EPAM Systems, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EPAM Systems Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question-and-answer session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, David Straube, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. By now, you should have received your copy of the earnings released for the company's third quarter 2021 results. If you have not, a copy is available on epam.com in the investor section. With me on today's call are Akati Dobkin, CEO and President, and Jason Peterson, Chief Financial Officer. I'd 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 comparable GAAP measures and are available in our quarterly earnings material located in the investor section of our website. With that said, I'll now turn the call over to Art.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I think it would make sense to start today from the same reference point we used exactly 12 months ago, when we began to see the first positives turning signs after the pandemic hit us earlier in 2020. That reference point was our Investor and Analyst Day, which took place November 2019 in Boston, which was still done in the old-fashioned in-person settings. On that day, we were reminded about EPAM history during our post-APO years and our transformational journey from being a pure software engineering services firm to a much more diverse digital and product consultancy with a strong engineering offerings. Beginning in 2013, we set an aspirational goal to become one of the global leaders in product development services space. Three years later, in 2016, we set out another one to become one of the global leaders in product and platform engineering services. We shared that practically every few years, we focused on the way Palm needs to evolve as an organization with our offerings and the specific elements that were essential to transforming the company. This undertaking enabled us to innovate, remain relevant, and stay ahead in an ever-changing market during those initial post-IPO times. Each aspirational mission was done as a landing point in a longer journey of transformation and was validated by external views, namely industry analysts watching the sector and our ability to grow significantly faster than the market, which has resulted in doubling the company revenue practically every three years. In result, At our investor and analyst day in 2019, we shared our aspiration for the next three years, targeting actually the end of 2021, and softly indicated that we might be able to double the size of Epamaga. We also stated then that to achieve this goal, we will need to continue transforming Epam into a different company with a strong ability to adapt people, platforms, and processes into those that quickly respond to change build and bring to life the digital platform that connects our people to work seamlessly and enables us to be efficient and effective in all what we do, extend our leadership across integrated consulting and engineering services, and, in result, open opportunities for transformation for everybody, anywhere, through net generation delivery, educational, social, and innovation programs. In short, We set our sights on becoming the transformation platform for those clients who would like to become adaptive enterprises themselves, which remains indeed our current undertaking today as well. So last year on our Q3 earnings call, we were reminded of all of that and shared a good level of optimism or self-confidence, if you will, that we would be returning to our traditional 20-plus percent organic growth rate in post-pandemic environment. But we also were almost certain at that point that doubling our 2018 revenue by the end of 2021 would not be a realistic target anymore with everything we experienced in Q2 and Q3 of last year and how we in general saw the situation for 2021 back then in November of 2020. Now, as we sit here today, we see how naive our post-pandemic assumptions were just a year ago, especially regarding the post-pandemic term itself. I guess we all are realizing today that we can drop the post portion of this term for some time in the future. But on another side, we are now realizing that IPAM is an exciting crossroads in its 28-year journey because While looking at the present, we have clear line of sight to a fiscal year, which will be one of the highest growing revenue years in our post-IPO history. That includes also breaking through to our first billion dollar revenue quarter at the end of 2021. And actually still reaching out our aspirational goal of doubling the company for the third time since 2012. This result is an intersection of many factors that have led us to our current state and the next phase of our journey. A journey that has been as much about transforming IPAM as it has been about helping our clients transform themselves. It's exactly through this latest ambition, which we shared in Boston, that we are developing ourselves to be one of the best in the areas of innovation and design, consulting, education, and social responsibility, In addition to driving even higher levels of excellence, it is one of the strongest engineering companies in our space. And today, EPAM is a substantially different company than we were just six, eight years ago. One that has much more diverse foundation to drive the next levels of value to the clients and our growth in result. So, along the way, we had to, and will continue to, solve for the challenges of scaling for growth, geographical expansions, and attracting new types of talent, which brings different experiences and different types of thinking to EPAM, while complementing our strong technical and engineering teams. Additionally, at each convergence, we identified capabilities that we needed to strengthen or build in order to transform EPAM to serve the market needs. and to be done in both ways, organically and through acquisitions, which continue to be an important part of our capability extension strategy. As we turn to the future and set our sights on growing to a 10 billion revenue company, our growth will come from the foundational building blocks we have assembled over the last years, some of which include an integrated consulting and engineering co-finance, which brings together business and strategy, technology, and experience consulting, brought to the market through our EPUM Continuum offerings. High-value cloud services focused on cloud-native development, application optimization, and enabling the data-driven enterprise, helping our customers modernize from inside out. Data and AI everywhere, leveraging our strong advances engineering, and data heritage, building the massive data structures and leveraging API technologies to drive faster insights. And enabled with our global target pool that's connected by our digital platforms, guided by our net generation delivery methodologies, and supported by educational, social, and innovation initiatives. Lastly, we will continue to focus on expanding our partner ecosystem, align with our vision, and map with our vertical and geographical focus, developing joint solutions and going to market together. So, pivoting to the current moment. As I mentioned a short time ago, acquisitions will continue to be a prominent part of EPAM capabilities and geographical extension strategy. This year, we have already closed on five acquisitions, which are enabling us to expand our current offerings in Salesforce, cybersecurity, analytics, strategy consulting, and our presence in Latin America. You also may have seen recent regulatory filings about our intentions to acquire Imakina Group. Imakina is a globally recognized digital marketing and experience agency, or how they call themselves, the user agency, specializing in a range of areas, including commerce and retail, media, planning and buying, service design, branding, and content production across a number of others. headquartered in Belgium, and with more than 1,100 employees and studios across 18 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. This acquisition will enhance EPAM's ability to deliver creative solutions, personalized experience, and new generation digital products, which we increasingly offer to our global clients. So, worth noting that while EPAM is already listed among, at age, top 25 largest agencies in the world, Demokino will add very new capabilities to our agency offering and significantly strengthen EPAM in market positioning across Europe and Middle East. With that, it seems like it's the right moment now to mention that just a few days ago, Fortune magazine published their 100 fastest growing companies list for 2021 and included EPAM in the fourth time and third consecutive year, ranking us 25th overall. and a number one in the information technology services category. Of note, we are actually the only IT services company on the list. And in addition, Newsweek included IPAM for the first time in the 2021 America's Most Loved Workplace ranking, placing us as a number 49 on the list. So before turning to Jason to provide an update on our third quarter results, in our 2021 outlook, while I would like one more time to state that demand for our services continues to be very strong. And we see this across all market segments. We also very well understand that this is an overall strong demand environment. And this is precisely why we feel we cannot become overly confident. We need to continuously building on our brand and continuously investing in our strong engineering culture, while constantly expanding our services into real end-to-end, higher complexity engagements across the globe to bring unquestionable value to the clients. We understand that everything about our future high growth is hard. But as before, we are not shy to push into new areas because they are challenging. And we are committed to do so in a very thoughtful and sustainable way. So as not to compromise on the quality of the delivery that we are known for. And if anything, we are constantly looking for ways to establish true differentiation for not only our customers, but also, importantly, for eParmers. With that, let me turn the call over to Jason.