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Latent View Analytics Ltd (LATENTVIEW) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Latent View Analytics Ltd (NSE: LATENTVIEW) Q3 2026 Earnings Call dated Feb. 02, 2026

Corporate Participants:

Asha GuptaEY Investor Relations

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Rajan VenkatesanChief Finiancial Officer

Analysts:

Srinivasu KAnalyst

Srinath VAnalyst

Pritesh ThakkarAnalyst

Aditi PatilAnalyst

SushoAnalyst

Shubham SehgalAnalyst

SurabhiAnalyst

Presentation:

operator

Ladies and gentlemen, apologies for the inconvenience for the conference to start at a later part. Good day and welcome to the latent View Analytics Limited Q3FY26 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will 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 touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Asha Gupta from ENY investor relations team.

Thank you. And over to you ma’. Am.

Asha GuptaEY Investor Relations

Thank you Sagar. Good evening to everyone and welcome to Q3FY26 earnings call of Data Review Analytics Limited and we are sorry about the delay in start little bit but apologies for that. The results and presentation have already been mailed to you and you can view them on the website www.datingview.com. in case anyone does not have the copy of press release and presentation or you’re not marked in the mail, please do write to us and we will be happy to send you the same to take us through the results today and to answer your questions. We have the CEO of the company Rajan Sethuruman, to whom we will be referring as Rajan and we have the CFO of the company Rajan Venkateshan, to whom we will be referring as Raj.

This is just to avoid confusion while doing the transcript. We will start the call with brief update on the business which will be given by Rajan and then followed by financials which will be given by Raj. As usual I would like to remind you that anything mentioned on this call that reflects any outlook for the future or which can be construed as forward looking statements must be viewed in the conjunction with the risk and uncertainties that we face. This risk and uncertainties are included but not limited to what we have mentioned in the prospectus file with SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find on our website.

Having said that, I will now hand over the floor to Rajan. Over to you Rajan.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Thank you Asha. For a change this time we are going to flip the order and I will. This is Raj Venkatesan. I will go first and I’ll give the financial update which will be followed by a slightly longer business update that Rajan will share. Right. So good evening everyone. I think this is the first time we’re doing a call a little later in the evening because that’s also because the board meeting happened in the US this time, so we are all, Rajan and I are diving into this call from from the US we’re very happy to report a 12th consecutive quarter of sequential growth and very happy with the business trajectory that we’ve been able to accomplish on a sequential basis.

Dollar revenues grew by about 5.7%, whereas in rupee terms revenue grew by close to about 8% in Q3. In line with our historical performance in Q3, you would note that this is a quarter that’s typically strong for us seasonally owing to one customer looking to exhaust their budget. But more importantly also contracts that we had stitched together earlier in the year, they need to get executed and delivered by 31st December. So traditionally Q3 has always been a strong quarter and this year was no exception. We are particularly pleased by the strength of the financial services practice which is continuing to grow at an exponential pace.

The share of the VFSI as to the overall revenue has gone up by almost 4% since the beginning of this fiscal and that’s a very, very encouraging sign. Specifically, a couple of the accounts that we had added close to about 12 months back are continuing to drive this growth and we have been able to penetrate and add new statements of work across multiple stakeholders within these client organizations. Rajan will later on give an update in terms of how does the future or the next year look, especially for the financial services practice. But as we head into the end of the fiscal, BFSI will continue to remain strong and continue to deliver strong sequential growth even in the subsequent quarter.

Right. The other good news is of course technology, which is our largest vertical sluggishness in the earlier quarters, has also returned to a growth path this particular quarter. This was primarily driven by, I would say year end projects at a few of the accounts, a few of our large accounts which led to this growth. We were also able to secure price increases in one of our largest, our second largest account, we were able to secure price increases that also led to a little bit of the growth that you saw in this particular quarter. CPG and retail, you would have seen that the results while in the last quarter the commentary was very positive and bullish.

In this particular quarter the results were a little more flattish in relation to Q2. A couple of reasons that can be attributable to that. One, there were a few one time projects that we had executed in Q2 where we were expecting follow on work to come through which has not happened. They’ve gone on a bit of a. So this was with a large apparel manufacturer as well as one of the largest SMCG companies based out of Europe. In both these accounts, the projects that we executed did not result in follow on work. But more importantly, I think.

For one. Of the large clients of Decision Point, which is the world’s largest beverage manufacturer, while there were several projects in the pipeline, there were timing delays in terms of start dates for some of these projects. And the good news is, of course we’ve been able to win quite a few of those projects in Q4. But the net result of that is you were not able to see the benefit of these small value projects at this large beverage manufacturer in Q3. And that was the primary reason for the muted performance in the CPG and retail practice. In terms of headwinds and factors impacting growth.

Rajan will talk a little more about some of the, I would say ground level feedback that we are hearing from some of our clients. But overall for this year I would say we are on track to deliver that revenue growth of between 19 to 20%. So we should end the year with revenue between 119 to 120 million. If a few of the projects that we are currently working on, we’re able to sort of execute them could even go past the 120 million. But right now the confidence is to deliver revenues between 119 to 120 million in line with what we had guided before.

I’m going to talk a little bit about, you know, the impact of the labor Code. So you did, you know, while you would have seen that revenue on a sequential basis grew by 7.9% payable and benefits specifically grew by 11.1%, which was disproportionate to the growth in revenue. A couple of factors that impacted the higher payroll and benefits cost, one of course was the impact of the new Labor Code. Here I would like to take a pause and highlight a couple of things. You would have noted that the total impact on account of. Total impact on account of the restructuring that we have done was close to about 4.6 crores or roughly about 1.6% in terms of EBITDA.

And that’s what we had reported even in our press release. The reason why we actually this number is much lower in relation to some of the other peers or the, you know, the earning when they put out their earnings. The impact for some of them was much, much larger. Was in fact, you know, we had been proactive about this even earlier. So we didn’t sort of wait for this to come through and get Financed in April of last year itself, we had undertaken a significant restructuring exercise where the basic salary for all our employees was already brought up to 50% of the overall CTC.

This was the primary reason why we were not as impacted as some of the other peer sets. So because of the proactive measures that we had taken. Having said that, we are currently in the process of working with a consultant to restructure the components of compensation for all our India based employees to ensure full and absolute compliance with the new Labor Code and we expect that this exercise will get done by 31st March 2026. We do not anticipate any further negative impact on account of such research. If anything there could be a positive impact. So I also wanted to make that very clear.

But on an ongoing basis the restructuring of compensation will mean that there will be an impact of between 10 to 15 basis points on our earnings going forward. So that’s the level of incremental cost that we anticipate going forward. Right. So this was one the other one off in this particular quarter which I. Would also like to highlight is in. Line with our sort of position to make the company a lot more nimble and future forward looking. We also re looked at all the roles within the organization and we did realize that there was some level of additional capacity that was built up over a period of time and there were certain roles that also did not align with our sort of strategy going forward. So there was a little bit of a rationalization excitement that we undertook in this particular quarter where we let go close to about 40 odd people across different functions including enablement, delivery and also growth and market facing roles.

So there was a cost of close to about 200k that was also associated with this one time restructuring excise that we had undertaken. So these were the two primary reasons as to why payroll costs and benefits. The rate of increase was substantially higher than the rate of increase in revenue but we expect this to stabilize and normalize in the coming quarter. Coming to SGA of course this particular quarter despite having a fairly large one off expenses in relation to this being the 20th year of our since the time we were set up and there were certain sort of employee engagements, gift related expenses that were incurred in relation to the 20th year celebrations which were like a one off.

Despite that we have been able to excite tight control on SGA and you will see that SGNA compared to the previous quarter came in at almost a 12% lower. This also to some extent was impacted or the lower SDNA spends could be attributed to lower travel, which is also a little seasonal because in general November and December tend to be slower periods in terms of business development related travel. So that also contributed to the lower HD science in this particular quarter. But going forward we do expect even for Q4 HGA to be in line with what was there in Q3 and therefore if anything you will see operating leverage play out in terms of investments.

For this particular quarter we brought in Venki, Ramesh and Rajan will talk a little more about his portfolio, but Venki will be heading our he’ll be the Chief Client Officer for our consumer, retail and marketplaces practice. He’s someone who comes with deep understanding of the CPG domain and has worked in organizations like EPAM and Infosys in the past. So we were, you know, we brought him on board towards the end of November. We’ve also continued to invest in client partners in line with our philosophy on deepening client relationships. So we’ve added client partners across our consumer and technology practice.

We’ve also brought in an AI lead specifically for our technology practice and we’re already beginning to see quite a few initiatives that are being driven by this new AI lead that we are bringing in. Rajan will elaborate a little more about the strategy on the AI side during his conversation. So net net, I think you know all of this. The revenue growth followed by tighter control on SGA meant that our EBITDA, our reported EBITDA for this quarter came in at 22.4%. However, the adjusted EBITDA, which is adjusted for the transaction related costs, came in at about 23%.

If you were to add back the one time labor code related restructuring costs, the adjusted EBITDA for this quarter would be closer to about 24.6%. On a full year basis we expect that our business EBITDA would be closer to about 24% which is in line with what we had guided earlier in the year. PAT and EPS for this quarter of course came in much better. So you will see that the growth in EPS and PAT was much better than the revenue growth. There was of course a small benefit that we also had on account of ESOP excise.

So this is the last tranche of ESOPs that were given out pre IPO that vested in this particular quarter and in the US typically. And then ESOPs are exercised. You do get this is an allowable tax expense and we did see the benefit of that coming through in this particular quarter and that resulted in a lower tax outflow compared to the previous quarter. But net Net, our EPS as a result of this grew by about 13% in comparison to the previous quarter. With that, I’m going to now hand it over to Rajan to talk a little more about the business and the strategy going forward and we can later on open up for Q and A.

Thanks, Rajan.

Rajan VenkatesanChief Finiancial Officer

Yeah, hey, thanks Raj. Raj has covered quite a bit of the stuff, so I’m just going to add additional points that I thought might be of interest. One of the things that we are currently undertaking is an exercise around rebuilding our consulting practice aligned with what the market expectations are. If you remember, we have talked about our consulting capabilities and the work that we are doing related to analytics, roadmaps and prioritization of initiatives. In the past this was being done with a team that was cutting across all of our industry entities, bringing in capabilities related to functional areas as well as work related to preparing those kind of roadmaps and doing the fuzzy problem solving.

We have now reoriented the team to be a little bit more integrated with the entities in the sense that even if we talk about say supply chain skills or marketing analytics skills, we feel that there are differences between what needs to be brought to the table from industry to industry. So therefore, rather than just have a common team, we are building a team with a specific domain focus and expertise being the key criteria. So this is an exercise that will pan out over the next few quarters. The people that we already had, we had reassigned them into the different entities based on their dominant expertise.

We will update you more on this in the coming quarters. A second area is the entire databricks strategy and how it has been executing. Very happy that we are going from strength to strength there. We had talked about a significant bump up in terms of the revenue coming in from databricks related work in comparison to last year. We continue to see that momentum. We had four joint wins along with databricks in the quarter and in the preceding months there are over 30 plus leads that have been identified that we are working on and we also get funding support From Databricks for PoCs where the client is looking for some initial investment from databricks or from our end and therefore that is good to see that as well.

Overall I would say that we are on track for the 50 million target that we had from a three year perspective. A few things that we expect will happen over the next two years to help us get to that number more focus on vertical solutions in the retail consumer goods manufacturing space, around migration, around supply chain analytics, around RPM and other vertical solutions that we are building. We are also expecting that the number of people who are certified and have core expertise will go up from 350 to 600 to 800 over that period of time.

We are adding more people into our on site domain expertise required to support this growth, both from a go to market as well as from an architecture solution in perspective. And potentially we will also look at acquisition opportunities in this space specifically related to SAP, given databricks partnership with SAP. That’s one area that we are looking at in terms of other good opportunities there where we can get a significant bump up right in terms of the capability that we bring to the table. A third point that I wanted to address is the diamond account strategy that I had talked about in the past.

If you remember, we had mentioned that we have identified 25 plus diamond accounts which we believe will give the main thrust for the growth that we are anticipating over the next two years. This is continued the focus area for us. Of course we are trying different approaches in terms of how we can not only expand the opportunity landscape, but also bring more focused content and value proposition and then have a rigorous, disciplined process in terms of executing towards that. Raj talked about Venky Ramesh coming on board as the chief Client officer for the combined consumer goods, retail and marketplaces practice.

One of the things that he’s been driving over the last couple of months coming on board is to do a complete review of all the accounts that we have across decision point and latent view. And in our discussions recently, we spent time on looking at our top six accounts, for example, where we believe while we are currently doing only about $10 million of work, there is potential to do more than $150 million of work in the areas that we have identified. So these are the kind of things that there’ll be a focus on cpg in particular, we see that our diamond accounts in the food and beverages space in quick commerce, these are the areas where we will double down in order to drive the growth overall.

I also see the similar kind of a trend in some of the larger accounts that we have in technology as well as in financial services. Our top account and technology. For example, even with one of the business units that we are working, we see hundreds of millions of dollars of potential in terms of what we can go after as a total addressable market and currently in the process of expanding the relationship in each of those business units. Similarly, the account that has driven the growth for us in the financial services space, we believe that we can double our revenue there.

This could Emerge as one of our top three accounts. In fact in the next two years based on just the focused growth strategy around the time and accounts. The expectation and the intent also is that there’ll be more integrated value propositions that will cut across multiple areas that will help us deepen the penetration and widen that interaction, accelerate across the different businesses geography side of the client that we’re working with. Finally, I wanted to touch upon the AI strategy and the center of excellence. If you remember, we had announced this at the start of this financial year in terms of putting our arms around all the work that we were doing, not only in the traditional AI machine learning kind of work, but also in terms of generative AI and agenting.

Over the last few months we have been doubling down on some of the pieces of work that we are doing and what it means for us in the coming months and coming quarters. So there are three areas that we have identified that we will focus on to drive the growth in the space. One is around conversational analytics. We already have multiple solutions and products that we have built in this space. You will recall AI, Pen Pal laser, the Beagle GPT solution that has been built by decision. I have talked about these in the past and this is an area where we see continued momentum and trust and we will focus on this.

A second area is what we broadly call business process automation. This is a space that traditionally has been in the IT services and maybe even the process outsourcing space. But there is opportunity to bring a lot more of an agentic approach to doing this work. We are already doing a bunch of pilots as well as production grade projects leveraging these kind of capabilities. I’ll touch upon that in a minute. But this is the second area of attention for us. And then the third is around the general topic of governance, specifically on evals and observability. And we believe that this will become important and significant in the coming quarters and years.

Especially as organizations double down on bringing in all the data that they have and applying the power of generator and agentic to driving automation, efficiency, productivity and so on. Now how are you going to do this? There is again a three pronged kind of approach. One is of course to build very, very strong execution expertise and capability in the skill sets and the areas that are needed to deliver on this. Second is a very intentional effort that they are undertaking across the organization in our diamond accounts, in the specific entities. For example, on identifying the kind of processes and the areas where we support our clients, where an agentic architecture can drive the type of Automation and productivity benefits and and efficiency gains that I talked about.

This is an exercise that’s been underway for the last couple of quarters this quarter. In particular, there’s an initiative that we are doing in one of our top tech accounts called Velocity AI which has identified over 10 opportunities that we are now engaging with the client on. Just in this one account in the retail marketplaces entity we ran a hackathon that identified over two dozen opportunities and secret of them qualified for final presentations and three of them we are now selected where we are going to be initiating plan conversations on how do we implement the agentic solution that we have built.

And similarly across the organization there is an exercise underway to identify more such opportunities. The intent is to go and have conversations with clients on a proactive basis telling them that the work that we are currently doing or work that’s being done from a process automation perspective by others. Here is a completely new approach using agentic architectures which will drive that kind of benefits and get a leg up in terms of positioning ourselves for grabbing a larger share of the work that’s being done in that area. Finally, the third aspect of how the AI strategy will pan out will be related to investment that we make in partnerships as well as maybe even strategic stakes in smaller organizations that are building very specific solutions.

Again, this is something that we discussed extensively in the board meeting yesterday and there is good alignment on this approach. This is something that again, we will expect to pan out over the next several quarters. There are already multiple candidates that are on the table that we are evaluating. Each of them bring very, very specific solutions to areas that can be addressed using the generative and agent tech approach. And we expect to make some of those investments in the coming quarters. So broadly, that’s what we expect will drive the action in this space. I know that it’s been a long introduction, but we wanted to cover the ground on some of the stuff.

But we will stop here to take questions.

operator

Thank you very much. We will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press STAR and then one on their touchtone phone. 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. Our first question comes from the line of Srinivasu K from tia. Please go ahead.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Hi sir. Congratulations for the great set of Q3 members. You mentioned that four joint wings and the 30 plus leads with DBX and also funding support for Boca. So can you quantify Q3 Databricks link revenue and also what is the expected conversion rate for these 30 leads at least for next couple of quarters?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Right? The conversion rate is a little easier. I mean we are seeing at least 30%, 30, 35% success there. I mean these leads, at least in terms of the early traction that we are seeing. The good thing with databricks is that while obviously there’s a universe of opportunities that you can follow, they are also very, very focused in terms of how they want to take the databricks solutions to market.

And there is a lot of internal validation that happens before the joint approach and the proposition is built for the particular opportunity. So in general I would say the conversion rates are better than what we have seen with other partners for the four logos that we won. I think this year, if I’m not mistaken, the revenue that’s come in through the joint approach is close to $1.7 million. This is out of a total of 16 to $17 million that we are likely to do. So it’s about 10% revenue coming in through the go to market action that databricks is driving for us.

I’m expecting that percentage will increase in the, in the coming quarters. Of course the rest of the money has been on the back of accounts that we have won ourselves or we’ve been doing work with them in the past and we’ve either helped implement the databricks environment or we have helped deliver use cases on top of a databricks environment. So that’s, that’s a broad projection that we have. Right. So in the expectation that that 16 to 17 million number which is the overall Databricks revenue, that is the number that is expected to get to the million mark in a couple of years from now. Thank you sir. And regarding your AI accelerators like marquee migrate made some of them, I’ve seen your website. So across this analytics agent, automation, governance, what accelerators do sell repeat repeatedly today. Like is it like price, like fixed price or subscription are like part of. Services. Largely part of services at this time. I mean in fact you use the word accelerator. So we are some of the these are positioned as brick builder solutions but in most instances they are in the nature of assets and accelerators. The one solution where there is a significant chunk being delivered out of the box is the migrate made solution. Right. So the migration work we have built a fairly strong accelerator integrated into the solution. So that makes the job a lot easier. So while there is significant Non linearity because of the effort reduction, they are still being delivered as a combination with the services model. So we still price based on overall effort. To some extent, the migrators and the accelerators help position us better in terms of the pace at which the project can be executed.

Srinivasu KAnalyst

Okay, so. So one general question, sir. What prevents from our Indian outsourcing system integrators copying these accelerators? Like what is latent views Defense ip?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Actually, nothing prevents them. I mean it is just a question of focused effort right in that area and the extent to which you are able to bring the combination of the domain technology, the architecture expertise, and the strength of the relationship that you’re able to put with the partner ecosystem as well. So it’s just a combination of all. Of these things in general. I mean, this hypothesis can be validated otherwise. I mean, smaller companies are able to act with a bit more agility on these matters, whereas it could be a more cumbersome process in larger organizations. That doesn’t mean that they will not be able to do these things or replicate. I mean, there is obviously a need to continuously look at how we can stay at the leading edge in terms of the kind of problems that can be solved and how it can be addressed using a generator or agentic or any approach for that matter, and how it can be built and integrated into the partner platforms and the solutions that.

They are working with. So it’s just a question of how quickly you can move the domain expertise that you’re able to bring to the problem, your articulation of the value proposition in the conversations that you’re having, and the extent of connect and relationship with the partner itself. So it’s a combination of all of them. Databricks, for example, they had identified us as one of the few generative AI partners that they are working with and we have done several workshops along with them. It is not because domain expertise doesn’t reside in other companies. It’s just like how well we are able to bring all that to bear very quickly using the new approaches.

The way we are able to articulate that, that’s what we hear from them in terms of why they prefer to work with partners who are native to the AI ecosystem, for example. But I think the same hypothesis will extend to the other topic.

Srinivasu KAnalyst

Thank you so much, sir. All the best for the 2 4.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Thank you.

operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. In order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all the parties in the conference, please restrict your questions to two each per participant. You may rejoin the Queue for follow up questions. Our next question comes from the line of Srinath V from Bellwether Capital Private Limited. Please go ahead.

Srinath VAnalyst

Congratulations guys on the good set of numbers. Arjun. Just wanted to understand this. Databricks. 15, 16 million, where would it be reported? Would this be largely in CPG and our industrials practice? Because the growth in those two practices has been a little soft. So wanted to understand how they flow into our numbers. And second is going forward as these businesses scale, as databricks start funding our projects and bringing us leads again, would it be fair to assume that these two practices will actually lead growth for us? Probably in FY27 or FY28, you know, just wanted some views on the same.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Yeah, thanks Srinath. Right. I mean till date the growth in relation to the databricks revenue has been largely led by the work that we do in the consumer goods space, in the industrial space and in tech itself. In technology itself. And as I mentioned earlier, it is not necessarily all revenue related to native view going in and doing a databricks implementation. I mean that piece of work will be a part of it. But in many instances it’s the delivery of analytics use cases on an existing databricks environment that the client already has. And as we execute those use cases there might be other additional data that moves from whatever legacy or siloed ecosystems that they have.

And we’ll then take responsibility for moving that data and integrating into the overall picture. I’m expecting that the growth will continue in this sector. In fact I mentioned that cpg, retail, manufacturing, these are sectors that we are expecting. The good news or the traction that we are seeing in the industrial manufacturing space is something that is giving comfort. In fact we won a substantial engagement with auto component manufacturer and we are seeing quite a bit of traction there. In fact after the next couple of days in the Bay Area I’m actually proceeding to Detroit where I’ll be spending three days.

There is a quarterly business review meeting happening with this client and they’re expecting that there’ll be more work that will need to be done on top of the databricks and development. So those sectors, technology, consumer goods, manufacturing, these are the ones where we see.

Srinath VAnalyst

Further action in the coming quarters. Just taking forward on this question, how do we understand again in the current business between pure migration and say use case driven implementation of this suite of products within the customer who already have databricks, how is this mix for us and how is it likely to progress over the next few years?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Our big interestingly is the flip of what databricks themselves are experiencing. In our case, only 20% or less of the revenue will be coming in from the migration. The hardcore migration work. Much more of it really happens on the back of the analytics use cases that we deliver closer to 80%. But Databricks has also called out that while in fact their own origins are more from analytics machine learning perspective right in comparison to other hyperscalers or even a snowflake, they continue to see a lot of traction just in getting the migration done. And they’re also making it a lot easier for companies to move data into their ecosystem as well as leave it there and do analytics even without moving.

I mean they’re their entire partnership with SAP for example is based on the premises. You don’t need to necessarily move all the data at one shot or anything. You can continue to operate in an environment where a lot of the data resides in SAP, but you still use databricks for the analytics use cases. On the back of all of this, I’m expecting that the 20% will get bigger. In fact the migrate mate solution is seeing traction with auto component manufacturer that I mentioned. For example there is quite a bit of work around moving the data into the database.

Several of the leads that I mentioned earlier, the 10 leads are related to that as well. My expectation is that the 20% will likely become 30, 40% right in the coming quarters.

Srinath VAnalyst

Thank you. Thanks a lot. I’ll get back to the question queue.

operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Pritesh Thakkar from PL Capital. Please go ahead.

Pritesh ThakkarAnalyst

Hello. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations on a good set of numbers and thanks for giving an opportunity. I just had a question on Raj commentary on indicate that there is some follow up work in anticipated but it has gone on a full mode. Just wanted to understand will it be a growth headwind going into FY27 and along with it one of the beverages company also indicated there is some slowdown. So if you can put a color on that these part of the world.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

So, so, so Pritesh, if I hear. Your question right you’re talking about some of the. Firstly the. You know the maybe the headwinds that we are seeing for some of our. In some of the technology accounts. That’s the one that, that you were talking about. The second one it’s around the sluggishness in the beverage company. I’ll address the second one first in terms of the. In terms of the muted performance for CPG retail in relation to the previous quarter. While I think the last quarter at Least, you know, the last couple of quarters have been fairly strong in terms of growth momentum for CPG and retail.

Last quarter specifically, while there was anticipation because of quite a few deeds and opportunities that were there in the pipeline, these were multiple small value projects, which is typically the engagement model that we have with this large beverage manufacturer where we provide several point solutions or in fact execute RGM projects for specific products, you know, products in specific markets. That’s the nature of the engagement with the client. There were multiple of such opportunities that were there in the pipeline, which in reality did not. We were not able to close them out in time for us to book the revenue.

The good news is that these are now beginning to sort of get firmed up and signed up and you will start seeing expansion in the CPG vertical in this particular quarter, especially Q4. Right. Because we’ve seen a lot of these pipeline opportunities getting closed specifically in relation to the headwinds that we’re seeing in technology. I wouldn’t say it’s a broad based vertical specific issue. It’s probably more a client specific, I would say condition or situation that is playing out where one of the stakeholders that we work with in this large account is reevaluating the way they engage with contractors or vendors.

This particular person is someone who typically prefers to work with FTEs as opposed to contractors and therefore there is some relook at the way they’re engaging, not just with us, with other vendors as well. So I think this sort of pause and wait condition will go on till about 31st of March post, which we are expecting that there will be enhanced clarity in terms of the way forward for this year. Right. But what this meant is that there is some level of either consolidation and or budget cuts that have been enforced across the entire organization and we will see some level of impact from this to play out, especially in Q4 of the current year for the technology vertical.

But on the positive side, while there is dependency or there is a very large revenue dependency from this particular stakeholder, there are multiple other threads that we have opened up in this large account. These are in relation to people analytics, these are in relation to some of even supply chain practice that we are trying to get into the devices practice. So there are multiple other threads that are going on right now which should partially offset the drop in revenue that we anticipate from this particular consolidation excite. We expect the net impact of this to be in the order of say maybe on an annualized basis between 5 to 6 million dollars of revenue on an annualized basis.

But as we plan for the next year, like I said, we anticipate that this shortfall as we begin this year will be made up by wins that we will get from other stakeholders. I hope that answers your question, Pradesh.

Pritesh ThakkarAnalyst

Understood this is really helpful. And on the tech side, I mean. On the top two account, just wanted to know earlier also you indicated that we had some productivity pass through the productive benefit that we called out last quarter. So. So that is there still on a. I would say still impacting our top line or you believe as we assume that thing will go and incrementally you would start, you know, fetching volume from there. So in terms of productivity benefits, so.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

The, I mean, let me take the question. So the productivity benefits is not necessarily in terms of the revenue impact because of team size reductions at this time. Because in general, even with, especially with tech accounts, we have been already proactive in terms of proposing the right kind of team sizes based on what we already see as efficiencies that can come through. It is still being the contracting and engagement is still being done in an effort based model. The reduction or the revenue impact in this large account is mainly because of their changing priorities in relation to freeing up capital for investments that they are making in other areas like data centers for example, or LLM models and so on.

In general, in the text space, there is a bit of softness on lower priority analytics initiatives and they will pick only the most impactful ones. And every organization obviously has a spectrum of initiatives where they are trying to get as much benefit out of even nuanced decision making as possible. So that is what got reset a bit because of all the money flowing into capital expenditure on the LLM and AI infrastructure fund. I’m expecting some amount of normalization will happen over the next few quarters. We are also pivoting on how even those investments that they are making can benefit their organization.

So while they’re building a lot of this for their own clients, it’s also how do they use it internally? So I talked about this Velocity AI initiative that we are running with this particular account that is mainly aimed at identifying use cases where their investment and what they have built in terms of modeling capabilities can be turned to their own business running their business. I’m expecting therefore some of the traction.

Pritesh ThakkarAnalyst

To come back after they make the pivotal understood. So given all these puts and takes, I mean do you believe FY27 could be a year where we can replicate the similar growth what we are anticipating in FY26?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

So that’s the intent, I mean we did a ground up exercise just preceding this board meeting and we have received a set of numbers based on. Where. The current set of discussions. Are leading to. Now we will be refining these over the next month and a half before we wrap up the fiscal so that we are having more confidence in terms of what we are able to project for the next year. Just a trajectory that is called for to get to that 200 million dollar number will require close to a 30% kind of a growth. Right. So that’s what we’ll be targeting. But I’ll be able to give you a better update on what the specific numbers would be. Right. That we’ll be able to provide us guidance when we get to the next quarter.

Pritesh ThakkarAnalyst

Understood. In the last one on the severance pay of 70 bips that we incurred this quarter. So that will be a tailwind in fourth quarter. Is it a assumption that is correct?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Yeah. No. So definitely evidence of about 200k that was paid out will, will obviously not be recurring in nature. Right. So it will be attainment for the following quarter. Thank you so much and all the best.

operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.

Aditi PatilAnalyst

Thank you for giving me an opportunity and congratulations on good set of numbers. My first question is on renewals. So can you talk about the how renewals panned out this quarter and did we see the overall TCV intact or did we see any pricing pressures and reduction in TCV in the renewal component?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

So in terms of renewals for this quarter, like I said, except for this one specific account, Aditi, where there were and this is more a stakeholder specific situation that we are currently handling, we have not seen any pressure in terms of either volumes for the next year going down or request for price reduction. In fact, in our number two account, which is also a tech account, we were able to get a price increase. Likewise with one of our largest industrials accounts, an account which is a $3 million plus account, we were again able to secure a 5% price increase.

So overall I would say renewals for the next year continue to look fairly healthy with no big anticipated budget cuts as well as price reductions. Except this one particular large account where like I already mentioned, the impact could be anywhere between 5 to 6 million dollars in terms of volume reduction. This is just more of a, I would say a client specific issue where they’re deciding to do either more work in house or just eliminate some of these positions. Right. Because they’re trying to restructure and bring things under a more central umbrella. So definitely not a case of us losing work to competition in this particular case.

It’s just more a case of the company itself consolidating the work that they’re doing. Apart from that, most of the renewals are already in the bag. In fact, even with a large financial services account we see very, very solid. While there was a big ramp up that we saw through the course of this year, we have a fairly good degree of confidence in terms of our ability to scale this account. So this year we should end the year with about a $7 million revenue. From this seven to seven and a half million we already have visibility for, I would say talking close to about 10 million plus from this particular account for the next year.

This is including renewals and extensions that are likely to happen through the course of the year. And of course these are also based off discussions and planning sessions that we’re continuing to have with clients. Right. So all in all I would say still fairly strong renewals except for this one situation with a large account.

Aditi PatilAnalyst

Okay, got it. And on margins, so if we look at the nine month FY26 EBITDA margins, excluding the one time labor code impact and the restructure the transaction charges, it is around 23.6%. You mentioned that for full year you are expecting 24%. So that means in Q4 the margins would be like upwards of 24%. Is my understanding correct? And what would be the tailwinds if that is correct?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

That is correct. On a full year basis we expect the margins to be closer to 24%. Aditi, there will be two specific tailwinds. One, of course we expect that while we have been extremely conservative in our when we, when we did the excise, even though we have appointed a consultant to do a full blown excise on restructuring of salary components to comply with the labor code and that excise is currently underway, we have been conservative in terms of provisioning for the full impact on gratuity and post retirement benefits when we publish the results for Q3.

And that is the reason why there was an impact of almost 1.6% on the EBITDA. Apart from this, the severance pay that I already did mention about, that would be a cost that we will not incur in the subsequent sort of quarter incrementally. You will also note that while historically Q4 is the period in which we incur substantial costs in relation to visa sponsorship this year, given the changes in the visa regime and also the changes in the way companies are actually hiring people with work permits. We anticipate that the outlay towards Visa costs also will be substantially lower compared to earlier years or in fact even the earlier quarter.

All of this would mean that the EBITDA for the next quarter could be closer to about 25%. Between 24.5 to 25% just for the quarter, which will mean that on a full year basis, our EBITDA will be closer to 24%.

Aditi PatilAnalyst

Okay, got it. And on the restructuring part, I think the majority of the restructuring is in sales and marketing because QOQ drop in sales and marketing is higher and you have also added talent in some of the high growth areas. So can you talk a bit more about your thought process in sales and marketing investments and rationalization at the same time?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

So the. I mean sales and marketing in particular, it is always a continuous process of evaluation and figuring out whether the people that we bring in. Right. That we have are able to stay in touch and in pace with what the market is expecting. Expecting. I mean this given the dynamic nature of the space, the ability to solution along with the clients in a very consultative kind of a model is an important criteria. So there will always be a natural process of evaluating and then adjusting for that. The ramp up that we have been doing over the last several quarters has been aligned with the diamond account strategy that I talked about earlier where they said that we need more people for the mining and farming.

So client partners, account managers, part of the entity organizations as opposed to just pure hunters. This is something that we will continue to evaluate. Two other areas which we are experimenting with. One is whether there is a regional construct with more geographic rather than an industry specific kind of a model. And second is the ramp up that we are doing in relation to databricks as well as the AI center of Excellence. We have been bringing in people at the front end, both domain experts as well as go to market people who will support the execution of the strategy related to databricks and aicoe.

This again will be an area of. Focus as we move forward. So there will be a slow uptick in the numbers as we see growth in revenue, but the churn and reorganization, just the routine aspect of making sure that the team is effective.

operator

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. In order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all the participants in the conference, please limit yourselves to two questions each per participant and can rejoin the queue for follow up questions. Our next question comes from the line of Susho 1 from Anandrati. Please go ahead. Hi Is my voice audible? Yes, sir, you’re audible. Yes. Please go ahead.

SushoAnalyst

So just one question and two bookkeeping questions. First one was basically in another couple. Of years from now, how do you. Envisage your vertical mix to be? Will it be more if there is. Some sort of flavor that you can provide? And on the bookkeeping questions, basically, what do you think would be your steady state margins and steady state tax rates? I think those are the two questions I had. All the others have been answered as well.

Rajan VenkatesanChief Finiancial Officer

Yeah. Let me answer the vertical mix question and I’ll pass it to Raj. We have already alluded to the growth that we are witnessing in financial services and even consumer goods. I’m expecting that there will be accelerated growth there given the investments. Also the renewed energy rate with which we are approaching that space industrials. I am still a little unsure because the general macroeconomic challenges have impacted that space the most. But having said that, there are conversations. It’s just a much, much longer sales cycle. And in technology we talked about the headwinds related to priorities that the tech companies have, at least the big ones have in relation to the AI infrastructure investment that they are making.

So we will have to see how that pans out. But taking all of this into account, I would say that over the next couple of years, financial services and consumer goods will become larger shares of the revenue that we’ll be delivering and tech will become slightly smaller because of some of the issues industrials. There is an opportunity to grow there if things become a little less uncertain. But that is something that I would have to wait before I comment on.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Shivan on the margins question. Right. So obviously this year, like I said, right. I mean, and as is the case with even the last couple of years, what you would have noted is typically we begin the year with margins, which are quite muted primarily on account of one, we start the year with higher visa costs. Plus all the. The impact of the wage hikes typically tend to dent the margin profile of the business at the beginning of the year. But as we go along during the year, revenue growth that sort of pans out in Q2 and Q3 starts improving the overall margin profile.

And on a full year basis, we typically tend to track closer to about 24 to 20. So this year we had guided that 23, 24% is the range in mid 20 we would like to operate. Right. And while in the past that range is probably 24 to 25% now, while we will sort of deliver to that promise this year, our endeavor of course is, you know, and which is what we don’t want to lose sight of is to get to that $200 million revenue by FY28. And therefore that will mean that we may need to make some investments early on in this year.

Right. And there are a few, you know, critical, I would say, senior roles that we will want to definitely look at as we look to build out the sort of the team muscle to deliver the 200 million. This coupled with also investment that will be needed on the AACOE and R and D side will also be very necessary for us to be relevant as well as in some sense build solutions that are, that are forward looking. So those investments will also be necessary. And third, of course while we’ve been a little slow on the M and A front over the last 12 to 18 months, we wanted the decision point integration to be fully successful as well as us had to have some reasonable level of confidence on the valuation numbers.

Because you would note that the industry itself is going through quite a bit of a change and shift with revenue models being challenged, effort based pricing being sort of again revisited, things like that. So we’ve been very cautious in terms of spending dollars to acquire companies, but we anticipate that some of that will change. Now we will look at a multi pronged approach of investing in inorganic ways. One of which could be investments in companies that are building very, very interesting agent AI based technology. Two, we could also partner with some of these companies as opposed to investing where we jointly go to market along with them.

And third would of course be acquiring companies under the traditional M and A playbook. Right. And here we could also potentially look at larger ticket sized deal. While I’m giving a fairly long winded answer to the question on margins. The. Reality today is that we need to make investments for us to get to that 200 million mark. Right now we’ll end the year with about 120 million. There’s an 80 million gap that we need to cover. Some of that will come through M and A, but then vast majority of it needs to come through organic growth which will need investments both on the innovation side as well as go to market side. We’ll be in a much better position to guide you on the full year margins. So we don’t want to give out quarterly guidances on margins because a lot of times investments are front loaded and therefore they could have temporary impacts on quarterly margins.

But on a full year basis. What. We will definitely aim to do is not substantially disrupt our margin profile, but you could potentially see some front ending of these Investments which could mean a 1 to 2% drop in the EBITDA margins in the coming year. But those are necessary for us to get to the $200 million mark. The second question around ETR, again. This. Is more of a bookkeeping question. On a long term sustained basis over a three to five year period. I would guide you guys to model an ATR of between 26 to 27% because those are I would say the maximum tax rate across all the jurisdictions that we currently operate in. So 26 to 27% is safer to assume these benefits, so called benefits that we sometimes get from excise of ESOP options also will continue to sort of keep coming down. We do not anticipate any further benefit on tax from from excise of options. I mean that number will keep sort of coming down.

So it will not have a meaningful impact on the overall ETR for the group. So you can safely assume that 26 to 27% builder will be the annualized ETR for the group.

SushoAnalyst

Thank you so much for the answer. Just, just one last question. This ESOP expenses, they do hit your EBITDA also, right? I mean they do, they do,

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

yeah. So the esop. No, no. So the what hits are obviously the, the ESOP expense hits are atr, but there’s a slight, you know, difference in the way ESOP is treated between India and the US In India the differential between the current, the fair market value of the, of the, of the share as on the date of the excitement and the excise price cannot be claimed by the company as a allowable expense. Okay. When we do our there is, the employee pays full taxes on, on this as part of personal taxation.

The company does not get, is not, cannot claim this as a payroll cost while filing for taxes. But in the US it is slightly different because for our US based employees, whatever is the differential between the excise price and the fair market value as on the date of the excitement can be claimed as an allowable expenses while filing taxes. Right? So that’s the slight disconnect. So every time we have an excise to the extent there are employees in the US who excise shares, we are able to claim that as a payroll cost and that reduces our overall epr.

So it’s a differential between while for the purpose of books we will not be showing this as payroll cost but only in tax. When we, when we file for taxes we’ll be claiming this as an allowable expense. So there is a differential treatment over there and that is what you see resulting in a Lower edr especially when in periods where the ESOP excite window is open. Thank you so much. I think a couple more questions, we’ll wrap up by 7:15. Our time is like 8:45 India. Yeah.

operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shubham Sehgal from Simpl. Please go ahead.

Shubham SehgalAnalyst

Hello, Am I audible?

operator

Yes, yes.

Shubham SehgalAnalyst

Thanks for the opportunity. My first question was so most pure play analytical forms today they appear largely interchangeable to the enterprise bios with similar talent pools, partner certifications and overlapping use cases. So from a client’s perspective, what are the two or three tangible reasons to choose latent view over the other pure platforms? And how does this differentiation further show up in the win rates, deal sizes or wallet share expansion rather than just you know, like capability narratives? I’ll call out two things actually you’ve talked about is extensively the patch as well, right? One is general our relations a lot more on the business side rather than. The CTO organization because analytics use typically driven by that. Therefore there’s a very very strong connect with the business, the business problem, understanding the context.

operator

Sorry to interrupt sir. Your voice is getting chipped in between right now.

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Okay. Yeah, so, so it’s, it’s, it’s really the connect and the domain understanding because we largely work with the, with the business sponsors and the stakeholders more than the CIO CT organization. While it’s an advantage in some instances, it can be a disadvantage as well because larger data engineering and IT initiatives tend to be driven more by the CIO CD organization. This is something that we are also understanding and navigating right as we move forward. But this is a differentiator, just a very, very close connect and proximity to the business side of things. The second is our front row seat in terms of working with the top tech companies in the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley who are in some sense leading the race in terms of inventing the next new when it comes to AI and AI and agentech and all that.

And that gives us a certain degree of credibility in terms of how we are able to talk about all of these technologies and tools and approaches being brought to bear on the problems that they are trying to address. I would really call out these two. Of course there will be implications in terms of the profile of people, the training that we provide, how connected and close we are to the leading edge of everything that is happening and all that. And then if you’re able to marry that all with the nimbleness and the agility that a smaller organization brings, then that is what kind of differentiates us? So as I answered an earlier question, even in today’s call, this is not like rocket science or it’s not like other organizations cannot replicate it.

But I mean historically it has always been a challenge for larger organizations given the multiple things that they focus on or are there their own internal mechanisms and processes and so on. Obviously, as long as we are able to bring these kind of differentiators to the table, we continue to stay relevant and clients reach out to us.

operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Surabhi from Bellwether Capital Private Limited. Please go ahead.

SurabhiAnalyst

Yeah, hi. Congratulations on great set of numbers. My question is on the data engineering side, we’ve displayed a lot of excitement for this stream of work. Wanted to understand the kind of growth that we’ve seen in this side of the practice, especially as we move towards doing more end to end deals. Do we have higher share of work coming on the data engineering side leading up to predictive and the consulting side of the work?

Rajan SethuramanChief Executive Officer

Yeah, I mean it’s been on the ramp up for the last several quarters. It’s also accelerated by the databricks partnership. I mean I mentioned how just data engineering work of getting the platform ready and in some sense creating that kind of an integrated picture across their multiple siloed ecosystems. Right. That’ll be very important prerequisite for getting any kind of analytics done, right? Leave alone generative and agent. Generative and agenting will mean that you need to pay attention to this even more. Right. I talked about how governance evals and observer observability will become important. Right? In the scheme of things, this will mean that there will be even more requirements around metadata, governance related metadata that needs to be captured and utilized on any analytics that gets done. So it’s not just about having some simple guidance and rules, but at the individual data element level you might have metadata requirements related to who can access it, how long can they access it, for what purpose can they access it, when does it need to be deleted, whether it can be accessed in an aggregated form or math form, or at a granular form.

All of these things will dramatically increase the quantum of data and metadata that needs to be managed, along with the complex set of rules and requirements surrounding that. Which naturally means that data engineering will be a fairly important aspect of work that remains to be done. Even the entire business process automation that I alluded to earlier, that can be done only if there is a great degree of confidence and faith in the data that supports the execution of the process so taking all of this into account, I would say that data engineering will continue to be a fairly significant component and piece of work.

I mean, I’m expecting when we get to that 200 million mark that we have been talking about, definitely 25% of the work that we are doing should be in the data engineering space. All right, we’ll have a wrap up here due to time constraints, but thank you all for joining today. I will hand the floor back to the moderator.

operator

Thank you very much on behalf of Latent View analytics limited. That concludes this conference call. Thank you all for joining us. And you may now disconnect your lines.

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