StarTek, Inc.

Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call

3/10/2022

spk03: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss StarTech's financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31st, 2021. Joining us today are StarTech's global CEO, Bharat Rao, and the company's global CFO, Nishit Shah. Following their remarks, we'll open the call up for your questions. Before we continue, we would like to remind all participants that the discussion today may contain certain statements which are forward-looking in nature, pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on information currently available to us and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. StarTech advises all those listening to this call to review the latest 10Q and 10K posted on its website for the summary of these risks and uncertainties. StarTech does not undertake the responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Further, the discussion today may include some non-gap measures. In accordance with Regulation G, the company has reconciled those amounts back to the closest gap-based measurement. The reconciliations can be found in the earnings release on the investor section of our website. I would now like to remind everyone that a webcast replay of today's call will be available via the investor section of the company's website at www.startech.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to StarTech's Global CEO, Bharat Rao. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Jonathan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining. I would also like to introduce Ron Gillett, who has just come on board towards the end of January and has joined us as Head of Business Transformation. Ron is the former Chief Operating Officer of WNS and brings a wealth of experience to StarTech. So please welcome Ron on board. Since joining as president in October, 2021, I've had the pleasure to travel across the globe and meet with our employees, customers, and stakeholders to get a firm grasp on the opportunities and challenges across our entire organization. Before I jump into the details, I wanted to start this call by taking time to thank all our dedicated employees and stakeholders across the globe. Your commitment and dedication to StarTech throughout all the difficulties we've faced in the macro environment has been instrumental to our continued progress and we deeply appreciate the support. For the structure of this call, I'm going to begin by walking through our accomplishments in the fourth quarter and what we've been able to achieve in the first five months that I've been on the helm. And then I'm going to pass it to our new global CFO Nishit Shah to walk through our financial results for the quarter and provide the full year in more detail. Finally, I'll return to discuss our strategic growth initiatives going forward. On that note, let's dive into the fourth quarter. Our fourth quarter performance was primarily focused on supporting our steady growth across core verticals and developing our operational foundation to hit the ground running in 2022. Our progress was reflected by our year-on-year revenue growth for both the fourth quarter and the full year, which occurred in conjunction with the cost management initiatives we've implemented throughout the year. Our revenue in 2021 and the fourth quarter increased year over year, primarily resulting from the growth we experienced in our key verticals. Telecom continues to be our largest vertical in terms of percentage of revenue, and we saw healthy growth largely driven by adding new lines of business with our existing clients. The large win with the South African telecom client that we spoke to in the previous quarter went live on October 1st and has ramped well through the quarter. Although e-commerce and consumer saw a slight overall decline due to volume reduction of a US-based client, we were able to offset some of that due to a substantial ramp in our e-commerce and food delivery platform in India. While the uncertainty brought on by the pandemic has started to recede, our travel and hospitality verticals have yet to rebound. However, the discussion with clients have started to refocus around growth and ramp, and therefore, we expect the travel sector to rebound sometime in the second half of 2022. On the other hand, financial and business services saw large recoveries back to pre-pandemic levels, as we began to move away from the macro constraints that were brought up in the past. As mentioned before, our vaccination program in the second quarter was a success, leading to a 32% increase in revenue within our healthcare and education verticals for the year. Despite some of our verticals having slight declines due to macroeconomic conditions and volume reductions, we were able to largely offset these decreases with sustained growth across our leading verticals. Operationally, we continue to be focused on strengthening our technological infrastructure. As many of you know, we were hit with a malicious cyber attack earlier in 2021. Since then, we bolstered our operations and security to ensure that our company stays resilient to any future event. Our initiatives included adding multiple layers of security to our data servers and emails, including geofencing and a two-factor authentication, establishing a 24 by 7 center of excellence monitoring, and scanning our networks across the world amongst other efforts taken to ensure that we provide an enhanced secure environment to both our clients and employees. As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, we believe it is our responsibility to maintain our platform and that is up to date with the state of art security measures for our customers and we remain committed to that responsibility going forward. We also spent much of the past quarter evaluating consolidation and right-sizing opportunities across our footprint. It has been our goal to maintain a lean and efficient organization that will be increasingly important as we look to produce meaningful revenue growth. We have already begun improving efficiency in some of our US delivery centers, especially as we transition to our overall hybrid and remote work plan. We remain set on our outlook of having a 75% and a 25% split of campus versus remote agents respectively, which will have a substantial effect on the utility of each campus. As such, we are working to maximize the utility of each center as part of our right-sizing strategy, which includes the consolidation of facilities and even closures. We'll keep you abreast of any material changes to our footprint as we further evaluate the best course of action. In addition to evaluating optimal efficiency across our footprint, we also continue to build out our executive team. Our company is rooted in the business of people, and that starts with our leaders in the organization. In October, we appointed Vivek Sharma, as Global Chief Revenue Officer, who has helped us lead our efforts to deepen our existing relationships with customers, as well as pursue new growth opportunities coming on the horizon. Vivek has a stellar record in the outsourcing industry, having spent over a decade at Infosys BPO, where he headed the global sales and marketing team and was also a member of their executive council. Rebecca Gautrey joined us in November as our Chief Marketing Officer with more than 20 years of experience in brand marketing. She will be using her expertise to ensure that StarTech has a strong presence across all channels and drive our new go-to-market strategies. Around the same time, we appointed Abhinandan Jain as Chief Digital Officer. who will be spearheading our digital innovations and ensuring that we remain focused on leveraging and expanding our digital partnerships. Our leadership team has seen a large transformation in the past year, including my transition to my current role as Global CEO, and each member, new and incumbent, have been paramount in driving company initiatives. Our executive team was not only part of the organization we expanded upon. We consider our sales ecosystem as one of the main pillars of this company and we invested heavily in this area by revamping our sales infrastructure with a reorganized solutioning and lead generation team. We also invested into our marketing team to better identify our brand positioning and and effective go-to-market strategies. In addition, we place much of our attention in driving digital partnerships by entering into POCs with our clients. These POCs are being supported by leading digital companies and startups with whom we intend to establish partnerships to boost our digital practice and provide most advanced and flexible solutions to our clients. For a leading computer manufacturer, for instance, we are deploying a hyper-intelligent automation tool for triaging and case creation which helps them drive customer response times down by 70%. Leveraging an AI-based noise cancellation application for a major telecom customer to deliver superior voice support. deploying a voice-based artificial intelligence omnichannel platform to transform customer service for a major utilities company. These are a few examples of the kind of POCs that I alluded to earlier. The fourth quarter and much of the back half of the year shared a common theme in preparing this company for its future growth opportunities, which I will discuss later on during the call. Overall, I'm very proud of the progress we've made across the organization and firmly believe that future is bright for StarTech. Before I jump into our strategic initiatives for the year and going forward, I would like to turn the call over to Nishit Shah, our global CFO, to provide further details on our fourth quarter and full year financial results. Nishit?
spk02: Thank you Bharat for the introduction. I'd like to first begin by expressing my excitement to join this organization and use my expertise to help accelerate the growth and enhance value for all stakeholders. There is much to look forward to with the strong foundation we have in place and look forward to executing on our growth priorities. With that being said, Let's drive into our financials for the quarter 4. Starting on the top line, net revenue in Q4 slightly increased to $178.7 million compared to $174.5 million in the year-ago quarter. On a constant currency basis, net revenue increased by 2% compared to the year-ago quarter. This year-over-year growth reflects continued performance strength across archi-verticals and geographies. Gross profit for Q4 was $26.8 million compared to $30.2 million in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 15% compared to 17.3% in the year-ago quarter. which was primarily attributable to the growth in our telecom and banking and financial services vertical that are delivering onshore. The gross margin for the quarter for 2021 was also impacted by a special bonus payout of around $2 million that was distributed across the organization. Selling and general administration SG&A expenses for fourth quarter increased to $15.1 million compared to $14.7 million in the year-ago quarter. As a percentage of revenue, SG&A was the same at 8.4% compared to the year-ago quarter as a result of continued operating leverage on the back of higher revenue base we generated during the quarter. Our investments in high-performing sales, solutioning and marketing, and digital team in order to drive growth and differentiation impact our SG&A in the fourth quarter. Our net income attributable to star tech shareholders for quarter four increased significantly to $6.7 million or $0.16 per share compared to a net loss attributable to StarTech shareholders at $-7.6 million or $0.19 per share a year ago quarter. Net income in the fourth quarter of 2021 included an approximate $4.5 million of impairment charge on the right-to-use asset that was driven by the decision taken to rationalize our brick-and-mortar facilities across multiple geographies. Where the company's client services in pivoting towards at-home delivery, the net income attributable to StarTech shareholders also includes $6.7 million in fair value gains from the investment made in CSS . Net adjusted income attributable to StarTech shareholders for Q4 increased 41% to $12.9 million or $0.32 per diluted shares, compared to an adjusted net income attributable to StarTech shareholders of $8.8 million or $0.22 per diluted shares in the year-over-quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in quarter four was $18.9 million compared to $23.3 million in the year-ago quarter. As a percentage of revenue, adjusted EBITDA was 10.6% compared to 13.4% the year-ago quarter. The decline was primarily a result of impact to gross profit associated with the special performance bonus declared in December. And due to high base in 2020, that had benefited from government grants. The quarter was also impacted by increase in IT cost related to upgrading of our applications and measures taken to enhance security infrastructure. From a financial perspective, at December 31st, 2021, our cash and restricted cash increased to $55.4 million compared to $50.6 million at December 31st, 2020. The total debt at December 31, 2021 was 170 million compared to 136 million at December 31, 2020. The net debt excluding restricted cash at December 31, 2021 was 122.1 million compared to 91.5 million at December 31, 2020. We remain comfortable with our liquidity position as it stands today. In addition, we repurchased an aggregate of 353810 shares of our common stocks under our repurchase plan during the fourth quarter at an average cost of $4.44 per share. This was testament to our continued confidence in our long-term growth prospects as well as our strong execution of this initiative. As we progress into 2022, we have maintained our commitment to further support our investments in key market-facing growth initiatives. We also plan to invest further in improving our IT and the go-to-market strategy, including enhancing our digital first capabilities and further building out our sales and marketing teams. We expect these investments and our enhanced infrastructure to have put in place to boost our operational foundation for the quarter ahead. and we look forward to provide further updates on our growth trajectory. Now let me briefly review StarTech's full year 2021 performance. Net revenue in 2021 increased 10% to $703.6 million compared to $640.2 million in 2020. Gross profit in 2021 increased 12% to $97.6 million compared to $87.2 million in 2020. and a gross margin increased 30 basis points to 13.9% compared to 13.6% in 2020. Adjusted EBITDA in 2021 increased 24% to $72.4 million compared to $58.2 million in 2020. As a percentage of revenue, adjusted EBITDA was 10.3% in 2021, up by 120 basis points compared to 9.1% in 2020. Net income attributable to StarTech shareholders in 2021 increased significantly to $1.5 million or $0.04 per share compared to a net loss of $39 million or $0.99 per share in 2020. Adjusted net income attributable to StarTech shareholders in 2021 increased 221% next to $27.3 million or $0.67 per share. compared to $8.5 million or $0.22 per share in 2020. This concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn the call back over to Bharat.
spk01: Thanks, Nishit. I want to take this time to provide some commentary on our strategic initiatives for 2022 and beyond. I've been involved with StarTech's strategic direction since the merger with Aegis in 2018 and I have seen the steady progress we have made these last few years to transform a company burdened with bloated cost structure into a lean and efficient organization ready to grow. Being at the helm from an operational perspective, our focus over the past five months has been on preparing this company for the growth opportunities we've identified across our core verticals. With all the initiatives that I discussed earlier, we have the utmost confidence in our position heading into 2022, and we feel that we are now prepared more than ever to capitalize on the opportunities at hand. Subsequent to the year-end, we continued our initiatives in bolstering our leadership team with the appointment of Ronald Gillett as Strategic Advisor and Head of Business Transformation. Ron was most recently the CEO at Continuum Global Solutions and was previously the Chief Operating Officer for WNS. He will lead the charge in optimizing our CX delivery capabilities to ensure that our platform can handle the ramp up in volumes that we are expecting. We also have Nishit Shah and Jayanta Lahiri joining us as our newest members serving as our Global Chief Financial Officer and Global Chief Information Officer respectively. Nishit brings years of industry experience in financial reporting, mergers and acquisitions, legal and compliance, and much more. He will be integral in our mission to maintain a balanced and efficient organization with healthy financials. Jayanta is one of our investments to ensure our platform is fully capable in today's environment. He will continue to drive our IT transformation into an agile and secure environment for StarTech and its clients. Having a strong leadership team in place is paramount to accomplishing our goals that we set out for ourselves and I am confident in the C-suite that we have assembled. Going into 2022, we will be continuously expanding our overall capacity and optimizing our platform to enhance our omnichannel capabilities. We will continue to invest in our sales ecosystem and we plan on hiring more senior sales staff to implement new initiatives in those areas such as targeting strategic verticals like BFSI, healthcare, e-commerce and high-tech. Our marketing team will be ramping up its efforts in communicating our brand unique digital first capabilities to existing and potential customers. We reviewed and further defined our target audience to enable more focused demand generation activity and as part of our brand building activity entered into partnerships with several third parties to develop our leadership content. Furthermore, Another key area we are focused on is driving new digital partnerships in 2022. In fact, Abby Jane has been driving a few very interesting POCs with some of our strategic clients that have vast potential to become standalone solutions that we can bring to the market. We are also focused on taking up very strategic digital projects and partnerships that can help us offer cutting edge and relevant solutions to our clients. We will continue to optimize our delivery centers as our efficiency ramps up further. Our campuses will undergo some internal efficiency changes in order to maximize their utility and we are exploring all options to ensure our company is at the right size. We have begun discussions with clients in establishing more sustained hybrid working models and we have had very encouraging and engaging responses from our clients. Most of the new deals that Vivek is participating in also have a greater preference for the work at home model which we believe is going to be more prevalent going forward. We are therefore closing down some of our sites particularly in the high cost geography. Lastly, I would like to provide an update on the non-binding acquisition proposal by CSP Management Limited. On December 20th, 2021, our largest shareholder issued a non-binding proposal to acquire all the shares of StarTech that it does not already own for $5.40 per share in cash. Subsequently, our board of directors formed a special committee of independent directors to evaluate the proposal. They have brought on legal and financial advisors to thoroughly examine the deal, while the committee continues its evaluation process. I don't have any material updates to provide, but will continue to keep shareholders updated on any meaningful progress. Overall, we have taken necessary steps to prepare for accelerated growth and we are ready to hit the ground running. Although we continue to expect top-line growth, we will continue to invest heavily for the future which we anticipate will limit growth to the bottom line in the near term. Our core verticals are ripe with opportunity and we are confident in the foundation we have built to capitalize on those prospects. With that, we will now open the call for questions. Jonathan, over to you. Thank you.
spk03: Certainly. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star then 1 on your touchtone telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Our first question comes from the line of Chris Howe from Barrington Research. Your question, please.
spk06: Good afternoon, everyone. First off, I wanted to welcome everyone to the call that's new, and it's good meeting everyone for the first time. I wanted to talk about fiscal year 22. You mentioned some of the performance within key verticals, for example, travel and hospitality. He said sometime in the second half you should see some recovery. As we look at the first half of fiscal year 22 versus the second half of fiscal year 22, how would you place revenue and the expense structure into context versus what you saw this last fiscal year?
spk01: Hi, thank you for the question. Am I audible at your end? Yes, you are. Wonderful. So, just to make sure I understand your question, because we had a bit of a disconnect on the call at our end, is the question around How do we see the first half of 2022 versus the first half of last year? Did I understand that correctly?
spk06: No, that's not the question. Well, in regards to the key end markets, you mentioned that certain end markets should see a recovery in the second half of fiscal year 2022. So, as we look at the first half of Fiscal Year 22 and the second half of Fiscal Year 22, how would you compare and contrast them to this last fiscal year on revenue and also the expense structure?
spk01: Male Speaker 1 Right. So, on the first, I'll just provide an overview, and then we can take any more, any specific questions. When we look at the first half of 22, versus the second half of 22. What we do expect is that some of the initiatives we have put in place from a digital perspective with the build-up of our sales team in the first half of 22 will start showing us results in the second half of 22 typically. As you would expect, You know, some of these initiatives, especially in our industry, they do take time to come to fruition. So there is some lag between the investments made, the people that come on board. So we are working through that. So we do expect to have more sustainable revenue and base going into the second half of 2022. I did mention that we should see recovery in some of the verticals, the travel, et cetera, going into the second half of 2022. So in summary, I think it would be fair to say that the first half of 2022 won't have the same benefits that we had in 2021, because in 2021, we still had the benefit in the first half of some of the COVID-related work that we provided a lot of support for, but we should see the efforts of the first half of 2022 culminate into a much stronger pipeline from a revenue perspective going into the second half of 2022. Equally, the investments clearly have to be front-ended, so we would expect from a bottom-line perspective the first half of 2022 to be relatively flattish in terms of bottom line, because we do see the investments that we have to make up front to be able to realize the benefits in the second half and then into 2023.
spk06: That's very helpful. Thank you. In the follow-up, we'll dig into the You mentioned you're identifying centers with suboptimal performance, you know, for further evaluation and consolidation. Can you talk about this in more detail, what you've discovered as you've obviously you have more flexibility with the work-from-home modality? What's your timeline for this consolidation or optimization of your footprint?
spk01: Sure, I think that's a very good question. What we have done, so just to ensure that I'm very clear in terms of what we mean, I wouldn't call them suboptimal performance. This is more in the context of the point that you just made on a transition to work from home and therefore some idle capacity. So the way we looked at it was, how do we right-size the organization? and ensure optimal capacity utilization. So that's the way we looked at it as opposed to looking necessarily at suboptimal performance, if you will. So we looked at how do we optimize capacity so that we can ensure that we are also able to provide the optimal focus from an operational perspective. So we have done, we have already taken steps in that direction and towards the end of this of quarter four, we identified, the executive team worked through to identify the facilities that we could potentially consolidate. And we've already taken that upfront. So going into 2022, we will actually see the benefits of that flowing through into 2022. Nishit, do you want to add anything to that in terms of... Would you want to add any more color to that?
spk02: Yes, Bharat. So if you go back to the initial discussion that we had in the call, we did cover that on some impairment charge that we had done in quarter four, and that's precisely linked to the discussion that you just mentioned on some of the facilities that we're looking at and that will give us a benefit in 2022.
spk01: Thanks, Nisha. Does that provide you some more color and help you get a better understanding?
spk06: Yes, that's perfect. And one last one, if I may squeeze it in. Sure. You mentioned some of the details as much as you could regarding the non-binding proposal and the special committee is ongoing its review. of this proposal. Does this in any way affect how you go forward with your growth initiatives? Just to get it out there.
spk01: Sure. I think very, very pertinent question in light of everything that's happening currently. But short answer to your question, no, there will be no impact From an operational perspective, the initiatives that we have identified and our priorities for investment will continue unabated. So there will be no impact from a management perspective on the direction that we've chartered and the initiatives that we have prioritized going into 2022.
spk06: Okay. Thank you so much for all the detail.
spk01: You're very welcome.
spk03: Thank you. Our next question comes to the line of Zach Cummins from B. Riley Securities. Your question, please.
spk05: Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Bharat, I just wanted to ask you around some of these foundational aspects that you spoke to in the call. Ever since you took over the leadership position, you've been building out some of these key aspects to really get – the company ready to scale as we move forward. I mean, can you discuss maybe some of the areas that you focused on and kind of some of the key actions that you took to really get the foundation in place for the company to grow moving forward?
spk01: Hey, sure, Zach, and good to reconnect. So in terms of the areas that we have prioritized going into 2022, and the work already started in quarter four of 2021 when I stepped in as president, the three pillars of our growth will be digital solutions and building our digital capabilities. as I mentioned last time and I continue to reiterate that our focus will be on our digital initiatives, partnerships, working closely with clients to identify areas of optimization internally and solutions and customer insights that we could offer our clients. The second area is revamping and rebuilding our entire sales ecosystem. And the third area for us is building a robust technology platform. We have always invested in our technology, but clearly after what we went through, we wanted to ensure that we have significantly improved capabilities on our technology front. to ensure a stable and a secure environment. So these are our three pillars and going forward, we will also build serious capabilities on our technology infrastructure across a few horizontals. Now, given that these three areas are our key areas of focus on the digital side, we are building out our capabilities with Abhi Jain, who joined us in quarter three of 2021. And he's currently building out a team. And as I mentioned, he's already got a few proof of concepts and pilots underway. So I'm pretty excited about everything that we're doing in that space, because this is going to create serious IP for us as we go into 2022 and beyond. From a sales ecosystem perspective, as I mentioned, we brought in in quarter four, we had Vivek Sharma who joined us from Infosys VPO. And Vivek is now building out his team. We have already revamped our solutioning and lead generation team because that effectively is the foundation for our much stronger sales ecosystem. We also brought in Rebecca, who brings a wealth of experience in brand management and knows the industry very well. She joined us from Citil and is working on some very interesting initiatives on the brand repositioning front. As I mentioned, we have also strengthened our lead generation and solutioning capabilities and added on a few experienced resources. across geographies in that area. On the technology front, apart from implementing a number of recommendations that the team, the technical expert team from Palo Alto Networks that we had retained provided us after we had the ransomware attack. So, A, we implemented a number of their recommendations. B, we have strengthened the team and recently had Jayanta Lahiri who was the CIO of First Source and he brings extensive experience from large organizations such as Wipro and Accenture and he brings that wealth of experience and will be building out our entire IT and infrastructure ecosystem. So what we have done is identified our key areas of investments and ensured that we get the right people to build out those areas. And last but not least, in fact, is having Ron on board. I mean, Ron brings a wealth of experience and he's kind of come in to help us with our entire transformation and provides the kind of deep domain expertise. As I mentioned earlier, he was the COO of WNS And prior to that, a very senior partner at Accenture, Deloitte, a number of other organizations having spent over three decades building this business. Ron, if you would like to add some of your insights and provide some more color on the kind of initiatives that we have going into FI22, I really appreciate that. Thank you.
spk04: Sure, Bharat. Let me just add that I think Bharat's covered a lot of it. I think the work that's being done by Avi in the digital space is really important. You know, as StarTech and all companies experience the pivot to work from home during COVID and some of the other things that that brought home to us was certainly the need for more technology enablement and to work in a new operating model going forward. For North America, the United States in particular, there's a desire on behalf of employees and employers, so in this case our clients, to have agents work from home, which presents some technology challenges that many of them were addressed in a fashion to be able to enable that pivot from home But as Rob mentioned, strengthening our technology platform and our environment to enable that not just here in North America but globally is important because work from home is caught on in some other locations as well and will find itself more institutionalized. But the initiatives that Avi's focused on, the use of AI and machine learning and robotic process automation, to strengthen our service delivery I think are very promising. Certainly we've had some of that in place with some clients, but now it's adding to that and building that out and making it available to more clients and making it part of our core offering going forward. So a very promising potential here and opportunity. So the hard pitch that was delivered from COVID has also been something that StarTik responded to well at the time and has learned from and is making that part of a guiding principle here of what we do with the company going forward.
spk01: Thank you, Ron. Zach, hope that provides you some clarity.
spk05: Yeah, absolutely. I always appreciate the additional insights there. And just my other question. is really on potential cost pressures. I mean, just given the current inflationary environment and the challenges to find talent to really execute upon these projects, how are you planning on managing the associated costs with that and being able to maintain margins here in the near and longer term?
spk01: A very good question, Zach, and I guess this is an issue that is faced not only by StarTech but by everyone globally. And that's where we talk about ensuring that we have the right delivery platform. Look at what we can offer onshore versus nearshore and offshore. So right shoring, if you will, of our proposition. That is one element. The other element is where we start having a lot of technology enablers to the solutions we provide, the benefit of which clearly flows through to customers and therefore they see the value that our proposition brings in and therefore to a certain extent insulates us from the kind of cost pressures that we face. But equally, I think what is going to be important is technology is also going to be a big enabler in helping us improve the kind of engagement that we maintain with our agents. Ron alluded to some of the challenges around the work from home situation. So to the extent we have technology and technology enablers that provide us to improve the experience that agents have, when they work either from any remote location or from our centers will go a long way in helping us create the right environment and culture to be able to offset some of these cost pressures. Does that give you some guidance in terms of what we are looking to use to mitigate the effect of the cost pressure?
spk05: Yeah, yeah, extremely helpful. I think that's all the questions I have for now. So thanks again for taking my questions and looking forward to reconnecting soon offline.
spk01: Thanks, Zach. You're very welcome.
spk03: Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Bharat Rao for any further remarks.
spk01: Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you all for joining us this afternoon and for your continued support of StarTech. I look forward to speaking with you next when we report our first quarter results.
spk03: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.
Disclaimer

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