StarTek, Inc.

This conference call to discuss Startex financial results for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2022. Joining us today are Startex 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 security 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. StarTAC 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. StarTAC does not undertake the responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Further, a discussion today may include some non-GAAP measures. In accordance with Regulation G, the company has reconciled this amount back to the closest gap-based measurement. The reconciliations can be found in the earnings release on the investor section of the 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, you may proceed.

Thank you, Renan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining. Our second quarter results were in line with our internal expectations as we operated against the backdrop of shifting market conditions. While we experienced soft year-on-year declines in revenue, The prior year quarter received a large benefit of one-off revenue opportunities with the CDC as well as general market tailwinds. Our priority during the second quarter was the ongoing ramp-up of client services in several verticals by training and hiring additional agents to expand our capacity, While this process inevitably comes with a margin compression, we expect to recapture the profitability impact in the coming quarters. Both our core telecom and financial and business service verticals continue to perform well and show consistent year-over-year growth through the expansion of services we drove to our existing clients. Through our telecom vertical, we deepen our relationships with our clients across the U.S. and South Africa as these territories represent valuable growth opportunities for our company. Travel and hospitality has proved to be slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels, showing consistent growth for the past few quarters and for this last quarter as well. Whilst still soft compared to pre-COVID, we do expect the vertical to continue on its consistent trajectory based on normalized activity levels. Our healthcare vertical showed a large decline, though this is due to the prior year quarter netting a one-off vaccination support program that contributed an outsized portion of our revenue to our mix. Our sales ecosystem showed improvement through the quarter as we added seven new logos with several more in advanced discussions. Our investment in our sales team and marketing initiatives have greatly bolstered our existing sales pipeline with the greatest effect occurring in our U.S. territory. Driven by our brand awareness campaigns, We are beginning to receive an influx of incoming calls and requests for proposals by prospective clients all across the U.S. Our redefined marketing strategy has provided immense value in bringing greater awareness and visibility to StarTix, while our revamped sales team tangibly builds our sales pipeline for future expansion. As one of the three main pillars of growth we have identified, we will continue to lean upon our sales ecosystem to expand our footprint across the industry. As we continue to expand our platform, we are ensuring that our capabilities remain at the forefront of the industry. Last quarter, we entered into a partnership with Genesys to leverage their leading technologies in cloud software, customer experience services, and call center capabilities. At StarTech, our goal has been to provide highly empathetic customer experience solutions to our clients, and we will continue to identify and partner with emerging technologies that allow our agents to effortlessly do so. Genesys and their seamless contact center experience is a natural fit for our platform and has meaningfully streamlined our agents' work processes to allow them to better focus on personalizing their conversations with customers. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Genesys and further leveraging their technology to provide best-in-class services to our customers. Alongside our digital partnerships, last quarter we announced the launch of StarTech Agent AI, a modular platform that combines AI-powered solutions to enhance and deliver a superior agent and customer service experience. Our platform supports our agents across the globe and will allow us to onboard faster, cultivate new skills more efficiently, and reduce the burden of repetitive manual tasks. As mentioned earlier, We are focused on providing the necessary tools to allow our agents to provide best-in-class services to all our clients. StarTech Agent AI builds upon the success of our award-winning StarTech cloud platform, and with combined capabilities, our customers can be confident that they can deliver a world-class customer experience through our platform. In the second quarter, StarTech was named the winner of the Comparably Award for Best CEOs for Diversity, an award that I was honored to accept on behalf of the company. It has been an incredible privilege to work with our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to foster a diverse and inclusive work environment for our 46,000 associates around the globe. I am proud of the culture that we have built for ourselves and we will continue our commitment in nurturing an environment that promotes the voice of all our employees. We continue to evaluate our hybrid work structures and our mix of physical contact centers as the macro environment evolves to ensure we remain a lean and efficient organization We recently exited one more site in the US and will continue evaluating our physical infrastructure across all geographies. We also remain committed to optimizing our fixed cost structure to eliminate excess expenditures and reallocate those savings towards sales, marketing, and digital efforts. Overall, We had another exciting quarter where we continued to capitalize on our investments and position StarTech for growth. The work we have done this quarter was necessary in preparing our platform for the ongoing ramp up with new and existing clients. As we continue to invest within our sales ecosystem and marketing teams, we must be prepared for the future demand that we are aggressively generating. While we do not achieve our year-on-year top line and bottom line growth, our focus on preparing a platform for the future has positioned StarTech to return greater value back to shareholders. Just a note that we are not going to discuss today the non-binding proposal made by Capital Square Partners. For the latest statement by the special committee, I direct everybody to the press release dated June 21st, 2022, that is available on our website. I would now like to turn over the call to Nishit Shah to provide further details on our second quarter financial results. After Nishit concludes his review of our financial performance, he's going to turn over the call to StarTech'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 for joining us, and I'll be available to answer any questions you may have during the Q&A session at the end of this call. Nishit, I'll now pass over the call to you.

Thank you. Thanks, Bharat.