EPAM Systems, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the EPAM Systems first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. If you require additional assistance, please press star then zero to reach an operator. I would now like to hand the call over to David Straubing, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. By now, you should have received your copy of the earnings release for the company's first quarter 2021 results. If not, a copy is available on epam.com in the investor section. With me today, Arkady Dobkin, CEO and President, and Jason Peterson, Chief Financial Officer. I would like to remind those listening that some of the comments made on today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and SEC filings. Additionally, all references to reported results that are non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the comparable GAAP measures and are available in our quarterly earnings material located in the investor section on our website. That said, I'll now turn the call over to Arc.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before I begin my summary of the quarter, I want to acknowledge that the past month has been a stark reminder that we are still in a deadly and very much global pandemic, and that we must continue to be united in our efforts against COVID. As we have done over the last year, we will do everything possible to support our people on the ground and the communities in which they live and work. Now, turning to our results. For the first quarter, we delivered $781 million in revenues, reflecting growth of 20% year-over-year as reported and 18% in constant currency. Stronger earnings per share of $1.81, a 27% increase over the same quarter in 2020. Smaller revenue growth combined with a greater level of profitability enabled us to continue to invest at higher levels across the business. Since we last talked mid-February, we have seen a meaningful increase in demand across our business. The notable acceleration is even in the second half of the quarter. The demand for our core services is very robust, as clients double down on digital transformation and innovation journals. Increasingly, they tend to respond to help not only build new platforms, but also to conceive new digital products and services, as well as to modernize and transform their technology strategy and delivery models. The digitization trends are driving increasing interest in business strategy, new types of engagement platforms, cloud migration and modernization efforts, data engineering and data analytics engagements, and in turn, machine learning and AI applications. On industry perspective, we're experiencing this dynamic most notably in life science and healthcare, financial services, insurance, CPG, retail, and telecommunications. Today, we focus on building a stronger vertical expertise to leverage even more effectively our market-leading capabilities in core engineering, data, and cloud. As a result, we still have much more work to do to continue building our integrated consulting propositions under EPAM Continuum brand. With our increasing depth in vertical domains, we are already realizing the promise of delivering increasingly differentiating offerings. to our global enterprise customers. An example, is creating a platform, developing modern cloud-based applications, products, and services, and bringing their data offerings to a new generation of consumers. It is a critical part of multi-year cloud and data-driven transformation for Equifax, where we are working together to build a Google Cloud platform-based data fabric It enables Equifax to organize its legacy data sources into single, seamless structure, while keeping all critical government and separation measures in place. Also worth mentioning that while the variety in Equifax legacy system to be cloud-native would normally take years, EPAM successfully assisted in transforming Equifax mainframe applications in less than one year. This is only one example, which is repeated across most of markets and verticals we serve, from financial services to rebounding interest in retail and travel platforms. We believe this underscores the amount of technology-led change that is pushing all industries into higher levels of activity. All this dynamic is in play today, and hopefully soon in post-COVID environment, the number of business domains and processes which must be digitized is going to be rapidly increasing. Post-market drivers, along with opportunities in cloud modernization, composable architecture, data, ML, and AI, and cybersecurity, will give us sizable room for continuous and sustainable growth. To meet this growing demand, we also continue to focus on scaling up our talent. 2020 challenged us to create a reliable and secure remote operation 2021 has presented an opportunity to leverage those investments in infrastructure, modern talent processes, and tooling from the globe to explore ways in which we can activate broader talent markets and deploy a more diverse set of capabilities. The result is that our hiring and net headcount growth is accelerating. For Q1, we welcomed approximately 2,300 net hires to EPUB. which included an increase of senior level hires coming to us with strong industry experience. In overall, since the beginning of Q4 2020, more than 3,400 net additions have joined the company, representing the highest level of powers we have added in two consecutive quarters. While this shortage of technical and deep industry talent is a known industry issue, We are confident that our investment in that area, our elevating brand recognition, and expanding employee career journey will continue to draw top talent to EPAM. Also part of EPAM's growth strategy is the expansion of our capabilities with very focused acquisition efforts. Recently, we closed three acquisitions bringing to EPAM talent and experience in the areas of sales force, business intelligence, and security. In April, we announced the acquisition of PulseSource, a Salesforce consultancy with a talent concentration in the U.S., U.K., and Poland. It will extend our Salesforce services offerings as global footprint and provide information for building additional expertise, IP, and scale around Salesforce ecosystem. This acquisition builds on our earlier acquisition of Mulsoft partner, Rickston, to advance our Salesforce API capabilities, and to enable customers to leverage a multi-cloud approach. Already working closely with our team to bring together a very different proposition. Surprise clients by joining our expanded consulting and global engineering confidence, and to become one of the top global players in the Salesforce services space. We are now on the acquisition of White Hat. niche cybersecurity consultancy based in Israel. Expertise, methodologies, and team of talented professionals will enhance cyber defense capabilities and help clients to further improve cyber protection within their platforms. And lastly, we recently closed an acquisition of boutique data and analytics consultancy firm with offices in Europe and Asia, serving customers across retail, consumer, and energy. This acquisition will bring a team of trusted advisors and experts who provide the full spectrum of data and analytics consultancy, including strategy, advisory, data management, market leaders, accelerators, custom ops, and end-to-end delivery across multi-vendor platform and solutions. We are pleased to have these three companies joining us. In closing, we are encouraged about the road ahead. During the last 12 months, we proved our leadership position in the digital segment of a very competitive global IT services market. EPUM of today is much more adaptable, diverse, and global company with increasingly strong market offerings and all the necessary components of scalable talent ecosystem, which are required for growth as we think about EPUM becoming a 5 to 10 billion company. With that, let me hand the call over to Jason to provide more specifics in our Q1 results and update to our 2021 business outlook.