Coforge Ltd — Q1 FY25

Wage increase in our case has happened effective the first of July. If it had happened effective first of April, we believe margins would have been depressed by 130-150 BPS. Broad assumption would be 140 BPS.

BFS, we believe it's a temporary blip, and that's a normalization that's happened, because last quarter, our BFS business had grown sequentially 6.4%. It is still YOY 10.4% higher.

India has always been at only about 4% of our revenues globally. The last two quarters were an aberration, where it went all the way up to 5.3%. This quarter, it's come down to 3.8%. We don't see the seasonality in India on an ongoing basis.

We see the demand outlook across financial services as having materially improved. We see the outlook for the aviation, travel aviation sector as continuing to be extremely strong. We are seeing a rebound on our insurance business.

Headcount addition 1,886. 250 of those are graduate engineer trainees. Forty-five percent were BPO resources. Most of the headcount addition was towards the second half of the quarter.

Last year we were possibly the only firm that did a wage hike on the first of April. This year, the call was in line with what we've seen across the industry, and in line with the fact that our ARC over the last two and a half years has gone up almost 40%.

The weakness was only in the top five. Top six to 10 have actually done very well. Our top five have a preponderant number of banking clients. Banking has seen a normalization after about 12 or 13 quarters of extremely significant growth.

We expect the momentum to be back starting quarter two itself. It might pick up further in the subsequent quarters, but quarter two should see this metric getting corrected.

I see travel doing better than last year for us. We look at travel as a composite of three different subsegments. For airlines, we are clearly seeing a technology overhaul. We now work with five out of the top 10 airlines in the world.

Three line items: government incentive around SEIS INR 3,433 million, TDS on ESOP expenses INR 55 million, long service bonus INR 35 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter was 12.6%. We are looking at 16%+ EBITDA margin going forward.

We book visa cost in Q1 every year. Typically 350 bps dip between Q4 and Q1: 200-250 bps wage hikes, 100 bps visa cost and renewals. This quarter we had visa cost and increase in on-site headcount. We are at 17.9% adjusted EBITDA.

We had talked about a very significant deal in the last quarter. The ramp-up of that deal has proceeded. Insurance YOY growth for the firm is 2.5%. We believe if current projections hold at the end of Q2, that number should be up materially.