Wipro Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q1 FY23 earnings call of Wipro Limited. 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 and then zero on your touch-tone telephone. Please note that 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, ma'am.

Thank you, Inba. A very warm welcome to our Q1 FI23 earnings call. We will begin the call with business highlights and overview by Siri Delaporte, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, followed by financial overview by our CFO, Jatin Dalal. Afterwards, the operator will open the bridge for Q&A with our management team. Before theory starts, let me draw your attention to the fact that during this call, we may make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Private Securities Litigation Reform 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 differ materially from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are explained in our detailed filings with SEC. WIPRO does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect the events and circumstances after the date of filing. The conference call will be archived and the transcript will be made available on our website. Over to you, Thierry.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and absolutely good evening. Thank you for joining our Q1 earnings call. Let me first tell you that as I speak to you today to show financial performance, I'm both humbled and excited. Humbled to have had the honor of leading this incredible company for exactly two years now and excited for what lies ahead of us. As always, I'll share with you a view on the demand environment and also offer some details on sectors, markets, service offerings, as well as business outlook for the quarter ahead. Despite the uncertainties of the macroeconomic environment, if I look at the pipeline, our order bookings, and the discussions we are having with our customers, there has been no slowdown or pullback of spends for us. The demand for our IT services is robust, and I must say I'm thankful for that. Our overall pipeline is actually, in fact, at an all-time high. And it continues to be renewed as we are winning deals at a pretty good pace. High-growth services like cloud, like digital, like engineering services or cybersecurity are seeing definitely strong interest from our clients. Led by our full-strike cloud services, more than half of our bookings today are attributable to these strategic focus areas. And we believe this rotation to high-growth areas is going to accelerate. Our bookings in cloud are up 35% year-on-year, and engineering services booking literally doubled. Overall, now bookings for the quarter were very solid. Our bookings in total contract value, DCB terms, grew at 30% plus year-on-year, And in annual contract value term, ACV, it grew 18% year-on-year. Three of the four markets grew upwards of 25% year-on-year in DCV terms. I've shared this with you in the past. The large transformative deals are a key pillar of our growth. Well, they provide, we know that, excellent opportunities to showcase our capabilities and scale. But I tell you, I'm pleased to share that our large deals bookings were nearly $1.5 billion this quarter, which is almost 3x of what we did, for example, last quarter. And the majority of these are new. Our revenue growth during the quarter was at 2.1% in constant currency terms and 17.2% year-on-year. We grew rapidly. 15% and plus year on year across all markets. We are investing heavily in talent to support our ambition growth plans for the year. We added such 15,000 net new talent during the quarter. In line with our strategy to reinforce our cloud and consulting capabilities, you probably remember we acquired and we completed the acquisition of Rising last quarter. Rising is a global SAP consulting firm, one of the leading strategic partners in the world for SAP. Rising will become a critical extension of Wipro's SAP cloud practice, but also Wipro full-stripe cloud services. Our Q1 operating margins, as anticipated, were lower at 15%. This is because We're investing in solutions and capabilities for us to further strengthen our position as a strategic partner for our clients. But we've also accelerated structural transformation by investing in freshers in particular and in our own IT that will help drive operational efficiency and agility. The inorganic bets we made to accelerate our growth are presently diluting our margin by 2.3% as a reference. And at 15%, we believe we have bottomed out, right? I will now provide some finer details on markets, on service offerings, and on sectors. All markets grew double digits. With the Americas and Europe, our top two markets, growing at 18% and 16% for the quarter, in year-on-year constant currency terms. Let's go through each of these regions in detail. In America's one, we grew 20% year-on-year in the quarter, with all sectors showing strong growth. During the quarter, technology products and platforms grew 37% year-on-year, and communications, media, and information services grew 26%. Now let's look at Americas too. We grew 17% year-on-year in Q1. Financial services and manufacturing, those two sectors, led the performance, recording a growth of nearly 30% each year-on-year. This order book in total contract value terms grew nearly 30% year-on-year in Q1. Now let's look at Europe. Our European business, delivered a year-on-year growth of 16% in the quarter gone by. UK and Ireland, Southern Europe, and Benelux grew at or over 20% year-on-year. Our pipeline here is robust, and we have won many large deals in the market. Our order booking total contract value terms grew at 40% year-on-year. Finally, our Apnea business grew at 15% year-on-year in Q1. The regions that did particularly well during the quarter were Australia and Southeast Asia. But here also, overall, the order bookings in total contract value terms were very robust, growing at 60% year-on-year. We said it, you know, as part of our strategy, continuing to strengthen client relationships remains a top priority. We have created a segmentation strategy to grow in key markets by not only deepening our relationships with our existing clients, but also bringing on new clients who are looking for a strong business and technology transformation partner to help them digitize their business. As I mentioned earlier, we are pivoting our go-to-market investments to allow us to do this. As a result... our top five clients grew 26% year-on-year, and our top 10 clients grew 22% year-on-year, both in constant currency terms. If we look now in the last 24 months, we have doubled our clients in more than $100 million segment to 20, so from 10 to 20. We also added eight clients in the more than 50 million segment just in the last 12 months. Now, From a service offering standpoint, our ideas, global business line grew 21% year-on-year in Q1. This growth was led by one, digital experience, 25% year-on-year, two, domain and consulting, which grew over 45% year-on-year, and three, engineering services, which grew 18% year-on-year. And then our second global business line, our ICO, GBL, grew 11% in Q1. You will certainly appreciate that this performance comes against a backdrop of accelerated rotation of portfolios to the new, to the high-growth areas I talked about earlier. And, you know, cybersecurity services led growth with 34% year-on-year in Q1. Improved customer and employee experience are definitely fueling these goals in ICO. Our customers want us to reimagine what I would call traditional services, such as end-user computing services and human resource outsourcing. Leading with business solutions has been one of our key differentiators. Our role as a cloud ecosystem orchestrators with Wipro Full Stride allows us to increase opportunities to grow our business. Last month, we hosted our first ever Full Stride Sales and Partners Summit, featuring 23 of our cloud partners. Together, during several days, we strategized around new opportunities and committed to working together to help our clients transform in the cloud. There was tremendous energy across our teams. And in the market, We are partnering closely with Microsoft, for example, to help one of our large healthcare clients transform their legacy infrastructure to Microsoft's cloud. Now, our engineering services have grown at a compounded growth rate of 4% over the past four quarters, which is showing the consistency in growth. In the depths of our services and capabilities here, I can proudly say that we are a true leader in engineering services. And this week, we have launched WePro Engineering Edge, our full-stack portfolio of engineering services. We know this will enable our clients to innovate at scale. This also extends our engineering heritage by combining capabilities such as cloud, 5G, AI, Industry 4.0, IoT, and silicone design. Engineering age is already having an impact in the market. For example, leading mobility technology company has chosen Wipro as an extension of their global engineering team to support them on the development of software defined vehicle applications. High demand around SDV these days. We also want a multi-year engagement with a leading U.S.-based semiconductor corporation to provide VLSI and system design services across a variety of products globally. We will help meet the quality standards required of semiconductor chips used in applications such as high-performance computing, self-driving cars, design and visualization, deep learning, AIs. I will share a couple of examples before I move on. Wipro has won a very strategic engagement to assist in the digital transformation journey of a leading U.S.-based fund administrator. We will provide a range of services, including digital contract management, cloud migration, with Wipro full-stripe cloud services. quality and process engineering, as well as create a talent transformation roadmap for the client's workforce. Wipro has also entered a multi-year strategic agreement with one of the world's leading energy technology companies. Here, we will reimagine the employee experience for the firm's 70,000-plus employees across 75 countries. I'll now share a view of our talent landscape. You may remember I had shared earlier about a shift in our talent strategy towards fresher intake. In line with that, we have embodied more than 10,000 freshers in Q1. Now, while we are on the subject of talent, I want to share that our attrition has continued to moderate, right? That's three consecutive quarter of improvement in employment retention in reality. In Q1, It was down to 23% on the training 12-month basis. And we expect further moderation ahead. Our talent investments, I believe, are paying off. That's what it says. If you recall, we announced moving to a quarterly promotion cycle, which will be effective actually July 2022, and salary increases for all those eligible in September of this year. Before I close, I will share an outlook for the next quarter. We have guided for a revenue growth of 3% to 5% in Q2, which will translate to growth of, to be precise, 11.62%, 13.8% on year-on-year in constant currency turns. With this guidance for Q2, let's be clear, we will very comfortably grow in double digits for fiscal year 2023. In summary, all our markets are growing. We have doubled our 100 million strategy clients. Our order bookings are strong. Our pipeline is at an all-time high. I must say I'm very optimistic about the rest of the year. With that, I'll hand it over to Jetty now for his comments. Thank you.