Globant S.A.

Good day, and welcome to Globin's fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. I'm Amit Singh, head of finance for the U.S. and global head of investor relations. All participants on this call will be on listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded and streamed live on YouTube. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release. If you have not, a copy is available on our website, investors.globin.com. Our speakers today are Martin Migoya, co-founder and chief executive officer, Juan Urtiage, chief financial officer, Patricia Pomies, chief operating officer, and Diego Tartara, global chief technology officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments on our call today may be deemed forward-looking statements. This includes our business and financial outlook and the answers to some of your questions. Such statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. Please note that we follow IFRS accounting rules in our financial statements. During our call today, we will report non-IFRS or adjusted measures, which is how we track performance internally and the easiest way to compare Globin to our peers in the industry. You will find a reconciliation of IFRS and non-IFRS measures at the end of the press release we published on our Investor Relations website announcing this quarter's result. I'd now like to turn the call over to Martin McGuire, our CEO.

Thanks, Amit, and hello, everyone. I'm happy to be back after another strong quarter and full year. Globan continues to deliver solid performance, and we aim to surpass expectations of our stakeholders and clients. As we look back over the past 19 years, since we started the company, 2021 stands out. This was one of our most transformative years ever. Our Q4 2021 revenue reached $379.8 million. This represents 63.3% year over year growth and 11.1% growth over Q3. For 2021, we became a billion dollar revenue company for the first time ever. The top line reached nearly $1.3 billion, representing 59.3% year over year growth. This is the strongest annual revenue growth since our IPO. Our CFO, Juan Urtiaga, will go into detail later in the call. These strong results have been made possible by the team of talent we have cultivated. I've never been more proud of our Glovers. They are creative and adaptable. They work together as one team throughout 18 countries. Our business fundamentals are stronger than ever. We're in a position to capture the significant market opportunity in front of us. As we know, reinvention and transformation is not an end-to-end process. It is a constant state of adaptability to grow in the face of challenges. This time, a full adoption of digital transformation is here. The IDC has forecasted global spending in the sector to exceed $10 trillion over a five-year period. We aim to be the partner of choice of our clients and to help them bridge the gap between the innovation opportunities and actionable transformation. We are executing this strategy through the pillars of growth that I laid out in 2021, our geographic expansion, our invention studios, and our growing platforms. First, our geographic expansion. Global footprint continues to grow throughout the regions where we work. Lately, we added two new countries to our Latin America operations, Costa Rica and Ecuador. This solidifies our already strong presence in the region. In Europe, we have recently announced our expansion to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In North America, we continue to expand our local presence throughout the United States and Canada. We are reaching new clients and hiring more talent in all those regions to lead this growth. We have also brought on new talent and expertise through strategic M&A. In 2021, we incorporated five new companies to the Globan family. These companies have combined operations in 12 countries. Their talent has reinforced our capabilities in multiple spaces from blockchain to digital sales and marketing, AI, Salesforce, and more. As we look to the major trends of the near future, we're already working on consolidating our capabilities in these spaces. A major transformation for how brands relate to consumers will be brought on by Web 3.0. Web users in the first generation of the internet were exclusively on the receiving end of information. They later became content creators, active consumers, and participants in the second phase. In this new phase, they will become owners. Through blockchain technology and decentralization, Web 3.0 puts the user in the driver's seat. They will have more autonomy in their consumption, creation, and interface with the internet. This is actually part of a larger change. Throughout the digital and cognitive revolutions, focus has shifted towards the consumer. This is a huge opportunity for Globant, since we have built our core business around these revolutions for the past two decades. In this era, the most successful brands are the ones that can apply the right technology to improve relationships with their stakeholders. A major way that people will experience this new phase of the web will be the metaverse. Organizations will have new spaces and platforms where they can extend their presence, offering, and creativity. They will be able to maximize engagement with their customers and employees. Last year, Globan launched the Metaverse Studio to guide companies in taking advantage of these opportunities. Although many will see the potential, they need a partner with the technology and the expertise for best-in-class execution. Globan believes that these and other trends in AI, machine learning, and teamwork agility will have a strong influence on our world in 2022 and beyond. We have done a deep dive on many of them on our Trend Report 2022. I encourage you to check it out at trends.globan.com. We also continue to develop our product and platforms offering under GlobanX. The goal is to keep expanding our existing products such as Start Me Up, Augmented Testing, and Augmented Coding, among others. At the same time, we will continue to add new offerings to our product portfolio. For example, Globanex is developing an MVP of a new platform, Project YORD. YORD is a diagnostic tool that aims to reduce the carbon emissions and operational costs of digital products and services. It identifies solutions by designing linear digital services as it measures energy consumption of software. It pinpoints areas where energy emissions and costs can be optimized by up to 25%. We believe that technological innovation is a force for good. However, we are mindful of the potential side effects that come from misuse or excess. We see several concerning examples in our society. from texting and driving, to cyberbullying, to internet security, to privacy, just to mention some. So as you may remember, last quarter, we launched our Be Kind tech fund. We will support and fund startups that develop apps that bring solutions to these challenges. Today, we are proud to announce three world-renowned ecosystem partners, Endeavor, New Lab, and LAFCA. Thanks to their extensive networks, we will be able to engage with a greater number of high-quality entrepreneurs and startups. We already have dozens of submissions, and we continue open to receiving applications from startups at BeKindTechFund.com. I've been happy to see our team's efforts generating greater recognition of Globan's brand identity. For the first time in 2022, Brand Finance has ranked Globan on its list of the top 10 strongest IT service brands in the world. The report studies marketing investment, stakeholder equity, and business performance. It showed an estimated 31% growth in Globant's brand value in the last year. This is great news for us, and we hope to continue improving our positioning moving forward. With that, I pass it over to Diego Tartara, our CTO, to comment on our studios and clients. Thank you very much, and looking forward to see you soon.

Thank you, Martin, and hello again, everyone. It's good to be back. As Martin mentioned, a major pillar of our growth strategy is the new industry reinvention studios, which we announced last year. This is the next step in the evolution of our signature studio model. Instead of focusing on a specific technology or trend, these new studios seek to transform the industries themselves. This widens the scope of our work and increase the potential upside. Each reinvention studio is supported by the expertise of our digital studios in areas such as the metaverse, data and AI, blockchain, and much more. I'd like to double-click today on the Life Sciences Industry Reinvention Studio. Its goal is to provide organizations with technology-driven solutions to face challenges in the healthcare value chain. These stakeholders include patients and relatives, healthcare professionals, public-private players, and institutions, academia, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, among many others. Globan has appointed Agustin Lamas as this new studio Globan Managing Director. Building on his experience as a pharmaceutical executive at AstraZeneca and GSK, we're happy to have Agustin on board as we reinvent this industry. The Life Sciences Studio will be a hub of modern design thinking, combining bioscience talent with our digital expertise across other industries. Now, some remarks on the ongoing work with our clients. Continuing the focus on Life Sciences, last quarter we started partnering with Abbott, a leading multinational healthcare and medical device company. Our teams integrated with theirs to understand their challenges and we are redesigning their analytics platform solution. The new data platform will allow for faster, more efficient data processing, enabling more intuitive decision making. In the same industry, we're also working with Vyer Medical to help with modernizing and redesigning their ventilator interface design. Vyer is a global leader in the respiratory diagnostics, ventilation, anesthesia delivery, and patient monitoring segments. We're also working with them on redesigning their UX and their medical incubator screen interfaces. As Martín explained, the metaverse is a concept that is quickly becoming reality and one of the reasons why we created our Metaverse Studio. In December 2021, we formed a partnership with Pixelinks, a leading music metaverse gaming platform. Pixelink is developing a new virtual world ecosystem that will allow artists to launch their own interactive environments and monetize them through NFTs, social music experience, and virtual performances. Our expertise in metaverse, blockchain, and gaming, along with their deep knowledge of the industry, are allowing us to accelerate the reinvention of the music industry together. We're also proud to be working with Dapper Labs, the creator of the world's most successful digital collectible blockchain apps, including NVA Top Shot and CryptoKitties. We're helping them optimize their processes as we automate the creation of NFTs. We have a long track record working with companies as we bring our technological expertise to education. We have recently been working with EverFi. EverFi enables private, public, and social sector organizations to respond to some of today's most pressing challenges through education, activating community engagement at scales delivered as a service. Through its technology and learning platform, EverFi has reached more than 45 million learners globally while also delivering critical insights to its corporate partners so they can measure and amplify impact on their educational programs. We partner with them to build their brand new onboarding and enrollment platform. We're building a more robust, scalable foundation that integrates with third-party sources of information and eliminates data mismatch and keeps rostering as a core service. It is extremely important for companies to remain human-centric as they embrace technology to improve their own processes and services. The implementation of conversational interfaces is a great example of this. This past year, we began an exciting engagement with Tabisca, a CX Loyalty technology platform, which is a division of JPMorgan Chase. Tabisca and CX Loyalty build products and solutions that empower some of the world's leading customer engagement and loyalty programs. And they're constantly transforming the way brands engage and reward their most loyal customers. The first project called Chatbot recently went live. It helps them improve their service offering and relationship with customers to meet business goals. In the food and beverage space, Danone has partnered with Globant for its transformation to a data-driven company. By applying AI, we're empowering them to have a higher and more insightful level of understanding of their shoppers and consumers and improve the route to market. we're working with agile methodologies and modernization of their platforms, improving the capacity to respond to context changes and to capture the new opportunities that the market generates from changes in consumer behavior. Thank you everyone for your time again. I look forward to Globant's continuous expansion of the array of expertise to keep delivering superb 360 digital transformation. With that, I'll hand it over to Pato, our COO.