Wipro Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Wipro Limited Q4F420 quarterly investor conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode. And there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note, This conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Aparna Iyer, Vice President and Corporate Treasurer. Thank you and over to you.

Thank you, Stanford. Warm welcome to our Q4 FI20 earnings call. We will begin the call with the business highlights and overview by Abed, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, followed by a financial overview by our CFO, Jatin Dhanal. Afterwards, the operator will open the bridge for Q&A with our management team. Before our bit starts, let me draw your attention to the fact that during this call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reforms Act 1995. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are associated with uncertainties and risks, which may cause the actual results to materially differ from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are explained in our detailed filings with ACC. WICRA does not undertake any obligation to update the forward-looking statements to reflect the events and circumstances after the date of filing. The conference call will be archived and a transcript will be made available on our website.

Thank you Aparna and good evening and good morning ladies and gentlemen. I am joined by my entire executive committee that is the Wipro Senior Leadership Team virtually today as we practice social distancing and have adopted ourselves to the new normal of working as a leadership team. We will share with you the results for the fourth quarter and full year performance for the fiscal year 2020. But before I do that, I want to thank the leadership team, all of the 180,000 plus Viproids globally, our customers and our partners for their untiring efforts and perseverance as we transformed ourselves into this new normal and enabling us for delivering on our commitments to all our stakeholders. These, as all of us know, are unprecedented plans and I'm extremely proud of how the entire team has come together in the face of this crisis and worked 24 by 7 to ensure the safety and well-being of each other while continuing to serve our clients. The fact that we've been able to stick to the earnings release schedule that was published several months back is a testament to these efforts. On our Q4 and full year performance, as you might have seen, our Q4 revenues grew by 0.4% in constant currency terms within our guidance range. And for the full year, we grew at 3.9% in constant currency. The first few months of the quarter were strong for order book, closure of large deals, and ramp up across all of our projects. But in March, as the COVID health crisis rapidly deteriorated in key markets like US, Europe, UK and the lockdown in India, we clearly saw an accelerated impact to our business. Let me talk a little bit about our response to the COVID crisis. As we realized earlier in China and then in Philippines, we quickly activated our COVID-19 Global Crisis Management Task Force, headed by Bhanu, our Chief Operating Officer, and consisting of various cross-functional teams of business continuity planning, our Chief Information Officer, our Chief Information Security Officer, our HR team, Our facilities management group, corporate affairs team and our topmost priority was and remains the safety and well-being of our people. With a lot of cooperation across not only internal but even external stakeholders including the administration in various jurisdictions, we were able to move by early March most of our people in global offices We enabled work from home. On March 15th, we changed the working arrangement for our support employees based in India to work from home and started enabling the 165,000 billable client facing employees to work from home. The initial effort obviously was about getting approval from our customers to be able to do that. Then just before the lockdown, to enable work from home, we moved massive number of desktops, acquired additional laptops and data cards, and transported them to our people's homes. We also created additional capacity in our cloud VDI and VPN using our own offerings around these areas to be able to enable a large number of our employees to work from home. In parallel, we reached out to our customers, briefed them on the measures we were adopting and sought their approvals. All of these hectic efforts ensured that today 93% of our employees are approved to work from home by our customers. And 90% of our employees are actually engaged in delivering projects globally and services to our customers in a work from home mode. In the past few days, our teams have settled into the new ways of working. Managers are conducting daily stand-up calls to track people, their welfare, their well-being, and the customer service delivery is being managed through this. I am pleased to report that our SLA performance has been stable and we are collaborating well with our customers on delivering our commitments to them. Most of our customers have appreciated our business continuity planning and our ability to help them. While there are many examples, I would like to share a couple of examples with you. The first one is of a large bank in the US which wanted to launch a full-fledged digital solution to support thousands of small businesses and their employees under the fiscal stimulus program initiated by the US Treasury to get financial relief Under the US CARES program which is popularly known as PPP. A team of committed employees from Wipro took this up as a challenge, worked closely with our cloud enterprise platform partner and started working on 3rd April and built a solution in about 72 hours which happened also to be a weekend. We've ensured that the application went live on 6th of April after incorporating a few regulatory changes by the US government on existing systems and providing a new content to be able to originate loans. On the first day of going live, 22,000 PPP loan applications were processed resulting in loan disbursion to the tune of $5.5 billion. This has made a Significant positive impact not only to our customers' business but to the society at large. After that, we've had three similar engagements with different banks in providing similar services. Another example that I want to provide is of one of the largest and busiest airports that we service in North America. We had to manage an orderly shutdown of international traffic besides being prepared to handle cargo planes delivering essential supplies like food and medicine from across the globe. This meant enabling and equipping most of the airport staff to work from home and ensure that they could continue to access all business critical applications without any issues. We happen to provide the infrastructure services to this particular airport and as you know airport employees are not attuned or accustomed to working from home and this was a big change for them. We enabled change management across the employee staff and over 800 people were enabled to work from home in about 48 hours. These are employees of the airport beyond the Wipro teams which service these employees and the customers. And we guided their employees over phone, We manned walk-in support kiosks in virtual mode, helped them do various monitoring across locations, trained them on MS Teams, which was deployed for collaboration, and enabled the soft phones features, among many other things. Totally across our customers, we have enabled over half a million client employees to be able to work in this new normal. There are many other examples across our various service offerings where we are seeing an opportunity to help our customers tide over this crisis. Talking a little bit about the demand environment, while we are very satisfied with our actions in ensuring safety of our employees and ramping up capability to service our customers from home, we are still very much in the middle of the crisis and the economic turbulence that it has caused. Based on various estimates, the global GDP growth rate are expected to decline by at least 2%. This assumes that the virus peaks in the April, May, June quarter. But if the peak goes into the July, August, September quarter, then the decline could be even more dramatic. This is likely, obviously, to have a significant impact on our customers' business and earnings, and hence a cascading effect on their IT spends. We already see instances of budget reductions, cuts in discretionary spend, requests for temporary discounts and pricing pressure, and restructuring of existing spends. Sectors like retail, hospitality, airlines, energy, especially oil and gas, and auto segment in the manufacturing business are experiencing a more immediate and deeper impact. Given the uncertainty in the environment and the inability to predict the course of the health crisis, we have decided to temporarily suspend our practice of providing quarterly guidance and we will resume when we have increased the certainty, when we see increased certainty of both the demand and the supply side constraints that this crisis has created. During the crisis, our priority will be to remain a trusted partner of our customers by staying close to them and enabling them in here and now. And focus on positioning our offerings, especially focused on efficiency like modernization, cloud, automation, cyber security, analytics, et cetera, to gain market share in strategic accounts as well as make the most of consolidation opportunities that this could provide. As we expect the revenues to decline during the quarter, it will put a significant pressure on our margins. We will have trade-offs to make on hiring, on salary increases that become due in this quarter in terms of the merits annual salary increase, discretionary spends that we have within WIPRO, variable costs such as subcontracting, facilities, etc., and depending revenues and gaining market share will continue to remain a priority as we look at opportunities to get more efficient. We do anticipate that our working capital requirements will increase in the near term. But our gross cash in our balance sheet does provide us the confidence that we will emerge stronger and better. In the end, I would like to reiterate that the environment is tough and As we all know, when the going gets tough, the tough get going and we believe that we are coming into this crisis in a position of strength. We will remain steadfast in our goal of employee safety and well-being, business continuity, staying close to the customers and committing ourselves to the new normal. I wish you all the very best. Please stay safe and stay strong and I will hand over to Jatin to give the highlights