StarTek, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss StarTech's financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2022. Joining us today are StarTech's global CEO, Bharat Rao, the company's global CFO, Nishit Shah, and the company's head of business transformation, Ronald Gillette. Following their remarks, we'll open the call 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 a 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-GAAP measures in accordance with Regulation G. The company has reconciled these amounts back to the closest GAAP-based measurement. The reconciliations can be found in the earnings release on the investor section of their website. I would 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 would like to turn the call over to StarTech's Global CEO, Bharat Rao. Sir, please proceed.

Thank you, Kate. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining. Like always, I first want to recognize all our hardworking StarTech ambassadors who are helping us become a premier global customer experience solution provider. Without your help, we would not have been able to accomplish the progress we've made since embarking on our transformation to reinvigorate growth across our organization. Thank you all for your dedication to this company. Our first quarter efforts were heavily focused on investing in our sales and technology ecosystem to drive organic growth in our key verticals and explore new relationships with new clients. Through our efforts, we experienced year-on-year revenue growth, increased our number of services through new digital partnerships, and improved upon our overall platform to support new opportunities within our industry. Early in the quarter, with the backdrop of inflationary pressures, we worked with our customers to develop unique solutions to rising wages and cost of services. We focused on creating an open dialogue to address their customer service needs worked to find the best combination of services for each unique client, and re-iterated our desire to form strategic customer relationships, not just valuing them as revenue streams. As such, we made the difficult decision to graciously step back from a contract we had with a client operating in our e-commerce vertical. Though we valued working alongside them, we wanted to channel our efforts into opportunities where we could make a long-term impact and in the medium term, be margin accretive in that vertical. This decision led to a temporary decline within the e-commerce vertical, though we fully expect to make up the loss with continuing growth in other clients in this vertical. Our financial and business services vertical continued to perform well this quarter. We saw year-on-year growth, and we are expecting strong performance throughout the year from this segment as we deepen our relationships with our existing clients and cultivate new logos. In telecom, we drove year-on-year growth by doubling our efforts to deepen and grow our existing client relationships. As I mentioned in our previous interactions, we are now fully ramped with our client in South Africa, and we continue to win new lines of business with another large telecom client. We also began to see improvement in our travel and hospitality sector as some of our clients prepared to normalize volumes back to pre-COVID levels. This sector is soft compared to pre-COVID levels, but we believe it has begun to trend in the right direction. Despite the organic growth that we experienced through the quarter, we set to rework our existing pipeline, and I am confident that it is now stronger than ever. Like I alluded to earlier, we brought in several sales members in our US territory, that have the expertise and experience to aggressively go out and identify new client relationships. Our new sales team have deep domain expertise in the specific verticals that we want to strategically grow. These efforts are part of our larger overall strategy to revamp our sales ecosystem. One of the three pillars we've identified for growth within our company. We will continue to refine our strategy, but you can expect us to be highly focused on realizing more revenue opportunities within our U.S. territory. I am excited and optimistic with our wins this quarter and therefore confident that the sales pipeline is encouraging. As we discussed on our last call, We have also augmented our capabilities in our infrastructure and cybersecurity front and will continue to identify and prioritize key areas to invest within our technology and cybersecurity areas in an ongoing effort to remain prepared for any malicious attacks against our platforms. We also worked and developed digital partnerships to increase our overall capabilities and product offerings to further grow our platform to offer cutting edge and relevant solutions to our clients. These added digital solutions allowed us to enter new RFPs and have strengthened our overall reach to tackle new and emerging opportunities. A key strategy around our transformation into a digital-first CX organization is to have strategic partnerships that give us access to the latest digital tool sets. As part of this strategy, we entered into partnerships with CRISP, an AI-powered noise cancellation solutions provider, to ensure that we can deliver superior voice-based experience to both our employees and our clients' customers. While our company is poised for growth, we want to ensure that we are continuing to operate within a lean and efficient structure. As a continuation of our efforts, we have been executing on a number of right-sizing initiatives to go along with our growth strategy. This includes optimizing various locations across the globe and working with our employees to develop the best solution for an evolving hybrid work environment. We are seeing positive conversations with our clients involving our hybrid work structure, and we have developed solutions that work for both our people and our customers. As the work environment continues to evolve, we want to be able to offer the same high-quality solutions that our clients have come to expect from us, while being able to provide these solutions in variable work environments. Furthermore, we have been evaluating our physical centers around the world and have been taking steps to ensure that we are maximizing the utility out of each location. These initiatives are still in preliminary stages, so you won't see the tangible benefits in our cost structure just yet, So we expect to begin seeing some of these benefits towards the later quarters of this year. We had a momentous quarter here at StarTech, and I am very proud of the progress that we have made to position the company for future opportunities. I want to reiterate that our work done this quarter was all about finding new ways to grow StarTech. While we achieved incremental top-line growth, our focus is on driving sustainable growth. only possible by optimizing our cooperation and procedures. I would now like to turn the call over to Nishit Shah to provide further details on our first quarter financial results. After Nishit concludes his review of our financial performance, he's going to turn the call over to StarTAC's Head of Transformation, Ron Gillett, to provide more insights into our strategic initiatives for the remainder of the year and beyond. Thank you all of us for joining us, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have during the Q&A session at the end of this call.

Nishit, I'll now pass on the call over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Bharat.