EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jason Peterson: I think we would still continue with the same strategy that we’ve had with doing acquisitions that allow us to expand capabilities and then sort of help further our opportunity to grow organically. And so certainly, we’ll be careful as we have been, but I think that you’ll still see a significant focus on acquisitions that are probably more in that sort of small to midsized tuck-in.

Arkadiy Dobkin: And I guess, that’s an advantage we have from our financial position. We have a very strong cash position to not rely on the outside market to do exactly what we were doing in the past, because it was relatively small acquisitions targeted for specific competencies or very specific geographies, we had a very good shape to continue doing this. I think that’s not much change.

James Faucette: Great. I appreciate those commens.

Arkadiy Dobkin: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from the line of Puneet Jain with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Puneet Jain: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask on financial services. Some of your peers have talked about seeing some weakness there. And you also mentioned banking within financial services as weak. So can you double-click on what you are seeing there? Like are the headwinds broad-based within banking? Or are they client-specific?

Jason Peterson: Yeah. For us clearly we have one large client where it’s probably client specific and we have seen some — I guess, some reduction in revenues there. And then there’s, a number of other banks that we would work with where we’ve also seen the decline. So I would say it’s probably relatively broad for banking. But other elements of the financial services practices were also seeing growth. And — so banking is certainly somewhat soft with opportunities in asset management and other areas in financial services including insurance.

Puneet Jain: That’s correct. And then, like it was nice to hear that some of the programs some of the projects clients are coming back. Is that incremental work driven by clients need to modernize their core systems maybe because of generative AI? Or are these still more cost optimization type of deals?

Arkadiy Dobkin: I think where the return happened. Usually it’s a program with — it’s a program where suppliers [Indiscernible] because they can do it with somebody else. And that’s usually the trigger for the return, but then it’s actually triggering opening new opportunities with us as well. So we have already several situations during the last several quarters when it’s happening. So Gen AI we talked about that we still see the direct impact on the revenue is not going to be exactly there yet, but there are a lot of activities and with all investments which we do in it right now have definitely differentiated our self we see the client reaction is what we should. So it’s starting to create tangible opportunities working against the size of that but still relatively small. So I think we will see us going to be developing during the next quarters or so.

Puneet Jain: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Mr. Dobkin, CEO and President for any closing remarks.

Arkadiy Dobkin: Yes. Thank you for joining today. So I think with all kind of numbers which we said and we still looking more positive to the situation that several quarters ago. Unfortunately, the world is still continues to be a very unpredictable place. And that’s why it’s difficult to make more clear statement sometimes. So let’s meet in three months and see what we will be able to share then. Thank you very much.

Operator: That will conclude today’s call. We thank you all for joining. You may now …

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