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

And it’s great to be able to see that regardless of the market environment, our business model is very resilient and very growth oriented, and we can grow our top line and our bottom line at double digits.

Ashwin Shirvaikar: Thank you for that.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon from Needham. Mayank?

Mayank Tandon: Thank you. Good morning. Rohit, you talked about the GenAI opportunities. Could you talk in terms of is that changing the existing contract structure with your clients? Is that being integrated into it? And how is that affecting the size and scope of the engagements with your existing client base as they incorporate GenAI into their business models?

Rohit Kapoor: Sure, Mayank. I think GenAI is having an impact on the way in which we are growing in multiple ways. Let me try and articulate this to you. Number one, the work that we do with our clients on our existing contracts in digital operations, we are certainly embedding a lot more GenAI into those operations and into those solutions. Number two, we are going to clients, leveraging GenAI and winning large pieces of integrated digital operations deals. So this is helping us win new business from — either from existing customers or from new customers. Number three, GenAI is also leading us to be able to deploy GenAI with clients which might have outsourced to work with other providers, and where we may not be handling the digital operations part, but we are applying our domain knowledge and our expertise on GenAI and helping them create operational efficiency and productivity gains.

And number four, GenAI is creating a huge opportunity for us on the data management side. So we all know that in order for GenAI to be effective, the data estate of our clients’ needs to be in order. And right now, there is a huge movement in order of our clients wanting to fix their data estate. Most of them in the past had focused in on moving their structured data to the cloud and getting their structured data organized so that, that data will be usable. Well, what we are finding is that the unstructured data is a much bigger piece of the work that remains to be done, and we can be very, very helpful to our clients manage their unstructured data sets. So frankly, there’s tremendous opportunity with existing clients and existing work that we have, new business that we can win with it, GenAI, pure GenAI solutions and deployments that we can have and then on the data management side.

So we think this is becoming a more strategic lever for growth for us going forward, and that’s why we are investing more heavily in this particular area.

Mayank Tandon: That’s very helpful color. It sounds like a boon not a curse as some people in the market have believed. So good to see some proof points there. Rohit and Maurizio, as my quick follow-up here on margins. Sorry, I did hear your comments, Maurizio, on margins, but for fiscal ’24, I know you’re not giving guidance, but if you are able to grow double digits, should we just expect some margin improvement even off the 19-plus level that you’re going to end up in ’23 just from scale benefits if nothing else really changes?

Maurizio Nicolelli: We have talked about — and thank you for the question, Mayank. So we have talked about every year making improvements to our margins going forward. We had the big spike up from 2020 to 2022, where we went all the way up to 18.3% from a range of 14% to 15%. And now we talked about making improvements to margins on an annual basis, marginally, meaning 10 basis points to 20 basis points a year. And we’ve been very successful at doing more than that. But we still think in our mindset that we should continue to drive margins higher, just incrementally, not these larger big spikes that you’ve seen in prior years.