Kellton Tech Solutions Limited (NSE: KELLTONTEC) Q3 2026 Earnings Call dated Feb. 13, 2026
Corporate Participants:
Niranjan Chintam — Chairman and Whole time Director
Karanjit Singh — Chief Executive Officer, APAC Executive Director
Analysts:
Jay Prakash — Analyst
Rohit — Analyst
Pratik Dedia — Analyst
Presentation:
operator
Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Kelton Tech Solutions Limited Q3 and 9:00am FY26 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there’ll be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing STAR and then zero on your touchstone phone. I would like to thank you all for participating in today’s company’s earnings call for the third quarter of the financial year 2026. Before we begin, I would like to mention a short cautionary statement.
Some of the statements made in today’s con call may be forward looking in nature and such forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties which should cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Such statements are based on management’s beliefs as well as assumptions made from the information currently available to the management. Audiences are cautioned not to place any undue reliance on these forward looking statements in making any investment decisions. The purpose of today’s earnings call is purely to educate and bring awareness about the company’s fundamental business and a financial quarter under review. Now I would like to introduce you to the management participating with us today.
We have with us Mr. Niranjan Chintam, Chairman and Whole Time Director, Mr. Karanjit Singh, Chief Executive Officer India and Mr. Srinivas Potluri, Chief Executive Officer US. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Niranjan Chintam. Thank you
Niranjan Chintam — Chairman and Whole time Director
I’m sorry I was muted and speaking. Thank you Mike. Good evening, good afternoon and good morning to all of you for joining the Q3 earnings call. I want to start off with the financial highlights and then we’ll talk about operational highlights as well as customer wins and followed by questions and answers right behind that. So I want to quickly talk about our financial results. I know we have published this but I go over it just to give you a quick summary of it. So I will not bore you with all the details but I will go with the numbers that we have.
The revenue we have achieved 308 crores compared to 300 crores of last quarter which is about 2.7% growth over last quarter. And EBITDA was about 39.7 crores versus 37.8 for the last quarter. So we have a 5% growth there. When it comes to the pat we are at 25.5 crores versus 24 crores over last quarter. Again a 5.8% growth. The EBITDA was around 12.9% and the PAT margin is 8.3% whereas the last quarter was 8%. So it continues to show improvement when it comes to revenue as well as the bottom line going Back to the nine month one.
The previous nine months, last nine months was 905 crores versus 812 crores the last year. And when it comes to Ebitda we are at 113 crores versus 99.5 crores. And EBITDA margin was 12.5% versus 12.2% for the previous nine months. Again the fat margin is at 8% for the whole nine months up to now and the previous year it was 7.4%. The diluted EPS is 1.4 rupees versus 1.3 rupees for the nine months. When it comes to the quarter, the eps stood at 50 paisa versus 40 paisa for the last quarter. So there is an improvement there too.
With that I want to hand over to Karanjit to talk about operational highlights on the customer wins. Karanjit, over to you.
Karanjit Singh — Chief Executive Officer, APAC Executive Director
Okay, so good evening everyone and thank you Niranjan. So I will cover both the new customer wins as well as the operational highlights. So let me first start with the client wins. I think I have a long list. We have about 11 clients but I’ll quickly go through some of them so that you sort of get a little bit of color on these client wins. So the first one that I would like to mention is basically a leading end to end product engineering. It’s a global technology giant and we are engaged with them on the product engineering for cloud, native and cross device web applications.
And we are basically doing this on enterprise grade services like Microsoft and on the back end is all architected on Azure. The second one, which is a very interesting one, is actually a legacy modernization. So the client is basically execute. We are executing an autonomous modernization strategy to transform their monolithic ERP environment which is built on A4 glass into basically a hyperscale Net core microservices based application. So this is what is interesting here is that this is basically not an upgrade in the same technology stack. We are basically moving it from one language to another.
And this language is an old generation 4GL language. And of course there is a heavy use of AI here. In fact in here we have written our own agents. In fact we have used AI for development on this one. So we have created our own agents that help us. It’s about 4 million lines of code. So obviously we cannot do it manually. We are basically leveraging AI heavily and in fact the latest cloud models to help with this. Similarly we basically we are partnering with a world leader in heavy engineering where we are helping them deploy AI driven orchestration systems which will help them streamline their complex industry 4, 0 driven manufacturing workflows.
Obviously there is some amount of agentic intelligence being built into their manufacturing workflows and large scale engineering projects. Similarly we have basically we are driving a large scale application modernization program again for a global leader in food services. And basically we’re trying to help them with the data engineering and the AI led transformation side of things. Similar stuff we’re doing with one of the largest providers of travel tech in India again where they’re again trying to basically modernize or modernize their platform and basically inject AI orchestrated engineering into the whole thing. We’re also seeing a lot of traction on the servicenow side and we’ve been in the servicenow thing and we had a question there.
So we basically are engaged with at least 2, 3 clients now that we have run where we are helping them. So one of them where we are helping them engineering high velocity AI orchestrated source to pay workflows. This is again on the ServiceNow platform for a global healthcare provider. We are doing similar thing for ITOMs for another North American public sector power company, a similar thing for a financial services customer which is a global industry leader in kind of deployment of their now assist generative AI platform within the ServiceNow ecosystem. And in addition to that we’re also working, we just have started an engagement with one of the largest telecom providers in the US where they are helping them architect financial hyper precision by deploying a high fidelity AIOps intelligence layer again within their ServiceNow kind of ecosystem.
So these are kind of some of the customers that have been. I have not covered every one of them but this will give you a general sense of the kind of wins and the kind of work that we are getting at this point to go on the operational highlights. So I’ll cover a few here. So we just basically enabled the algorithmic financial systems for a premier global bank by automating their mission critical payment workflows across multiple countries, across markets. Similarly we have basically we have also achieved the highest level of partnership. We have achieved the Microsoft solution partner designation across three areas, data and AI digital and app innovation and infrastructure Azure.
This kind of places us amongst a very select group of companies within the Microsoft partner program and our relationship with Microsoft is growing and we continue to sort of strengthen IT and work jointly with them. We also for one of the premier and largest creative agencies, we basically work with them to develop AI orchestrated creative at scale ecosystem as they call it. This basically helps them and this company operates around 140 companies. What this will help them is using AI, eliminate a lot of manual production bottlenecks that you face and basically it will kind of move them move the creative workflows into an autonomous browser and they want kind of hyper personalized asset generation.
So this will help them really scale their outreach to their customer in time to market. Similarly we have developed for a global communication provider agentic AI driven verification fabric and this has been developed on our own proprietary TIE platform which kind of helps them to address board level risks and also things like sim swap frauds and account takeovers and things like that. We have also been selected by a prominent UN agency to again design and deliver a generative AI integrated application supporting their global humanitarian program. So these are also the key operational projects or operational highlights that we achieved during this quarter.
So that’s all I have.
Niranjan Chintam — Chairman and Whole time Director
Thank you Karanjit. A lot more detail is in our earnings presentation and we welcome any questions that you might have in the quick Q and A. So please do join the queue. Mike, can we open it up for Q and A?
Questions and Answers:
operator
Sure. We will now begin the question answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press Star and one on the Touchstone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue you may press star and two participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. We have the first question from the line of Jay Prakash from Axel Research. Please go ahead.
Jay Prakash
Hi Congratulations on a stable set of performance last quarter. I wanted to understand that currently on the ongoing scenario around the world, if you look at all the shares of major IT companies, for example ServiceNow Co. Listed elsewhere, which is one company that you have recently acquired, also functions on the similar domain that is down around 50% over last one year and there are fears related to AI taking up a lot of services going forward. How do you see that? And related to data center CapEx, which is going to come up very soon, is there any opportunity for Calton to probably add value or participate in that?
Niranjan Chintam
So thank you for the question Jay Prakash. I’ll answer the first question. The second question rather where you talked about the data center part of it. Yes, absolutely right. We have deep expertise when it comes to data center both from setting it up. Our Data centers as well as managing and maintaining that data centers. So we’re actually partnered with a physical setup guy to cater towards one of the largest data centers in the world. We are still in discussion stage. We are not at a proposal stage yet. We have responded to RFPs and we’re going and presenting.
So we believe that we are in the front foot when it comes to in the data center space, setting it up as well as maintaining and operating. So right now we are at the RFP stage like I said. Now coming to your first question about the software companies taking a tank, including the services company, right. Which they’re calling the SaaS Acopolis. We don’t believe that it’s just a hype that is going around there. We don’t believe that there’s going to be a big impact on this. The impact is going to be more on per seat kind of revenue that people operate.
This is where the back office operations that happen for BPO related activities. That is where we believe that there’s going to be an impact. While people are talking about cloud is going to replace all the SaaS platforms. Yeah, Cloud might replace for the small mom and pop kind of places where there is a requirement for a SaaS platform. But when it comes to enterprises, Enterprises will not bet big on homegrown or setting it up using the cloud cowork platform. Now I want to ask Srini to answer this because he’s front and center on these things.
So I’ll let Srini give a little bit more color on this Sarsacopolix and what the impact is for Kelton like companies. Srini, can you jump in and answer this question please?
Karanjit Singh
Sure. Niranjan, thank you very much. To reiterate what Niranjan has been saying, the SaaS that happened with the drop in share price values of all these SaaS platforms was. I mean you can already see right now that things are improving and things are going back up. It was just a market reaction to something that Anthropic Claude released. Right. Recently it released Nothing but about 11 or 12 widgets or plugins which are open source that seem to do a lot of stuff but in reality they are nothing but some workflow automation that was built about by actually logical steps going through. So yes, I mean what is being seen right now is that the progress that is being made on the AI front is real. The pace at which it is improving and putting solutions out there or potential solutions is there. But there’s nothing that is impacted right now other than the fact that Customers are expecting more efficiencies in the workflow and so in the workforce.
So basically what it says is that in future scale is, until now scale has been associated with headcount. That will change, it will be more about outcomes. And Kelton has always been on selling outcomes rather than selling billable hours and so on. So the impact is going to be minimal. Yes, but the rate at which improvements will happen and what will come out in the market will increase. So that is the major, major difference that we see right now. And yes, ServiceNow has also all of these SaaS platforms, whether it be ServiceNow, Snowflake, Microsoft, all of them have in some way shape or form either internally started to build their agents and their AI components within their core.
And in some cases companies like ServiceNow to reacting to this, have also preempted this by acquiring AI companies. Right. So we see that the SaaS companies will improve, will do what is necessary to compete and will adopt AI rather than fight it. So we don’t see a huge impact either way. Yes, the way we operate will change, efficiencies will improve. But beyond that, I think this was just a market reaction.
Jay Prakash
Okay, just a follow up to the previous question that on a quarter to quarter basis what type of productivity increase that you are seeing per. On a per employee basis? You know you mentioned about efficiency. Per employees will go up. So I believe that.
Niranjan Chintam
Let me answer that.
Jay Prakash
Let me complete my question, please.
Niranjan Chintam
Please go ahead. Yes.
Jay Prakash
Yeah, yeah. So and are you also looking to make your team more leaner? I think a more lean team given the productivity increase will probably shareholder value.
Niranjan Chintam
Okay, so let me answer that. I guess we have two part question. Let me answer the second part first. Are we expecting a linear team? Absolutely we are expecting a linear team. But there’s a second school of thought where they’re talking about the volumes are going to increase because of the efficiency. So we could be keeping the same team and increasing. Just picking discussion’s sake. Right. We have 300 customers today. That could go to 400, 500 customers or it could be. Some people are talking about an order of magnitude too. Right. So we are still waiting and watching because what we are predicting today with the rate of progress of AI, what we are going to be in a month from now is completely different.
So at this point our prediction is that volumes will increase while efficiencies are increasing. I will let Karanjit take the answer on question on this. What are we seeing per customer? But you know, again per employee. I’m sorry, but it all depends, right? He will answer that. It depends because units in our company have different kinds of efficiencies that have come in play. Kanjit, you want to take that? Sorry, you were asking something else, Jay?
Jay Prakash
No, no, no, that’s it.
Niranjan Chintam
Okay. Karanjit, can you answer that? Currently?
Karanjit Singh
Yes, thank you, Niranjan. Yeah, so basically see we have various engagements types with customers. So wherever, which is outcome. Wherever we have outcome based contracts, you know, various steps of the development cycle. Obviously we have different users of, you know, AI. So like automation test today, QA test cases are pretty much written using our own KAI tool. Similarly, all the documentation again gets generated by KAI tool. The stories and stuff like that, that all happens with the KAI tool. On the development side also we basically use AI is rolled out to all developers. We use Copilot and then again within that we can use various models.
But anyway, so the one where we can very clearly measure it is this outcome based projects where we are seeing depending on the technology kind of project, is it a new one, is it an old one that you are upgrading to on new projects where you’re seeing between 20% to 30% efficiency gains. That’s something that we can clearly see now if you already have a huge code base then obviously it depends on where you’re working and things like that. So that’s been our experience, about 20 to 30% general gains. And this is being rolled out internally to every project.
I also made a mention in my first part of my comments where we said we are doing this translation or basically a legacy modernization where we are converting a 4GL language to let’s say a modern Microsoft. Net architecture. Now this is a big deal. It’s 4 million lines of code. Obviously it is sold assuming certain already AI embedded into it. But I think in the manual world the customer wouldn’t even have. That is something which possibly the customer wouldn’t have taken up that project and even if he did, it would have been at least 3 to 4x of that value.
So that’s the kind of new work that sort of Niranjan alluded to. Right. So that’s kind of our lived experience with this.
Karanjit Singh
Okay, thank you, Jay.
Niranjan Chintam
If there’s any other questions we would love to answer.
Jay Prakash
Thank you.
Karanjit Singh
Thank you.
Jay Prakash
That’s it.
Niranjan Chintam
Thank you, Jay. Okay, next question please.
operator
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Rohit, an individual investor. Please go ahead.
Rohit
Hi Rohit. Hey. Hi Natim. I’m Rohit from Pune, a retail investor. Congratulations on acquiring Kumari Technologies. And I have One question. How does Kumari Technologies acquisition contribute to Kelton’s growth? Sure.
Niranjan Chintam
So kelton bet on 3, 4 partnerships for the growth that we want to get to. Right. One of them is ServiceNow, the other is Microsoft, and then we have a snowflake SAP we already have bet on. So now when it comes to Kumari Technologies, right. Kelton had a certain partnership level earlier, before the acquisition of Kumori. Kumori gave us some more expertise and a much deeper expertise when it comes to delivering, using services, using ServiceNow. Now we are at a different level of partnership with ServiceNow and that is going to give us better access to more customers.
What Kumori has given us is a ready made partnership with deeper, I guess, expertise. And now using Kelton’s sales arm and the global reach, we will be able to get a lot more customers as well as interactions when we are going with ServiceNow. They are now saying, okay guys, you have so many certifications and you are a certain level of partnership. Our relationship has changed and we expect revenue growth to be there. Karanjit, you want to answer? Add anything on that?
Karanjit Singh
Sure. So basically, as Niranjan said, right. So there is one. One is the strategic intent. So we’ve kind of zeroed on certain partnerships and for us, we had to figure out how do we accelerate this. So what Komori gives us, as Garanjan pointed out, is they already have ServiceNow expertise. They’re working with the ServiceNow ecosystem already. So we get all of that expertise. And you know, we are combining that with our sales force. So it kind of helps now to do a global outreach of their capabilities. And there is a lot of traction that we’ve actually been seeing very specifically on ServiceNow and take that to market.
So kind of. And also they’ve sort of now we can actually sell to all our customers all over the world, right? From the US and also APAC region, Europe, everywhere. So that’s kind of what it is. And of course we get case studies and expertise and technical capabilities. Right, that’s, that’s a given. So it just helps us accelerate our journey.
Niranjan Chintam
Thank you
Niranjan Chintam
Any other question? Rohit? Okay, so can you go to the next question?
operator
We have the next question from the line of Pratik Dedia, an individual investor. Please go ahead.
Pratik Dedia
Am I audible?
Niranjan Chintam
Yes, you are, Pratik, Go ahead.
Pratik Dedia
Yeah, okay, thanks. So yeah, I think coming back to the efficiency part, Shah, I understand that there have been efficiency gains with the AI part deployment. So how do you see that translating into higher margins going ahead and what if you could quantify that would be helpful over two years or three year period.
Niranjan Chintam
Okay. So it’s difficult, Pratik, at this point to quantify how it’s going to reflect on the bottom line. The reason I say that is, you know, since Karanjit has already alluded to see, most of our business is TNM Tamil material, right. If it is an outcome based like was talking about, where we have the flexibility to use the tools and we are not dependent on the customer driving the contracts. You know, some of our customers have told us in no uncertain terms that we cannot use AI. So we have to do the old school way of doing programming.
As more and more customers are willing to accept the efficiency that is going, that AI is going to bring in and the confidentiality is protected, then we can start showing more product winning creatures. But at the same time the customer is already demanding saying that hey, you are using AI tools, pass on some of that margin to me. And we have in most cases have passed on that efficiency to the customer. So we cannot at this point say, okay, hey, because we are using AI, our margins are going to increase by X amount of points, which is something that we cannot do at this point.
But we are seeing efficiencies and like I said, the volume we can do is increasing with the same amount of stuff and we are passing on some of the margin that we are gaining to the customer. So at this point I cannot quantify it.
Pratik Dedia
Yeah, Niranjan, if I can just add to that. Absolutely. See what is happening is the way they play out is. Yes. You know, in fixed in outcome based projects, which is a certain percentage, you know, we could keep the efficiency but sooner or later the customers, customers will, the customers will demand that, you know, they will ask for aggressive pricing or like I mentioned the last one, right. The customer wouldn’t have even gone ahead with that program because the costs were prohibitive. But AI is allowing it to happen. So that will say increase in the, in the business.
One other thing that will happen even on the TNM side and this will happen for a small time is AI skills are basically premium. So this happens with every new wave we have seen and typically lasts only about a year or so. So like back in the day there were the blockchain and NFT technologies. So we could command slightly, right? So we would have a $10 or a $15 upside on the rate. But then quickly, the Indian IT industry is smart. Everybody learns it and sooner or later that advantage again comes back to wherever it was.
So that will Happen a little bit. So. So the ones that are up ahead in the AI what it will impact is in your availability. It will help you in your competitive advantage and for a certain time maybe you can command slightly premium rates but then of course everybody will chase those premium rates. That’s how I think. And in terms of the contracts that where client is asking you to not use AI, how are you seeing the pricing happen currently and what percentage of your new contracts are being signed without AI? Sorry, can I get the first part of your question again?
Niranjan Chintam
Let me answer that. I think I understood this. So he’s the question that was asked was you know how many of our customers are saying we cannot use AI? Okay, majority of our customers are telling us we cannot use AI. Their pratik. The reason for that is they’re still not ready for AI. They see some of our customers when you do a sales pitch also specifically this is happening in us. They’re saying hey if you’re going to talk about AI please don’t come to me because they are not ready to adopt AI into their, into their enterprises, right? And yes they will change the market will force them to change, the competitors will force them to change.
This is specifically I think with what has happened with the stock price crash everywhere people are seeing hey AI is getting adopted. It’s in many, many companies so they will have to do it. So they don’t have a choice. But at this point majority of our customers because like I said most of our customers are T and M so it is time and material. When it comes to time and material they are dictating what is it that we can do or cannot do in an outcome based we take on what they call the fixed price contracts then it’s based on outcome, what we deliver, how much efficiency we deliver, how soon we deliver.
So those are the things that are measured versus what we have used to get there, right? In that scenario we are getting these efficiencies by using our own internal KAI tool or other cost products or open source AI tools that are available in the market.
Pratik Dedia
Can you elaborate on the pricing part for non AI contracts? How are you seeing the trends that.
Niranjan Chintam
Now this has been the same. There’s no change on that, right? That is not changing on the non AI contracts. It is per, let’s say what you call the billet or per engineer based on the seniority that the customer asks in the TNM contracts they say okay I need a 10 year experience Java full stack person and we provide that person for this project. Give me what is your estimate? Who are all the people that are going to be. It’s a named resource there and they will drive the outcomes. Not we driving the outcomes, they being the customers driving the outcomes.
Pratik Dedia
Got it. Okay. That’s it. Don’t mind. Thank you
Niranjan Chintam
Prateek, Mike, any other questions?
operator
Thank you. Not currently, sir. I’ll just announce for questions once more. Participants who wish to ask a question may press star and one on your touchtone telephone. It appears we have no further questions. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Niranjan for closing comments.
Niranjan Chintam
Thank you everyone for joining this earnings call. We’re really excited to talk about our capabilities when it comes to the AI. Looking forward to more interactions. If you come over to Hyderabad and or Gurgaon, please look us up. We would be happy to show and tell what all we have been doing. But please schedule that with the team ahead so that our availability and the time is locked. Again, thank you. Looking forward to talking to you soon.
operator
Thank you. On behalf of Kelton Tech Solutions Ltd. That concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines.