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00:00 Mr. Hariharan, you were telling us about the quarter gone by and what you make of it.
00:04 Thanks, Agam, for having me at the show. On Q4, results have gone well. We've been
00:10 sequentially improving our quarter percentage every quarter from the beginning of the year
00:16 to 1.45 percent and we reported revenues of 22,513 crores, the highest ever Q4 revenues we've had.
00:25 We also had annual revenues of 89,600 crores, the highest ever, at a 13 percent growth rate.
00:31 And for the quarter, we've grown 3 percent top line and 5 percent bottom line. It has largely
00:38 been contributed by our growth geographies, India and KSA. India grew at 9 percent. Saudi Arabia
00:45 grew at almost 15 percent. So geographically, we are right now in three geographies, India,
00:51 Middle East, Africa and Turkey. There were some stress markets like Africa and Turkey, but
00:56 the growth geographies contributed well. Amongst the business lines, cloud grew very well for us
01:04 and so did the Endpoint Solutions Group, which consists of PCs and printers. And we have done
01:11 well in those and continue to expect a good growth rate on the cloud front and the subscription
01:16 business front. This is going forward, which are, at least as far as FY25 is concerned,
01:23 what are the markets which are going to be most key for you? Where are the markets where you are,
01:28 in fact, which are the largest markets, one, and where is it that you're actually looking at most
01:33 amount of growth? Of course, you mentioned that Saudi Arabia is looking at about 15 percent growth.
01:37 India has seen 9 percent growth as well. But what's the way forward for FY25? So we're looking
01:43 at two big trends in the market in the next year. One is obviously cloud. Cloud continues to grow as
01:48 customers move to cloud very aggressively. On the other front, AI is coming on us from different
01:54 directions. So AI enabled PCs will be there, AI enabled workstations, AI enabled smartphones and
02:02 the cloud, all of them are getting AI enabled. So we see a big trend on this in the next year,
02:09 and which will increase the fresh cycles, which will increase new use cases and new revenue
02:15 streams. The place that we see the biggest potential for growth again will be India.
02:20 And in Middle East Africa will be Saudi Arabia and UAE. And just look at Gartner's projections
02:27 for the next three to five years on the IT landscape. They expect India to grow at 10
02:32 percent in the next few years and the Middle East Africa growth markets at around eight, nine percent.
02:37 So we expect these geographies to contribute in a big way and these new trends to contribute as
02:44 well. We will see growth on the mobility of the phones. We will see more growth on the servers
02:49 and software subscriptions we do, as well as the PCs and printers. It will be a balanced growth
02:56 across all the business units with cloud being the fastest growth. Right. Could you also give
03:02 us a picture on your margins at the moment, which remain in a range, and I reckon that it's been in
03:10 a range over the past few quarters. What's the outlook and what's the update here? Yeah, so I
03:17 think margins will remain somewhat in that same range. We had healthier margins during COVID,
03:23 where supply was chasing demand. But we are, that is coming up. The post-COVID syndrome is
03:30 setting in, in terms of going back to margins that we used to have before COVID. So we will be in that
03:35 similar range of margins. In the cloud, where we will do a little bit more of cloud adjacency
03:42 services, we will see a little bit more margin there as that part of the business growth is
03:47 really tiny and small right now. But rest of the businesses, the margins will broadly stay in the
03:53 same range. All right. Mr. Aryan, I'm also looking at your top vendors at the moment. Of course,
03:59 Apple leads the charts, but we also have a substantial amount from HP and Dell. In terms
04:06 of the mix beyond just Apple, do you think that's likely to change going forward into this year? Or
04:11 do you actually see this share of Apple being maintained there in terms of the products that
04:16 you distribute? Or how is this mix, in fact, expected to change, if at all, in FY25?
04:24 So you will probably not see an impact just purely on FY25. Clearly, the subscription business
04:30 is almost a billion dollars now. It's spread across quite a few different brands.
04:35 And that is growing rapidly. That includes the hyperscaler cloud business, as well as the
04:40 software as a service and platform as a service business. That's growing at 20, 30, 40 percent.
04:45 And some of the brands there will start coming into the top 10 over the next few years. I'll
04:52 not be exactly able to say on the top five it will make a dent, but clearly that will become a
04:57 larger part of our portfolio as we go forward. All right. Well, Mr. Aryan, then my final question
05:04 then is for your top line growth. Any indications of what we might expect? I understand if you don't
05:10 want to give us a number, can you in fact at least tell us whether or not you could do a number which
05:16 is better than or at least be in line with what we've seen for FY24? See, the way we look at the
05:24 market, the market size is there. As I mentioned to you earlier, the Gartner projections for the IT
05:30 market is between 8 and 10 percent in the theaters we play in. And we are number one, number two in
05:38 most of the geographies we play in. And we want to keep that leadership position. So we will expect
05:44 to obviously grow at market or a little bit above. Again, it will depend on how this landscape grows
05:53 in the market size and we will appropriate our number one, number two share wherever we are
05:58 at number one or number two. So very hard to pin a number right now, but that's where we stand.
06:04 Okay, Mr. Aryan, we'll leave it at that. Thank you so much for joining us and taking us through
06:07 the quarter as well as what you can expect going forward.