Wipro Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Wipro Limited Q2 FY24 earnings 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 that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Deepak Bohra, Senior Vice President, Corporate Treasurer and Investor Relations. Thank you and over to you, sir.

Thank you, Yashashree. Warm welcome to our Q2 FY24 earnings call. We will begin the call with the business highlights and overview by Thierry Delcourt, our Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, and a financial overview by our CFO, Aparna Iyer. followed by Amit Chaudhary, our Chief Operating Officer. 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 current expectations and are associated with uncertainties and risk. which may cause the actual results to differ materially from those expected. The uncertainties and risk factors are explained in our detailed filing with SEC. Wipro 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 the transcript will be available on our website. Over to you, Theri.

Thank you, Deepak, and good. Actually, good morning or good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. I'll begin with an overview of this quarter's results and detail of our sectoral performance, talk about the demand environment, and some direction for the coming quarter. Our CFO, Aparna, and our CEO, Amit, will join in with their comments as well, okay? Q2 was yet another quarter of strong deal bookings for us. Total contract value terms, we closed large deals to the tune of $1.3 billion. This is the highest in the last nine quarters. And this represents a 79% year-on-year growth and a 6% growth on a quarter-on-quarter basis. During the quarter, we booked 14 deals in the greater than $30 million TCB range versus 10 in the previous quarter. Total bookings from a TCB standpoint stand at $3.8 billion, which is also a growth of 6% year-on-year. We have added this quarter again one new account in the greater than $100 million client category in Q2. We now have 22 accounts in that bucket. If you remember, uh back in fy 21 we had 11 100 million dollar accounts so we've doubled the number of accounts in the 100 million dollar categories we've won also two close to half a billion dollar deals in two of our large accounts as has been the case for several quarters now cash flow has remained strong at 145 percent of net income in q2 a bit or earnings before tax and interest of our IT services segment has increased 6% year-on-year. All of that gives us confidence that we're winning in the market against a backdrop of economic weakness. The business environment, as you all know, has been uncertain. Inflation has stayed high, as have interest rates. Clients are continuing to take a much more rigorous look at their investments. They are hyper-focused on efficiency, on optimization of existing investments, and faster return on new ones. Lower discretionary spending is a reality today. Conversion of order book has become slower. Transformation programs that are nearing their project term are being replaced by new ones, but at a slower pace. All of this has impacted our top-line growth as well. In Q2, revenues declined 2% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency terms. But even though there's some softness in top-line growth, we are continuing to hold margins steady. Operating margin for the first half of FY24 was 16.1%. This is 110% basis point higher than our operating margin in the first half of FY20. Now, let's look at the performance of our four strategic market units. One in our America's one market unit, revenue grew 1% quarter-on-quarter in constant currency terms in Q2. This revenue growth was led by a strong performance in our healthcare business, as well as in the technology products and platform business. Order bookings in terms of TCB, grew 36% earlier. Our Americas II market unit, which has higher exposure to consulting clients and to DBFSI sector, saw a higher than usual impact of the macroeconomic slowdown. Revenues in Americas II declined 2.3% quarter on quarter in Q3. Europe, which has been our growth engine for the last two quarters, for our last two years, sorry, growing by 39% in FY22 and 12% in FY23, has also seen slowing demand and reprioritization of client spend, waiting on the overall business. Revenues in this market declined 5% quarter on quarter. Having said that, we are seeing strong traction on the other booking side, which in total contract value terms increased 10% in Q2 year on year. Given our strong bookings in this market, we are confident of a swift rebound. Finally, in our Apmea business, revenues for the quarter declined 0.5% quarter over quarter. Our goal in this region is absolutely to capture the rapidly digitizing market. For that, we are leveraging our global scale and domain expertise to actually continue to move our portfolio towards higher value transformation projects. This focus on improving the quality of revenue is now reflecting in our margin performance, which has improved 330 basis points over the last five quarters. Being able to sustain margin despite softer revenue is largely due to our ongoing transformation efforts. This includes several programs around delivery excellence and operational efficiencies. Across the board, we are pivoting our business towards high-quality, high-potential businesses and reducing our loss-making accounts. We're also working on faster bench deployment. In the last quarter, talent utilization increased to 84.5%, an improvement of 80 basis points quarter over quarter. Third, our account segmentation strategy, together with the one-way pro approach, is helping us seal bigger deals with existing clients and win in a consolidating market. And I'm proud that we are seeing these benefits within three months of moving to the new four-global business line operating model. Amit will share more details shortly. Both on the delivery assurance and efficiency side, these actions are having an immediate positive impact, while also setting us up for long-term margin resilience, because profitable and sustainable growth is our top priority. In Europe, we closed three large consolidation deals in Q2 at a 100% bid-to-win rate. For example, The global bank has selected Wipro as its partner to deliver multi-year digital transformation initiatives across business units. Wipro will work with the bank to build solutions to enhance its global products and services through responsible use of AI and also hyper-automation. This will deliver better customer experience, analytics, and drive significant operational efficiencies. Another important point to drive your attention on. Our partnership strategy continues to stay strong. Bookings through our partners as a percentage of total bookings have continued to increase quarter after quarter, from 25% in FY20 to 44% in FY23, and it was at 53% in Q2. Increasingly, clients are not just looking to migrate to the cloud, but also run and grow their businesses more efficiently on the cloud. Our full-stripe cloud services, with its full-stack cloud offering, is setting us apart from competition and letting us tap into opportunities across the cloud journey. For example, multinational healthcare and insurance firms want us to co-create the consumer and digital experience. As a strategic technology partner, we will build AI and automation solutions to drive speed to market, better client experience, and reduce their cost. Our high-performance software engineering program will bring them at least 20% more efficiency. Now, if you look at the bigger picture in this, you will see that our ongoing transformation is driving a substantial improvement in our market position. And that's in turn reflected in the types of deals we are winning. Clients now look to us to help them solution and orchestrate their transformation. They trust us with their complex challenges. That's reflecting in the latest customer satisfaction survey as well with our NPS expanding by 840 basis points. which is quite substantial. I'll take a few minutes now to share an update on Wipro's AI360 strategy. Since our announcement last quarter, we've trained as many as 180,000 employees in basic GNI principles. We have rolled out Persona-based learning pathways to create a pool of specialized talent with deeper technical expertise. We are working with our alliance partners to further enhance AI learning pathways through our AI and cloud academies. Recently also, we launched a new GNI Center of Excellence with IIT Delhi. We're rapidly integrating GNI into our processes, our solutions, and our offerings. Thousands of our employees have or are starting to use GNI. Let me give you examples. In the HR functions, Our teams are seeing significant productivity gains by using GNI for candidate background verification. Then in marketing, we are using GNI for content generation and translation, tasks that used to take hours earlier now takes minutes. In sales, we're deploying GNI for research to improve sales collaboration and to generate RFI responses. Now engineering business. GenAI is helping with software development and lifecycle automation. One of the areas with the biggest productivity gain is in quality engineering and quality assurance testing. GenAI is helping with scenario creation, code generation, synthetic data creation, as well as execution at scale. Initial pilots of these GenAI apps have been so successful that we are now rolling them out to all our employees. On the client front, GenAI is now a part of every client conversation. There's a tremendous interest in exploring new use cases, as well as understanding the benefits and implications of this technology. Today, we are seeing a doubling of GenAI active projects than we did just one quarter ago. But now, We're seeing rapid adoption in healthcare, consumer and financial services, but also in high-tech and utilities. One example I can share with you here is the following. We are working with a US-based health insurer to deploy a GNI-based chatbot for their agents. We are developing a solution that is fine-tuned to be more contextual, so that agents can provide more personalized assistance to every member. This solution is driving 30% to 40% reduction in operation costs, significant improvements in agent productivity, and improving net promoter scores. Another example, we're working with a European multinational telecom company to unlock value from data. Working with different vendor tools and software kits, we are generating high quality synthetic data which allows the client to not only increase cross-border collaboration but also mitigate bias and eliminate distribution limitations that exist in real data. As the technology evolves and GNI output becomes more accurate, we expect demand for our GNI services and expertise to increase greatly over the next 6 to 12 months. Frankly, very excited by the opportunity GNI presents and we are investing in new use cases, solutioning for clients as well as upskilling our employees because we really want to take a leadership position in this space. Worthy on our guidance now, for the next quarter we are guiding for a sequential growth of minus 3.5% to minus 1.5% in constant currency terms. We expect Margins to stay range-bound, as we've seen over the last few quarters. As the market starts to turn around, on the back of our transformation and efficiency plays, we expect to start seeing improvements in the coming quarters. Despite the global slowdown across businesses, Wipro will continue to invest in its people through training opportunities, leadership development, global exposure to new clients and technologies, and by obviously also rewarding them with merit-based salary increases. With Prozintellectual Capital, our people are our biggest strengths. By continuing to strengthen our foundation, streamline our operations, and moving towards a more modern, dynamic culture, we have the right strategy and vision to keep us competitive and resilient. With that, I'll turn it over to Uthana for comments. Thank you.