EPAM Systems, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Bella, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the EPAM Third Quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed in mute to prevent any backward noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn over the call to Mike Rochandle, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As the operator just mentioned, I'm Mike Rochandle, head of investor relations. By now, you should have received your copy of the earnings release for the company's third quarter 2024 results. If you have not, a copy is available on epam.com in the investor section. With me on today's call are Akati Dabkin, 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-GAP measures have been reconciled to the comparable GAP measures and are available in our quarterly earnings materials located in the investor section of our website. With that said, I will now turn the call over to ARC.

Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. It's good to share it today that our third quarter results came in better than expected, reflecting our strong execution, core differentiations, and continued value and relevance across our global portfolio of clients. Further, we've been busy since we spoke last, with signing two large acquisitions, and now since Friday of last week, we closed New Otis, which is the most significant addition in our history. From a strategic perspective, the acquisition of New Otis does three things for us. Number one, give us an entry point into attractive new markets in Latin America and parts of Europe. Number two, accelerate new growth opportunities with our joint clients and bring significant new logos to our clients' portfolio. And number three, create a powerful and unified E-POM New Otis delivery platform in the region, which we believe will be highly regarded across Latin American and Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world in general, while strengthening our service offering with local and national value propositions. We will be talking more about it a bit later today, but first, let me share some key highlights across our business. During Q3, we delivered revenue growth both year over year and sequentially. We saw broad improvements in client engagement across all our verticals and geographies, which we believe demonstrate what we hope to be the most stable overall market outlook. The level of our performance in Q3 was driven by increased client trust in our now much more globally diversified capabilities and in our ability to continuously execute is a high level of quality. That triggered a better than expected client willingness to increase their budget share with us. Key verticals to cloud include life science and healthcare, emerging markets, and notably financial services and software and high tech, which both returned to substantial growth this quarter. In addition, we were seeing further signs of stabilization within business information and media and consumer goods retail and travel, while clients still continue to navigate mixed dynamics in their own end markets. Today, we are encouraged to see first a more positive demand sentiment in both our existing portfolio and new acquired clients in comparison with 90 days ago. Secondly, we were pleased with our ability to maintain our reputation as a go-to partner for technology-led optimization and transformation programs while continuously expanding our unique offering in core product and platform engineering services and advanced data cloud and general AI capabilities. To summarize, we remain optimistic about certain sectors of our target market and about our broader portfolio as well to return to higher levels of growth over the coming quarters. So we are continuing to strategically invest in key offerings and capabilities and capture increased market share once global demand returns in full. However, currently we do still see broad enough caution and some delayed decision-making with a continued focus on cost optimization. With all of that, we are staying very close to our clients and adapting ourselves to meet their most critical needs while they continue to assess their investment appetite, prioritize transformational efforts, address their own end market conditions and most likely think about a variety of plans when navigating around the world as we speak. As we stated many times in the past, our global delivery strategy is focused on becoming the most diversified company in our industry from global talent perspective. And based on that, on enabling us further to support our global clients and their new transformative business models realization around the world. We believe we are successfully executing this strategy by investing both organically and through acquisitions into building new advanced capabilities and service offerings is in key for us talent markets. As a result, currently we focus on four major global delivery hubs within the plan. In Europe, we continue to remain highly differentiated and helping our clients to address their most complex business and technological challenges. Our core engineering DNA remains very strong and intact. As you can see, is our better than expected Q3 results. We continue to deliver this high quality across existing clients, as well as the new logos from our European delivery hub, which operates around more than dozen countries, including our largest in Ukraine and many within European Union zone. In the recent signing of first derivative, we will further strengthen our future footprint in Europe. With addition of new service offering, especially for our financial services clients, but not limited to just those. We will be ready to talk about it in more details when we close the transaction later in Q4. In India, we are very pleased with our level of growth based on demand for differentiating services in the region, which is more product engineering focused compared to majority of other service players. Our investment dating back to 2015 are playing off now. Today we see robust growth in the country and just this year we added over 2000 professionals and expect India to reach the 10,000 people by early 2025. In Latin America, we are following a similar path as India, investing and building for the future from 2015 as well. As mentioned already on November 1st, we completed the acquisition of Neoris. This acquisition represents a significant milestone for our company and we'll really scale up our global capabilities with local leadership, knowledge, depth and expertise. Now with Neoris, we immediately doubled our delivery footprint to approximately seven and a half thousand people, notably expanding our presence in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil among other countries in Latam, but also in Spain and Portugal. Neoris strong client portfolio and depth of relationship clearly demonstrate the market differentiation in the region. In addition to strong application development system implementation, cloud migration and automation, Neoris has developed very strong data, AI and SAP practices. Today Neoris is recognizing Latin America, a regional market leader in SAP. It brings over thousand practitioners globally to our current SAP practice and further enhancing our core enterprise platforms value proposition. Finally, they bring strong local capabilities across many of our key articles and also in manufacturing and Intel globally. In Western Central Asia, we continuously building a relatively new delivery hub in addition to the previous three. Today we have nearly 7,000 people in the region who are representing all our major global technology practices. We have a very healthy mix of strong senior talent along with a more junior and energetic young population hungry for new opportunities and future growth. Now let's turn to important topic that remains top of mind for many. Gen.AI. Last quarter we talked about how our AI transformation approach is a three dimensional. Dimension one is internally focused and represents what we do for ourself. It's a pan-internal transformation of Gen.AI talent using our own skill-based organization tools and methodologies, which is a key differentiator for us and delivery of highly advanced and sophisticated trainings, boot camps and other skilling efforts. In this category also everything related to our efficiency and productivity advanced in back office and internal processes. Dimension two is all centered around client transformation opportunities and Gen.AI enabled client solutions, which encompasses our Gen.AI platforms and methodologies such as the E-POM dial, E-POM AI run and E-POM elitance. And finally, dimension three is all about partner ecosystem network helping us to enable large transformational Gen.AI driven programs when close cooperation with cloud data and other type of major digital partners must be in place for success. All those dimensions are closely interconnected and currently we continue to make very solid progress across all three of them. However, for today we would like to focus a bit on combination of dimension two and three to illustrate how our efforts are driving client engagements and generating real pragmatic value. Throughout 2024, E-POM has seen very strong engagement with most of our clients across the full spectrum of Gen.AI initiatives. For us, such programs cover all our core capabilities in engineering, including our specialized AI enabling services, internal and external platforms and accelerators. Such programs also often include business consulting services with our approach to holistic business redesign and optimization. And experience consulting, including implementation of our Gen.AI interactive assistance by helping to bring AI to customer service operations across all our major verticals. When you look across our top hundred clients, we are directly engaged with about 70% of them on different type of Gen.AI initiatives. If we look at those from the size and maturity perspective, we will see inconsistent and expected fiction. So far this year, we saw a doubling of what we call stage one or fully stage projects compared to last year, where we are demonstrating our ability to help our clients kickstart their journey and quickly get to stage two for mid-size AI projects with defined outcomes. This engagement are characterized by more clear roadmap and defined top and bottom line outcomes based on vertically or horizontally driven requirements. Stage three is where we are starting to see the readiness to focus on Gen.AI and AI enabled transformations more broadly. This engagement are multi-year and multimillion dollar programs and combines our data factory construct with new Gen.AI capabilities at scale. Our most transformative work this year has involved establishing large scale AI ecosystems for AI factories within our clients' organizations. Those are comprehensive enterprise level solutions where you might manage the entire AI product life cycle, which include complex operational models and integrated services. During this year, we've already been engaged in a few of these programs, which are sizable and could be in tens of millions of dollars range, which we believe will grow much faster in 2025. Now, let me share a few client examples. Let's start from the story, which was being featured just few days before, almost in real time on the main stage at the Gartner IT Symposium in Barcelona, where our team presented jointly with our client, Rekit, a global manufacturing of health and nutrition products. This program is a large multi-year data transformation story that started with getting the organization ready for a variety of AI use cases, really covering the full life cycle transformation from data foundation to data governance, platform strategy and the construction of responsible AI framework, setting the stage for an operating and business model transformation for this 200 years old, 40,000 person company. Another story that we briefly mentioned three months ago is different, but it's continue making strong progress into the future.

In

collaboration with International Monetary Fund, back in 2023, we built the first version of StatGPT, the platform that allowed users to talk about the world economic and financial data using natural language. It was developed based on our EPMDAL and EPMQANHUB IP as a cornerstone for the next generation conversational data exploration and analytical solution for economists and statisticians. Since then, StatGPT was presented in numerous global SDMX events, where SDMX is a set of technical standards established by European Central Bank, Eurostat, IMF, United Nations Statistical Division, World Bank and other government and semi-government agencies. This month, we delivered the next version, StatGPT 2.0, which significantly improves the way user access the world global economic data and can seamlessly guide users to the specific data they need. Just now, StatGPT went over the evaluation process, which included eight large publicly available data sets from international and national statistical agencies and was conducted by more than 100 representatives from SDMX sponsoring institutions and national statistical organizations. In result, this month it will be presented as a 2024 IMF statistical forum in DC in the session called Measuring the Implication of AI on the Economy as an alternative data access simplification platform for SDMX users community globally. To conclude, we are pleased with our stronger than expected Q3 results. Our core differentiation remains evident. We continue to deliver value, quality and excellence for our clients. We are successfully executing our global growth and domain strategy while expanding market and capabilities at the same time. Finally, we continuously and rapidly obscuring ourselves in the most advanced engineering and generic capabilities. We strongly believe EPUM continues to be well positioned to capture rebounding market demand and share. Let me now turn the call over to Jason who will provide additional details on our Q3 results in our

tool. Thank you, Eric and good morning, everyone. In the third quarter, EPUM generated revenue of 1.168 billion, a -over-year increase of .3% on a reported basis or .9% in constant currency terms, reflecting a positive foreign exchange impact of 40 basis points. Excluding the impact of our exit from Russia, -over-year revenue for reported and constant currency would have increased by .5% and .1% respectively. In addition to returning to -over-year revenue growth, the company also saw four out of six reported industry verticals contribute positively to this growth. Along with the revenue growth, EPUM also delivered solid operating performance and profitability. Additionally, the company recognized a benefit from a Polish government incentive program that further improved the company's profitability in the quarter. During the third quarter, the company recognized 52 million of benefit resulting from government incentives the company expects to receive for qualifying research and development activities conducted in Poland. This benefit reduced cost of revenues, improving gap gross margin and IFO by 450 basis points. 22.9 million of the benefit pertains to incentives for activities conducted in 2023. And this amount has been adjusted out for non-gap purposes. The remaining 29.1 million in benefit derived from 2024 -to-date R&D activities in Poland, improved non-gap gross margin and adjusted IFO by approximately 250 basis points. We expect the incentive to be recurring and estimate that the company would receive a further benefit of approximately 9 million in Q4 2024, as well as benefits in 2025 and other future fiscal years. While the Poland R&D incentive is reflected as a benefit to operating expense for gap reporting purposes, the effective tax rate during the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2024 was negatively impacted by the accounting with respect to the receipt of the incentive. Therefore, the positive impact of the Polish R&D incentive on IFO, net of the increase in the gap effective tax rate contributed 62 cents to Q3 gap EPS. For non-gap EPS, the contribution was 35 cents. Moving to our vertical performance, financial services increased .3% -over-year, driven by an improvement in demand from clients across FinTech and banking. As well as continued strength in the insurance sector. The vertical also delivered solid sequential growth this quarter. Life sciences and healthcare delivered very strong -over-year growth of 14.6%. Growth in the quarter was driven by clients in life sciences, pharmaceuticals and medtech. Consumer goods, retail and travel decreased .5% on a -over-year basis, largely due to the clients in consumer products and retail. Partially offset by solid growth in travel. Software and high tech grew .1% -over-year. Business information and media declined 9% compared to Q3 2023. Revenue in the quarter was substantially impacted by the previously discussed ramp down of a top 20 client. However, in the quarter, the vertical returned a slight positive sequential growth. And finally, our emerging verticals delivered solid -over-year revenue growth of 8.5%. Driven by clients in energy and manufacturing. From the geographic perspective, America's our largest region representing 60% of our Q3 revenues grew .9% -over-year on a reported basis and .9% in constant currency terms. AMEA representing 38% of our Q3 revenues contracted .3% -over-year and .3% in constant currency. However, the region showed ongoing signs of stabilization returning to sequential growth in the quarter. And finally, APAC increased .8% -over-year or .6% in constant currency terms. And now represents 2% of our revenues. In Q3 revenues from our top 20 clients grew .6% -over-year. While revenues from clients outside our top 20 increased 1.7%. Moving down the income statement, our gap gross margin for the quarter was .6% compared to .1% in Q3 of last year. Non-Gap gross margin for the quarter was .3% compared to .9% for the same quarter last year. Both GAP and non-Gap gross margin benefited from the Polish R&D Incentive. For non-Gap gross margin, the benefit associated with 2023 activities has been excluded. GAP S&A was .7% of revenue compared to .9% in Q3 of last year. Non-Gap S&A in Q3 2024 came in at 14% of revenue compared to .4% in the same period last year. S&A improvement in the quarter is a result of our ongoing focus on managing our cost base and increased efficiency in our spend. Gap income from operations was 177 million or .2% of revenue in the quarter compared to 114 million or .9% of revenue in Q3 of last year. Non-Gap income from operations was 223 million or .1% of revenue in the quarter compared to 196 million or 17% of revenue in Q3 of last year. Both GAP and non-Gap income from operations include a positive benefit from the Polish R&D Incentive. For non-Gap income from operations, the benefit from the 2023 activities has been excluded. Our GAP effective tax rates for the quarter came in at .1% and our non-GAP effective tax rate was 24.1%. As mentioned earlier, the Polish R&D Incentive had an adverse impact on both GAP and non-GAP effective tax rates. Deluted earnings per share on a GAP basis was $2.37. Our non-GAP deleted EPS was $3.12 compared to $2.73 in Q3 of last year, reflecting a 39 cent increase year over year. Both GAP and non-GAP EPS were positively impacted by the Polish R&D Incentive. For non-GAP deleted EPS, the benefit associated with 2023 activities has been excluded. In Q3, there were approximately 57.4 million deleted shares outstanding. Current cash flow and balance sheet, cash flow from operations for Q3 was 242 million compared to 215 million in the same quarter of 2023. Free cash flow was 237 million compared to free cash flow of 211 million in the same quarter last year, representing our highest level of free cash flow in our history. At the end of Q3, DSO was 74 days and compares to 76 days for Q2 2024 and 73 days for the same quarter last year. Share repurchases in the third quarter were approximately 245,000 shares for $50 million at an average price of $204.32 per share. Cash and cash equivalents were two billion as of the end of the quarter. Moving on to a few operational metrics. We ended Q3 with more than 47,750 consultants, designers, engineers, and architects, a decline of .5% compared to Q3 2023. However, we returned to sequential growth for the first time in nine quarters with net additions of 750 employees. Our total headcount for the quarter was more than 53,250 employees. Utilization was .4% compared to .7% in Q3 of last year and .5% in Q2 2024. Now let's turn to our business outlook. In Q4, we expect demand in North America to continue to drive -over-year revenue growth in the region. Additionally, we're beginning to see a degree of demand stability emerging in our European geography. As a result, we now expect Q4 2024 revenue to be approximately flat -over-year, excluding the contribution from the New York's acquisition. Our guidance assumes that we will continue to deliver from Ukraine at productivity levels consistent with previous levels throughout 2024. As mentioned earlier, we expect further benefit in Q4 related to Polish R&D government incentives. We expect our production headcount will continue to grow in Q4 and anticipate finally returning to -over-year headcount growth after seven quarters of decline. Moving to our full year outlook. Revenue is now expected to be in the range of 4.685 to 4.695 billion, effectively flat -over-year. The impact of foreign exchange on growth is expected to have a positive impact of approximately 0.2%. Our guidance reflects both improvement in organic revenues in the second half of our fiscal year, plus a $54 million contribution from New York's for the months of November and December. We expect gap income from operations to now be in the range of 11% to .5% and non-gap income from operations to now be in the range of 16% to 16.5%. We expect our gap effective tax rate to now be 23%. Our non-gap effective tax rate will continue to be 24%. For earnings per share, we expect that gap diluted EPS will now be in the range of $7.78 to $7.86 for the full year. And non-gap diluted EPS will now be in the range of $10.73 to $10.81 for the full year. We now expect weighted average share count of 57.9 million fully diluted shares outstanding. Moving to our Q4 2024 outlook, we expect revenue to be in the range of 1.205 to 1.215 billion, producing a -over-year increase of 4.6%. On a constant currency basis, we expect Q4 revenue to increase .3% -over-year. Similar to our full year outlook, our Q4 guidance reflects a $54 million contribution from New York for the months of November and December. For the fourth quarter, we expect gap income from operations to be in the range of .5% to 11.5%. And non-gap income from operations to be in the range of 16% to 17%. We expect our gap effective tax rate to be approximately 26% and our non-gap effective tax rate to be approximately 24%. For earnings per share, we expect gap diluted EPS to be in the range of $1.73 to $1.81 for the quarter. And non-gap diluted EPS to be in the range of $2.70 to $2.78 for the quarter. We expect a weighted average share count of 57.2 million diluted shares outstanding. Finally, a few key assumptions that support a gap to non-gap measurements for Q4. Stock-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately 44 million. Amortization of intangibles is expected to be approximately 9 million. The impact of foreign exchange is expected to be a $1 million loss. Tax effective non-gap adjustments is expected to be around 14 million. We expect a tax shortfall related to stock-based compensation of around 1 million. Severance driven by our cost optimization program is expected to be 9 million. Finally, one more assumption outside of our gap to non-gap items. We maintain a significant level of cash and are generating a healthy level of interest income. However, we expect interest income to decline in Q4 due to the acquisitions of both Neorus and First derivative. Based on the reduction in cash resulting from these two acquisitions, we are now expecting interest and other income to be approximately 6 million for Q4. While we work our way through this cycle of stabilizing demand, we will continue to run at E-PAM efficiently, positioning the company to capitalize on a more normalized demand environment. Lastly, my continued thanks to all our employees for their dedication and focus on serving our clients and driving results for E-PAM. Operator, let's open the call for questions.

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask for questions, press star, then the number one in your telephone keypad. We asked for one main and one short follow-up question. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Brian Bergen with TD Cowan. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning, thank you. It's good to hear the broad improvement here that you noted in client behavior over the last three months. Are there particular areas that are leading that recovery that you're most optimistic about? And as you just think about the discussions with these clients in recent weeks, any color you can share on early 25 budget discussions?

Yeah, I think clearly we're seeing improvement in financial services, and obviously it shows up in the results for Q3 and it's something we would expect to see as we exit the fiscal year. It does feel like those clients have reached a point where they do need to make investments in the beginning of rapid knowledge that they've got to start spending again. We're obviously seeing improvement in high tech and then we continue with our domain investment in life sciences and healthcare. We continue to see good improvement there. I don't know that that's necessarily budget improvement with those clients, but probably relative success on our part as a company. Probably still a little bit too early to sort of comment on what we see for 2025. But again, I think we just reiterate that there's certainly a degree of stability and conversations feel incrementally more constructive.

Okay, and then a follow-up, just on the poll and R&D incentive benefit here, understanding this is expected to continue. Just all else equal, can you give us a sense of how much this will help on gross margin and just then the headwind as well on the effective tax rate as we think about refreshing 25 forward?

Yeah, so how I think about it is that the entire benefit, well, I guess the $29 million for Q3, which was kind of a year to date number and the 9 million that we talked about Q4, all of that impacts gross margin. And so I think one of the quick takeaways is that if you just looked at Q3 and if you adjusted out Poland, we'd be at about .8% for gross margin, the Polish tax benefit, sorry. And then the adjusted ICO would still be at a quite strong 16.6%. As we look ahead, we do expect to have what's called a similar level of kind of benefit. But Brian, we continue to have that challenge where we've got wage inflation and the pricing environment hasn't gotten worse. We do think there may be some opportunity for very modest price increases next year, but we still think we've got a disconnect between wage inflation and price improvement in 2025. So I think that's still gonna kind of pressurize 2025 profitability, somewhat consistent with what I've been talking about over the last couple of earnings calls.