Executive Board’s Letter

Dear Stakeholders:

Businesses, companies and enterprises focused on delivering services around digital technologies were able to adapt successfully. The industrialization-of digital theme that had gathered steam earlier was accentuated by the pandemic. Adapting to digital realities became an imperative. Technology was no longer just a cost of doing business; it became a source of advantage. Happiest Minds as a Born Digital . Born Agile Company was fortuitous to be at the intersection of technology + digital and favorably positioned to serve our customers making the migration. Demand for our services was robust which is reflected in growth, revenues and profits. Therefore, we continue to see a healthy demand for our services.

As mentioned in our letter in the Annual Report 2020-21, during the pandemic, three technology themes had evolved: People Centricity, Location Independence, and Resilient Delivery. These three continue to be at the core of discussion for business users, decision makers and CXOs. While certain aspects of these themes have been mastered, enterprises continue to try, evaluate, test, and deploy technology solutions that can meet and enhance the needs of their teams, customers and stakeholders. This provides a long runway for Happiest Minds to partner with its customers in their strategic digital roadmap. Today, Internet of behavior, Distributed Cloud & AI Engineering continue to evolve and are still work-in-progress for many enterprises.

We foresee that enterprises will have three strategic imperatives to focus on – Growth, Digitization and Efficiency

1. Growth

Leveraging technology trends to maximize value and create IT force multipliers to win business and market share by

• Enhanced People Engagement: The world in the foreseeable future will be hybrid and remote working must be enabled for more use cases like real-time collaboration, AR / VR and metaverse. Delivery model must be reconfigured to embrace distributed services
• Enhanced Customer Engagement: Combining Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), User Experience (UX) and Multi-experience (MX) to drive greater customer and team confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy
• Implementing self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their environments and can dynamically modify their own algorithms to adapt to new conditions in the field like humans
• Developing systems and applications that learn about objects or content by analyzing their data and using it for creating realistic, original, and brand-new artefacts

2. Digitization

IT and business staff as a team-in fusion collaborate and drive innovation to rapidly digitize business by

• Composable Application architecture which allows implementing new features up to 80% faster which reduces risk of losing market momentum and customer loyalty significantly
• Implementing Decision Intelligence architecture to understand and engineer how decisions are made
• Rapidly identifying, vetting, and automating as many processes as possible
• An integrated approach for operationalizing AI models to generate three times more value from AI efforts

3. Efficiency

Digital business requires a resilient and efficient IT foundation as its core to scale cost-efficiently & to engineer trust

• Resilient and flexible integration of data across business users and platforms to simplify the data integration infrastructure and minimize technical debt
• Assets and users can be anywhere, meaning the traditional security perimeter is gone making a strong case for ring fencing security around data, privacy, and safety

Your Company is leading the digital efforts for its customers as they experiment and rapidly deploy systems and processes that pivot them to their next level of growth, adopt to changing times and increase the trust factor amongst stakeholders.

Your Company delivered an excellent performance in the fiscal gone by. Your Company delivered industry leading growth both for the fourth quarter and the full year with a superior margin profile. Operating revenues for the year was at US$147 Mn , a growth of 40.2% over the prior fiscal. Total income for the year was ₹1,131 Crores, displaying a solid growth of 41.8%. Since FY18, your Company has delivered a consistent Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.3%.

The Executive Board expresses its deep appreciation to our Happiest Minds who gave their best and acted in resonance resulting in those excellent numbers. The revenue growth was broad-based, and all the three Business Units (BU) have shown growth, profitability driven by demand and growth across all our geographies and chosen verticals.

Digital Business Services (DBS) led the growth with 53.3% followed by Infrastructure Management and Security Services (IMSS) at 45.4% and Product Engineering Services (PES) at 31%. The three Centers of Excellence (CoE) delivered excellent performance with all of them contributing to revenues of more than 50%. We will continue to focus on strengthening our technology offerings by carving out new centers of excellence as and when they achieve a critical mass. Next-Generation Cyber security services and low code/no code application development services are two areas where we have seen increased traction and demand.

During the year, your Company added 33 new logos and increased the average revenue per customer by 22% to US$774,000. The success of our land-and-expand strategy resulted in an increased count of large customers. Our $5-$10 Mn clients increased by 1 to a total count of 4, $3-$4 Mn clients increased by 2 to a total count of 8, $1-$3 Mn clients increased by 9 to a total count of 25.

Our EBITDA for the year was ₹295 Crores at 26.1% of total revenues showed a superior growth of 26.9%. 99% of EBITDA was converted to cash with a free cash flow of ₹291 Crores. Net Profit increased by 11.5% to ₹181 Crores. Our capital return ratios continue to industry leading standards with Return on Capital Employed (RoCE) at 39.8% and Return on Equity at 27.3%.

The Board of Directors, based on your Company’s good performance, strong cash generation and review of capital allocation strategy has recommended a final dividend of ₹2.0 per equity share subject to approval of shareholders. The total dividend for the year including the interim dividend (of ₹1.75) is ₹3.75.

We made good progress on our diversity metrics which increased by 2% to 26.4%.

Your Company received multiple accolades from the Great Place to Work® Institute which includes:

• India's Best Companies to Work for 2021
• India’s Top 25 Best Workplaces in IT & IT-BPM 2021
• Asia’s Best Workplaces 2021
• India’s Top 50 Best Workplaces for Women 2021
• India’s Top 15 Best Workplaces in Health & Wellness 2021 and a special recognition for our Care programs for Happiest Minds and their families during the COVID-19 crisis

Your Company’s Glassdoor® ratings increased to 4.4 from 4.3 in the previous fiscal. These recognitions are a validation of our efforts over many years of fostering an open culture and putting our people first in everything we do and focusing on their learning and development. During the year, on an average every Happiest Mind spent 30 hrs on learning. Also, we had 1,885 Happiest Minds who were covered as part of various upskilling & multiskilling initiatives. We ended the year with 4,168 Happiest Minds which is a strong net addition of 22%.

In the fiscal, Happiest Minds entered into a strategic partnership with Tech4TH Inc, an early-stage start-up which provides consulting-led digital solutions to the travel and hospitality industry. We intend to join forces and combine their consulting and domain expertise with the strengths of digital technology and software engineering of Happiest Minds to deliver innovative solutions.

As we look at FY23 and beyond, the demand remains buoyant despite multiple shocks to the world economy – cross-border conflicts, high inflationary scenario, rising interest rates, broken supply chains and slow growth. With our ear to the ground, we continue our focus to shape the digital journey of enterprises. Cloud adoption is still underpenetrated with about only 30% of workload on the cloud and core transformation that is a multi-year journey has still a long way to go. Our aim is to grow consistently at 20% and continue to deliver superior margin profile. To address the heightened demand, we will strengthen our existing delivery centers in Bengaluru, Noida & Pune and open a new delivery center in Bhubaneswar. During FY22, we started onboarding fresh campus graduates and we will continue this journey with greater vigor in this new fiscal and beyond. We have enhanced our hiring channels both onsite and offshore which will help us attract quality talent across the digital spectrum. We are making ahead-of-time investments in emerging technologies such as Metaverse, Web3.0, Advanced Analytics etc. to ensure we are ready when our customers adopt these technologies.

Our organic growth has been very healthy. However, in the case of inorganic growth, despite coming tantalizingly close to some strategic opportunities, we were not able to close any during the year. We will however continue to focus on this aspect with increased vigor and focus in FY23. Our approach to inorganic growth opportunities will continue to be focused on strengthening our offerings, entry into a new geography or strengthening an existing geography for us, getting us in-depth focus in a vertical. Our emphasis will be to build on the strength of Happiest Minds or fill gaps in our capabilities while acting as a springboard for our growth aspirations.

With COVID abating, one question which has been topmost in the minds of people has been on ‘return to office’. The IT industry was the first to move to remote working/work-from-home when the pandemic hit. However, now with most of the industries returning to work in a physical mode, the technology industry has been in a wait-and-watch mode.

We believe very strongly that working in the office with and amongst colleagues strengthens and sustains culture. Our Back2SMILES initiative was conceptualized to welcome our colleagues back to office in a planned, staggered manner. All our offices are now open, working, and ready. To meet our growth objectives, we have also decided to expand in our existing locations while also opening a presence in Bhubaneswar in FY23.

We express our gratitude to you as a stakeholder of the Company for providing us support, encouragement and timely advise which acts as guiding light to the next level of growth.

Thank you.