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spk08: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the TDCX Q4 2022 results announcement. My name is Kelly and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand you over to the TDCX management team to begin.
spk04: Hello everyone and welcome to TDCX fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Jason Ling, the head of investor relations. Allow me to introduce management on the call. We have our Executive Chairman, Founder and CEO, Mr Lahong Junick, our CFO, Mr Chin Tzu Ni, and our EVP of Corporate Development, Mr Edward Goh. 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 any reliance on any forward-looking statements. Also, this call includes the discussion of certain non-IFRS financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. For reconciliation of the non-IFRS measures to the closest IFRS measures, please refer to our press release on the Form 6-K, which is available on our website. We have prepared a convenient translation for the translation of Singapore dollars to the US dollar. This was done at a rate of 1 USD to 1.3446 Singapore dollars. This should not be construed as representation that any SGD amount can be converted to USD, at least for any other rate. With that, let me hand over the call to Lahong. Lahong, please.
spk02: Hello everyone, and welcome to our results briefing for the fourth quarter and full year 2022. 2022 has been a challenging year, but despite that, we continue to execute on our long-term growth strategy previously outlined during the IPO. We achieved our growth expectations with almost a 20% increase in revenue year on year. We doubled the number of new logos signed up to 41 and ended the year with our highest ever client count of 84. The new clients on board contributed around 20% of revenue growth for the year. This demonstrates the strong incremental growth that we can deliver from new clients. We also continue to execute well on our global expansion plans. We added three new geographies that have started to contribute meaningfully to our global revenue. I'll share more details later. The TDCX team has worked very hard to deliver all this, and I want to thank them for their efforts and for another year of high growth. Today is International Women's Day, and I want to celebrate the wonderful women that make TDCX what it is today. Now, in terms of revenue highlights, let me first cover some highlights of our financial performance. We delivered robust revenue growth in Q4 2022 as revenue rose 14.2% to US$131 million. This was driven by contributions from clients across key verticals and has helped diversify our client concentration. Our top two clients stood at 52% in Q4 2022 compared to 59% last year, while our top five clients stood at 78% compared to 83% last year. The growth was growth-based as clients outside the top five grew at more than double the rate of group revenues. Now, in terms of revenue contributions from verticals, digital advertising and media remains our largest vertical at 54% of revenue in FY 2022. This is followed by travel and hospitality at 22% and fintech at 12%. Revenue from digital advertising and media rose double digits in 2022, despite some headwinds. This was driven by our relative strength in Asia Pacific, a region where the digital advertising industry is continuing to grow faster than the rest of the world. We are also seeing good growth from other key verticals. Travel was up 26%, while fintech was up over 50%. Gaming was another highlight for us, growing over 70% as we supported our key gaming clients into greenfield sites such as Turkey and Korea. In terms of earnings, Our Q4 adjusted net profit was impacted by a foreign currency loss due to the depreciation of the US dollar and declined 13.3% year-on-year. For the full year, adjusted net profit remains robust, rising 14.1% year-on-year. The profit growth rate was lower compared to revenue growth of 19.6%. This reflects the lower adjusted EBITDA margins of 30.1%. compared to 33.3% in 2021, which was boosted by two exceptional quarters in Q3 and Q4, with margins of 34 to 35%. Our CFO will share more details on the numbers in the later sections. The quality of our earnings growth is translated into strong cash flows, as FY 2022 net cash from operating activities rose 59.3% year-on-year, to 123 million us dollars in 2022 we continued our focus on geographical expansion as a key strategic priority and we added three locations hong kong vietnam and turkey each location brings its unique strength and value proposition while at the same time boosting the group's network capability we're seeing greater contributions from our newer geographies the Seven geos added over the past two years made up 10% of the year-on-year growth in revenue against FY21. Korea is a good example of our network expansion that has worked out very well. Over the past year, we have onboarded three of our existing large clients in Korea, successfully growing our business with them from the original geography. We also continue to receive good RFP opportunities in Korea through our value proposition of being the best friend to international companies. Colombia is also doing well and we want several new clients there who are unique to the group. Besides being completely new businesses on this side of the world, this gives us opportunities to cross-sell into Asia Pacific. As shared earlier, we have continued our business development momentum. We doubled the number of new logos signed up in 2022 to 41 compared to 20 in 2021. Our launch client count rose 62% to 84% as of 31st December. Beyond the new logo sign-ups, we also recorded strong organic wins with our existing clients. Our annual net revenue retention rating FY 2022 was 117%, demonstrating that the incremental pipeline and revenue from existing clients remained strong. Now, in terms of outlook, before I hand over to Mr. Chin to cover the financials in detail, I'd like to provide an update on the outlook for FY2023. The economic challenges we saw last year are expected to have a spillover effect into 2023. Macro uncertainty is impacting our largest clients in the near term, especially in the digital advertising and media vertical. And we recently saw a number of companies laying off. Things have evolved very rapidly within a matter of weeks recently. These clients have had to re-look at their costs and many find it difficult to commit to budget plans for a longer period. Some clients have cut their headcount requirements and we want to be there for them in thick or thin, so we will adapt to serve them best in this challenging time, not just tactically but strategically as well. For some of these clients, The visibility we have on their requirements is reduced a quarter from six to nine months previously, so things could change very fast. As you know, digital advertising is half of our business. This has a significant impact on our forward visibility. Because of these factors and the uncertain macroeconomic environment, we're providing a wider range of revenue guidance at the beginning of the year as a matter of prudence. Revenue growth in FY23 is expected to be from 3% to 8%, We will adjust the guidance range over the year as we get more visibility. Let me now hand over to Mr Chin to bring you through the results and the outlook in greater detail.
spk05: Thank you, Lohan. As Lohan mentioned earlier, our Q4 2022 profit was impacted by a foreign currency loss that occurred in the last couple of months of 2022. Before I go into the details of our Q4 2022 financial performance, let me first share our historical adjusted EBITDA margins including forex differences recorded over the last two years. In Q4 2022, we incurred a relatively large foreign exchange loss of SGD$6 million or USD$4.5 million due to the pronounced depreciation of the USD against the local currencies of our main delivery locations. This arose from mainly the revaluation of USD denominated cash and receivables on our balance sheet held by the main delivery locations. If the net forex losses were to be excluded, adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 29.9% in Q4 2022. This is largely consistent and comparable over the preceding three quarters. Let me now move into the details of Q4 2022 financial results. Revenue rose 14.2% to US$131 million, driven by growth across the omni-channel CX, sales and digital marketing, as well as content trust and safety service lines. Adjusted EBITDA declined 13.1% to US$35 million, largely due to the Forex loss mentioned earlier. Excluding the Forex loss, adjusted EBITDA margins declined from 35.2% in Q4 2021 to 29.9% in Q4 2022. The 5.3% point decline in margins between Q4 2021 and Q4 2022 can be broadly broken into two broad buckets. Firstly, productivity and efficiency. Productivity from several key client verticals for the omnichannel CX service segment in Q4 2022 were lower than expected as we recruited in anticipation of planned project volume expansions, which did not materialize due to a change in short-term outlook. Further, Group revenue and margins in Q4 2022 were negatively impacted by lower productivity levels at our Philippine side, which incurred significant costs in transitioning back to work from office in order to have minimum impact on our clients' projects. The combined impact from these two factors was around 3 percentage points. We are addressing the issue right now. The second bucket involved investments and increased costs to support business growth, including strengthening of our management structure to support business expansion as well as being a listed company status, higher non-staff operating expenses such as depreciation and technology costs, and initial overheads of the newly set up locations in Turkey, Vietnam, and Brazil. The combined impact from these factors was around 2 percentage points. Moving on to profit, our adjusted net income declined 14.5% to US$22 million while net profit for the period declined 13.3% to US$19 million, due largely to the adverse movement in the foreign exchange currency. Next, we share some insights on our Q4 revenue performance by the service lines. Revenue from Omnichannel CX Solutions was up 6% to US$73 million, due mainly to higher business volumes from the travel and hospitality and technology vertical. Revenue from sales and digital marketing services increased by 41% to US$36 million with the extension of existing campaigns from our key digital advertising and media clients, as well as additional contributions from new clients in 2022 which are ramping up. Revenue from content trust and safety services rose by 5% to US$21 million due to high business service volumes from existing clients. In Q4 2022, Omnichannel CX made up 56% of our total business, while sales and digital marketing contributed 28% and content trust and safety at 16% respectively. Let me next elaborate on our operating expenses. For Q4 2022, operating costs as a percentage of revenue stood at 82.1%. This was higher than 76.4% for Q4 last year due to the factors I alluded earlier on adjusted EBITDA margins. Employee benefit expense rose 18% to US$85 million due to higher employee headcount and share-based payment expense arising from the implementation of the Performance Share Plan in November 2021. Our depreciation expenses increased by 11% due to office space expansion to support our business requirements. All other expenses rose 78% for Q4 2022, largely due to the forest loss during the quarter. Besides this, there were increases in rental and maintenance expense for the setting up of greenfield sites in Turkey, Korea and Vietnam, as well as transport and travelling and telecoms and technology expenses to support our growing business needs. Next, let me share some details on our FY 2022 financial performance. Revenue rose 19.6% to US$494 million, similarly driven by growth across all three business service lines. The actual revenue growth falls within the range of what we gathered earlier for the year. Adjusted EBITDA rose 8% to US$149 million as adjusted EBITDA margins landed at 30.1% within our guidance range for the year. The lower margins mainly reflect the forest impact of USD rising talent competition environment and increased support and corporate function overheads. Adjusted net income rose by 14.1% to USD 93 million. Our net income rose by a lower 1.1% because the performance share plan expenses was incurred for the full year of 2022 instead of only the fourth quarter of 2021. For the revenue front, FY 2022 revenue from omnichannel CX solutions rose 15% to US$286 million. Revenue from sales and digital marketing services increased by 45% to US$124 million, while revenue from content trust and safety services rose by 6% to US$81 million. For FY 2022, Omnichannel CX makes up 58% of our business, while sales and digital marketing is at 25%, and content trust and safety at 16% respectively. Let me next share some details on our FY 2022 expenses. Operating costs stood at 80.7% as a percentage of revenue for FY 2022. Excluding PSP costs, this stood at 77.8%. Employee benefit expenses increased by 29% to US$325 million and 23% without PSP costs. Due mainly to higher employee count to support the business volume requirement, higher wage and other operational costs to cope with inflationary pressure. Our depreciation expenses was flat for the year, with most of the capital spending back ended in the second half of 2022. All other expenses rose by 37% driven by the forest cost in Q4, higher equipment as well as telecommunications and technology expenses to support the business volume requirements. Lastly, let me provide an update on our full year 2023 outlook. As Lohan mentioned, there is significant uncertainty in the business environment, in particular for some of our large clients in the digital, advertising and media verticals. Taking into account the recent discussions with our clients, we are guiding for an indicative 3% to 8% revenue growth for FY23. This reflects the limited visibility on business volumes prevailing in this current highly uncertain environment. We have provided a best possible gauge of what is in front of us at this moment in time and opted to be prudent in our assumptions of what business will materialize over the course of FY2023. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be between 25% to 29%. The wider margin guidance range of 4 percentage points reflects the variations in outcome at this point in time due to the uncertain environment. The main factors impacting FY2023 margins against the 30.1% achieved in FY2022 includes this. Firstly, the current market situation described by Lohon earlier will create near-term revenue volatility in 2023, which will impact margins. Meanwhile, we have beefed up our overheads such as management and support structure, including the client services team and our Centre of Excellence division. This also includes our geographic expansion plans, which represent investments into growth strategy for the future, and which will incur initial overhead costs. As we get greater clarity over the course of this year, we hope to adjust or narrow the revenue guidance range over the next couple of quarters. Over 2023, we will adopt a balanced approach between cost optimization and being ready for recovery in the later part of the year. Let me now hand over back to Lohan for some closing remarks.
spk02: Thank you, Mr Chin. Let me just provide some comments before we proceed to Q&As. Despite the near-term uncertainty, I remain confident about our ability to accelerate growth once the macroeconomic headwinds subside. There are four reasons underpinning this confidence. The first one, our stronger business development and client conversion capabilities. We have beefed up our BD efforts in the past two years, and our profile has risen since our listing. These have paid off, giving us a stronger base of clients from which to grow. We believe this is a key change from pre-listing, giving us a much stronger platform to build from. Further, we have beefed up our client services team with seven senior hires throughout FY 2022. They are responsible for pitching for business with existing clients, and we intend to drive a lot more campaign wins with existing clients through this avenue. In Q4 2022, we had our largest ever number of organic wins through RFPs with existing clients. Now, our second point is around our network expansion strategy. The seven geographies that we added since end 2021 give us a much wider footprint. This expansion into Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latam was strategically planned with the objective of positioning ourselves well to emerge stronger. TDCX is now able to provide even more clients with a full range of solutions across different services and different geographies. This will enable us to win new businesses which would not have been possible beforehand. Thirdly, we retain our expertise in core domains and our ability to provide value to clients. In particular, the travel and hospitality sector remains a bright spot and a tailwind for us in 2023. There's still room to grow, in particular when the North Asian travel starts to reopen. We have built in a modest recovery in our numbers. If North Asia travel takes off, we will see a stronger second half of 2023. Another of our key strengths in the sales and digital marketing service, which now makes up a quarter of our business, this is core to our client's business where we are helping to grow their revenues and this segment should continue to be resilient and a bright spot for us. In 2022, we added a key client in this space who has started to contribute meaningfully At the onset, the client selected two locations, which are top-tier cities and multilingual hubs. These house native language speakers with higher qualifications or capabilities, which tends to lead to higher conversion rates. This demonstrates that clients appreciate the higher value that we can bring in ourselves and digital marketing services. Ultimately, we believe that the global digital advertising market remains an attractive, high-growth opportunity over the long term. Lastly, we have embarked on strategic initiatives to deepen our relationship with our clients, such as the launch of our digital CX Center Excellence in Singapore. The center will enable us to provide more dedicated strategic advisory to our clients. We have received a meaningful amount of requests at the very strategic level. Clients are rethinking their CX strategies as we speak. They need to evolve their model, consider optimization, adapt their AI strategies, They come to TDCX to help them with ideas and insights. So what we do is not tactical. We now are in a position to advise them by leveraging insights from our data science and machine learning platform. Just to illustrate, one client is asking us to help them redesign their sales strategy to grow way beyond their existing size. Another has asked us to advise them on their CX strategy in light of increasing complexity of the work their advisors perform. We have huge data sets with years of performance information and trained data scientists and consultants. We believe this is a strategic advantage. Our approach to monetization here is by remaining our clients' global partners and to double down on top-notch execution augmented by data science. With the strong talent pool that we have built here at TDCX, our ability to provide value-added services to our clients will continue to be a differentiator. I'm confident these points will position us to better navigate the current market conditions. Once our clients get better visibility of their cost efficiency efforts, later down the road, we will be in a very strong position to benefit. Further, the continued recovery of sectors such as travel and hospitality and markets such as China will help, and we remain optimistic of our growth prospects over the mid to long term. With that, let me hand over back to Jason.
spk04: Thank you, Lahorn. We are now ready for the Q&A session. Before we begin, can we request that you keep your questions to the maximum of two each? If you have more questions, please rejoin the queue and we will come back to you. Operator, can we have our first caller, please?
spk08: Thank you. Our first question comes from Casey Ong of CGS CIMB. Please go ahead.
spk03: Hi, Morning Management. Thanks for taking my question. Two questions from me. Firstly, can you provide more breakdown in terms of segmental trends around the revenue guidance provided, please? And with the recent headlines on tech layoffs, can we confirm if TDCX campaign size with any of such clients have been negatively impacted as an extension? Question number two, any further color you can give around your margin guidance? Is this baking in further Forex headwinds similar to what we have seen in fourth quarter? And are you seeing a harder time passing through some of your operating cost increases to end customers given the macro headwinds? Yeah, thanks.
spk02: Thank you, Casey. Laurent here. I'll take the first question. I'll have the second question answered by Mr. Chin after that. The question around the guidance and which are the segments impacting us the most, I would safely say that digital advertising is one of them. It's not a secret that you can see the big digital advertisers have been announcing layoffs. They've provided negative guidance for the year. Their business is definitely impacted. So it would be very difficult for us not to be impacted in that sector. But within those digital advertising companies, you know, we do three things. We do OCX, the customer support work. We do their sales. And we do their content moderation for some of them. So where we see the biggest impact right now is on the customer experience side, the OCX part of the business where the volumes have come soft, and that is impacting us in the near-term forecast. So let me just, again, backtrack a little bit. We see some macroeconomic uncertainty. We have seen quite a bit of volatility and changes very recently that's caused us to come up with a softer forecast on the back of reduce expectations in terms of volumes, but also clients looking for more efficient ways to manage their business. But that's really on the CX side. So we are going to need to adapt to support our clients. The challenge for us is with visibility. We can see three months ahead and that's it. And things may turn around very fast, but as you can see, the Fed is possibly going to be increasing, continuously increasing interest rates. Would that have an impact on the small and medium enterprises who are consuming digital advertising or e-commerce or other types of services? So we're not really sure how is that going to impact our clients moving forward. So right now, three months visibility, limited visibility, mostly driven by all our digital advertising clients, not just one, and really looking at also optimization and efficiencies. So I hope that answers the question. Mr. Ching, you want to talk briefly about the margin guidance as well?
spk05: Yeah. On the margin guidance, to answer CK's question. That is, in the first one month of this year, there is a little bit of continuation of the Forex volatility that was acted in into the guidance. Going forward, I would say it was, Forex were kind of square off each other over the longer period of time. So in the near term, there will be some further fluctuations that will be impacting our margins to a certain extent, but probably not as significant as Q4. But it remains to be seen. On the other side of the equation is the, as what Rohan mentioned about the revenue volatility that It's coming through due to volume flattening by some of the clients, some reduction here and there by some of our key clients to addressing their own business volume that they are facing. On the whole set of things, we have also, as what I said in my script, invested overheads that we have done in recent period, especially last year, to address, to actually cope with our earlier intended growth that in a way will be a bit sort of flat going into this year um and but the thing is we try to uh pace the overhead growth a bit nearer to our uh the business side of things um to mitigate against all these uh revenue volatility and also the headwinds that is uh coming our way now so that's in essence uh how the um The margin is evolving. We are hoping to evolve this year.
spk02: And Casey, if I may follow on, I mean, there's some bright spots in travel, in gaming, new business, financial services as well. For us, it's really something that is contextual of the digital advertising, some other sectors As well, so it's a macroeconomic impact more than anything else that's driven us to do this revised forecast. As far as the company is performing, we're really performing at the top end of the chart with our clients. So I'm very confident of our capability to ride this moment. The question really is how long is that going to last? and in what shape or form. But as far as we're concerned, we're sticking to our guns with the investments we've made, and we want to continue to double down in providing great services for our clients and be ready when things shape back up on these sectors. And again, it's not all parts of those sectors that are affected. It's more on the CX side, which makes sense when you look at it.
spk03: Thank you so much for the explanation. Can I have just one follow-up, if I may? Yeah, yeah, please go ahead. Yeah, sure. It's mainly on a new client that you've won last year within the short video space. Given the recent headlines, do we foresee any potential impact for that client? Thanks.
spk02: Thank you, Casey. A bit early to tell. We still have some growth potential from this client because of the early part of our relationship. So we haven't adapted our forecast because right now what we see is more narrative. Until that really happens, then we'll adjust accordingly. Fortunately or unfortunately, the business is not huge for us right now, so the impact may be moderate if there is any at this point.
spk03: Thank you so much. You're welcome.
spk08: Thank you. We now have our next question from Pan Fit of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
spk09: Thank you very much for the opportunity to question for me. Maybe firstly, sorry to go back on the revenue guidance again, but I just want to make sure that we understand it right. I think if you're actually looking at the mid part of your guidance, somewhere around 5%, it's somewhat implying that 2023 is seeing some declining trend from the exit rate from fourth quarter 2022. So if I were to go back there and asking about the trend that you're currently observing, What led you to this belief that things are going to trend badly? Of course, you mentioned a couple of things earlier, but I just wanted to understand a little bit deeper in terms of the numbers there. On top of that, if you can also provide in terms of how do you view the trajectory between the seasonality, why as well, first half, second half, are we going to see more weakness at this point in time in the first half already, or most of the will come more in the second half of the year. Any comments about that would be extremely helpful. So that's question number one. Question number two, I think, you know, we have seen you expanding into many new geography in the last couple of months. I think more recently we also see you just opening new office in Brazil as well. So wondering, you know, with all these new expansion in geography, et cetera, Why are we not seeing this coming in in terms of the revenue impact at all? And how long will it take for any of these new geographies to ramp up and seeing some positive momentum there?
spk02: Yes, thank you, Pong. Nice hearing you again. Yeah, the revenue guidance, I think you... You really nailed it here about our ability when you're saying you want to know more of the first half versus the second half. And then your first question on really a bit more color on the revenue guidance. Very much the driver here is softer volume we're seeing from clients. To be taken with a pinch of salt, Because what we see is clients laying off, looking for efficiencies, cost-cutting is their first order of the day. And you can imagine a little bit of panic mode. I'm not saying they are in panic mode, but everything goes almost in the early part of these decisions in general. Later down the road, they could change in different ways because the volumes actually are much bigger than expected. Second, I did mention, I think, in the past that the layoffs or clients looking for efficiencies could have a positive impact on outsourcing because they're going to be cutting their middle management layers. They're going to be needing to do more with less, and outsourcing stands to benefit. The big question for us is when. And right now, with that volatility, what we really can see that the clients can commit is three months. And we are taking a fairly conservative approach to forecasting. We're not the types to make bets on the second half. So will the second half turn around? the increased number of interest rate hikes make it worse. Maybe some people know, but I don't at this point. So we're taking a very conservative approach. So that's probably one for the difference between first half and second half. There is definitely hope that the second half will be much, much better than the first half, but I can't commit to a number at this point. So that's why we gave that wide range of... of 3% to 8%.
spk01: Pang, this is Ed here. Maybe I just want to sort of supplement what Laurent had said around sort of the broader markets and trends on digital advertising. I think if you look at what happened in 2022, broadly the expectation for the market in that sector was to go at around 15%, 16%. But based on some of the stats we're getting from some public sources, I think they're expecting that year to just close at half of that, which is just 8%. So I think the sector, including some of our clients, are basically having to adjust their resources and expectation for 2023. There are some early stats that say that this year, originally they were expected to grow, rather digital advertising market is expected to grow by 13%, but that's moderating to around 10% this year. The adjustment downwards for the market this year is less, but what's happening is that the clients, after going through quite a drastic cutback in 2022, are having to sort of rethink quite hard. And I think that's sort of, I think we're feeling a little bit of that repercussion in terms of clients' willingness to commit. So I think I just want to sort of connect what's happening in a broader market to what we're seeing and hearing from the client.
spk02: And as a follow-on to this, I mean, there's some bright spots in The second half possible bright spot for travel, for example, if travel over delivers on our expectations, we've built in a fairly modest growth for our travel business this year. Again, the question will be, will travel be impacted through the rise of interest rates or will it not? If it's not, then we stand to benefit. So there's a number of things that are not under our control to put a stronger forecast at this point. We've provided that wide range. There's a possibility we can beat that. There's a possibility we stay within. It's going to depend on some of those macroeconomic factors and all the good things that we're doing. So the good things we're doing around winning new business, winning a lot more new business from existing clients, which is also a very good sign. of our capabilities and our client satisfaction. Otherwise, clients wouldn't come to us for more if they were not satisfied with what we do. Coming back to your question about the new GOs that are not yet delivering enough, they're starting to pull their weight. And the good news is that the GOs we opened last year all opened with business. And that's been on the back of quite a bit of gaining. which seems to be another bright spot for us in 2023. So gaming is great. Well, you know, before in 2021, we were opening a few geos with no business, right? Now, how long is it going to take? We think two to three years minimum to see proper effects of those new geographies. But they are essential to our strategy. of growth and relevance to our existing clients. So I'm a little bit excited about 24, actually, because we're going to be in an incredible position to be a global player. We see it from a number of clients, big clients, who are now also looking at optimizing the number of vendors they have, and I'm happy to see that TDCX is making it to the list And that, especially in sales and digital marketing, for example, 2024 could be an interesting year for us. But I don't want to go too far ahead since we're really looking at solid forecasts in a matter of months rather than a matter of years. What I'm trying to say is that we see very strong fundamentals for the BPO sector, for the outsourcing industry, but more importantly,
spk09: for tdcx in our ability and the way we've delivered our strategy so far we're spot on where we need to be to be ready for for the bounce back uh thank you maybe just quick follow up there um just to be clear if you can help uh comment and double click on the you know industry landscape as well can we also basically say that what exactly you are seeing are not a result of you losing market share, but it's an industry trend overall. Meaning that other peers that you are observing in the industry are actually seeing similar trends for this year.
spk02: It's a bit difficult for us to tell on the other peers. They all have very different business than we have, different geos, some are much more diversified. And then I think you may have seen the guidance that were given by them. But in general, what I think is, and that's my own opinion, that in moments of crisis, clients are going to be asking a lot more from their vendors. So you need to perform at the top of the league and we do at TDCX. So that's the good news and that's an instruction I've been working hard on since actually second quarter of 2022. We could sense that this pressure on performance was going to be important and it is. So I know it's a constant thing to perform well, but it's going to be even more important. but also we're going to need to perform efficiently for our clients so that they have their efficiencies in productivity, in cost efficiencies, and not just cost efficiencies, in productivity. And again, once again, we're doing well on that front. We've invested, as I've spoken about before, into our consulting division, our advisory and transformation, and we are playing a part at the strategic level with clients at this very important moment where they're rethinking some of their strategies. So that's going to be, again, coming handy to be invited to the big bets of 2024. And if we position ourselves well enough, which I think we are, we stand again to win. I hope that answers the question, Pong. Sorry for a long-winded...
spk09: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Maybe just last one here before I jump back into the queue. Adjusted EBITDA margin definitely came down from what we have seen in historical trend, 25% to 29% for your guidance. Is this something that we should expect beyond 2023 as well, that the number will be at the normalized run rate of high 20% or we actually may actually see things going back to low 30% again? some colors around here would be helpful.
spk02: I'll take this maybe more on a general basis. So, I mean, the guidance and Mr. Chin has given some color on the details of it for the revised guidance. From my point of view, it's really a matter of context of volume reduction that is pretty faster than we're able to manage our overheads down and a mix of wanting to overperform for clients and taking in some bigger overheads on our side. I don't mean by overheads, but more by direct cost to really keep being at the top of the game. So there's a temporary element of the margin reduction, which is contextual. From a long-term point of view, it is our views that we can continue to have the margins we've been guiding for in the past, as long as we don't change our business model. And at this point, we believe we're on the right business model, so no intention to change it at this point. Mr. Chin, if you want to chime in.
spk05: Yes, thank you. Further to that, the direct cost, as what Lohan said, we are watching it quite closely to address the volume contraction, but at the same time, we still want to stay invested in necessary and critical overhead resources to ensure that we deliver the best service still. to our clients who are going through tough times, sort of investment in ensuring the stickiness of those clients with us through these challenging times so that in the times when the volumes start to show signs of recovery, we will be there to reap the fruit of the recovery. And also on the indirect or the fixed overheads. There are some overheads or some investment in technology that we have embarked since last year that we, in our pursuit of automation, in our pursuit of better way of working we are still going through those motions and the projects are still ongoing and it is a long-term project so to speak ranging from two to three years so we are not aborting those projects that as we speak to because we believe that those platforms those tools those projects, transformative projects that are necessary, essential part of our business to support our clients better. There will be a slide of the compression that I mentioned in the near term. Whether it will go back to the 30s, it remains to be seen. I wouldn't be able to comment that well, how the recovery will pan out in the coming like you say, second half year and going into the next 12 months, going into next year. So we will be watchful and mindful without sacrificing our quality of service for our existing clients who are going through tough times as well as onboarding the new projects, new clients in the new jewels going forward. So it's a lot of moving parts that we have to balance in terms of overhead management. in reaction to the business fluctuation. Hope I answered your question.
spk09: Thank you. Thank you. Yes, it's answered. Thank you.
spk08: Thank you. We now have our next question from Verum Ahuja of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
spk06: yeah hi um thanks uh thanks for the opportunity a few questions uh so obviously uh during this year you expanded into seven locations how should we think about the plan in 2023 given some of the macro headwinds that you alluded early in the call and how should we think about mna uh on that context right there's not there's an option of going inorganically versus organically so given the cash on the balance sheet and healthy cash flow generation so just on that line of thought on the question number one. Question two, obviously there's a lot of talk about generative AI and the impact on the business. A few clients have also kind of trying to gauge on that front. So given we have management on the call, it would be helpful if we can some color, how should we think about the generative AI and its impact? I know it's more long-term, but what kind of investments are you making right now and thinking about it? That's number two. If I can squeeze in one more, your medium-term growth aspiration still remains the same during the IPO time that you guided for around 20% growth, 20-25% growth. Is there any change on that front? Thank you.
spk02: All right, Varun, thank you so much. That's quite a few questions. Plans 2023, geographically, we have a Brazil that we are in the midst of opening as we speak, and Indonesia. And with that, we will be, as I said before, that we are now opening offices on demand from clients. So they start with business as a complement of our network. We will continue with that strategy in 2023. as opposed to what we did in 2021 where we needed strategic network expansion by committing a presence in country. And so that will have a probably better effect in our P&L, but also it's reflective of the fast expansion that we've performed over the past two to three years. We think our network is in a good place now, and we have enough products to offer to our clients in global English, Asian languages, European languages. We're covering it all, almost, and we'll see, depending on demand, if new geos are required. So that's for the plans for 2023. On the generative AI side, the trend of... automation, artificial intelligence is not new and that's why we've started investing in that sector for quite a number of years. We've made good progress with our digital lab that is fully functional for a number of years. We've developed a number of tools that we leverage to support our support services but also our clients. And then now we have this consulting division that we are leveraging to provide the consulting services at the most strategic level for our clients as they consider further automation, further optimization. It is not just coming from generative AI or AI in general. It's also through process optimization and the strategic thinking. So we are... going for not just the delivery at AI and data science particularly, but also at the strategic level. And that also, the last one I wanted to say before I hand over to Ed to talk about the M&A, is that, well, maybe I hand over to Ed first on the M&A side.
spk01: Sure, Laurent. On the M&A front, look, I think we're very confident with where we are. Since the listing, obviously, we've been receiving a lot of ideas coming from different advisors, a network of bankers. We have a very good sense on what's out there. We have a very good sense on what we want to pursue proactively as well. We're very disciplined. with regards to what we're looking for in terms of the financial profile, in terms of the footprint, in terms of the client mix. And obviously with the current business climate, it makes it a lot more compelling for us to look more closely and to be disciplined with the type of targets that we're engaged with. But on the other hand, I think as you notice and observe as well, we're obviously in a good place with the cash balance that we have to be able to deploy it, particularly in a climate where the interest rate is still very high. It puts us in a strong position for us to act on strategic acquisition. So stay tuned on that one. I think we're working hard. I think, as I said previously, we're looking for... targets that are synergistic and also sort of horizontal in terms of what we are doing. But at the same time, I think as we talked about what you said, generative AI, related to that is the conversational AI. It's a very fragmented sort of market out there as well with a few thousand vendors that are looking at things like sentimental analysis, language translation, document processing, all those could be interesting. ideas for us to explore as well as we try to blend that into what the consulting unit is doing, what our center of excellence team is trying to achieve. So the opportunities are abound. I think we're quite excited with this particular area.
spk00: Thank you. Thank you.
spk06: The last question was on the medium-term growth forecast. It still remains the same, 20-25%, once this macro headwinds kind of clears.
spk02: It depends how you define the medium-term, Varun. The things have changed dramatically since we went IPO, right, in 2021. So I have difficulties giving you a a number in the current moment given the lowered guidance we have in 2023. In effect, if the outsourcing, you know, the assumptions we've made was on the back of a growing BPO business globally through indicators given to us by known companies or advisors. So now the question is, have these assumptions been revised? If they have not, we have absolutely no plans to change once we've kind of gone over this economic crisis which is almost unprecedented. And if there's no impact, then there's no reason we should change our assumption. We're in a fast-growing region. We have leadership position in some key markets. We're doing well with new economy clients. Those have not changed, those fundamentals. Now, is the tech sector, is the new economy, companies are going to recover? I think they will. The question is always the same. It's when. But you cannot stop the pace of digitalization. It's happening. New categories are created all the time. CX is an essential part of their delivery. It's not about to go away, and again, TDCX strategy is to aim for the higher complexity type of work, which has a good opportunity. What we see as a trend is the complexity is really rising, and the need for top talent, top training, top processes and strategy is going to be increasingly important for our clients, and we intend to be there to deliver it for them.
spk00: Thank you. Thank you, Lauren.
spk06: Thank you, Ed. And good luck for doing anything here and beyond.
spk08: Thank you. Our next questions come from Sigrid Chu of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
spk10: Hi, good morning, management. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I have two questions. Firstly, I understand that some of your competitors are witnessing lengthened selling cycles because of greater client cost discipline. So maybe I just want to confirm with you, are you observing the same trend? And if so, how long do you think the increased contract deliberation will persist in 2023? And maybe how will it affect your new client acquisitions? as well as existing client penetration. And my second question would be on the employee expense. I'm wondering would forecast employee expense would be a reasonable base for us to forecast for 2023? And you've mentioned that there's a reduced productivity and the potential of hiring. So how would it go from here directionally? Maybe more In detail, maybe how should we think of your hiring plan going to 2023? It would be great if you can break down the geography as well. That's all from me. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you, Sigrid. The longer sales cycle, yes, I can confirm. In these times of uncertainty for our clients, they see decisions are taking longer. to make so they're sitting on decisions and it's delaying us in our ability to bring in a new business yet where we're still able to close some deals and it's the go-to market is we have faster decisions from existing clients than we get from new opportunities so yeah I can confirm we've observed that trend When is it going to subside? I'm not sure. Possibly second half where clients need to make decisions because they need to make their year, right? So the pressure then is on them to finally make that decision they're sitting on because of lack of confidence and having difficulty. So we understand the challenge they're going through. The employee expense, I will partner with Mr. Chin, but I think part of your question is can we use a Q4 as a benchmark for 2023. Keep in mind that Q4, operationally, we did have some kind of challenges, or we adapted our strategy to meet our clients' requirements, and so I'm not sure I should use this as a as the approach to 2023. But Ed, you want to chime in?
spk01: Yeah, I think just to add on, I think 4Q was, I would say, a relatively unusual one because there were specific sort of challenges and we are working on it right now to resolve that. I think looking at a full year of 22 instead of 4Q22 sort of might be more representative of, you know, the performance going forward obviously we must bear in mind that there are still challenges particularly on sort of the inflationary pressure it could still uh be a swing factor there which i'm sure mr chin has already affected that in as well in the margins top process yes yes um so um an extension of to both the gentleman's uh responses 4q serves as a platform for us to be
spk05: re-look, re-calibrate our employee workforce plan into our staffing and stay, as what I said earlier, to stay as close to the volumes of the client, which unfortunately is swinging quite with wide bandwidth. But having said that, first quarter of 2023 would probably have a a small indicator of where we will land. But I would say it serves as a platform for us to revisit and recalibrate our planning in terms of staffing and hiring strategies. Also, in terms of revisiting some of the talent profiles to see whether there's any room for productivity, room for cost optimization to mitigate against the revenue challenges that both the gentlemen have alluded in the early part of the conversation. So it is a learning process and it is re-planned and re-executed and we have deployed some strong leadership to some of these units like the Philippines, and all the rest of the units which are also going through some of these events to a certain extent in pockets of projects and locations.
spk00: Thank you.
spk08: Thank you. This question comes from Han Tan of HSBC. Please go ahead.
spk07: Thank you very much. So you guys talked about lower utilization impact on EBITDA margin. Could I ask for those employees that are being utilized, how much is the sort of your price spread narrowing over wages? And how much of that contributes to the sort of the reduced EBITDA margin guidance for this year?
spk04: Sorry, Han, we missed the question. Can you repeat again?
spk07: Other than lower utilisation impact on EBITDA margins, how much is the spread of your pricing over wages for those employees that are being utilised? How much has that contracted?
spk03: It has not contracted.
spk04: For those employees that are being utilised, the margins has not contracted.
spk07: Okay, so you don't expect any contraction. Yeah, for this year, is any of that margin erosion from pricing contraction? No, right?
spk04: No, not from pricing erosion.
spk07: Okay, thanks. Well, just one final question. I want to ask about outsourcing impact. You said that you might see that later in the year, but A lot of the vendors are saying that clients are asking them to be part of this onshore to offshore transition. So I wanted to ask if you have won any incremental new deals from the clients that are looking to offshore, or if all the business stays with the big BPO vendors?
spk02: I think the big BPO vendors all have a big network both onshore and offshore, so they'll probably keep the business. They just will need to relocate it to lower-cost locations. So as much as we can say that maybe the price won't have erosion, but the revenue per employee may have because of the flight to lower-cost locations wherever possible. And that's quite a natural strategy in a moment like this of our clients looking for efficiencies. So I think, yeah, you'll see possibly in the industry clients looking to move away from, let's say, the U.S. into the Philippines. So it's a positive for us. We're not in the U.S., or in India or in Colombia to do cost optimization. But we may also be impacted by clients looking for lower cost location that we can provide in Asia Pacific as well. So something to keep in mind as well. And so I think it's a good one in terms of the trends that we can see.
spk05: Okay, thank you.
spk04: Okay, thanks, Han. I think that's all the time we have today for Q&As. Thank you all of you for joining us. If you have any follow-on, just feel free to reach out to me. On behalf of management, we're signing off. Thanks, and take care.
spk08: This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your line.
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