Wipro Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q2FI23 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 touchtone 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.

Thank you, Inba. A very warm welcome to our Q2 FY23 earnings call. We will begin this call with business highlights and overview by Thierry Delaporte, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, followed by a financial overview by our CFO, Jatin Dalla. 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 the 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. WPRO does not undertake any obligation to update the forward-looking statements to reflect events and circumstances after the date of filing. The conference call will be archived and a transcript will be made available on our website. Over to you, Thierry.

Thank you, Aparna. Hello, everyone. Good evening. Thank you for joining our Q2 earnings call. And for those of you joining us from the U.S., good afternoon, I guess, maybe good morning for some. Since the last time we spoke in July, we've seen the macroeconomic conditions across almost all markets and sectors have changed. In speaking to our clients every day, we're seeing a change in the level of optimism. As businesses around the world are dealing with inflation pressure, with geopolitical turmoil, with energy crisis, also rising interest rates. Almost every major economy is experiencing economic deterioration. And it's against this backdrop that we delivered a strong quarter. Our business strategy is sound, and our value proposition continues to resonate with clients across markets. This is reflected in robust bookings, healthy deal signings, growth in revenues, as well as operating margins. Let's start. Our bookings. Our bookings in total contract value terms grew 24% year-on-year in Q2. Two of the four markets, America's one and Europe, grew more than 30% year-on-year. It was said in the past that large transformative deals are a key pillar of our growth strategy. Indeed, they allow us to demonstrate the true power and scale of our services, talent, and operations. Large deals are where we deliver maximum value for our clients. So I'm pleased to share that large deal wins have continued to be really strong. In Q2, we signed 11 deals with a total contract value of $725 million. This actually follows an exceptional quarter in Q1, when we clocked over a billion dollars in deal signing. And this strong booking trajectory translates into a 42% year-on-year growth in our large deal bookings in the first half of this fiscal year. Over the last few years, we have steadily increased our win rate, improved the quality of our pipeline. As of today, our pipeline has what I would say, a well-balanced mix of transformation, growth, and cost takeouts engagements. Now, this mix may change in the coming quarters based on external conditions that I talked about earlier. But we expect continued strong demand for our comprehensive portfolio of services. We know that technology, in good times like, in bad, has become the underlying success factor for any business. Regardless of what the problem is, increasingly, technology is the solution. I believe we are better positioned than ever before to help our clients tap into the true power of technology, whether that's to drive growth and transformation or manage cost or build a sustainable future. Speaking of sustainability, we continue to build sustainability into everything we do, including across our tech stack. You'll see us leveraging our sector domain expertise and a strong partnership to develop new low-carbon impact solutions for our clients. Our enterprise scaling and sustainability process experience is helping us stand out in the market and leading to strong client demand. Overall, with our deep engineering expertise and comprehensive set of offerings, we are, I know, well positioned to be the partner of choice for our client as they face a growing set of headwinds. Now, turning to our revenue growth, we recorded 4.1% growth in constant currency terms sequentially and 13% on the year-on-year basis. That translate into double-digit growth across all markets. Business growth translates into growth for our colleagues. And I'm happy to share that we rolled out quarterly promotions to our employees in July, and salary increases effective September. And yet, we've achieved operating margins of 15.1%. As we continue to enhance our portfolio with the newer and more strategic service offerings, our clients are recognizing the value we deliver. This is increasingly reflected in our improved price realizations. These efforts, combined with operational excellence, automation, higher productivity, are the key levers for margin improvement. As every quarter, I'll now share some finer details on markets, service offerings, and sectors. Let's start with our markets. In America's one, we grew 15% year-on-year in the second quarter, with all sectors showing strong growth. During the quarter, the fastest-growing sector in the market was technology products and platforms, which grew 26% year-on-year. Order bookings in total contract value terms grew nearly 34% year-on-year in Q2. Now moving to Americas 2, we grew 12% year-on-year in Q2. Manufacturing and energy and utilities led the performance, recording a growth of more than 20% each year-on-year. Financial services actually grew 17% year-on-year. Moving on to Europe. Our European business delivered a year-on-year growth of 12% in Q2. Most of the markets recorded strong double-digit year-on-year growth with Benelux, UK and Ireland, and South and Europe leading the pack. Our order book in total contract value terms grew at 36% year-on-year, which is quite massive. Our Apmea business grew significantly. at 11% year-on-year in Q2. Regions that did particularly well during the quarter were Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Middle East. So you can see across all markets, double legit growth. Strengthening client relationships remain a top priority for us. As a result, we're gaining share in our metal accounts. Our top five clients grew 19% year-on-year, Our top 10 clients grew 17% year-on-year, both in constant currency terms. Now moving to service offerings. You know we have two global business lines, Ideas and iCore. Let me go through each of these two business lines. Our Ideas global business line grew 15% year-on-year in Q2. This growth was led by cloud transformation first. which grew 26% year-on-year, by applications and data, which grew 21% year-on-year, and finally by engineering services, which grew 18% year-on-year. Now, looking at ICO, the other global business line, grew 9% year-on-year in Q2, but here, led by cybersecurity services, which grew 23% year-on-year in Q2. And as the speed of transformation accelerates, we are experiencing increased demand for our full suite of cyber offerings. We are leveraging internal methodologies, framework, intellectual property, in collaboration with our technology partners to help clients manage a dynamic and complex risk environment. In one recent example, we helped a global communications organization improve and automate their compliance processes leading to an enhanced risk posture. We now operate and execute this program globally and have driven significant cost reductions in their security and in their compliance program. Then talking about Wipro full-stride cloud services, which is more than one-third of our business today, continues to be a driver of our success, and partnerships are at the center of this growth. In fact, in the second quarter, bookings with hyper-gross partners grew 24% year-on-year. Working alongside our partners, we know we are creating industry solutions and leading major transformation efforts designed to help clients unlock the value of cloud, but also realize new efficiencies. In addition to modernizing applications, we see a great amount of interest in modernizing data operations. The organization realized the power of data in gleaning new insights into their business. For example, for a U.S.-based diversified financial services group, we are working on a digital transformation and data modernization effort, which actually involves building a next-generation cloud analytics platform. The goal here is to deliver omnichannel experiences that help our clients get better, real-time insights into their business. Ultimately, the transformation is helping our clients reduce time to market for new capabilities and deliver enhanced experiences. In another example, for a leading provider of industrial automation solutions, We are working on a transformation program that will help them become more client and relationship-centric. We are building a multi-cloud solution that will transform the firm's marketing, sales, and services around a single client definition, creating opportunities for more meaningful engagement with customers. And we continue to double down on strategic investments in areas that we know will drive long-term competitive edge for us and for our clients. For example, recently we launched Lab45, a new brand for our CTO organization. Lab45 is a new direction for our technology research and development units. The objective of Lab45 is to develop new assets, intellectual property, and products through client collaborations and partnerships. Lab45 will help our clients build new business models, enhance user experience, and drive growth through enterprise technologies. In fact, the opportunity to tap into our expertise and world-class talent through Lab45 is already factoring into client decisions and making an impact on how we win in the market. We're continuing to also expand our capabilities in strategic areas, such as artificial intelligence and data, but also 5G, metaverse, IoT, Industry 4.0 to help clients gain new competitive edge. I now share a view of the talent landscape. I'm first happy to share that our attrition has continued to moderate for the third quarter in a row. In Q2, attrition was down to 23% if you're looking at it on a trading 12-month basis. And our quarter annualized numbers are trending even lower than that. Expect a further moderation in Q3. And like I had shared last quarter, we are now offering promotions to our employees every quarter. And in Q2, we promoted about 10,000 colleagues. I'm also pleased to share that the annual salary increases were given to our colleagues across bands in Q2 was, as you know, is our philosophy, a steep differentiation in rewards for our top talent. We've also onboarded over 14,000 freshers in H1, which is over, imagine, 75% of what we added in the whole of last year. And finally, I'll share an outlook for the next quarter. We're guided for revenue growth of 0.5 to 2%, which will translate to growth of 10 to 12% year on year in constant currency terms. The guidance reflects current environment and the quarter and seasonality. For the full year, we are certain that we will report double-digit growth. Our margin in Q3 will have some headwinds. There's the impact of two incremental months of salary increase, and yet we expect to hold our margin in a narrow band. In a summary, we have delivered a strong performance against the backdrop of a mixed macroeconomic environment in Q2 Our order bookings and large deals reflect an improved market competitiveness and prove that our strategy is working. We are experiencing a real shift in the market as clients increasingly turn to us to realize their boldest ambitions. And based on all these factors, we remain confident of gaining market share in the coming quarters. With that, I will hand it over to Jatin now for his comments.