Tariff anxiety vanished Q2 onwards.

On the BFSI side - what led to higher-than-usual furlough? Is there any sub-segment or client-specific factor? And is the productivity pass-through done entirely for the quarter, or is there something more to come into the next quarter?

Look, I think if I look at the BFSI perspective, I just want to call out a couple of things and I will address your specific questions. But the first is that our BFSI business is compared to our own business is relatively small, right? So, a small change in a couple of clients tends to get amplified in terms of the percentage numbers. And there is a lot of underlying good news within the BFSI numbers. What I want to point out is, for instance, we have added up a significant number of logos over the past quarter, I just want to call out a couple of them. So, for instance, in APJ, we signed up one of the largest Japanese banks. We won a transformation deal in wealth for one of the largest banks in Singapore. In Europe, we signed up a global preferred supplier list with one of the largest global insurers, and a new MSA and project wins with one of the world's largest private banks, again in Europe. In the Americas, we successfully renewed a longstanding infra-network support and transformation contract with an American insurer. So, there is a lot of momentum that is happening on the ground. Now, in terms of the furloughs that really had a quarter-on-quarter impact in some markets, like in Canada, for instance, which is an important market for us, we saw with some of our clients higher furloughs than we had seen in the last year, for instance. Now, this could just be dependent on their project frequency or their own budgeting cycles. As far as the productivity benefit for a larger client that we have spoken about, again, the productivity stepped down because it is a multi-year contract, you have to take a step down every year. We do not expect it to spill through into the current quarter, and we expect to get back to our quarter-on-quarter growth trajectory. I just want to stress that our ambitions for BFSI remain unchanged, and while this quarter has been weak, there is underlying positive movement in terms of client acquisitions and deal activity.

Is it fair to say that your deal-win mix for BFSI would be higher than your revenue mix?

Well, it is a fair conclusion to make overall, not specifically for this quarter. In this quarter, I would say that our deal wins have tilted more towards telecom and hi-tech, candidly. We have had a lot of significant renewals from a BFSI perspective, which is also very important. For instance, we renewed our long-standing infrastructure contract, as I mentioned, with an American insurer. In terms of net new, no, that would not be true for this quarter.

On headcount - sequentially, there is some reduction in headcount. Was that more to manage the productivity pass-through and keep the cost structure under control, or is there something more to that?

Well, I do not think there is any more to that. What I will say is that we have called out from the beginning of this transformation program that one of the places where we see very significant levers to drive transformation is in our fixed-price portfolio, right, which is over half of our revenue. And so, as we drive productivity into our fixed-price programs, we are obviously releasing a lot of existing talent there. And then, rather than hiring fresh talent, we are largely using this pool. And because of the new sort of software infrastructure that we have created within the company, we have much better visibility of our bench and our talent pool than we previously did. So, redeploying those two projects, which is why, we are also seeing growth, right, we are also growing rather than shrinking, and we have chosen not to backfill the talent that would be leaving. And so, on the one hand, you are getting people freed up from fixed-price projects who are being redeployed, resulting in both margin growth and profit growth. On the other hand, where there is attrition, we are first choosing to redeploy our existing fixed-price pool. And thanks to our new software infrastructure, we have much better visibility of individual-level talent and where they can be redeployed.

On the telecom deal - is the entire 500 million net new? On BFSI - how big is payments for us considering the credit card rate cap at 10%? And does the large win impact margins as we start executing this?

Thanks for those questions. I will take them one by one. So, telecom, yes. The revenue that we have called out is all net new. While this is an existing customer, the number that we have included in our large deals wins is only the net new component. So, we have excluded the existing revenue component over here. This large deal, again, has been signed, but we expect the actual delivery of this to start in the first half of the next financial year. So, it should start kicking in relatively early in the new financial year. As far as your question on BFSI is concerned, while we do have a very large payments practice, our exposure with the actual issuers is somewhat limited. A lot of our exposure is to the payment networks, and we do not see it having a sort of near-term impact. Obviously, this credit card interest rate cap is now just a proposal as it follows through into actual legislation and then into IT budgets. We will be able to give you a clearer picture. But as of now, our exposure is largely to the networks and not to the actual providers. On the margin impact of the large deals, look, we have always been very clear about the fact that we do not want to do large deals that lose us money. And so, we have continued to stay very disciplined from our pricing and from our profitability perspective. And while obviously, large deals involve execution challenges that could dilute margins, we have not upfront signed a money-losing deal, we will not do that.

With deal bookings being very strong for the last 4 quarters, how do you see the incremental deal pipeline? Is there signs of exhaustion or is it still good?

Well, I think the deal pipeline still looks pretty good at the start of the year. Obviously, these things tend to be lumpy. And if you recollect in Q1 of this year, I had actually, when this question was asked, when are your deal wins going to start converting to revenue? We had said that these deal wins will start converting to revenue from the second half of the year onwards. And as we have closed Q3, you have seen that that is true. So, I do feel that the deal pipeline is still strong. It will continue to be lumpy. So, you may see a quarter-on-quarter of fluctuation. But overall, we are happy with the pipeline and our odds of winning these deals.

On BPO segment - growth has been really strong over the past 3 years. What has driven growth? What are potential risks given AI? And from a profitability perspective, it hasn't been a similar story - what are the reasons?

Maybe I can answer profitability first, Mohit, and then you can talk about the growth. So, Rishi, on profitability, as we mentioned earlier, right, if you look at the overall trend, we had also had some divisions that we had move to BPS, right? And BPS has a mortgage processing unit in the UK, etc. They were relatively dilutive, so there was a comparative dip there, right? But from there, post the integration, they have been consistently increasing on margins, as before. Just this quarter, there is a one time that they had, because of which segment was down, but on operating performance is still Q-o-Q improvement, if you exclude that. And we see that trajectory for BPS to continue over the next quarters or so. Mohit Joshi: Yes. And the whole look, I think I have always been very bullish about our BPS business. That's for a couple of reasons. One is, we have a really strong leadership team in BPS, led by Biren. And at the end of the day, this business is very much based on the quality of your leadership, and therefore the solutions that we are able to develop. I think the BPS business has also gained from the huge infusion of technology, and specifically AI and automation that we have been able to infuse, because of being a large IT player. So, everything that we are doing from a TechM Orion perspective, in terms of agentic AI, or the work that we are doing to build large and small language models, is feeding into the capabilities of our BPS team, to become more effective, and therefore win deals from pure play BPO providers, who may not have that set of capabilities, right? We see this very clearly, for instance when we are pitching against maybe a pure play BPO for a banking back office deal, right, where our ability to be able to show the level of automation and agentic AI capability, far exceeds what a pure play may be able to provide. I do feel that as long as this business continues to go up the value chain, and be able to be more solution driven, rather than purely sort of bumps on seats driven, that business will continue to grow. And so, we remain bullish about the long term possibility of this business. Biren and team have also entered into new areas, where we are able to generate significant revenue. For instance, one of our key capabilities in BPS that's increasingly emerging, is our Saffronic capability, right? Which is our ability to do short digital movies, and a lot of the work on the animation side that is winning them clients across the world, so that BPS capabilities continue to increase. And we are also driving a greater cross sell between our existing IT and BPS clients.

You set a target to grow at or above peer average by fiscal '27 and have hit that target. Do you see this as an improved growth position relative to peers that should be sustainable going forward?

Thanks, Rod. So, look, I think when we had set the plan, it certainly looked like a really ambitious plan because we were at the bottom of the pile in terms of growth. And so therefore setting a path for exceeding the peer average was seen as an aggressive plan. And I am happy with the progress that we have made over the past 2 years. What really makes us confident that this is credible is first and foremost, the quality of the leadership team that we have assembled. I believe that we have really built a world beating team in TechM. The second is that we have focused the growth on our largest accounts, right? And so therefore it is stickier, because a lot of the growth is coming from selling new service lines to existing clients, so new design capabilities to existing clients and new AI and data capabilities to existing clients. As I have shared previously, our top accounts, that is accounts with more than $20 million in revenue are growing significantly higher than the company average. And so therefore there is stickiness because this is not one-off revenue from marginal clients. And the third factor that I wanted to call out is our large deal book, a large and increasing large deal book also gives us a greater visibility of revenue for the future. So, we are confident that going into F '27, that we will be able to fully meet our promise of growing faster than our peer average. And then hopefully over time building that momentum, there is a high degree of confidence there.

On the Comms vertical - in light of the large deal win in Europe, give us more color on the outlook. How much is a function of the vertical overall versus your ability to capture share?

Thanks, Rod. So, look, I think the comms vertical is very interesting, because at the end of the day, it is our largest single vertical. And it is very important that we maintain and grow our relevance in this vertical. I do feel that for the Comms vertical, we have quite a unique proposition, because we are the only player that has the IT capabilities, but we also have the network capabilities and increasingly a lot of the opportunities are emerging on the network side. And we have BPS and software capabilities, right? So, in Comviva, which has increasingly won a number of Tier-1 clients for our BSS solution, for our marketing analytics solution, we are able to sell that in Europe and in the America. So, first and foremost, I feel that we are really the only player to have a comprehensive and complete portfolio from a Comms perspective, IT and BPO, Network Services and Software. So, that is a winning combination. In Europe specifically, we see a lot of consolidation opportunities because most of our clients still have a very long tail of partners. And as they consolidate, like they did in the mega deal that we had referred to earlier, we are getting increased opportunities. We also see a lot of opportunities with the Comms sort of technology providers. In the US, we do not see so much of a consolidation opportunity because really the vendor landscape is already significantly consolidated. But we are seeing, as opposed to what we were seeing in '23 and '24, a slight loosening of purse strings. I would not break out the champagne yet, but it is a better picture than we saw certainly 18 months ago. And in Asia, we see an opportunity really to deploy our software stack at scale. And again, it's been a couple of consolidation opportunities, right? For instance, in the early weeks of this current quarter, we have won a consolidation opportunity for an ASEAN based telecoms company, which consolidated from 10 plus vendors to 2. So, I feel consolidation will drive a lot of growth for us, and the software portfolio that we have, especially with Comviva, which is growing much, much faster than the rest of the company, is driving that differentiation. So, that, in a nutshell, is where we are on Comms. No significant increase in overall spend for the sector, but an increase in market share for us, given our unique portfolio offerings and our incumbency for key clients.

On deal TCV - based on the efforts and pipeline and success ratio, is it fair to assume on an annual basis we can now achieve $3.5 to $4 billion worth of new business TCVs?

Well, I hate to make projections about the future, but yes, I do think it sounds reasonable, Sandeep. We have certainly demonstrated that over the past 4 quarters, and I certainly don't see us going down from what we have accomplished. You will see some up quarters, some sideways quarters, and some down quarters, but the overall trajectory for us has been steadily rising from 300 plus to 500 plus to 800 plus to a billion plus this quarter. Rohit Anand: Yes, and Sandeep, already the LTM for us is 3.5 billion if you look at the last 12 months. So, as you rightly mentioned, the momentum needs to continue, right? We have to go to the F '27 aspiration, what we articulated 2 years back, executing that. But as Mohit said, there's lumpiness associated with that, but yes, that mark needs to be ballpark in that range, yes.

In your opening remarks you called out certain one-time or seasonal strength in the revenues. Where were they - mostly BPO and Retail in U.S. or also in Pininfarina?

Yes, so there was marginal impact on the Retail and BPO, but more around the European Auto, which had some deliveries lined up, which will normalize next quarter.

Will this also have a margin headwind in the 4th Quarter or no?

No, it won't have a margin headwind.

On gross margin expansion - have we reached the peak or there is still juice to be taken out? And it seems we are on the favorable side of vendor consolidation in telecom - any reason to believe the same in Financial Services space?

Yes, so Abhishek, I will probably talk about the gross margins. So, as you look at the first half, we articulated our improvement was predominantly driven by the improvements in the SG&A side and a lot of the Project Fortius efforts, including consolidation of our portfolio companies and various initiatives that we have driven. That led to the margin expansion. And as we discussed about the second half, I had clearly articulated that our expansion will be more driven by the gross margins. I think it's a journey that will continue as we move forward, not just for the next quarter, but also for the next year, right? Because all the efforts that we are driving around Fortius will be factored and focused around it, while some impact and improvement will continue in SG&A, but on a relative basis, majority of the contribution will come from gross margin. Mohit Joshi: Yes, and on the BFSI question, look, I think vendor consolidation is happening across sectors. It's just that BFSI has longer buying cycles and longer ramp-up cycles. So, for us, the BFSI story really is about, especially in the Americas and about an APJ, is really getting into new clients and then being able to ramp up, which is why I am very enthused, for instance, like I said, by the signing up of one of the largest global banks headquartered in Japan or winning a transformation deal in Singapore or our preferred supply list selection with one of the largest global insurers, and the win that with the private bank, right? So, we really have to be able to scale up in these accounts. That is what will give us the growth. And really, we are not really such a large incumbent in existing accounts that we have to fear vendor consolidation in the sector.

On the manufacturing vertical - how are you seeing it over the next few quarters? Auto and ex of Auto?

Yes, so look, I think the Manufacturing vertical has done exceptionally well this quarter, right? Both from a Q-o-Q perspective and a Y-o-Y perspective. But as Rohit pointed out, there were some sort of seasonal ramps that we saw in European Auto, which will not recur next quarter. So, that's a bit of a headwind for us. Overall, I think U.S. Auto has stabilized, and we should start seeing some growth there over the next few quarters. We continue to build on our strength in Aerospace. We saw one of the large deal wins was in Aerospace as well. So, there will be some volatility because of European Auto, candidly, in the next couple of quarters. But on the whole, I feel very comfortable with the Manufacturing story that we have built, right? I think the expertise that we have built, the partnerships that we have built with the software providers, the lift that we are seeing because of the SAP upgrade cycles, that makes me long-term confident about Manufacturing. And also, Manufacturing with the smart factory of the future, with physical AI, we see a lot of opportunities to build on a truly differentiated story within Manufacturing, where we have a natural right to win because of our history and heritage, and also because of the capabilities of the group. So, near-term volatility, but medium- to long-term significant opportunities. And that is just also backed up by the performance in the current quarter.

On Q4 seasonality - typically last 2 years we have seen 1-1.5% Q-on-Q decline. Will the seasonality continue this year?

Yes, Vibhor, the seasonality on revenue for us is more towards Q1, where we do we were back on the platform, not really Q4. So, I think the degree of that seasonality has definitely improved over the years. It's not as much as we had anticipated before, but it will continue. So, we will see a Q1 pressure on seasonality still to happen. But that's not in Q4.

Could you take us through the margin walk for the quarter - the 100 bps margin expansion Q-on-Q breakup between operational efficiency, INR depreciation and other factors?

Yes, sure, sure. I think from a currency perspective, the improvement was marginal. It wasn't a big factor. Most of the improvement that you see is driven by operational improvement. Volume, of course, is some part of it, around 20 to 30 basis point is driven by margin, and the rest is driven by Project Fortius, which is all operational improvement. And that's divided into various initiatives, as we called out, between delivery-led growth, pricing improvement, utilization improvement, fixed-price projects that we continue to call out as a big leaper, where we continue to drive automation, embed AI, and keep on driving what Mohit explained, redeploy people internally into new work, and that's why the revenue productivity also keeps on going up, right? So, all the projects around Fortius are contributing to that, and that's mostly contributing to the improvement.

In your ambition to grow higher than peer average in FY '27, which vertical other than Telecom you are confident of to achieve that vision?

Fair enough. So, first of all it's not about only next year, right? Because at the end of the day, we are building a company for the long term, so we want to make sure that we are growing really across verticals. If you look at our portfolio, though, we have seen strong strength in Manufacturing on the basis of the solutions that we have created, the capabilities that we have, and the clients that we have. I continue to seek growth opportunities there. If you look at our Retail and CPG and Travel, Transportation, Logistics portfolio, that has done extremely well. Candidly, I did not have such high hopes from it when we had started, but under very strong leadership that we have had with Sampath Saagi and the others, that portfolio has done extremely well, and I am very optimistic, bullish about our opportunities there. The portfolio that we have in BFSI is clearly very important because there is a large spend pool. We are creating capabilities. We have continued to hire exceptional quality talent on the market, and I have no doubt that that will be a medium-too long-term growth driver for us. In the long run, I expect all of our verticals to do well, right. We have great capabilities. In some spaces, like for instance, U.S. payer, right, it will take us time to build out broader capabilities set and a deeper client presence. But on the whole, for Telco, for Manufacturing, for Insurance and Payments and Asset and Wealth Management, for the design-led capabilities in Retail, those capability sets already exist, so it should be easier to ramp on that.