IBEX Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to IBEX first quarter, fiscal year 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. Should you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Brinley Johnson of Blue Shirt Group.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I want to remind you that matters discussed today on today's call may include forward-looking statements related to our operating performance, financial goals, and business outlook, which are based on management's current beliefs and assumptions. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions as of the date of this call and we undertake no obligation to revise this information as a result of new developments which may occur. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expected and described today. For a more detailed description of our risk factors, please review our final prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 10, 2020. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob Deccan, CEO.

Thank you, Bryn Lee. Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us today as we discuss our first quarter fiscal year 2022 financial results. We are excited to speak to you today as Carl and I share our business overview and our results. First and foremost, we hope you are all staying safe and healthy. The pandemic reminds us each and every day to put our employees and their families first. A critical factor in our success is our people. Without our employees, their drive and commitment to put our customers first, we would not have achieved the success we are experiencing today. Many thanks to each of them for their continued commitment to our business. As we shared with you last quarter, we are in the midst of a very exciting year at IBEX, a year marked by key strategic growth initiatives that includes innovation, formally launching our staff augmentation business we call IBEX Augment, expansion of our Wavex technology, and geographic expansion into Honduras, driven by our long-term thinking as we invest for our future and continue to transform our business. As expected, the first quarter proved to be our slowest of what will otherwise be an impressive year for IBEX. This was really driven by the tale of two cities, our growth engine, now 62% of revenues, and our legacy customer group, largely comprised of telco customers, which experienced a significant one-time reset last year and is now approaching the tail end of the decline in rough comparisons year over year. The growth engine, consisting of clients new from FY16 who are adopting our omni-channel capabilities, now make up 62% of our business, up from 46% in prior year and 52% from Q4 FY21. And this continues to grow at an explosive rate. This has driven a remarkable change in the mix of our business, including our top clients. Today, our largest client represents 11% of our revenues. In FY16, our top three clients were approximately 80%. And we continue to add to this engine. Our sales organization continues to really set the tone for the business. with another strong quarter of revenue growth in the addition of nine new clients across key verticals. As a reminder, this comes on the heels of last year, which we drove 23 new clients, a record for IBEX, and we are well on our way to delivering another exceptional year in new client revenue and wins. As I have previously discussed, our growth model is designed to deploy a land and expand approach with our clients. We deliver exceptional CX results with extremely proficient launches and then showcase the additional insights and partnership solutions that WaveX and our business intelligence tools can offer. This allows us to win new lines of business and service with these clients and expand our wallet share with them over time. On average, the revenues in year two of our client relationships are between two and a half to three and a half x of year one revenues, with continued strong growth into year three and beyond. We've shared this in a table in our recently filed annual report, which I encourage everyone to review. Now, as an example, one of our strategic clients we won in FY19, who quickly became a top 10 client for us, recently expanded with us in two additional locations in the Philippines and Jamaica, effectively doubling the size of our business. As part of the expansion into new state-of-the-art facilities, IBEX was awarded two new lines of business plus additional market share. IBEX is consistently ranked in the first two positions for performance in the customer's outsourced BPO network. This growth that we have won is expected to move our client into our top three clients later this year. In Q1, though, this growth was offset by declines in our legacy three clients. where one-time events occurred in our two legacy telco customers, one which emerged from bankruptcy and the other which had a major divestiture last year. This decline, which played out over the last three quarters, will be behind us beginning in the third quarter. These clients now represent only 25% of existing revenue exiting the quarter. which going forward will be overshadowed by our new omnichannel business. As a result of our powerful growth engine scaling to such a substantial percentage of our business, as well as our revenue diversification, our client mix has purposefully and structurally changed. This is most evident in the repositioning of our top three clients. As of this quarter, we now have a new number one client when measured by revenue over the last 12 months. This client is one of the most dominant technology providers and marketplaces in the world. This not only represents a meaningful strategic relationship, but a key partner and partial owner in our business with warrants and an underlying common equity ownership. As indicated above, we also believe that we will soon have another high-growth, omnichannel client entering our top three later this year. These relationships represent a paradigm of IBEX 2.0, where we deliver differentiated customer value propositions and a new level of service for our clients. And in key strategic relationships like this, offer a dedicated team in place not only as an extension of our customers' brands, but internally to support this relationship as well. As a result, these relationships with our clients have become mission-critical extensions of their brands in creating a business that's truly essential as evidenced by our continued 100% retention within our top 20 clients. As I noted in our earnings release, our spending this quarter outpaced our revenues as we onboard new clients and invest in key long-term growth initiatives. We have added 4,100 new seats in the calendar year, representing a 25% increase. While this was initially done to invest ahead of the curve, We ultimately have such a strong backlog and demand from our customers looking to grow with us. In hindsight, it is largely being done just to service that customer base and the new clients. This includes our expansion into Honduras, a new market for IBEX and one in which we are very excited about. We have a strong early mover advantage. and are entering the market with a beautiful state-of-the-art CX delivery center, which will serve as our anchor in the region. We believe that we have the ability to become the leader in this market, just as we have done in Jamaica, in Nicaragua, and the island of Baha'u'llah. We have always invested for our future and will not manage the business for a given quarter. We have a significant pipeline of committed business and we expect to return to growth this quarter. Turning to our balance sheet, we have a strong cash position. The company is currently levered at approximately 1.8 times EBITDA and thus has significant room for increasing leverage when additional opportunities present themselves. In closing, While we are, of course, disappointed by the short-term pause after 16 quarters of impressive revenue growth and achieving record margins along the way, we expect this track record to resume in our current quarter. As such, our guidance is reaffirmed and we are incredibly excited about what's ahead for IBEX. I will now turn the call over to Carl. Carl, over to you.