ExlService Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:EXLS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Within this business, Insurance, as you know, is an industry vertical where we have a leadership position. It is a business which we pride ourselves in terms of our knowledge and understanding of the marketplace there. And I think we’re getting rewarded for that knowledge and expertise that we have, because more and more clients are giving us larger pieces of work and that business for us is growing very nicely. We are seeing a similar kind of a trend shape up in Healthcare and EBU in our Emerging business unit. But certainly, these two businesses are much smaller in size as compared to the Insurance business. The Emerging business units in this particular quarter did have one client which transitioned out because of them filing for bankruptcy, so there has been an impact on that.

But keep in mind that our Emerging business unit targets actually many, many subverticals. So we target clients in utilities, in travel, transportation and logistics, in retail. And therefore, we’re seeing a great amount of, actually, diversified strength coming in into the Emerging business unit. The Healthcare business for us is largely driven on the operations management sees around clinical operations. And there, we are seeing that there can be increase in volumes at sometimes and there can be a diversification of a customer base as well. So our hope is to continue to build that and bring the same kind of value that we are bringing in Insurance, which is the combination of data analytics and operations and bringing that to bear in Healthcare.

So frankly, for us, we are very, very happy with the way in which the Digital Operations & Solutions business is growing.

Ashwin Shirvaikar: Understood. Understood. And thank you for all the color. One of the questions we get relatively frequently nowadays from investors is with regards to what’s the normalized growth for a company like EXL over time. And I found maybe a potential clue on an interview you had given to a newspaper where you said $2 billion in revenue by 2025, which would imply somewhere in the low double digit, 11% and change type growth. If you could kind of provide more color on that. Because that — relative to how you’ve grown the last three, four years, that seems quite modest. So any color that you can provide, if stuff is changing in the last two, three years were just anomaly. How would you think of that?

Rohit Kapoor: Sure. So I guess, for the last few years, we’ve grown nicely. But I think the conviction that we have is twofold. One, the portfolio that we have, which is a combination of the Data Analytics business, which represents approximately 45% of our revenue and the Digital Operations & Solutions business, which is 55% of our business, both these businesses for us are strong growth businesses. We would expect on a combined basis to be able to grow double digit on a normalized growth trajectory. There will be points in time where one of these business lines might grow faster and the other one might grow a bit slower and vice versa, and we’ve already seen that happen. So for example, in 2022, our Data Analytics business was growing very, very rapidly as such and the Digital Operations business was growing slightly slower at that point of time.

Right now, in this current environment, we are seeing the Digital Operations business really grow much more strongly, and the Data Analytics business has been challenged because of discretionary projects as well as the marketing analytics that we’ve spoken about. But long term, on a normalized basis, we expect double-digit growth across both these businesses on an organic constant currency basis. We do think we have the ability to be able to add on to this through inorganic growth. And M&A is certainly something which we’d be looking at and adding on to that. You’ve seen us do the acquisition of Clairvoyant, and that was a very successful acquisition for us, which added very specific capabilities and expanded our portfolio. So we feel comfortable about growing our business double digit long term in a normalized way.