Attrition situation won’t change for the next few quarters: Debashis Chatterjee

Can you guide us on the average quarterly deal win trajectory? Also, what is the overall pipeline looking like for your company?

The clients are looking at maximising their revenues, that is why a lot of transformation deals are happening over there. Clients are also looking at cost optimisation and there is a lot of effort in terms of workplace modernisation, workforce transformation for every client. Most of the deals are digital and cloud led and are becoming a short cycle. But it is not that we do not have a longer-term multi-year deal. The short cycle deals over some time develop into larger strategic relationships. From an overall TCV standpoint, we have YTD $1.2 billion, which is 21% up from last year, YoY. We are fairly comfortable and the pipeline that we have is fairly robust. We are very confident of the deals that will flow through in the coming quarters.

Could you give us more colour on how the mix has changed? What is the overall size, duration, quantum of the shorter deals?
When we look at our pipeline, it is a mix of both large and transformation deals. Every quarter it will be different, but at this point, we feel that we have more deals that are short cycles, which will eventually translate into multi-year initiatives, but it will come in iterations.

Would you increase your EBITDA margin guidance from the current 20%?

We have been focused on taking the margin to healthy levels. 20% is a healthy level for us to operate from an EBITDA standpoint. It may go a little up and down in a few quarters, but on a full-year basis, we feel that our margin story is going to be intact as we go along. 20% is a good range to look at. The processes that we have put in place in terms of tracking the margin, all the various levers that are working out fairly well.

The travel transport and hospitality transformation vertical was coming back to pre-pandemic levels and then once again, the Omicron variant played spoilsport to a certain extent. Is there likely to be a slowdown in that space in Q4?
We have reached the pre-pandemic levels, which is a very positive thing. This particular quarter, we have hit the $200 million run rate in terms of our travel vertical. During the last several quarters, we have also diversified our portfolio in travel beyond just airlines and hospitality. We also ventured into food and beverage, surface transformation, cruise liners and so on. The portfolio of clients we have in travel now is much more resilient. It is not going to be uniformly impacted because of the virus. We have made the portfolio much more diversified and much more resilient at this point.

What is the cash utilisation plan? Any M&A in the pipeline?

We have been looking at M&A all the time, and we will be open to looking at inorganic M&A’s as well. We have done one inorganic in the past and are seeing very good results. We are on the lookout and we will be hearing something as we go along.

Are there any signs that attrition has peaked?

In the near foreseeable future, at least in the next couple of quarters, I do not think this scenario will change. We need to counter that with other things we have been doing on the talent side. We have internally also organised ourselves better to make sure the way we deal with talent and the way we manage with talent is much more nimble and agile. Hopefully, some of these things will help us in terms of countering some of the other macro situations.