Key highlights from Tata Elxsi Ltd (TATAELXSI) Q3 FY22 Earnings Concall
Management Update:
- TATAELXSI said that the company crossed the INR200 crore PBT and INR150 crore PAT milestones for the first time in the company’s history, with the growth powered by its largest division, Embedded Product Design Division (EPD).
- The company also said that it has been steadily adding to its talent base with 500 fresh engineers being added in Q2, while adding 150 in Q3. Expects to add larger number of fresh engineers in the coming quarters.
Q&A Highlights:
- Hiren Ved of Alchemy Capital Management asked that in the transportation vertical the company is seeing growth and if the company is seeing any progress in the non-traditional transportation. Manoj Raghavan CEO commented that in transportation business, lot of company’s business comes from passenger car vehicles. But in the last 6-8 quarters, TATAELXSI has diversified its revenue profit to include commercial as well as off-road farm equipment and the rail segments. It’s a steady progress. The company added that it expects 20% of its revenues to come from nontraditional in the next three years.
- Hiren Ved of Alchemy Capital also asked about the healthcare vertical’s growth going forward considering its small base, if it would continue. Manoj Raghavan CEO said that healthcare business is definitely going to grow and the company’s three year roadmap talks about 40:40:20 ratio between automotive, media and communication and healthcare business. It’s in line to achieving this roadmap.
- Aditya Ahluwalia from Invesco queried about the share of the company’s top customer increasing in the last couple of quarters and what’s driving that growth. Manoj Raghavan said that it’s due to some of the large deals TATAELXSI was able to win in the last 2, 3 quarters and some of the growth is due to the ramp up of deals.
- Naveen Bothra asked about the IDV business and its outlook going forward. Manoj answered saying that it’s a smaller business the company has and though on a YoY basis it increased but QoQ the numbers were fluctuating. The company added that the QoQ fluctuation was due to a one large customer in the top 6 to 10 bracket where a particular work was postponed, but which is temporary issue. However, on a YoY basis, the company expects to grow 60-70% over last year’s performance.
- Naveen Bothra also asked about the IPR and licensing revenue if it’s still below 5%. Manoj Raghavan CEO said that it’s still below 5%.
- Karan Danthi of Jetha Global asked about the company’s deals with auto semiconductor companies and the semiconductor shortage outlook. Manoj Raghavan CEO replied that the company has been working with auto semicon companies for the last 20 years. And some of them are large customers of the company. And on the semiconductor shortage, TATAELXSI believes the situation should improve in a couple of quarters and companies like JLR are seeing improvement in sales related to this.
- On a question by Dev of Invest Yadnya about ER&D space and its outlook, Nitin Pai CMO explained that as far as digital spend and budgets outlayed by companies go, ER&D is seeing the largest growth among all of the spend that’s possible from companies.
- Analyst Abhishek of Nomura asked about the fixed-price projects rising consistently for the company and if it’s the reason for improving margin trends. Manoj Raghavan CEO answered that fixed-price has been going up and has helped in improving margins to an extent. The company added that it will have more fixed bids as it matures in its service offering and the overall confidence.
- Abhishek of Nomura also enquired about attrition numbers. Manoj Raghavan CEO said that the company is taking attrition very seriously and it is taking various steps to improve employee life. The company added that over the last 15 months TATAELXSI has hiked the salaries three times.
- Analyst Siddesh Shraff asks about partnerships and the company’s plan ahead. Nitin Pai CMO said that the company looks at partnerships as two-fold, namely acquisition of technology and go-to-market. From an acquisition of technology perspective the company already has large number of partnerships at play. And on the go-to-market one, the company not only acquire technology by include them in the solutions and go to market together, which are fewer in nature and more strategic. So the company will be making announcements going forward.
- An individual investor asked about the company’s announced deals of EV connected vehicles/autonomous vehicles and the average length of these contracts. CEO Manoj Raghavan said that it’s typically in the 12-18 months range and in some cases it’s 24 months.