EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

James Faucette: Thanks for the….

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Arvind Ramnani with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead

Arvind Ramnani: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Yes. I just wanted sort of really better understand when you kind of consider guidance, do you look at like – do you go account by account? Like just trying to get an understanding of kind of the procedure to basically come up with guidance because kind of – clearly things have – are just in an environment where things that are just so fluid and the velocity of change is something that’s difficult to predict?

Jason Peterson: Yes. And so it’s hard to predict kind of moving quarters at this stage. We’ve talked about the unevenness of the choppiness or the – in some cases, we’ve had programs that we have been awarded and then they either haven’t started or as Ark talked about, they’ve been descoped. We have clients who come back to us and said, we’d like you to do this, but in a lower-cost geography. And again, all those things kind of impact the revenue growth rate. So again, there is a significant amount of sort of client level and RFP win estimation and all that, but we’re just finding that the demand environment continues not to evolve the way we had originally expected.

Arvind Ramnani: Okay. That makes sense. And then just with kind of uses of cash as you kind of think about doing additional M&A or basically doing kind of buybacks, or just trying to see – or is it just one of these things that you’ll continue to build?

Jason Peterson: Arvind, I’m going to be a little short of my response just because we’re kind of at the end of the call or past time. But I would say yes to both. So you will see us continue to do more and more acquisitions that again, are all strategic and do allow us to continue to expand our position, both end markets and in delivery locations. And you will also clearly see us do more buybacks in the coming quarters.

Arvind Ramnani: Terrific. Thank you.

Jason Peterson: Hey, thank you Arvind. Appreciate it.

Operator: And this concludes our Q&A session. I would like to turn the call back over to Arkadiy Dobkin for closing remarks.

Arkadiy Dobkin: As always, thank you, everybody for joining today. I think we’re looking forward for the next call. And I think we’re not going to bring surprises next time, at least similar to today. So let’s look pragmatically to everything. So fortunately, we didn’t have any questions today about Gen AI and how we do it there because we’re doing pretty good and feel very good about this area, but probably we can spend more time on this topic next time. Thank you very much.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Enjoy the rest of your day. You may now disconnect.