Alithya Group inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Aletheia Q4 and fiscal 2021 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Rachel Andrews. Please go ahead, Ms. Andrews.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Aletheia's fourth quarter and fiscal 2021 results conference call. The press release and MD&A with complete financial statements and related notes were issued earlier today and are posted on our website. The webcast presentation and fiscal 2021 annual review can also be found on our website in the Investors section. Presenting this morning are Paul Raymond, Alesia's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Claude Cibot, Chief Financial Officer. Following their comments, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, I would like to specify that this conference call is intended for the financial community. Also, please be advised that this call will contain statements that are forward-looking and subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please refer to the cautionary note on our presentation and to the forward-looking statements and risk and uncertainty sections of our MD&A available on our website for more details. Let me remind you that all figures expressed on today's call are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated, and be aware that we will refer to certain indicators that are non-IFRS measures. Please refer to the cautionary note on our presentation and to the non-IFRS measures section of our MD&A for more details. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Paul Raymond.

Thank you, Rachel, and good morning, everyone. Bonjour. I'm very happy to be with you here today to share our Q4 results. Fiscal 2021 was anything but normal. We remained focused on being there for our people, for our clients, building the necessary trust that keeps Aletheia top of mind when complex, mission-critical work needs to get done. Throughout the year, we made decisions and investments with a view that Aletheia would emerge from the pandemic stronger and better positioned than ever to successfully pursue our growth strategy. Our fourth quarter results proved us right. Before providing some color on the quarter, I want to take a minute to review our latest acquisition closed this past April, R3D, and explain the transformational impact that this deal will have on Aletheia for at least the next 10 years. Because of the R3D transaction, we could say that we are starting our 2022 fiscal year that began this past April with the wind in our backs. Indeed, this acquisition and its associated long-term contracts was a milestone deal for many reasons. I'd like to highlight four of those reasons for you now. First, this transformational acquisition added two 10-year contracts that combined will add approximately $600 million in total guaranteed revenues over the next 10 years, starting on April 1st of this year. Once we are done with the expected ramp-up period, these contracts will be generating significant high-value recurring revenue for a very long time. Second, with nearly 600 new professionals coming from R3D, we now have more than 3,000 billable professionals in an industry where qualified personnel are scarce. This is also very positive. Third, the two historic contracts with Beneva Remember, this is the company resulting from the merger of La Quetzal and SSQ and are now the largest mutual insurance company in Canada. And Quebec, a Canadian telecommunications and media leader, strengthened our presence in both those industries. These same industries are going through significant digital transformation phases and will require a trusted partner more than ever. Lastly, the transaction was immediately cash flow positive, reducing Aletheia's debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio and pointing to further deleveraging of our balance sheet. So before I move on to discuss our fourth quarter results, I can already tell you that R3D's integration within Aletheia's current structure is progressing well and allowing for notable short and midterm synergies. we are repeating our successful formula of buying quality companies and accelerating their growth. Now let's talk about our fourth quarter performance. Last year at this time, we were preparing for a period of great uncertainty, but one in which the underlying demand for digital transformation services was accelerating. Today, I am pleased to report the great work that our teams have been doing that led to these quarterly results by executing our strategic plan with discipline, Here are three examples that illustrate what I'm talking about. One, our revenues increased 6.5% to a record $78 million in the quarter. The percentage increase would have been 7.7%, assuming a constant U.S. dollar exchange rate. This is strong organic growth in our industry where most players are showing year-over-year declines. Two, Q4 bookings reached $92.8 million, which translated into a book-to-bill ratio of 1.23. This reflects, once again, our well-established reputation as a trusted advisor in digital transformation. We started disclosing bookings and book-to-bill ratios in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 to offer insight into the trends and visibility about our new projects and volume of new business over time. Keep in mind that these numbers do not include the R3D acquisition and associated long-term contracts as the transaction closed after the end of fiscal 2021. R3D's numbers will start being accounted for in our first quarter of 2022. Thirdly, as for our adjusted EBITDA, it increased 61.8% from last year as we continue to benefit from organic growth, our acquisitions, and operational synergies quarter over quarter. Let's take a closer look at what is happening in our practices and geographies. In the United States, we are very happy to see sequential quarterly growth of our revenues from $27.6 million to $29.7 million, despite a year-over-year decline. We can see that Aletheia's U.S. activities are recovering from the pandemic, as we see traction in specific industries like food and beverage, healthcare, finance, and retail. Also, we're pleased to see that our Microsoft and Oracle Enterprise solution implementations are giving our existing and new customers the digital tools that they need to become more agile, productive, and innovative in order to sustain their vision in a fast-changing, highly competitive post-COVID market. Now, turning to Europe, we also see stabilizationary activities with the addition of new major clients, including in the aerospace industry, such as Airbus. On a sequential basis, revenues in Europe were essentially flat with a decrease of $100,000. In Canada, we saw fourth quarter organic growth both year over year and sequentially. We see solid momentum both among our private sector and public sector clients. More specifically in Canada, our teams who service our government clients perform very well. As an example, we won a significant contract worth $12.4 million to assist the Quebec government ministry, a Quebec government ministry, sorry, in providing project management services for their internal initiatives. This is one of the largest government contracts Aletheia has been awarded in Quebec in recent years. This new contract, combined with our recently acquired status as a preferred service provider of cloud solutions to Quebec public organizations, is a clear demonstration of the trust we have gained with our public sector clients. That's the Alethea way. In the energy sector, we were also awarded a very significant contract this past quarter. It consists of a multi-year agreement with a $10 million initial value for plant-level operational technology cybersecurity consulting services in the North American manufacturing and utilities sector. Excuse me. Alethea's portfolio includes decades of work in regulatory compliance, including assisting other top-tier customers to identify and address cybersecurity challenges and to implement strategies to improve system resilience. This brings me to highlight that one of our areas of focus is to straighten our existing practices. One of the best examples of this is our Digital Solutions Center. I spoke to you about it in my opening remarks last quarter, but I would like to highlight that with the acquisition of R3D, our Digital Solutions Center now comprises more than 500 professionals specializing in the transformation and modernization of custom systems geared towards new technologies to meet today's most pressing digital transformation needs. We are also strengthening our expertise in key elite EF practice areas, such as business intelligence, agility management, infrastructure, operational security, cloud services, machine learning, IoT, just to name a few. In the past quarters, you have also seen our cross-selling strategy pay off. We have won multiple cross-geography and cross-industry enterprise projects as a result of these efforts of leveraging past acquisitions to accelerate organic growth. Before I pass it over to Claude, I'd like to discuss two other items, diversification and M&A. As I indicated before, our exposure to our top client has been significantly reduced in the past two years, even though we continue as their strategic partner, as evidenced by organic growth of 17% in Canada while reducing our client concentrations. We are managing a growing business, and thanks to the diversification and range of high-value services offered by Aletheia, we will prioritize and continue to strengthen our industry and geographic presence, our expertise, our integrated services offering, and our positioning in the value chain. Doing so will allow us to pursue our development in market segments experiencing rapid growth. Diversification of our services, our customers, and our regional presence has also emboldened Aletheia to solidly face this crisis. Over the next few years, growth will continue to be driven by existing and new clients through value-added services, by investing in our talent, and with greater scale from complementary and transformational acquisitions. As we witnessed during the past year, Aletheia is built on strong foundations, and we are ready to face potential headwinds to come. As I mentioned before, acquisitions remain an important component of our long-term growth strategy. Considering the scale of our existing platform, recent acquisitions were integrated quickly and smoothly and allowed for immediate focus on cross-selling, accelerating growth, and gradual efficiencies. I'll now ask Bo to go over some of the financial highlights. Bo?