StarTek, Inc. (NYSE:SRT) Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss StarTek's financial results for the quarter ended December 31st, 2018. Joining us today is StarTek's President and Global CEO, Lance Rosenzweig, and the company's CFO, Ramesh Kamath. Following their remarks, we'll open the call for your questions.

Before we continue, we would like to remind all participants that the discussion today may contain certain statements which are forward-looking in nature pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the federal security laws. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary materially from these projections. StarTek advises all those listening to this call to review the latest 10-Q and 10-K posted on their website for a summary of these risks and uncertainties. StarTek does not undertake the responsibility to update these projections.

Further, the discussion today may include some non-GAAP measures. In accordance with Regulation G, the company has reconciled these amounts back to the closest GAAP-based measurements. The reconciliations can be found in the earnings release on the Investors section of their website. I would now like to remind everyone that a webcast the replay of today's call will be available via the Investors section of the company's website at www.startek.com.

Now I would like to turn the call over to StarTek's President and Global CEO, Lance Rosenzweig. Sir, please proceed.

Thank you, Sonia. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining. The StarTek and Aegis integration is largely complete and led to a very strong quarter of operational performance and business development. Our post-merger integration team also continued to identify and implement both revenue and cost synergies across the organization.

Operationally, StarTek grew revenue and adjusted EBITDA sequentially due to improved client diversification and strong growth from our non-telecom verticals. For the second quarter in a row, excluding telco, we grew revenue with every one of our top 10 clients with some clients even accelerating growth from last quarter. Further, we experienced some of the strongest holiday volumes ever seen by the Company as we now have a greater mix of next-gen retail clients.

A good portion of our growth in Q4 was driven by a shift in operational structure. During the quarter, we implemented a new client-centric model in the Americas to replace our previous geographic model. To summarize, historically, StarTek followed the old-fashioned call center industry geographic based organization where center heads report to regional heads who report to country heads, et cetera. In this model, if a client was utilizing our services in multiple geographies, each operating team would report to a different regional leader. This resulted in inconsistent performance with no single point of responsibility. Now, in our next generation client-centric model, client teams in all campuses report to a single client leader that manages that client relationship.

Under this new model, we are able to better understand, and address client needs consistently and globally while deploying services in the most appropriate geographies to enhance performance