It gives me immense pleasure to share this year’s Integrated Annual Report with you. The financial year of 2023 was eventful for Happiest Minds. Progress made against our Vision 2031 on Business fundamentals, Customer satisfaction, People, Growth, Profitability, Environmental & Social Initiatives, and not least of all, Governance makes me proud. We have come out stronger from the last years marred by the pandemic and economic uncertainty with a steely resolve to continue building a stronger and sustainable organization.

While our financials, achievements, and other metrics point towards all of the above, our Vision of building a Company which will have a perpetual existence hinge on our commitment and us executing on a thought-out Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework.

ESG as a collective concept came into prominence during these last few years and primarily by investors who were looking to invest in companies but wanted a measure or a touchstone against which they could evaluate investments made or to be made. With ESG regulations increasing globally and studies linking good ESG practices to improved revenue growth, ESG performance has become a significant determinator when doing business.

Put simply, ESG takes cognizance of the environmental impact of a company’s operations, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and good governance practices.

Simply put, ESG refers to the ‘Dharmic principles’ per which one should run an enterprise. ESG is a philosophy and must be ingrained into the culture of the enterprise or the way we operate and do business to see its complete impact, effect, and benefits.

I make this statement drawing from my experience and with specific reference to my current engagement at Happiest Minds. When we started the Company 11 years back, we had clearly articulated the Mission, Vision, and Values of our Company. We believe that “MVV” - short for Mission, Vision and Values are the cornerstones to building a successful enterprise.

Active participation and a collaborative approach to establishing the MVV of a Company have been seen to be very effective. MVV at Happiest Minds is done collaboratively and democratically, which means this is grounds up and in active participation with all Happiest Minds, which is how we refer to our employees. Such an exercise ensures not only a common objective but also alignment and buy-in into the Vision by one and all.

We had incorporated Corporate Governance, Social Commitment, and Stakeholder Value enhancement into our Vision. This focus and rigor from inception helped us immensely and especially during these past few years in an environment of heightened awareness and attention around “ESG”.

As part of our Vision statement, aspects of Corporate Governance, Social Commitment, and Stakeholder Value enhancement were to be achieved through clearly articulated milestones. These milestones are evaluated regularly along with our Board.

After listing in October 2021, we decided to put together Vision 2031. Given how ESG has evolved, we now have a Vision statement focused solely and completely on ESG, which is “Be known for our ESG practices”. Again, we have clearly articulated milestones linked to achieving desired outcomes to fulfill this vision. Our focus on Corporate Governance meant we put in best practices on accounting, disclosure, Board composition, management, compliance with law, systems, and processes from the word ‘go’.

Though set up as a Private Ltd. company, we thought and operated like a publicly listed company. For example, Board meetings are serious affairs with clear agendas, pre-circulated reading material, etc. We established committees ahead of time and before they were mandatory. We published annual reports just like a listed company would do. Transparency and information sharing amongst stakeholders, identification of key indicators on the health of the business, etc., were put in place right upfront. All our actions were subject to the ‘sniff test’ of – “how would it look if what we did or did not do” appeared in the newspapers tomorrow.

We are quite proud of our industry recognitions, working with sustainability at the forefront of our decision-making. Ingrained as a core component of our global strategy to act on environmental, social, and governance issues, our 2023 Integrated Annual Report focuses on the theme of Corporate Governance that hinges on transparency, integrity, and management accountability.

Suffice to say, our practices got us a few winners like:

We won all these awards within two years of being a listed company. Honestly, this was only possible as we had made corporate governance a part of our being and the way of doing business. A company with strong governance practices leads to certain desirable outcomes. For example, we realized that markets and investors give a premium to companies that have higher levels of governance and transparency. Governance is a continuous process, and the organization must be at it and adopt changing requirements on a real-time basis and ahead of time.

Since our inception, we recognized the deserving, unseen, underprivileged, and unfortunate as stakeholders and that we had a social responsibility towards them. Addressing this stakeholder through social commitment is critical and a fundamental building block in our ethical foundation.

We are focused on aligning our CSR initiatives with our sustainability agenda, which has helped us to evolve, adapt and accept newer ideas of growth and innovation. Furthermore, to implement the value chain sustainability framework and ESG standards across the supply chain, we have established and defined the Vendor’s Code of Conduct which we expect our vendors to respect and adhere to. We engaged with the underprivileged even before we became profitable and had a CSR budget. We have adopted the Akshaya Patra Mid-day meal program for school children as a form of “giving”. A generous contribution to the Akshaya Patra program accompanies all celebrations at Happiest Minds or the achievement of milestones. As our CSR budgets grew, our contributions to Akshaya Patra have increased, and as of date, we have crossed giving 60 lakhs or 6 mn meals. Along with the Akshaya Patra during the intense period of COVID, we also repurposed some of our budgets to COVID support and related relief.

A large part of our CSR budget, which is now reasonably sizeable, is targeted toward supporting environmental causes. Adoption of groves, forests, and continuous tree planting is what we do. We have also taken on an audacious goal of becoming a ‘Net Zero Carbon’ emitter by 2030. In addition to the above, we are converting all our rooftops to produce solar power. In almost all our buildings, we follow water conservation measures, striving to become a ‘zero discharge’ facility. All our procurement is analyzed for sustainability. We assess the use of plastic with an effort to instill into people’s consciousness on the environmental impact of all actions that they take while at work and otherwise.

We are working towards integrating sustainable values in our business decision-making, at the intersection of our Company’s environmental, economic, and social dimensions, by reiterating business for good as a specific focus of our ESG approach. It gives us significant competitive advantages in seizing growth possibilities when the well-being of the people and the planet drives our business.

Consistent and constant communication on inter-generational equity and the need to follow sustainability principles is regularly conducted.

As I look ahead, there is potential for much more. Our ESG approach is poised to help our people, customers, partners, and investors benefit from their core digital transformation agenda. In the changing world dynamics, and the demand for digital soaring, we will continue to remain resilient and remain steadfast in our commitment to the community in which we live and operate. We are mindful of the unpredictable and transformative nature of the rapidly evolving global economic and operating environments, the escalating trend of climatic extremes, and their potential impact(s) as we chart our journey ahead. So, what becomes essential to build resilience and manage risks is solid and measurable ESG performance driven by ambitious targets.

I would like to thank you for the confidence you continue to place in us. As a work in progress, we have much more to accomplish, and I am confident that we will continue to produce long-term value for our stakeholders at each step of our growth story.

Warm regards,

Venkatraman Narayanan

MD & CFO