TDCX Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Stuart, your chorus call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the TDCX Incorporated fourth quarter 2021 results conference call. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question today, you press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. Press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the call over to management. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to TDCX 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. My name is Jason Lim, the Head of Investor Relations, and allow me to introduce management on the call. We have our Executive Chairman, Founder, and CEO, Mr. Lahong Junik, and our CFO, Mr. Chin Tsuning. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realised in the future. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. Also, this call includes the discussion of certain non-IFRS financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margins, For a reconciliation of the non-IFRS measures to the closest IFRS measures, please refer to our press release or the Form 6K, which are available on our website. Lastly, we have provided a convenient translation for the translations of Singapore dollar into the US dollar. This was done at the rate of 1 US dollar to 1.3517 Singapore dollar. This should not be construed as representations that the Singapore dollar amounts could be converted into the USD at this or any other rate. Our management will now share updates on the operating and financial performance. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you may have. With that, let me turn the call over to Lahorn. Lahorn, please.

Thank you, Jason, and hi, everyone. I'm very happy to report that in Q4 as well as for the whole of 2021, TDCX delivered financially, delivered operationally, and delivered strategically. First of all, a big thank you to our 14,700 employees who have made 2021 a record year through smart and hard work. Many of our employees had to adapt to the new hybrid work model, and CDCX have delivered enhanced services to support them in this constantly evolving environment. I have also a thought for our employees who were severely impacted by Typhoon Odette in Cebu in the Philippines and the floods in Malaysia at the end of Q4, just around Christmas. Our teams came together strongly to help, and I am very proud of them. Currently, 80% of our employees are still working from home, and I'm happy to report that our latest employee satisfaction survey indicates 89% satisfaction score globally, compared to 88% last year at the same period. What is also important to know is that all indicators in that survey are up. As a result of the contributions for our employees, we delivered a strong financial performance. Our Q4 revenue rose 28.8% year-on-year to a record $114 million or $155 million. Our adjusted EBITDA was $40 million versus $32 million for the same period last year. On a four-year basis, revenue rose 27.7% year-on-year to a record $411 million or $555 million. We managed to achieve a full-year performance above the top end of our guidance range. In particular, we have seen strong contributions across several verticals, Digital advertising and media continued its positive trajectory, rising over 40% in FY 2021 off a very large base. We grew our business with these clients both in the work streams of omnichannel CX and sales and digital marketing across multiple geographies. Two of our newer verticals continue to grow. We gain further traction in the FinTech space as revenue from FinTech clients rose 67% in FY 2021 and 114% in Q4 in particular. compared to the same period in 2020. Gaming was also another bright spot as revenue rose 99% in F1 2021 compared to last year. The travel and hospitality vertical posted a 15% gain in Q4 2021 versus Q4 2020 and showing signs of recovery. For the full year, this vertical was still down 4% compared to 2020. With our continued focus on new economy clients, revenue from new economy clients now stands at 93% of total revenue in FY21. We delivered operationally. So let me next touch on this. In terms of hiring, in Q4 alone, we hired close to 3,000 staff whom we call TDPs. This meant we achieved a 99% fill rate of what our clients asked for. demonstrating the effectiveness of our hiring mechanisms. I'm also very excited about some significant productivity gains we were able to deliver for some of our clients. In one instance, we were able to increase productivity by 170% on a project with more than 700 FTEs. The positive impact for our client was significant. In another instance, DBCX presented a unique concept of customer lifecycle management in new business programs that provides actionable insights, which resulted in 29% incremental acquisition of customers. We have numerous examples of performance, quality, or productivity improvements, and we're continuously working towards adding value to the business and that of our clients. Beyond servicing and growing our existing clients, we were focused on ramping up our business development efforts and adding new logos. These efforts are showing great results. We added a record 20 logos in 2021, more than double the nine that we added in 2020. Let me share some highlights of our logo additions. During the year, we further entrench our expertise in fintech and gaming, two new economy verticals that were not even existing five years ago. We're doing highly specialized work under the fintech umbrella, such as KYC for customer onboarding. and resolution of trading issues. The work for such clients is segregated into various complexity and escalation levels, and we're already helping our FinTech clients at the most complex levels. In gaming, we're starting to move beyond the customer support work on gaming matters, and we now even help to moderate speech and player interaction for our clients, also in foreign languages. We added another two globally recognized gaming clients to our register during the later part of the year. In addition to this, we also added an interesting new food delivery client. Beyond the established international Western firms, we are seeing a wave of exciting Asian-originated large logos across verticals. This includes e-commerce, gaming, fintech, and technology. They will provide a tailwind for TDCX over the medium term, even as we continue to grow along with the established clients already on our client list. With the Strong Logos edition, we ended December 2021 with 52 clients, a 37% jump from the 38 clients as at the end of last year. Now, I was saying that we also delivered strategically. From a geographic perspective, revenue rose across all the geographies we operate in. Our key Southeast Asian geographies, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand, continue to deliver very strong growth, while our newer footprint in North Asia, China, and Japan is starting to contribute a sizable mix to overall group revenue. Recently, we've also announced that we commenced operations in South Korea, our newest geography with three projects at the onset. This further augments our North Asia presence. All in all, 2021 was a good year for geographical expansion and saw us achieving maiden revenue contribution from four geographies, Colombia, India, Romania, and South Korea. These four newly added geographies underscore our plan to continuously expand our global footprint, to offer more language capabilities than ever, and to be better positioned for global RFPs. My executive search unit also delivered the goods in 2021 and continues to be on overdrive mode. Attracting talent in new markets is super important and we have onboarded two senior hires who will be part of the core team in Korea. It's worth noting that one of them joins us from a large Korean CX operator. where he oversaw the international business unit covering some exciting new economy clients in 2021. We also made some senior key hires in India, Romania, in Colombia to lead the new sites. Aside from new GOs, Ben Sun, an ex-McKinsey consultant, joined us in 2021 as SVP Business Intelligence and Solutions and to lead our in-house advisory unit. Ben has been very involved in redesigning our data and process solutions to provide management and our clients with better data and insights for us to make quicker and better decisions. Now, besides new hires, we have made some internal reorg as well. Ricard Valvacant, our EVP for Philippines and Americas, was promoted to Group Chief Client Solutions Officer to oversee areas of B2B branding, marketing, solutioning, and RFP proposals management. Whilst early 2021, Angie Tay took the all-important and new role of Group Chief Operating Officer. As you can see, we have been busy and we still have an exciting pipeline of key hires to fill in 2022, and I will update along the way. In terms of tools and innovation and through our very own digital lab, we invest in developing tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment delivery of desired CX. We now have 39 tech headcount across Malaysia and India who are doing two things. One, enhancing existing tools such as Flash Suite, our own proprietary suite, of management tools to improve productivity and quality. Number two, this team has been working on some new tools. We leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to deploy seven bots, which are now working in sync with our agents in the trust and safety team for a new economy client. The bots truly augment our agents here and drove huge productivity gains. In 2021, this team helped to roll out more than 100 RPA robots to drive efficiency across the group. Our in-house advisory unit led by Benson functions as a close business partner to our ops teams to identify operational and process improvements. I'm confident that these two units will make key contributions to productivity gains. Our offerings to clients continue to evolve to meet their changing needs. In 2021, we commence providing data labeling services. We categorize and label content on our clients' platforms to train and improve machine learning, while also refining algorithms and predictive models. Our clients then use this information to enhance the user experience and utilize key insights on user behavior and evaluation of models for further product improvements and developments. For another client, we also set up a regional team in charge of driving sales for cloud services. On the M&A front, we continue to build our pipeline. Being public listed has certainly given us a boost as our M&A unit has received more ideas in the last five months than in the last five years. So the pipeline is healthy in the sense that we have a good view of what's in the market or coming to the market. And we want to be very selective and act only on the right targets in terms of client mix, footprint, culture, and financial profile. I hope I've given you a good view of what we've achieved during the year. We're now more ready than ever to provide our clients with a truly global solution platform and I'm excited by the opportunities as I look forward to 2022. We believe that what we've achieved so far and the plans that we've laid out sets us on the best possible path forward. I'll now pass over to Mr. Chin to share more details on the financials as well as the outlook for FY 2022.