of the work-from-anywhere model has been stupendous, and we believe the market is now ready to embrace our offshore staffing model that continues to deliver top-notch talent, but at price points that will generate material cost savings for our customers over the domestic model. The rollout of this new service offering in late Q4 went very well, and the offering was one of the contributors to the record gross margin performance of our IT staffing services segment in the first quarter of 2022. We believe this model is both scalable and will provide our customers with an enhanced value proposition. And now it gives me immense pleasure to introduce to you our new Chief Executive Officer of the Data and Analytics services segment, Ganeshan Venkateshwaran. I can tell you that our board conducted an exhaustive search for this critical role, leaving no stone unturned to find the right leader to take Mastic InfoTrailers to the next level in its life cycle. As our search progressed, it became clear to me and our board that Ganeshan was the ideal leader to take our data analytics business on its next journey. Clearly, our organization is excited to have on board Ganeshan who has already hit the ground running in his first month with the company. So without further ado, I will now turn the mic over to Ganesan Venkateshwaran, our new CEO of MassTech InfoTravis.

Thank you, Vivek, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today talking to you on my first MassTech Digital Earnings call. As you are aware, I joined MassTech InfoTrailers as the Chief Executive Officer on March 28th. So I'm quickly approaching my first full month with the company. Somehow it seems a lot longer than that. Let me start by giving you a bit of my background and experience. Prior to accepting the CEO position at MassTech InfoTrailers, I held executive leadership roles at Trance and at Wipro Technologies. From an academic background, I hold an engineering degree and business management programs from the Indian Institute of Science and the Wharton School of Business. Throughout my career, I have been involved with advanced technologies and enabling digital transformation services to enterprise clients. The pandemic has only accelerated the need for digital enablement forcing CXOs across enterprises to think of cross-functional and a connected experience value chain for driving enterprise success. I am a hands-on leader and bring a strong blend of technology, execution, and management experience to drive a strong team collaboration while delivering growth and profitable outcomes. I was attracted towards Mass Tech, given the well-rounded capabilities that Mass Tech InfoTrailers has built around the data and analytics practice, covering core aspects of end-to-end data, which includes data management, data engineering, and data science, combined with a layer of enabling customer experience which came as a part of the Amberleaf acquisition that MassTech InfoTrailers made. This positions MassTech InfoTrailers to engage with both the technology stakeholders as well as the business stakeholders, which is a very strong position to be in. Also, I see the variety in experience that the board brings, starting from scaling large businesses depth in technology, making successful large acquisitions in the past as an advantage as well as a leverage for me as I go after opportunities for hyperscaling. I believe I have a solid opportunity to make a profound difference at the MassTech InfoTrailers. Next, I would like to share my views on some of my first impressions of the company. It's almost one month in. You know, when joining a new organization, particularly in a senior leadership role, your first instinct is to find out if anything is broken and needs to be turned around. I am pleasantly surprised that is not the case at MassTech InfoTrailers. I have been very impressed with the people that I have met. the strong work culture and work ethics that they demonstrate, and more importantly, the burning desire to be successful. I found the culture to be very collaborative, open to change, and focused on success and innovation. Also, I found the competencies of our delivery center in Chennai, India to be outstanding. which explains the company's track record of near 100% customer retention. However, work needs to be done to bring together an integrated and holistic view of driving enterprise customer experience, starting with digital strategy and roadmap to enabling technology solutions and providing managed services. I will be working closely with my teams to shape this go-to-market approach. What this will essentially mean is a premium positioning at upstream end of the enterprise value chain and being able to command a premium pricing. In summary, the digital transformation services is an exciting space that I know well and have been hands-on. I am looking forward to leading MassTech InfoTrailers in its journey ahead by enabling industry-leading learning experience for our employees, capturing the growth wave, and creating substantial value for our shareholders. Thank you, and back to you, Vivek.

Thanks, Ganesan. Operator, this concludes our prepared remarks. We can take questions now.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your line for the queue. And for participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question is from Lisa Thompson with Zach Investment. Please proceed.

Good morning. Nice to see a great Q1 and record revenues. That's pretty exciting. I have to say it seems, I don't know if the word's ironic, that staffing is doing better than data and analytics. Do you expect with a new CEO, that that might change, or is there going to be competition on who can grow faster?

Hi, Lisa. Nice to hear your voice. I would actually like to have a competition. That sounds pretty exciting. No, on a more serious note, I see no reason. Inside, I see every reason why we should see scaling happening on the data analytics side. We are very excited to have Ganesan on board, And he has the right background, the right experience to take it forward. So we should see some healthy competition in the future.

Okay. Any prediction on when that might cross over to then growing faster?

Lisa, as you know, we don't make any projections. But I think we're just... As Ganesh mentioned, he's barely been in for a month. We need to give him a bit of time. And I have no doubt as the year progresses, we'll start seeing the uptake and the scaling happening on the data analytics side.

Okay, great. A couple financial questions. It looks like in Q1, SG&A was a little bit higher than at least I expected. Is anything funny going on there this quarter? Do you expect that number to come down from the 12.6 or not?

I'm going to pass this question over to Jack.

Hi, Lisa. Hi. You know what? I think that the 12.6 is likely to stay put in Q2. and increase a bit in the second half of the year. I don't think there's anything funny. I mean, we had a lot of variable expenses that increased just to support our revenue growth.

All right. And I know in the past you discussed how margins were benefited by that consultants weren't traveling. Are they traveling now? Is that going to affect gross margins?

Go on, Jack. No, I think traveling is going to open up a little bit. And on the DNA side, you know, it could have some impact on gross margins, but I don't anticipate it to be a huge number. As far as SG&A expenses, I think in Q1 we did have some travel costs. that exceeded last year's Q1. So that's part of the increase in overall operating expenses to come up with that $12.6 million number.

All right. Just to clarify, when you said that the consultants went up by 3%, you meant that sequentially to like 1305?

Yeah, it's a 3% increase for the quarter.

Sequentially, right, from Q3.

Yes, right.

All right. And then one last question is, I noticed when reading the 10-K that you went from having like 48% HB1 visa people down to 26%. Can you talk about how that happened and if that's going to stay that way?

So, Lisa, if you're talking about... It wasn't very clear. You're talking about the H1B percentage. Yeah. I think it's a, you know, that's just a sign that we are placing a lot more non-H1B people right now on billing. And we don't see any reason why, you know, that kind of ratio will not continue. It should continue. We should continue to have the H1Bs coming down as a percentage over a period of time. as the other side of the non-H-1B side of the business keeps picking up.

Does that save you any money, or how does that change anything?

Well, it does change. It does save us some money. There is always the visa processing fee, which is there. But I think at a larger level, it just means that we are addressing a larger pool of resources across the country, and MassRemote is helping us as well. So it just helps us address the needs of our customers much better by going after the larger pool.

Okay, great. Thank you. That's all my questions.

Hi, Lisa. This is Ganesan here. Nice to have you on this call. And to your earlier question on the DNA business, a couple of points from my side in addition to what Vivek covered is One, it is always nice to have a very healthy competition, so be prepared for it. I first want to commend the team that were holding the fort in the absence of a chief executive. I think the teams have done a tremendous job. But coming to the market itself for DNA, the data analytics market is booming. The market is expected to grow at a caliber of around 13% plus. And the demand for data analytics professionals is also exploding. Nearly 90% of the corporations have predicted that analytics is going to be an essential competency this year. So that positions MassTech InfoTrailers in a very unique position of being able to enable growth and experience to all of our enterprise clients, given that we bring in a very holistic view of data. So we should expect to capitalize on the market opportunity, and you will see that reflect as we move forward. I'm still early. It's been four weeks since I came on board. but I think the indications look very positive from a market standpoint. I hope I answered your question.

Yes, I also remembered another thing. I know they have a pile of acquisitions for you to look at. Have you started working on the stack, and do you see that happening anytime soon?

I have not yet started to look into it. I think the first order of priority for me as a joined MassTech InfoTrailers was to look at a couple of things. Number one, what is our opportunity for a go-to-market positioning based on what we currently have? Now, when I look at both the data and analytics, as well as the customer experience of business, okay, the ability to strongly influence customer acquisition and growth side of our enterprise clients is very, very high. What I mean by that is the data and analytics segment will enable enterprises with a data-driven approach to architecting business intelligence and driving growth. The customer experience enabled by Amberleaf will enable enterprises with a customer experience-driven approach to sales, service, and marketing transformation. So there is an opportunity for MassTech InfoTrailers to operate on both the technology side of the business as well as the business side of the business. So I see a tremendous opportunity to cross leverage, upsell, and influence the enterprise value chain. The second area that I started to look at was the differentiated value proposition to clients from a service offering perspective. I spoke about strategy and roadmap, technology implementation, and then manage services. That will position us for an engagement with the clients upstream and also help us to engage with the clients at a CXO level, position us for premium pricing, and in that process create downstream revenue at scale. The third area of focus was around scaling the data and analytics business strategically and rhythmically. What I mean by that is, from a growth standpoint, how are we focusing on achievability, predictability, repeatability, and I underline repeatability because being able to do more of the same means less stress, less effort required to be able to sustain and grow the business, and also look into opportunities for driving non-linearity. As part of my initiative to drive non-linearity, I will be looking into some of these acquisition candidates downstream. I am not ready for that yet, Lisa. And of course, the last area of focus has been around people and culture and the leadership coming together as a scale. So these have been my areas of focus in the last four weeks, but we will get to some of the acquisitions pretty soon.

Okay, great. We'll give you another quarter and I'll ask you again. Thank you.

Our next question is from Timothy Call with the Capital Manager Corp. Please proceed.

Congratulations on strong bookings and your increased backlog. The cash levels are rising and might exceed long-term debt later this year. Should we expect net interest expense to approach zero?

Jack, will you take that question?

It's clearly going to go down, you know, absent an acquisition. Yeah, we're paying off debt at a shift of $1.1 million a quarter, and that's going to continue. And so I, and we're, generating cash flows. So if we don't accelerate our early pay or debt, we're going to be accumulating cash. So I think our interest rates or interest expense is clearly going to go down.

Absent from other effects, does the IT staffing unit benefit from US wage inflation? do your revenues and profits grow because of wage inflation in that unit?

Yeah, Tim, to some extent, you know, definitely there is, you get the benefit of it in terms of the bill rate increasing. And also, you know, for the same number of heads, you are able to get, you know, more revenue per head as a result of that. There's not that much of, for gross margin improvement because that sort of goes with the higher rates as well. The input rate also goes up or is going up as a result. But definitely there is a bit of an upside on the rate increase as a result of this.

And do you see a shortage of – with the shortage of U.S. skilled labor, do you think that will lead to increased outsourcing opportunities in the United States and would that eventually increase business at MassTech?

Well, it's already happening. The demand is way, way more than supply. The customers are unable to fill those positions internally. Even the permanent positions they have are lying open and they are increasingly leaning more and more on organizations like ours to help them find contingent workforce. And we are sort of, you know, rising to that and, um, And some of our growth that we've demonstrated over the last few quarters has been as a result of that. Of course, when there is more demand than supply, we also lose people much more. So our focus has been how do we make sure that we pick up new business, we do new placements, we do new starts disproportionately more than the ones that we lose. And we've done a pretty decent job so far.

Well, congratulations again on a great quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Tim.

Our next question is from Mark Riddick with Sidoti and Company. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning, everyone. Hi, Mark. So I wanted to start with was there anything as far as – any shifting of orders or business or any disruptions that we should think about during the course of 1Q that would maybe affect comparability?

No, I don't think so. I don't think there is anything like that to report right now. Jack, is there something that I may have missed?

No, no disruptions.

That I'm aware of. Okay. Okay, great. And then shifting gears, I wanted to talk a little bit about maybe, and I know it's only been, first of all, welcome, Ganesh. I know it's been a whole month that you've been there, so the stack of acquisition opportunities will still be there tomorrow, I suppose. But I was wondering if you could maybe update everyone as far as the general thoughts around maybe what the general pipeline looks like, valuation, and if there's been much of a shift as far as the opportunities that has been seen maybe over the last three to six months.

Mark, thank you. And is your question around the pipeline for acquisitions or is it around the pipeline for the data and analytics business?

Well, the acquisitions first, and then – well, actually, you can answer both if you wish, but I was asking about acquisition.

Okay. I would probably turn over to either Vivek or Jack to answer on the acquisitions piece, and then I can take the question around the overall business pipeline.

Yeah. So as far as, Mark, the acquisitions are concerned, we did have a few candidate – targets that we were considering towards the end of last year. And I think I mentioned that in my previous earnings calls as well. We had to put them on the back burner and it makes sense to go ahead with any acquisition without having a new leader on board. So clearly we've said that before that our acquisitions are going to be in the data analytics area. And that strategy or that approach is still very much valid. So we're just waiting for Ganesan to settle down and have a look at the targets that we were considering. And also there could be new injection of ideas from Ganesan and we would refine our target or the approach that we are taking. So we see that in the later half of this year, we should start going back to evaluating what could be the next targets to look at.

Thank you. Thank you, Vivek. And Mark, to the other question, what the pandemic has done is influence the velocity of digital transformations. And as we all know, no industry is spared. But when you look at the sequence in which effective digital transformation initiatives happen in the market, it all starts with data and analytics. And in order to get insights of your own enterprise, but the real end-user transformation begins with redefining experiences of your products and services. Now, when I look at MassTech InfoTrailers, I think we are very uniquely positioned to influence what I call as the customer acquisition and the growth segment of an enterprise, which essentially starts by driving your customer experience initiatives, starting from your product and the service design, customer user journey mapping, and then taking it all the way into your implementation and the managed services. So the ability for MassTech InfoTrail is to drive the transformation experience, starting with the business stakeholders, be it in sales, be it in service, or be it in marketing, and then driving it down the value chain to the technology stakeholders, okay, comprising of your, be it on the data side, or be it on the application side, or be it on the cloud side, okay, seems to have, is very seamless and the capability are very well aligned. So I am very optimistic about the capturing of the market opportunity and being able to grow the business because it is not just the data business which is seeing a significant growth in 2022 and beyond, but combined with the ability to drive upstream customer experience, I think we have a significant opportunity to tap into. I hope I answered your question, Mark.

Yes, absolutely. Thank you. And then a couple more for me. One, I was wondering if you could sort of give us an update as to where you are with the real estate strategy and as far as, you know, with your offices and where you think you can get to by the end of the year. And then I have one last follow-up after that.

Okay. Go ahead, Vivek.

No, I was going to respond to the real estate situation. So, Mark, I think one thing that's happened as a result of this pandemic, as we all know, that we don't really need everybody to be in the office every day. And what that means is that the office spaces that we have right now right now can handle a lot more people because we will have the hybrid approach going forward. But having said that, I mean, we have large centers that we have. There's one in Noida, which is in India, in the national capital region. Then there is one in Chennai, which is the data and analytics center. And then, of course, the third large one in the U.S. one is, of course, Pittsburgh. And then we have smaller offices, quite a few of them, sales offices in different parts of the U.S. and in Europe. So that kind of footprint that we already have, we did upgrade our Chennai facility to a much larger facility, almost double the number of seats, and that we did in January. because we expect that that part of the business will probably scale on the offshore side of data analytics will scale the fastest and the quickest. So I think we are pretty comfortable right now in terms of the real estate footprint that we have, at least for the foreseeable future. And I'm hoping that we'll get to that point, you know, maybe next year when we have to start thinking of what more to add, and that will be a great problem to have. That means we are scaling it. Right, right, excellent.

And then the last thing for me is, why don't you talk a little bit about the – you talked about it in your prepared remarks, but maybe you could put a little more around sort of the timing and what your thoughts are around the offshore staffing launch.

Yeah, so the offshore staffing, as I mentioned, is basically – if we go back a little, June of 2020, right in the middle of the thick of the pandemic, we launched a service called Mass Remote, which is leveraging the customer's readiness to work from home or work from anywhere model. And that actually was very well-timed. And from that point onwards, all the way till the end of 2021, roughly two-thirds of all placements that we did were Mass Remote. And what we found when we launched this new offering of your staffing If you think about it, it's just an extension or a variant of that where we are not just having people working remotely, but they're working much further out. And the logic essentially is this. If you look at the demand for IT people, it's very heavily skewed towards the U.S., followed by Europe, and then followed by the rest of the world, including Asia. But the availability of resources is just the other way around. The largest available resources are actually in Asia, followed by Europe, followed by the U.S. at this point in time. So what we are trying to do is address that, where the demand is and where the supply is through this offshore staffing. And we found that customers having experienced this work from home, work from anywhere model successfully are now ready and more amenable to having people work offshore An offshore model we already know has a lot of advantages. It's availability of a very large pool of top-notch talent and at a price point, which makes it a compelling proposition for customers because they can have a lot of cost savings. Or they may not want cost savings. They can have much more people for the same amount of spend that they would have had. So we launched this offering in Q4, and we're finding it's gaining traction very rapidly. So we are pretty excited about it. So if you put this along with mass remote, I think we now have a pretty good sort of option in addition to, of course, the traditional on-prem or on-premise staffing. So our sales team is pretty excited that we now have a much wider complement of offerings to offer.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark.

As a reminder, just star one on your telephone keypad if you would like to ask a question. Our next question is from Brian Kinslinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please proceed.

Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my questions. With the solid bookings you've discussed in the first quarter and even what sounds like revenue growth as well, can you first talk about and maybe I missed it, where demand is increasing the most for both Mass Tech staffing as well as the analytics business by industry? Is it financial services? Is it healthcare? Maybe take us through which industries you're seeing the most demand.

Hi, Brian. Thank you for your question. Actually, right now at this point in time, it's pretty evenly distributed across all industries. I mean, you know, when we look back how things were in the last one and a half years, you know, we could see a skew towards healthcare more and it was, you know, followed by financial services, followed by, you know, retail or manufacturing. But at this point in time, the demand seems to be there across all industries. So, I mean, we can, I can try and we'll give them some kind of an order there. But actually, I don't think that's that relevant at this point in time. So all our customers in all our segments, we are having conversations with them. And this applies to both sides of the business, IT staffing as well as data analytics. And maybe I'll ask Ganesan if he's seeing a skew on the data analytics side in his analysis that he's done over the last one month or so, if there is a skew on the industries.

I think, Vivek, you covered it. And, Brand, to add to what Vivek said, I think we are looking at banking, retail, and high-tech as industries where we are seeing a sort of a momentum. But coming to the data and analytics business from a core standpoint, it is industry agnostic. The way I would sort of see this is, when I look at it from an industry perspective, is from two dimensions. One is there are certain industries which have a high touch impact with their consumers. For example, if you take either healthcare, media, high tech, or retail. And what I mean by high touch is the entire feedback loop with the consumers is extremely high for example if apple were to release a phone then you have a feedback loop into the adoption and the usage of the features very quickly these are industries that will continue to be on the cutting edge of a digital transformation and also continue to keep growing okay and adopt faster on the other side there are there are certain industries that are low touch Examples would be the ones that are highly regulated, be it insurance or energy, etc. Now, the need for digital transformation and especially data-driven is seen across the board. But where you will sort of see a change in flavor is depending on the velocity of the transformation. that each of these industries adopt. And depending on that, we will see a slightly skewed pipeline, but that does not mean that any of the industries that I earlier spoke about are the ones where there is transformation work that is happening. I think it is cutting across.

Great. My second question is, as demands increase, and you touched on the difficulty on the supply side of resources, how long does it take you to find and onboard staffers to meet demand?

Actually, we have a very well oiled engine for recruitment. We have a pretty large team, which is sitting in India. They are based in Noida, and they're working to US time. And we are able to find candidates in a matter of hours in some cases. and we are able to get, you know, customers connected for those candidates for interviews and get things done, you know, in a matter of days when there is a crunch and the customers have that urgency. But a normal time takes about, you know, a week to two weeks for the entire process to happen from availability of the requirements, finding the right candidates, going through the shortlisting, interview selection, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, so it's really... And remember, we are not the only ones who are being offered those RECs. We have competitors or competition there as well. And we are able to do well because of the speed at which we are able to do and also the number of producers that we have who can go after these requirements. So yeah, we are able to move pretty fast and sort of get ahead of the competition in the process.

When I see this question from the data and analytics side of the business, I have a very unique advantage of being able to leverage the strength of what the digital staffing business brings to the table. And you are very well aware of the great resignations and the challenges that the technology services industry is facing. both in terms of a talent acquisition as well as from a talent retention standpoint. The great advantage for me to be able to drive a hyperscaling of the data and analytics business will come from the fact that I can leverage the digital staffing arm of MassTech to be able to acquire talent at speed and have a big base of both process maturity as well as recruiters who can help with the scaling. So I feel very nice about the fact that I can leverage the digital staffing business for the growth of a D&A. Great.

My last question relates to your bookings. How much higher is the implied pricing on your new business compared to the average rates of 2021? Thanks. Brian, let me ask you this question.

Is this question about the IT staffing or is this the data analytics piece?

Well, on the staffing side, because one of the earlier questions you talked about revenues will benefit from higher salaries or higher pay, of course, that you pass on. So I'm just curious as it relates to that, how much higher? Are prices 5%, 10% higher than they were last year?

Well, it actually varies. We are seeing anything from, you know, 0% to 25% as well. It also depends on the type of skills and how – difficult or how scarce are those skills in the marketplace? And, you know, you can imagine scarcity drives up pricing. So many of the new positions that we are doing could come as much as maybe 10% on an average more, but then it's a bucket which has got, you know, already a lot of people and, you know, you are adding more, but it takes a little while for the overall, the average for the bucket to start changing. But there is definitely some increase which is happening in general, but it varies from technology to technology. Great. Thanks so much.

Hey, Brian. Our average bill rate in the 2022 quarter was just under, this is for staffing, just under $79 an hour. And in the first quarter of 2021, it was just over $75 an hour. So, you know, that's about a 5% increase. And some of that is, you know, inflation, inflationary pressures, and some of it is, you know, just the type of skill sets that we've been working with on new assignments. But, you know, clearly the trend is up.

Great. That's super helpful.

Thank you.

Our next question is from Ross Davison with Benetton Capital. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just a question. Thinking about all the positive outlook that we talked about with data analytics, all the great trends that the business is tapping into and Ganeshan spoke about, reflecting back on Q1, 15% growth rate is great, but as we talked about, it sounds like there's some room for even higher growth there. I'm curious in Q1 if there were things that you could point to or in your mind maybe limited that growth. Another way of thinking about the same question perhaps is as you look out in the future and tapping into all the trends, are there specific tactical things or other parts about the business that you can identify that sort of give you the confidence that you can step up that growth rate? Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Russ. From a Q1 standpoint, again, I think as both Vivek and I said, I commend the team for managing the fort in the absence of having executive oversight. But from where I see opportunities for scaling, and I've identified opportunities between both the customer experience side, coming from Amberleaf, as well as the data and analytics side. and significant opportunities for cross-leveraging and upselling. There were some tactical things, synergies around people alignment, which have already been fixed. So I believe that when it comes to driving customer experience, we are already at a point where we are in a position to drive a holistic approach and the rich customer experience. In fact, I call this as a five-dimensional approach to driving customer experience, one that comes from the business development team, driving relationship experience and driving net new logo acquisition. Second, coming from an integrated digital transformation practice perspective, which is an area that, as I mentioned earlier, is something that I am shaping as we speak. And once we have that, we will be able to drive both the strategy and roadmap across all of our enterprise clients, which positions you at the upstream of the value chain. The third, of course, is the global delivery, which is functioning extremely well today, delivering a 100% customer retention. And the two other areas that I'm looking into are bringing in specific industry domain expertise in areas where we have a strong positioning with clients and also looking into possibilities of platforms and IPs as they get to understand the business more. So that is where you will start to see a shift happening both in terms of not just the customer acquisition, but also the quality of revenue from each of these customers, being able to drive the average revenue within customers, and bringing in some amount of non-linearity through platforms and IPs. Ross, did I answer your question?

Yeah. Thank you, Ganesh. That's really helpful. I appreciate it, and it's great to have you on the team. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Vivek for closing comments.

Thank you, operator. So if there are no further questions, I would like to thank you for joining our call today. And we look forward to sharing our second quarter 2022 results with you in early August. So thank you all.

Thank you.

Have a wonderful day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.