Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cognizant Technology Solutions third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, 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 question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary for you to pick up your handset before pressing the start keys. Thank you. I would now like to turn this conference over to Mr. Tyler Scott, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir. You may begin your presentation.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release and the investor supplement for the company's third quarter 2021 results. If you have not, copies are available on our website, cognizant.com. The speakers we have on today's call are Brian Humphries, Chief Executive Officer, and Jan Siegmund, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments made on today's call and some of the responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to the risk and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. Additionally, during our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information to our investors. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures, where appropriate to the corresponding GAAP measures, can be found in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Brian Humphries. Please go ahead, Brian.

Thank you, Tyler. Good afternoon, everyone. We executed well in the third quarter, delivering revenue of $4.7 billion, up 11.8% year-over-year, or 11% in constant currency. Booking's growth, a key leading indicator, Accelerated to 24% year-over-year growth in the third quarter. Our book-to-bill ratio of 1.2 times revenue and a trailing 12-month basis underscores our commercial momentum. I'm grateful to our teams around the world for their resourcefulness in meeting our client commitments despite a challenging labor market. We delivered solid sequential adjusted operating margin expansion in the third quarter as we offset the cost of increased hiring with cost discipline elsewhere. I'm also pleased with our progress against our key strategic initiatives. For example, third quarter digital revenue grew 18% year over year. Digital represents 44% of our overall revenue mix. We expect this percentage to grow in future periods, positioning Cognizant for both top line momentum and margin expansion. Moreover, the intimacy of our C-suite engagement increases as we serve clients in their digital transformations. Better than expected growth in our non-digital business impacted our digital mix progression, but is nonetheless a welcome outcome. During the third quarter, we saw continued strong top-line momentum in our digital business operations practice, reflecting our differentiated offerings for digital natives, our BPaaS leadership position in healthcare, and our strength in intelligence process automation solutions. We recently announced Cognizant Nero, a simpler and more effective way for clients to achieve the full potential of intelligent process automation and speed time to results. Everest Group, a leading industry analyst firm, recently recognized Cognizant Nero as an exciting development to enable automation at scale. Moving to industry segments, financial services ongoing recovery continued with growth of 4.3% year-over-year in constant currency in line with our expectations. We posted strong double digit growth year over year in constant currency in products and resources and in communications, media and technology. Within products and resources, we continue to deliver excellent growth in manufacturing, logistics, energy and utilities, as well as across retail, consumer goods and travel and hospitality, which have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In communications, media and technology, We continue to lead with our digital engineering capability to win transformation deals while leveraging our alliances to be a premier cloud transformation partner. In healthcare, we had another solid quarter, achieving 9.8% constant currency growth. Momentum in life sciences continued. Demand across payers remained strong, and we're beginning to see an uptick in demand across providers as they look to digital technologies to help reduce operating costs and strengthen new channels for delivering care. Our products business saw continued double-digit growth in Q3. We're expanding our footprint in the healthcare market and adding new growth members on our platforms. We're also well underway with our digital transformation of our products, including the launch of our connected interoperability solutions to help clients provide secure real-time data access and meet compliance deadlines. We're proud of the work we're doing in partnership with clients like Parkland Community Health Plan. Parkland was looking for better ways to meet the growing needs of its medically underserved populations in Texas and to better manage its health insurance claims, member transactions, and network of physicians and hospitals. Our Trizetta QNX core administration platform, delivered in a BPAS model, is enabling delivery of care management, claims processing, member services, provider services, and quality on a single platform. thereby enhancing care coordination and member experiences. Our healthcare business is a hugely strategic asset. I'm pleased with the progress we've made accelerating growth in healthcare, and I'm optimistic in our future prospects as healthcare companies modernize their business to address the need for enhanced client experiences, including virtual care solutions. Let's turn now to strategy, including our digital ambitions. I remain bullish on both the macro demand environment and Cognizant's growing momentum in digital. Clients continue to accelerate their investment in digital operating models to improve their customer and employee experiences and modernize their operations through data, automation, and cloud. While most companies have launched digital initiatives, few have made the shift to a fully digital operating model. Cognizant is now one of the few global firms that can serve clients across all stages of their digital transformation. from modernizing their technology foundation to implementing agile workflows. This is, in part, a result of investing approximately $3 billion in mergers and acquisitions over the past few years to broaden our portfolio while strengthening our relationships with hyperscalers and key partners. A good client example is Cabot Corporation, a global leader in specialty chemicals and performance materials, who recently engaged us to help transform their digital operating model We'll be providing application development and maintenance, as well as infrastructure and operations services, and enabling Cava to create an enhanced digital experience that drives value for its customers and employees. Scaling our international operations is another strategic priority. And during the third quarter, we grew bookings and revenues solidly in both Europe and rest of the world, with a highlight being 19% constant currency revenue growth in the United Kingdom. We remain optimistic on our international market prospects and aim to accelerate growth as we invest in our talent, brand, partnerships, and operations. Global biopharma leader Sanofi has selected Cognizant as a strategic partner to deploy an omni-channel customer engagement model. The solution will enable their customer-facing teams to engage with healthcare professionals via new digital channels, provide them with personalized content, and also suggest next best actions. Cognizant deployed the cloud-based CRM, integrated marketing automation, and intelligence data platform to the first 18 markets in just eight months. And for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, the UK government's tax authority, we're providing broad technology expertise across its Pega technology stack and enabling Pega application development and operational support that will facilitate case management and customer service applications. Moving on now to the intensifying competition for talent across multiple industries. The demand, supply, and balance in our industry remains particularly acute. Third quarter voluntary attrition reached 33% on an annualized basis or 24% on a training 12-month basis. As a reminder, when we measure attrition, we count the entire company, including trainees and corporates across IT services and BPO. Despite elevated attrition, we increased our net hate count in Q3 by over 17,000 sequentially, which speaks to the tremendous work and effectiveness of our recruitment team. Given our focus in recent years on accelerating fresher hiring in India, we've made meaningful progress on addressing our pyramid. In the fourth quarter, we expect to make offers to 45,000 new graduates in India for onboarding in 2022. Retention and recruitment have our leadership's full attention. We are continuing our comprehensive program to support our associates' career growth and engagement through a range of initiatives that include committed annual increases and evolved approach to promotions, job boards so associates can easily explore open leadership roles company-wide, abundant new training and development programs, sustained communication with our commitment to belonging and inclusion across our company and to society more broadly, and the continuing pursuit of an ESG agenda, which holds special meaning for our associates. To this point, earlier this year, we published our first ESG report and set out on a path to reduce our emissions and increase our energy efficiency. Last week, we announced Cognizant's commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. We plan to achieve this net zero goal through ongoing investments in renewable energy, building on our initial success in India where a quarter of our energy has come from renewable sources since 2020. We will also be investing in new energy-efficient technologies across our offices and data centers globally. In addition, we will extend our expertise in cloud, IoT, and AI to help clients meet their sustainability goals. In closing, while the industry faces an unprecedented competition for talent, During the third quarter, we attracted a record number of employees to Cognizant and stayed focused on delivering against our client commitments and our strategic repositioning. We are bullish on the industry and on our growing commercial momentum. Jan and I look forward to discussing Cognizant's future with you at our November 18th investor briefing. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jan, who will cover the details of the quarter and our financial outlook before we take your questions. Jan, over to you.