4.Earnings Transript(Q2-FY 25)
4.Earnings Transript(Q2-FY 25)
4.Earnings Transript(Q2-FY 25)
To,
This is in continuation to Quarter 2 Financial Year 2024-25 Investors Call of Sagility India Limited held
on November 27, 2024.
Pursuant to Regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligation and Disclosure Requirement), Regulations
2015, we attach herewith the transcript of Quarter 2 Financial Year 2024-25 Investors Call of the
Company which was held on November 27, 2024.
Thanking You,
Encl: a/a
MANAGEMENT
● Ramesh Gopalan - Managing Director & Group CEO
MODERATOR
● Siddharth Rangnekar – CDR India
QUESTIONERS
● Abhishek Kumar – JM Financial
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Siddharth Rangnekar: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q2 & H1 FY '25
Earnings Webinar of Sagility India Limited. This is Siddharth Rangnekar
from CDR India, and I shall be moderating the event today.
As a reminder, all attendee lines will be in the listen-only mode and there
shall be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation
concludes. Please note that this conference is being recorded. Now to
introduce the management we have with us today, Mr. Ramesh Gopalan,
Managing Director and Group CEO; Mr. Sarvabhouman Srinivasan, Group
Chief Financial Officer.
Before we begin, I would like to state that some of the statements made
on today's discussion may be forward-looking in nature and may involve
certain risks and uncertainties. A detailed statement in this regard is
available in the Q2 FY '25 results presentation that has been uploaded to
the exchanges earlier.
I would now like to hand over the forum to Mr. Ramesh Gopalan to begin
the proceedings of this webinar. Over to you, sir.
Ramesh Gopalan: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining our first
earnings call. Before I get into the Q2 financial results and operational
updates, I want to first acknowledge all of you who've been involved in
taking Sagility public. It's a very landmark event for the company as a
whole, and I want to thank all the advisors, investors, regulators, and my
team for getting us to this point.
Given that some of you are hearing from us for the first time, I'm going to
spend some time giving you some background about the company, the
industry in which we operate, the opportunity size, and how we plan to
capitalise on this opportunity over the next few years. After this, we will
then talk about the previous quarter financials and the first half of the
year numbers and our performance.
As you would have noticed, we've had a strong set of financials for the
quarter, and we're very confident about the rest of the year ahead. Before
that, let me first get into some of the details of the company.
So as I've told, many of you who we met at the road shows, we are one of
the largest pure-play Healthcare Service providers in the U.S. market. All
that we do is, U.S. Healthcare. And that is something, which we have
gained deep expertise in. And so we have broadened deep domain
expertise in the U.S. Healthcare space. And I'll talk about our Service
portfolio. Our service portfolio is quite broad and deep. So we can offer a
number of services to our clients both in Payer and Provider. And we
generally classify them as both administrative services and clinical
services.
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While what we do is core operations, there's a lot of investments that
we've made in technology and transformation. And so, all of our
operations are enabled by an underlying technology and transformative
capabilities. We work for 45 client groups. The client groups, we mean
clients and their subsidiaries. And out of these clients, five of them are
part of the top 10 Payers. Payers are insurance companies in the U.S. And
we also work with three of the top six PBMs. PBMs are Pharmacy Benefit
Managers. The top six by claims volume, we work for three of them. And
on the Provider side, we work with four of the large IDNs, lab companies,
DME companies, and radiology Providers.
The most interesting statistic about our business is the fact that our top
five clients have been with us for an average of 17 years. So very long
tenure relationships and relationships that still continue to grow to this
day, and we'll talk about that. Like we said, 100% focused on the U.S.
Healthcare. We've been in the business for 24 years even though Sagility
is just about three years old, the underlying business has been around for
24 years. And as many of you know, Sagility was formed as a result of a
carve out from the divestment that AGS did in the beginning of '22.
And our financial profile as, we've told you in the past, we've had a
consistent track record of growth and profitability. Last financial year, we
grew at 12.7%. And our EBITDA margins over the last two, three years
have been consistent between 24% and 25%. Our adjusted PAT margin
last year was 12.4% and a very healthy OCF to EBITDA conversion at
87.2%. And the numbers that you see, 105 claims per 1.5 billion process
(05:10) and 75 million interactions just give you an idea of the scale of
operations that we currently handle for our clients. And 94% of our
headcount is in the offshore and nearshore geographies. And that's
another reason why our margins are very healthy.
And all of the analysts who track Healthcare services, they rate us very
highly. So we've been rated in the top quadrants by Everest Group’s PEAK
Matrix, by Avasant in their clinical services transformation. And very
recently, ISG rated us as a leader in the GenAI Service Provider space. I'll
talk about our GenAI capabilities. And our HR capabilities have also been
awarded for. And if you look at all of the awards that we've got, we've
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been awarded one of the best employers, in each of the geographies
where we operate, be it India, Philippines, Jamaica, and the U.S.
Now quickly talking about the industry, U.S. healthcare. A lot of you have
asked me why U.S. Healthcare? But U.S. Healthcare as an industry is a
very, very large industry. $4.7 trillion is the total healthcare spend. About
17 plus percent of the GDP today, and it's likely to become 18% of the
GDP by 2028. And if you look at the per capita spending on U.S.
Healthcare, U.S. spends the most of all the countries globally, right? So
roughly about $12,500 per head, which is 50% greater than the next
largest country. So very large overall spends and very large per capita
spends as well.
And if you look at the specific target market size for us, the core
operational spend between Payers and Providers is roughly about $200
billion as of CY '23. And what is outsourced from this is, only about 20 odd
percent. So about 19.5% to 21.5% in Provider and a little higher on the
Payer side. So out of the $200 billion, it's a $45 billion opportunity that's
been outsourced so far. And so, there's a lot of potential one to gain,
wallet share in this $45 billion. But more importantly, as the offshoring
and outsourcing penetration increases from the $200 billion, that gives us
a much larger opportunity to grow as well.
Quickly on the Services, like I said, very broad and deep service portfolio.
I won't spend a lot of time talking about the individual services. But like I
said, for a Payer, it probably almost touched all of their functions in the
value chain. So broadly, we bucketed them into the four pillars that you
see for Payers.
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● Clinical is another fast growing area for us. There's a huge clinician
shortage in the U.S. And so, a number of our clients who in the past
wanted to do some of this work in house today are looking at service
providers like us to outsource more of the clinical services. And
broadly, the work that we do on the clinical side is of two types. How
do you control the current clinical spend and how do you also control
the future clinical spend, right? So we control the current spend by
something called Utilisation Management, which is prior
authorisation of services, concurrent review, and even review once
the claims are submitted. And then future spend through
programmes like, Chronic and Complex Case Management and
Population Health Management are some of the initiatives to risk
stratify the population and work with our clients to engage with high
risk members so that they don't become high cost claimants in the
future.
And as, you can see at the bottom, about 89.2% of our revenues comes
from Payers. The balance 10.8% comes from Providers.
So these are full grown programmes that have a technology back end and
services on top of the technology, that we take to market.
And then we have functional products which are not full platforms, but
these are more point solutions, which work with an underlying platform
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to deliver a business outcome. And then across the board in operations,
we deploy what we call Robotic Process Automation, Analytics, AI. And
the objective of all of this is threefold. One, to improve the efficiency,
which is the primary purpose of why clients give us work. One is, obviously
to take out cost, but to also improve efficiencies of their operations, two,
we also increase the accuracy of the work that we do, right? So we sign
up to very stringent quality measures. And so these tools help us improve
the accuracy.
GenAI is a topic that has come about in all of our conversations. Like I said,
we've acquired a company recently called BirchAI. And we'd already
started working on a number of GenAI pilots in the last 18 months. And
with the acquisition, we've enhanced our capabilities in all of the areas
that you see here. So today, we are running a number of pilots across the
front office, which is essentially all of the interactions that we have on
behalf of our Payer clients with both Providers and members, ability to
automate some of those interactions, ability to summarise the outcome
of those interactions. All of this, we are deploying using GenAI.
And in the back office, a large part of the work around Grievance and
Appeals, Letter Generation, Identification of Fraud, Waste and Abuse, we
are using AI in a big way. But the biggest efficiency improvements that we
are seeing is in the clinical space, where we handle medical
documentation, clinical medical records, where GenAI helps us not only
summarise that information, but also helps us classify and improve the
efficiency of the clinician who's making the final determination.
And lastly, we're using GenAI in all of our operational needs within the
organisation in our hiring, in our training, all of these, we're using GenAI
to not only improve efficiency, but also improve the speed to proficiency
as we call them. How do we get a newcomer more productive sooner?
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So lastly in terms of our go forward strategy, our top clients, we've worked
with them for a number of years. Like I said, while the tenure has been
long, these clients still continue to grow in double-digits. So a lot of our
top clients still give us a number of opportunities to grow. And we've done
that over the last several years and we continue doing that.
And like I said, we've invested a lot in technology over the last few years.
And we continue to invest in technology, not just in building full scale
platforms, but also in areas like GenAI. And lastly, M&A is a key lever for
us to build our capability. So we're looking at two kinds of M&A's. One is,
capability-based acquisitions, just like a BirchAI or a DCI. And we are also
constantly looking for other opportunities, which will give us access to a
much larger pool of clients. Since, mid-market is a is a key focus area for
us, we are actively looking at acquisitions which will give us more clients
in the mid-market space.
With that, let me quickly jump, into the results for Q2. We are pleased to
report that in Q2 FY '25, we registered a year-on-year growth of 21.1%, in
rupee terms, which is 19.8% in constant currency terms. During Q2 FY '25,
our revenues were $157.9 million, and ₹13,250 million in INR terms. This
is a 8.3% Q-on-Q growth in INR and about a 7.7% Q-on-Q growth in
constant currency.
During the quarter, our Payer vertical grew 20.8% year-on-year and
contributed to 89.2% on the revenue mix. And the Provider vertical grew
23.7% and contributed to 10.8% of the total revenues. Our growth, like I
said, like in the past, our growth was led by demand from our existing
clients and our new logo wins. Our largest clients continue to provide us
with many opportunities to increase our share of wallet. And this is
possible because of our continued strong operational performance, and
that is something that we've done, flawlessly over a number of years. And
so that gives us the right to win additional business from our existing
clients.
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We are also increasing the value that we provide to our clients. We are
engaging in consulting engagements. For example, we are doing a
customer journey mapping for a new client of ours. And for another client,
we are engaged in clinical consulting. We are working with them in the
utilisation management space to optimise their spend on high utilised,
high spend specialties.
And like I said, we are also working on a number of GenAI pilots for our
customers across both front and back office areas. And we were awarded
the leader in GenAI service provider in 2024 by ISG. Also, our enhanced
focus on the small and mid-market peer clients has started to show fruit
as we widen our presence across both large and the midsize customers.
Now switching to the half yearly results, we are pleased to report that H1
FY '25, we registered a sequential growth of 15.3% in INR terms and a
13.8% in constant currency terms. And during the first half of the year, we
recorded revenues of $304.5 million, which translates to ₹25,484 million
in INR terms.
Our consolidated adjusted profit after tax for the quarter stood at ₹1,636
million, which is an year-on-year increase of 30.5%. Our continued
reduction in our debt position is one reason why our adjusted PAT growth
is very healthy. On a half yearly basis, our adjusted EBITDA of ₹6,538
million grew 12.8% year-on-year, while our adjusted PAT of ₹3,083 million
grew 15.1% year-on-year.
So if you look at our people metrics, we added about 2,522 people to our
headcount. So the overall headcount, at the end of the second quarter
stood at about 38,380. Our annualised attrition is very stable at 25.8%. It's
better than our historical levels. Thanks to our employee engagement
initiatives. And as I showed you in the first slide, we won a number of
awards for our employee engagement.
I'm pleased to inform you that our company was chosen as one of the best
organisations for women in 2024 by Economic Times.
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Now let me hand it over to Srini to walk you through the financials.
Sarvabhouman Srinivasan: Thank you, Ramesh. Firstly, welcome all to our first earnings call. Like
Ramesh mentioned, we had a very good quarter and a good first half of
the year. Our revenue growth and profitability has been consistent in the
last few years, and we expect this to continue going forward.
Like Ramesh mentioned, I would want to reiterate that our business has
seasonality where the second half is slightly more pronounced than the
first half, and that's due to the open enrolment seasonality in H2.
Therefore, we prefer our financial performance to be reviewed on a YoY
basis and not a QoQ basis.
Yeah, I would want to spend some time here on this slide. If you had
noticed our earnings per share has been gradually improving. And what
you see in the last column is the trailing 12-month earnings per share, for
September '24. On the return on capital employed, it continues to be
healthy at mid-40s, and it's largely driven by a robust operating
performance. You will also notice that there has been a consistent
reduction in the debt. And as of 30th September, our net debt including
lease liabilities, is 0.78x of trailing 12 months EBITDA, and our net debt
excluding the lease liabilities is only 0.34x of trailing 12 months EBITDA.
Yeah. I'll just pause here for a minute. This gives you a quick snapshot of
our revenue and profitability. We have two adjustments in our EBITDA
and three adjustments for our PAT. Let me walk you through the details.
The earnouts, the first one from the reported EBITDA to adjusted EBITDA
is on account of the earnouts under acquisition agreements. And this is
pertaining to the acquisition of the DCI and Birch, the two companies that
we had acquired in FY '24, and these are non-recurring in nature. And FY
'26 will be the last year for these earnouts, and we have shown the details
of what will that charge be in slide 18.
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company and also do not reflect in any dilution to the shareholders of
Sagility India. The details of the same for future period is given in slide 18.
So the go forward positions we have shown, what will the debt be in our
books. As of FY '25, we are likely to have ₹8020 million. And for FY '26, it
will be ₹5,670 million. We'd be repaying about ₹2,490 million in FY '25,
₹2,350 million in the next year, and we have provided the details. Also,
you would have noted that in the share-based payments, we had a huge
number in the first year. It's because of the change in the plan that I
explained earlier, which is equity settled for the company, and the go
forward number will diminish as it is shown here.
On the balance sheet, our cash and bank balances as of the end of Q2
stood at ₹5,068 million and after payouts of the shareholder loan in the
Q1. CapEx spend during the first half of the year was ₹682 million. The
DSOs at the end of the quarter stood at 72.5 days. Our strong operational
performance resulted in a very strong free cash flow of 101% to EBITDA.
So that's the details I've shown in the cash flow slide. Overall, the balance
sheet remains very healthy with a very low leverage. Over to you, Ramesh.
Thank you.
Ramesh Gopalan: So let me summarise. Looking ahead, on the revenue front, the key drivers
poised to drive a sustained growth include a robust relationship with the
existing clients and strong performance of our sales and marketing teams
to win new logos. We see incremental opportunity as we focus on small
and mid-market segment Payers, where as a firm, we can provide end-to-
end offerings.
We expect the growth for the full-year ending March 25, to be in line with
our growth performance in H1, and our EBITDA margins to stay steady at
these levels for the full year. Summing up, we are very well positioned to
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deliver another strong operational and financial performance and begin
our journey as a listed company on a very strong footing.
QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSION
Moderator: Thank you very much. We will now commence the question-and-answer
session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may digitally raise their
hands. When prompted, announce your name and the name of your
company followed by your question. If you wish to remove yourself from
the question queue or once you have finished asking your set of
questions, please lower your hand and mute yourself. A request if you
could limit your initial round of questions to two to three to ensure that
every participant gets a chance to engage with the management. If you
have any additional questions, would request you to kindly re-join. Ladies
and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment for the question queue to
assemble.
We'll take the first question from Abhishek Kumar of JM Financial. Your
line has been unmuted.
Abhishek Kumar: Yeah, hi. Good afternoon, and congratulations, first of all, on your listing
and on your first earnings presentation. My first question is on the
business itself. Your top clients drive a lot of your revenues. And you've
said that you still have a lot of opportunities to grow these larger
accounts. Just wanted to understand, how do you look at mining these
accounts? Is it more number of services? Is it more volume that that will
drive the growth? And, also, if you can touch upon the competition in
these accounts, who would be the vendor if you were to take market
share away from some other vendors indeed? That would be my first
question.
Ramesh Gopalan: Thanks, Abhishek. Yeah. So good question, right? So, like I said, I'll answer
the concentration question also, right? So if we look at the peer industry
and as you probably know, it's a consolidated industry in the U.S. The top
10 to 15 Payers command somewhere between 60% to 70% market share.
And in fact, some of the segments like Medicare and others, you would
have even four to five Payers commanding 60%, 70% of the market share.
So our position is also reflective of the market position. So our top clients
contribute a large portion of our revenues. And to your specific question,
historically, we would have started working for all of these clients in one
area. And over the last about 10, 15, 17 years, we have expanded to
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multiple areas. And as you saw, our service portfolio, we have pretty
broad and deep exposure to all of the services, for a Payer organisation.
To answer your specific question, we don't do all of the services even for
the current set of large clients. So the portfolio that I showed you is all of
the things that we do, but we may be doing them for different clients. But
for the same client, even for our top client, we probably only do, roughly
about 80% of the service portfolio that I've shown, right? So there is still
opportunity for us to work with each of these clients in areas which we
are not supporting them today on. And in a number of cases, they will for
example, clinical, like you said is an area which has not been outsourced
in a big way in the past.
And so these are white spaces for, even some of our larger clients. And
we continue to get opportunities to work on those areas. So most of the
growth for the Payer space I mean while our Payer clients may continue
to grow that itself doesn't drive a large part of the growth because the
volume growth is not significant. So most of the growth for us, from our
top clients comes from additional lines of work, that we are able to
penetrate.
And the wallet share increase is coming from that. And it's also not
because we are replacing, I mean, we might replace some smaller
vendors, but typically a large part of the growth is not coming from
replacing another large vendor. But it's essentially coming from, getting
new areas of growth. And if I ask you to go back to the slide that I showed,
where if you look at the total outsourcing penetration, it's still in the 20s.
So there is still a large part of the work that clients still tend to do in-
house. And, with the mounting cost pressures, more and more of that
work is being outsourced. And that's what is leading to the growth.
Abhishek Kumar: Okay. That's very clear. Just again on competition in your top three, do
you come across the larger IT services players? Because healthcare and
life sciences is big vertical for them as well. And a lot of those guys are
talking about using GenAI to get into a multi-tower kind of deals that
includes BPO and other verticals. So does that pose a competition, for a
pure-play BPO company like us?
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah, first question, yes. There are some IT players, but not a lot of them
are in the healthcare space, right? So, we in our prospectus, we had given
you a competition slide. So we do come across people like, Cognizant,
Accenture in some of our Payer opportunities. But not all of the Indian IT
service players, do we see in those opportunities. To your second
question, yes, GenAI is an opportunity for all of us, right?
The only differentiation between us and the IT service player is the fact
that our domain expertise is far greater than some of the more generic IT
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services players. So we're not going to market leading with, saying that
we have GenAI capabilities and tell us what problem we can solve for you.
Rather because we are running those operations for our clients, we are
able to do the pilots in the existing operations that we are currently
running, and we are able to show them the benefits and sharing the
benefits with the client.
So the slide that I showed you where we are running a number of pilots
across front office, back office and clinical work, these are not projects
that we are deploying for the client in their environment. These are work
that we are doing for them today. And so these deployments are in the
operations that we currently handle for them. And so it's a very easy way
for us to demonstrate the value that we can bring to the table. And then
we have very innovative game share arrangements with the clients to
monetise some of our efforts.
Abhishek Kumar: Well, maybe one last question, bit of a macro question. A lot of concerns
around Donald Trump's Presidency and his views on life sciences,
healthcare, pharma in general, his choice of Health Secretary as well. I just
would like to, get your views on how you think that can impact their
industry and us in particular? Thank you and all the best.
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah. So broadly, I mean obviously, we'll get to know more details. But if
you look at it, both the administrations, both the parties focuses on how
do we reduce healthcare cost from ballooning, right? So from that point
of view, there's no divergence in thinking. And the kind of work that we
do, our work for our clients, and I forgot to point this out is the revenues
that we make is part of the non-discretionary spend, right? Because we
run core operations for our clients. This is not a discretionary spend that
the clients can switch on and off. This is something that they need to
spend day in and day out to keep their operations running.
And so when there is a cost pressure on a client, it makes more sense for
them to look at service providers like us because off the bat, we can bring
about cost reductions. And on top of that, we can bring about additional
efficiencies to further reduce the cost, right? So from that point of view,
we don't see a major risk to our business directly, in terms of any policies.
And from a coverage point of view, we are broadly diversified.
Moderator: Thank you, Abhishek. We'd like to move to the next question. We take the
next question from Abhishek Bhandari of Nomura. Abhishek, your line has
been unmuted. Request you to ask your question.
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Abhishek Bhandari: Yeah. Thank you to the management. My question is related to previous
Abhishek's question. And if you look at, some of the features what
President Trump made was around reducing these costs around
insurance. And during the last few years of Biden Presidency, we had seen
some leniency in terms of drop in premiums, which almost doubled the
enrolment. So the question is, if that were to expire at the end of 2025,
how much part of the business is linked to number of enrolments from
government sponsored insurance company? That is the first question.
Ramesh Gopalan: So, I mean you're talking about the exchange business and government
sponsored; I mean, even, Medicare is paid. The premiums are paid by the
CMS, right? If you look at the exchange business today, the enrolments
are I think have grown tremendously in the last three, four years, right?
We don't think that is going away.
Abhishek Bhandari: Got it. Thank you, sir. My second and last question is around this captive
sourcing proliferation in India. Many of the large U.S. healthcare Payers
are also opening or increasing their captive presence in India. Is that in an
area which is not currently with us or do you think there are certain
overlaps in the existing business which may be moving to this captive
shift, if at all they were to grow?
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah. So I mean couple of large captives, that we are aware of are having
done by clients, by healthcare Payers who are not our current clients. The
other conversations that, even when we have with our current clients, a
lot of them are thinking about setting up more innovation centres in
places like India to work on things that they're not comfortable giving to
a third-party Provider.
A number of them are now thinking about setting up captives for core
operations, which is what we do for them, right? So I mean, these
conversations come up every now and then even with the existing clients.
And we are closely working with them in a number of instances, we are
even willing to help them set up some of those captives for like I said for
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core innovation or for some of the transformational services that they
want to try out internally.
Abhishek Bhandari: All right. Maybe if I can squeeze in one last one. So many of the IT
companies, which also have BPO arms, they have been talking about huge
productivity gains in the voice based contact centre as and when they get
automated with GenAI. So the question for you is do you also have a point
of view on this and how much part of our business is coming from this
voice based contact centre in the overall scheme of things?
Ramesh Gopalan: The way we would talk about it is, when we don't per se, talk about it as
a contact centre, right? So in the overall gamut of things and let me give
you an example, right? So we spoke about claims. So when we handle
claims for a Provider let's say a Provider submits a claim and I don't, end
up paying the claim in full. The Provider is going to either pick up the
phone, call me, do a chat or send a correspondence appealing the lower
payment.
And like I said, some of the GenAI pilots that we are running with our
clients today, we are actively looking at, what are some of the call drivers
that are amenable to automation. But healthcare being, very complex and
the systems also being very, what should I say disparate and data not
being in one place. We don't see a full automation, beyond 15%, 20%. But
having said that, we think there is a tremendous opportunity to improve
the efficiency, right?
Abhishek Bhandari: Thank you for those answers, sir and all the best.
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Moderator: Thank you. We shall take the next question from Pranay Roop Chatterjee
from Burman Capital. Your line has been unmuted.
Pranay Roop Chatterjee: Great. Thank you. Good evening to everyone. So my first question is
essentially trying to understand the revenue model. So, I think we had
about ₹4,800 crores of revenue in FY '24. Is it possible to break that down
into how much is coming basis transactions happening? How much is a
fixed subscription based revenue? And how much would we, let's say one-
off implementation costs or those sort of revenue? I'm just trying to
understand.
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah. No, I get your question, right? So at a high level, everything that we
do, like I said I would say over 90% of the work that we do is operational
services, which is a recurring revenue. Unless, volumes decrease or
unless, we lose an SOW, that's a revenue that will continue to accrue for
us year-on-year. Our contracts are typically three year contracts and like
I said for large clients who've been with us for 17 plus years, we've gone
through several renewal cycles of those contracts. So that's point number
one. Number two, the models could be very different.
So while those models also exist, the predominant models are effort
based, which is either an FTE model or a transaction rate model. And in
terms of the recurring revenues, like I said, over 90% of our revenues are
recurring revenues.
Pranay Roop Chatterjee: Got it. Another question I had, and I had this before the IPO as well. Is that
obviously, because of the transaction that happened in 2021, this entity
was incorporated. Is it possible to share the revenue data of probably
couple of older years just to see or assess what can be the growth profile
of a company in the sector. Because right now, the only data we have is
12%, 13% for the last year. So maybe FY '19 or FY '14, if you can share
some figures?
Ramesh Gopalan: So, I mean, what I can guide you is, HGS is part of discontinued operations
after they divested this business. You can get the revenue numbers for a
couple of years from that, right? Otherwise, there are no published
audited separate numbers for healthcare revenue.
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Pranay Roop Chatterjee: Got it. So if we forget the history and focus incrementally, right, you
mentioned this year 15% is something that can be done. So given the
strength of, given the traction that you are seeing in the market for
outsourcing, given the strength of your sales team is 15% a good number
to keep in mind even after this year? Is that a good number? Can it be
accelerated? What would the management team be happy with?
Ramesh Gopalan: Look. Historically, if I look at the last few years, you asked the revenue
question, but I mean, like I said, the management team has been
associated with this business for a number of years. Even if you go back
three, four, five years, we've always grown in double-digits. We've grown,
I would say in the low teens to mid-teens number. And that's a number
that you see us growing this year as well.
And like I said, the first half we've grown at that rate, and we are fairly
confident of maintaining the trajectory for the rest of the year. Two, three
years is a long time for me to give a specific number. But given the fact
that we've done double-digit growth in the low-to-mid teens, that's a
number we are aiming to. Now, of course, with the increase in
investments, in the market facing team and our focus also to penetrate
the mid and small market, we could -- the attempt is always to increase
the growth number. But if you look at our historical trend, it's been in the
low-to-mid teens.
Pranay Roop Chatterjee: That's very helpful. So my last question is on your margins. Obviously, you
mentioned, 24% to 25% has been stable for the last three years.
Incrementally, you are thinking differently. Because historically, we have
been concentrated in top four, five clients, which are the large players.
Now as we penetrate smaller sized players, and probably their share
increases over time, how would it affect our margin profile? Is it
reasonable to assume that you can maintain it, or is there a structural
headwind to it? How should we look at it?
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or it could be a gain share model, which means there's some part of the
efficiency that that we manage to retain. Whether that efficiency is going
to reflect in an increase in margin or whether I'm going to use that to
invest further in technology. That's a management call. And since we've
been keeping our margins stable and consistent, we think anything that
we can do to continue to invest to grow our capabilities, that is something
that we will do and try and keep our margins consistent.
Pranay Roop Chatterjee: Excellent. Great results and all the best.
Moderator: We move to the next question from Naysar Parikh of Native Capital. Your
line has been unmuted.
Naysar Parikh: Hi. So the five top clients that you have, can you give an idea of what
would be your share of wallets in them? How many other players are
there? Typically, do they divide it with two, three players, and how does
that work? And secondly, when you win new clients, whose business are
you actually winning? Because like you showed, these are long-term
contracts. So it'll be for even your competition. So how do you win the
new clients?
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If it is a large client, it could be as an additional vendor. Like I said,
sometimes clients during the renewal may want to bring in a new vendor
so I may get an opportunity as an additional vendor, or I might be
replacing some of the smaller vendors. But, typically, this is a very sticky
business. As sticky as it is for me, it's sticky for some of the other large
players as well.
Naysar Parikh: Got it. Understood. And who would be the largest player over here in the
outsourced market according to you in U.S.?
Ramesh Gopalan: If you're talking about similar service profile, see some of the companies
who operate in multiple segments, they don't break down health care
numbers separately. And even when they do breakdown, if they do both
IT work and operations work, they don't give the split between IT and
operations. So in talking to analysts, we believe that some of the bigger
players like Accenture and Cognizant, their revenues could be closer to
the 1 billion mark annually. So but, there wouldn't be more than two or
three folks who would have larger revenues than us in the space we are
in.
Naysar Parikh: Okay. Got it. Just last. When we look at the TPAs, which are operating in
India, and the kind of work that they are doing, if you were to contrast
compare yourself what you are doing versus the TPAs in India, how would
that be?
Ramesh Gopalan: If you look at it from a macro point of view, it is very similar. So they
process claims, we process claims. Obviously, the level of automation and
so on is very different in the U.S. versus what's in India. So without getting
into those details, broadly, that's we also do claims. We handle grievance
appeals, that the TPAs do. We help in enrolment. They also help in
enrolment.
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Yeah. Payment Integrity is another thing that is unique in the U.S. context.
But, yeah, so except for some of those differences that I spoke of, at a
broad level, yes, activities would be similar.
Naysar Parikh: Got it. Thank you so much. I'll come back in the queue. Thank you.
Moderator: Thank you, Naysar. We take the next question from Pratyush Agarwal
from White Oak Capital. Pratyush, your line has been unmuted. As we
don't have audio from this line, we move to the next participant.
We take the question from Rishi Jhunjhunwala from IIFL. Your line has
been unmuted. Rishi, you may go ahead.
Rishi Jhunjhunwala: Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. Just wanted to understand a little bit
in terms of your medium term growth profile. So if we look at you have
pretty high client concentration with top three clients contributing
probably close to around two-third of your revenues. If you look at the
industry, the health care services outsourcing grows at 8% to 9%. For you
to do 13% to 15% kind of a growth rate on a sustainable basis, assuming
that your top three clients probably will grow largely in line with how the
industry is growing, given that your wallet shares are pretty high in those,
and there will not be a situation where they will depend on a single
vendor. It would typically mean that for the rest of your business has to
grow consistently at 20% plus.
So just wanted to understand what will drive that growth on, for the rest
of the business. And also, if you can give some colour in terms of your say
top three clients, how they have grown over say past three to five years
just a CAGR?
Ramesh Gopalan: Thanks, Rishi, for those questions. So first question it's a good question,
right? I'll answer the second question along with the first. If you look at
the top three clients combined, I don't have the exact number, but if I look
at the last three, four years, it would probably be in the 9%, 10% range
combined growth of the top three clients, right? So they continue to grow
healthily, year-after-year. It's slightly higher than your 7% to 8% in that
range.
But to answer your other question, what we are very good at doing is, we
are very good at farming. So even when I open a mid-market client today
or any new client today, typically, like I've explained in the past, we get in
with one or two services. And then, we are very good at being able to
convert that to a third service and a fourth service and so on. So typically,
if you get into a client with one service and in the next year, you're able
to add on a new service, I mean, roughly, you're going to double the
business. So that's a lot of the new clients that we are adding today are
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going to grow much, much faster than clients who've been with us for 10,
15 years.
Just for the very fact that I'm starting on a smaller base. And then we are
continuing to also look at more newer opportunities. So we are continuing
to penetrate mid market clients. And so both the new engine, new logo
growth, as well as farming from the logos that, I've opened in the recent
past, those numbers are likely to be in the high teens, which is what
combined will give a low-to-mid teens growth.
The one way of trying to increase that low-to-mid teens to higher teens
growth, like I've discussed in the past is, can we open some of these new
logos, not on as one service, two service basis, but can I combine a
number of services and open it as a larger deal right from the get go. So
that is the BPaaS model that we've been discussing. So we are in the
process of trying that out, it's early days. But if we execute on that
strategy successfully, then we believe that the deal sizes can be much
larger and the growth rate can be higher than what it is today.
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah. The first question, yes. We want to grow the Provider aggressively.
Even today, the Provider is growing marginally faster than the Payer of
business. But we are constantly looking to grow that faster, because our
Provider portfolio compared to the Payer is a lot more restricted today.
Whereas, we have a number of capabilities on the Payer side that are
equally applicable to the Provider side. And so we are looking at ways of
expanding our service capabilities on the Provider side and growing that
business more aggressively. Having said that, Payer will still continue to
be the larger core part of our business for the foreseeable future.
To your next question, look, I mean theoretically not a lot of it, not
everything is replicable globally. The administrative system of the U.S.
healthcare is very different than what you would encounter in other
places. But the clinical side, whatever we are doing is equally applicable,
right? So that's one part of the response. But broadly, like I said, given the
size of the U.S. market and the fact that we are still a very small player
compared to that opportunity size.
We believe that, we need to keep focused on the U.S. market. Having said
that, there are other adjacencies to the Payer and Provider markets that
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we haven't explored in the past. And that's something that we might, look
at exploring in the future. But yeah, it's likely to be more in the U.S. for at
least the near future before venturing outside.
Rishi Jhunjhunwala: Understood. And just one last question on margins. At that 24%, 25%
EBITDA, you're pretty much in the top quartile when we look at players of
similar businesses. So do you attribute this largely to the level of
offshoring that you're able to do, or are there any other specific reasons
for your margin differential versus some of the peers? And how defensible
do you think that is, if you were to start seeing some sort of pricing
pressure across customers?
Ramesh Gopalan: You're right. The margins offshore are higher than the margins that you
would generate on the same shore, right in the U.S. So that's true for
almost everybody. And so the more offshoring you can do, the better are
your margins, right? So and like I said, we have over 90% of our resources
in nearshore and offshore geographies. And so that is one reason why our
margins are high. The second question is our operating efficiency. We
pride ourselves on being strong operators. We've done this for 24 years.
We know how to run the business. And these are businesses where you
need to manage headcount very carefully, and you need to manage
efficiencies very carefully. And we master the art of doing that.
So we believe that we can squeak or eke out more margins, than our
competitors, even for the same price points. And your third question on
maintainability of margins, we've addressed that in the past, right? So
there are several levers for us to act on, when it comes to margins. And
efficiency is a big factor, like I've said. And we have several tools at our
disposal to continue to generate those efficiencies.
Rishi Jhunjhunwala: Great. Thank you so much, and all the best for second half and the
following years.
Moderator: Thank you. We take the next question from Chirag Shah from White Pine
Capital. Chirag, your line has been unmuted. You can ask your question.
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Chirag Shah: Okay. Thanks for the opportunity. So my first question is with respect to,
how difficult it is to win a new business? Okay. Say, for example, right now
in U.S. where you are, a new client, in terms of capability, in terms of time
it requires from the effort you put and the time it requires to scale up. So
that is the first question if you can just share how, based on your
experiences.
Ramesh Gopalan: Thank you, Chirag for the question, right? So I mean in any industry, it's
never easy to win a new client. More so in the operational world because
the domain expertise is a very strong entry barrier, right? So you have to
prove to the client that you have the capability because they are handing
over their existing operations to a service partner. And this is something
like I said, this is something that they need to run day in and day out, to
keep the lights on. And so they can't afford to make a mistake by choosing
the wrong partner, right?
But given the risks involved, people are very cautious when they make the
decisions to choose a vendor and to offshore. So I would say, yes. It is
difficult to get into a client. Your second question on ramp up, it depends
on the size of the deal, right? So we've onboarded clients with 300, 400
FTEs and ramp them up in four to six months. So it depends. But for
smaller deals, we could be up and running in a time as short as two to
three months, right?
But the larger the size of the deal, it might take us, longer. Because, most
other than the clinical work where we hire clinicians who are already
trained, but we still need to train them on the U.S. healthcare. For the
nonclinical cues, we tend to hire people with limited healthcare
experience. And we train them in U.S. healthcare and in the process
before we deploy them. So there is hiring and training cycle which takes
time. But for that, our ability to ramp up is quite fast.
Chirag Shah: When you say ramp up in say, four to six months, you need to achieve the
optimum level, right? Optimum level of revenue from that contract?
Ramesh Gopalan: Yes, for the reasonable sized contracts. Yeah and by six months, we will
be hitting the steady state revenue if that's what is, yeah.
Chirag Shah: Yeah. Also in terms of time required, suppose you start a discussion today
with your client, either you approach them or they approached you.
Unless it's a dire situation for the client. I'm excluding that part. But
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generally, you experience how much time it takes for you to make an
entry, it will look like.
Ramesh Gopalan: Again, if the entry point is when a RFP is out and you're invited to
participate, it could be anywhere between three to four months. But if
you're essentially cultivating a relationship, which will then result in an
actual RFP and so on, it could take anywhere between six to eight months.
Chirag Shah: Okay. This is good enough. And second is any thought on, expanding your
geographical reach?
Ramesh Gopalan: I just answered that question, sir. So like I said in the near future, we're
going to be focused on the U.S. market, at least for the next couple of
years, right? So we have a large opportunity there. And we think by
staying focused, we can win a larger share of the business.
Chirag Shah: And one last question if I can squeeze in. So of the ₹100 of the opportunity
that is available in general for outsourcing or say among top three clients,
how much of you are doing today? Because some of the things will be
done in-source. You highlighted only 20% is being outsourced, right?
Chirag Shah: For you, of the ₹100 of opportunity available today in your assessment,
how much you have already encashed and how much you think you can
encash over next three years?
Ramesh Gopalan: I mean if I understand your question, you're asking me for I mean, there
are multiple ways to answer that question. If you're asking me what's my
market share amongst the players with similar services, I don't have exact
number. But like I said, to in response to some other question, there are
only two or three players who are bigger than me.
Chirag Shah: Let me rephrase the question, sir. I'm saying that there's an outsourcing
opportunity of, say you said that today as well as the potential that could
be outsourced is ₹100. You are addressing only 20% as an outsourcer,
correct? Now going from 20% to say 40%.
Chirag Shah: What will it require to fall in place either for you or for industry? I'm
putting it.
Ramesh Gopalan: Okay, okay. I get your question. So the 20% to 25% is an industry average,
right? If you look at the different maturities, they'll be different, right? For
example, if you classify the market into the large national Payers and the
mid-market and the small market, it'll vary significantly. The large guys
would have done a little more. They'll probably have a 40% plus,
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penetration. Whereas the smaller guys may be in the single-digits, right?
So what will it take is I mean, the industry, the cost pressures are only
increasing. Someone asked the question, the reimbursement rates are
coming down.
To your earlier question, it's still not an easy sale, but at least they are
more open to having those conversations today.
Moderator: Chirag, may I request you to re-join the queue? We have a few
participants waiting for their turn.
Chirag Shah: Yeah, I was just thanking them. Thank you very much.
Moderator: Thank you so much. We'll take the next question from Pratyush Agarwal
from White Oak Capital. Pratyush, your line has been unmuted.
Pratyush Agarwal: Yeah, hi. Congrats on a great set of results. I'm sorry earlier those some
audio issue. So my question is, on the client addition side. So given it's
taken decades practically to build the current client base that trust the
engagement. So can you talk about what could be a reasonable result in
terms of new client addition, say for the next two, three to five years?
What would you say be a reasonable case for new client addition in terms
of numbers?
Ramesh Gopalan: That's a good question, Pratyush. It's, I mean, historically also as a
company, as a division within a larger enterprise, we were not as focused
on penetrating the mid and small clients, because we were growing
healthily just with the top Payers. So the focus on the mid and small
market started in earnest only about three, four years ago. So that's point
number one.
And to your question, what we've done in the last couple of years is
indicative of what we think we'll be happy with. Anything between eight
25
and 12 clients a year is a number that we are targeting. If we manage to
do better than that, we'll be happier. But that's a number that we are
targeting to do.
Pratyush Agarwal: Got it. Thank you for that. And to an earlier point you were making in
terms of engagement. So of our current client base, what are the
percentage of, let's say, client or opportunities you say where you have a
clear -- you've demonstrated success engagement trust. And now you
think, these clients will ramp up in terms of wallet share irrespective of
overall, let's say client per dollars growing or not in that particular, let's
say, overall account?
Ramesh Gopalan: Okay. I may come across a little arrogant, but other than the clients that
I've onboarded on the last 12 months or so, I would say I have that rapport
with every other client. So for us, onboarding a client and giving them the
experience of what we can deliver in the first 12 to 18 months is sufficient
to build that trust and relationship for them for us to continue to grow
with them.
Pratyush Agarwal: Got it. Thank you so much, and best of luck.
Moderator: Thank you. We'll take the next question from Nilesh Jain from Astute
Investment Management. Your line has been unmuted.
Nilesh Jain: Thanks for the opportunity. And congratulations for a good number.
Firstly, I just need one data point. I just wanted to understand, top five
clients, revenue contribution for this quarter and maybe comparable
quarter for the last financial year, if you can provide that?
Ramesh Gopalan: I don't have the numbers off hand, but it'd roughly be the same numbers,
right? It'll be about 80% top five?
Nilesh Jain: Okay. So in just to follow-up on that, I was just checking out comparing
the numbers for FY '23 and FY '24 and for the quarter one. I see, obviously,
number of client groups has increased from 35 to right now currently 45.
So there's been addition of around net basis, 10 clients you all have
added. And in terms of share, if I look at the growth of your top five client
has been around 11% odd. Balance of the remaining clients, revenue
contribution has been around 21%.
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of growth coming from your new acquisitions or once that you recently
acquired?
Ramesh Gopalan: Yes. I mean, that's the aim. So if you look at our concentration, it's come
down. At least for the top three, has come down by almost 10 percentage
points over the last three years. So we are actively targeting the mid and
small space to grow them faster, to bring the top client concentration
down. But having said that, like I keep saying the top client still continue
to grow nearly at double-digits, which makes the job difficult.
But, yeah, in the next, if you're giving me a two, three year time frame,
we want the top five clients from the 80% to come down somewhere
between 60% to 65%.
Nilesh Jain: Right. Okay. Interesting. Just to follow-up on that, obviously, everyone
been asking on the acquisition side. Just wanted to understand, what
could be the case, if you're losing a client, what could be the possible
reason? Is it your end of the contract that's not getting renewed? Then
what could be the possible reason if you're losing a X client?
Ramesh Gopalan: Yeah. So the contract not getting renewed is very, very rare. So there been
one or two instances where, at some point, the client has decided to take
the work in in-house. And that typically happens when a client is only
working with me in the U.S. So if, for whatever reason, they didn't want
to offshore, they work with me in the U.S., then sometimes, in one or two
cases, they've taken the work back.
But and we've not had too many client losses. The only other reason we
may lose a client is if the client decides to opt out of a segment that we
are supporting them on. So for example, we had a client in 2022, and we
were supporting them on the exchange business. And the client the next
year decided to exit the exchange business completely. So that's one
reason we lost all the clients.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you, and I wish you all the best.
Moderator: Thank you. We take the next question from Radhika Mittal from Avendus.
Your line has been unmuted. Radhika?
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Radhika Mittal: Thank you for the opportunity, and congratulations on a great set of
numbers. I just wanted to ask, as a result of the company's strategy in
focusing on smaller mid-market clients, is this something that will be
margin accretive, simply on a perspective that these smaller clients will
have lower negotiating power? So will revenue charge, let's say, per FTE
improve?
Ramesh Gopalan: From a pure pricing point of view, Radhika, I don't think that'll happen.
Even though we may not have a negotiating power and we are unlikely to
be the sole contender for the business. So there'll still be a competitive
situation. While overall, you're right, in terms of, they're not as mature an
outsourcer like a large Payer word. But I still don't think it'll be a very
meaningful difference in terms of pricing.
But having said that, the opportunity to generate efficiencies and the ease
with which we can get permissions to do that, we believe is a lot higher
with mid-market clients, because there's a lot of protocols and red tape
that you need to go through with large clients before you can, implement
any efficiency initiatives.
Radhika Mittal: Got it. Thank you. Congratulations and all the best.
Moderator: That was the last question for today. I would like to hand over the forum
to the management for their closing comments.
Ramesh Gopalan: Thank you. I hope, all of your questions have been addressed. In case, you
have any further questions, feel free to write to the Investor Relations
team. And thank you for your support in the IPO and later. And we look
forward to connecting with all of you after the next quarter results. Thank
you.
Disclaimer: This is a transcription and may contain transcription errors. The transcript has been edited for clarity. The Company
takes no responsibility of such errors, although an effort has been made to ensure high level of accuracy.
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