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Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Tata Communications Earnings Conference Call. We are joined today by our MD and CEO, Mr. Amur Lakshminarayanan; and Pratibha Advani, CFO. The results for the quarter and full year ended March 31, 2020, have been announced on Saturday, and the quarterly fact sheet is available on our website. I trust you will have had the chance to look through the key highlights. We will commence today's call with comments from Lakshmi, who will share his thoughts on the strategic imperatives, followed by Pratibha, who will share detailed views on the financial progress achieved. At the end of management's remarks, you will have an opportunity to get your queries addressed. Please note, all participants will have their video disabled and audio on mute during the call. The participant asking questions will only have his or her audio unmuted. Interested participants may click on raise hand icon next to their name in the participants pane on WebEx application to join Q&A queue. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that some of the statements made or discussed on the conference call today may be forward-looking in nature and must be viewed in conjunction with the risks and uncertainties we face. A detailed statement and explanation of these risks are included in our annual filings, which you can locate on our website, www.tatacommunications.com. The company does not undertake to update these forward-looking statements publicly. With that, I would like to invite Lakshmi to share his views. Over to you, Lakshmi.
Thank you, Vipul. Good afternoon, all. I hope all of you and your families are staying safe and healthy in these difficult times that we face. My comments here today may be divided into 3 broad sections: first, impact of COVID and opportunities in post-COVID world; second is an update on Q4 and the full year results; and third, our medium- to long-term strategy. The situation we are witnessing is quite unprecedented. While the frontline medical professionals and staff are battling it out every day to save countless lives, there are people like us all around the world who are trying to adjust to a new daily lifestyle. We must also acknowledge unsung heroes of the digital world who have kept operations running 24/7 and ensuring reliable connectivity for the world, which needs to stay updated and connected with each other to learn and evolve on a continuous basis. At Tata Communications, we enabled 98% of our employees globally to work from home in a very short period of 2 weeks. And thanks to the robust infrastructure that we have in place, we have been able to make the transition smoothly, thereby protecting our employees, while also ensuring uninterrupted business continuity for us and our customers. The exception is, of course, the front-line workers who are involved in operating and maintaining our network sites, back-end IT operations and infrastructure. Our business remains fully functional and all measures are in place to minimize any effect that the lockdown situation might have on these services. The importance of network, seamless connectivity and security has increased many fold. Our enterprise customers switched to their own business continuity plans, which involve enabling work-from-home for their employees and shifting of workloads seamlessly across borders. People are working from home to connect to their organization servers online. Cloud traffic has surged due to the use of collaboration tools and data consumption, which is multiplying many folds. Our teams are working in an agile manner, tirelessly to keep services running for our customers, delivering service upgrades and changes in record speed. We are also helping our large customers and partners to rapidly expand network capacity to serve the need of their customers. During this time, we have been working closely with our customers and provided 3 categories or lines of solutions. Firstly, capacity upgrade. This was necessitated due to an increased cloud and Internet traffic as employees across the world accessed their enterprise applications in data centers and cloud. Globally, we have witnessed and delivered over 650 orders, specifically related to COVID, corresponding to 1.35 terabytes of additional provision bandwidth. IP traffic is up by 23% quarter-on-quarter on our networks. In the month of March, we've witnessed a 30% growth in Internet traffic on our network over January 2020. This trend has continued in the past couple of months as well. This capacity expansion in short span of time has been possible due to extensive upgrade and modernization of our network done over the course of last 3 years. All our network elements, which is NLD, metro area network, wireless access and the DC-to-DC connectivity have all been made future ready. All new platforms and technologies being deployed in this network are designed to make the network more intelligent and programmable. We are working on a few initiatives to work the network context of that, thereby further enhancing the speed and agility for our customers. Second, is a seamless collaboration. One of the most important aspect of remote working is seamless collaboration of all internal and external stakeholders through various collaboration platforms like Teams, Cisco, Zoom, BlueJeans, et cetera. The need for video conferencing and collaboration platforms has increased as organizations globally now depend on these tools for most of their secure communication needs. We recorded 1 billion minutes of enterprise voice traffic in March alone, and our UCC revenue has grown 20% Q-on-Q this quarter. Third, through our Global Hosted Contact Center Platform, we've been able to help call center agents service desk associates to work-from-home in a regulatorily compliant way. While we witnessed these spikes in traffic, the spread of coronavirus has impacted some customer segments. This includes either cancellations or postponements of major live sporting events for which we host critical digital infrastructure, enable remote operations and enable new broadcast technology. Our current outlook remains stable. However, we'll have to wait to fully comprehend the COVID impact on our customers going forward. We are keeping a close watch on the situation and working with our customers to minimize the impact as much as possible. We are facing some challenges in our supply chain. We have adequately stopped and have been able to fulfill customer orders immediately. But now due to lockdown, we are facing a 6- to 8-week delay in procurement from OEMs and equipment manufacturers. We are working with all our suppliers to keep this delay to the minimum. So this is not a showstopper, but causing some minor delays, which our teams are coping with admirably. I want to specifically call out the trend on work-from-home. It goes without saying that the global pandemic has introduced radical changes on both professional and personal front and has forced tens of millions of people to adapt to working from home, the most overnight. Global survey suggests that 91% of the organizations now support work-from-home as compared to 63% in pre-COVID world. The changes that we have seen accelerated during the period are likely to stay and become the new normal. The workplace will be significantly different from what it was before the pandemic. In India, 90% to 95% large IT organizations are still working from home, and the managements have indicated that the practice will continue going forward. And same is the case in many other sectors globally. This presents a huge short- to medium-term business opportunity for us. Just to give you an example, at Tata Communications, we ourselves had about 1,200 VPN connections for our employees before the lockdown, and this number has now increased to about 5,500. If you consider all the chats and calls within our organization on Teams platform, we have witnessed a 50-fold increase in traffic. I'm sure the trend will not be very different for other large businesses as well. In a short span of time since the lockdown, we have enabled tens of thousands of employees in India and globally for remote working across more than 150 organizations. As we speak, there are many more under deployment. As work-from-home becomes the global norm, cybersecurity has become critically important. To support corporate agility, we are working with customers to deploy security strategy seamlessly and quickly, offering simple but effective security solutions that can be implemented within days like the global secure internet gateway and managed authentications. These add another additional layer of security to enable secure access to applications and data residing in enterprise data center or public cloud infrastructure. NetFoundry has become even more relevant in the context of remote working. Through NetFoundry, we can spin up the network, the secure network over the Internet enabling quick, secure access and performance accelerations to organizations application in any location from any device. It ensures users have high-performing reliable connectivity to their business resources. As this is a software-driven solution, it's on-demand consumption-based with 0 touch deployment, it is extremely convenient. For one of our customers, NetFoundry deployment has led to over 6x improvement in speed with which employees are connecting to enterprise applications. Our themes of wireless growth and managing business risks have acquired an all-new meaning. A successful remote working solution needs to be secure, connected, scalable and highly performant. In coming weeks, some of the make-do solutions to work from home will be industrialized, what one would call as Work From Home 2.0 to deliver what we call a secured connected digital experience, enabling enterprises to crystallize the efficiencies and help them to give an unprecedented new digital experience to both employees as well as their customers in the B2C as well as the B2B worlds. Our customer centricity and strength of our product and solutions has been recognized time and again, both by our customers and industry leaders. I'm happy to share with all of you that for the seventh consecutive year, we have been named as leaders in Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Network Services globally. The Gartner Magic Quadrant assesses providers' completeness of vision and their ability to execute, we are glad to be part of this prestigious list yet again. Partnership has been one of the key pillars of our growth, and we have been successfully partnering with some of the biggest OTT players globally, cloud players and other service providers. We have recently partnered with a major pan-African telecommunications service provider SEACOM to offer high-speed level pathways between Africa, Europe and Asia to meet the growing demand for connectivity linking these regions. This partnership with SEACOM will help both companies leverage each other's digital infrastructure and help provide customers with state-of-the-art technology services. This is the first step of many in expanding our partnership with SEACOM across areas such as the Internet, MPLS, cloud, media and cybersecurity. Coming to our financial performance. Data business is our growth driver and continues to grow at a healthy pace. Engagement with our customers is getting more meaningful. During FY '20, our enterprise business grew by 13% year-on-year with India business growing by 16% and international business growing by 11% year-on-year. We witnessed strong profitable growth in both traditional and growth services. In FY '20, traditional growth services grew by 4.6% year-on-year, and growth services grew by 14% year-on-year. We have tightened our deal selection criteria to achieve the right mix of growth and profitability. And as a result, we have achieved a double-digit EBITDA margin for growth services this quarter, which is an important milestone. While Pratibha will provide details about financial performance, I just want to highlight key numbers. Our consolidated revenue for the quarter came in at INR 4,398 crores, witnessing a growth of 3.6% year-on-year and 4.0% Q-on-Q. EBITDA for the quarter was at INR 869 crores, witnessing a growth of 26.8% year-on-year and 14.2% Q-on-Q, aided by profitable growth in data business and continued focus on cost optimization. We've been continuously focusing on our costs, and we are closely monitoring all our direct and indirect costs and looking at all business processes to achieve optimal cost infrastructure. Our efforts have started to show results. We have seen gradual improvements in margins. In FY '20, our data business recorded EBITDA margin of 22.1%, which is an expansion of 310 basis points over FY '19. And we will continue to drive these efforts within the company. This quarter, we took a provision of INR 342 crores towards additional license fees liability on account of cost reductions as per actual payment basis as against accrual basis claimed earlier. This led to a loss of INR 275 crores in Q4 and INR 86 crores in FY '20. On AGR matter, we have appeals pending in Supreme Court and Madras High Court, and our appeals are not included in the Supreme Court Ruling of October 24, 2019, on AGR. While I will present our detailed strategy in a separate session in the third week of June, I just wanted to touch upon briefly about our company's strategy. The current environment has accelerated the need for global businesses to go digital. Digital, and I think I mentioned this before, is a combination of data, applications and connectivity. And connectivity is vital for anything to be digital. And unfortunately, it has not been given its due importance. The opportunity for us starts with considering the economics of data and ultimately how close you are to the customer and who and what role you have in that ecosystem having the conversation with the customer. Global enterprise telecom spend is divided into 2 broad categories: one, global enterprise network spend, which is expected to be around USD 145 billion by 2023, and we are a direct participant and well positioned in this segment. Our solutions and platforms are relevant to current and future business trends, and we will be at the forefront to help global enterprises to transform their network towards more cloud, Internet and mobile-first challenges. Second, is the Internet ecosystem, which is expected to be at USD 254 billion by 2023. We are an indirect participant in this segment and we're gaining with the growth in the Internet traffic. We aim to participate more actively and gain revenue share in future. Our ambition is to achieve profitable growth and become a digital ecosystem enabler in the eyes of our customers and the industry. We believe that we have a robust product portfolio, but we need to make some strategic shifts in our execution to achieve this plan. Broadly, our strategy consists of the 3 elements, which I'll briefly talk about the who, what and the how. Who, greater focus on clarity on who we target and how we engage with our customers and simplify the experience for our customers. We are looking to actively participate and partner in our global -- in our customers' transformation journey. Through an excellent customer experience, consistent streamlined engagement model and flawless execution, we want to take a dominant share in customers' digital spend.In the what part, we will shift from an individual product focus to a more integrated customer solution focus by building on our strength of our existing product portfolio. So our role will be to shift from products to platforms and one that solves business problems and align us to their enterprise goals. All our products in the future will be platform-based and will have a focus on CapEx efficiency. We will evaluate all our products on 4 parameters, scalability, profitability, relevance to industry and the technology trend and differentiated product offerings and design -- and service design. The third is a how part. Our aim is to achieve the right operating model with an optimal cost structure and agility that will deliver the right experience for our customers. We are also culling out our service delivery and aggregating our capabilities as a service rep which will help us to stitch all of these products and platforms so that a customer can see a seamless execution from our side and a deeper engagement with our customers. We will embed sustainability, innovation and artificial intelligence at the core of our business, which is in line with our company objectives. This strategy will have an overlay and focus on financial fitness, which is all about getting our balance sheet healthy and achieving a double-digit profitable growth. We have been working on the right cost structure and looking at an optimal onshore offshore mix. And some of these measures are already in place for the last few months, and you would have noticed the results in our numbers. Our digital expertise enables us to be a partner of choice in our customers' digital transformation journey. This would mean a higher level of customer engagement and a bigger long-term business opportunity for us. We seek to clinch this opportunity and focus on solutions that are at the center of the customers' experience transformation, address business needs and eventually create more value for our customers and ourselves. We are witnessing good traction in the market. We recently won a multimillion dollar deal from a large health care equipment manufacturing company. Not only we are offering multiple products, we also built in our service rep capability on top of these offerings that seamlessly brings all of this together for our customers. This capability helps us to get a better value and then integrate all of our solutions within the enterprise ecosystem. Our customer focus has started to show results, and our NPS score for this year has come in at 70, a substantial 15-point increase compared to last year's score of 55. Overall participation has gone up by 6%. Our NPS is higher than the B-to-C NPS benchmarks of almost all companies across industry verticals and puts us in the top quartile of the industry. NPS is a strong indicator of customer advocacy and positive customer perception, and this year's score is an incredible achievement for us. Delivering superior customer experience is critical pillar of our new business strategy with a sharpened focus on customers and emphasis on solution-centric platforms, there is no doubt that we will become trusted partners for our customers. To conclude, we see this current situation as an opportunity for our business. And we are fully geared to leverage on this opportunity. As mentioned earlier, we will be presenting our mid- to long-term strategy for the business more in detail in the third week of June. Invites will be shortly sent, and I hope to meet you all there again. With that, I will request Pratibha to take you through the financial highlights.
Thank you, Lakshmi, for sharing your thoughts. A very good afternoon to all of you, and I hope all of you are safe and in good health. I would like to thank you once again for joining us for our Q4 and FY '20 earnings conference call. I'll take you through the commentary on our financial performance and touch upon the key highlights. We have registered another quarter of robust growth in these rather tough times. Data services continue to be the key driver of our business growth, as articulated by Lakshmi. Consolidated revenue for the quarter came in at INR 4,398 crores and grew by 3.6% year-on-year and 4% sequentially. This growth is due to robust performance in data business and slower-than-expected decline in voice. EBITDA for the quarter came in at INR 869 crores, witnessing a growth of 26.8% Y-on-Y and 14.2% Q-on-Q with margins coming in at 19.8%. Our margins have expanded by 180 basis points sequentially on the back of strong profitable growth in data portfolio combined with focus on cost efficiencies and onetime catch up billing in our real estate business of INR 18 crores. If we exclude IndAS benefit of INR 99 crores in EBITDA this quarter, Q4 EBITDA has grown by 12.3% year-on-year and margins have expanded by 130 basis points. For full year, we've reported a revenue of INR 17,068 crores, witnessing a growth of 3.3% year-on-year. EBITDA for the year was at INR 3,289 crores and EBITDA grew by 19.8% year-on-year with margins coming in at 19.3% and have expanded by 270 basis points year-on-year on the back of strong profitable growth across our data portfolio, with the exception of Transformation Services and Payment Solutions business. Even without IndAS benefit of INR 325 crores, EBITDA has grown by 8% with margin expansion of 90 basis points. Transformation Services has been adversely impacted -- had adversely impacted our margins by 80 basis points. Depreciation for the quarter was up by INR 126 crores, out of this INR 107 crores is onetime due to impairment of certain assets and alignment of end-of-life upgrades with the life of our cables. This onetime depreciation charge has led to lower EBIT by INR 18 crores and operating PBT by INR 25 crores. During the quarter ended September 2019, the company had received demands from DOT, aggregating to INR 6,633 crores towards license fee on its adjusted gross revenue for the financial years 2006/'07 till '17/'18. The demand included an amount of INR 5,434 crores, which were disallowed by DOT towards cost adjusted to gross revenues by the company that was claimed on accrual basis instead of actual payment, for which a revised statement on the basis of actual payment has been submitted to DOT. We have not received any further communication from them on this matter. However, during the quarter, we made a provision of INR 342 crores towards additional license fees liability on account of cost reductions as per actual payment. Our appeals relating to our ILD and NLD licenses are subjudice and are pending with honorable Supreme Court and Madras High Court. Our contingent liability computation has been trued up for license fee till March '20 and also for interest and penalty. We have been working to achieve the right blend of onshore and offshore mix of workforce. As a result, we took an additional exceptional provision of INR 38 crores this quarter on account of staff cost optimization. Y-on-Y, our offshore head count ratio has improved by 4%. Despite a strong operating performance this quarter and full year, we recorded a loss of INR 275 crores during Q4 due to exceptional provisions being taken during the quarter, as I mentioned earlier on. On a full year basis, we reported a loss of INR 86 crores as compared to a loss of INR 82 crores in FY '19. Moving to our segment performance. Data business now contributes 82% to revenue and 95% to EBITDA. Q4 revenue came in at INR 3,595 crores, growing 7.5% year-on-year and 5.1% sequentially. India Enterprise segment grew by 6.9%, and the International segment grew by 5.2% Q-on-Q. We have witnessed strong performance across all segments of data business, barring the payment solutions business that has got impacted by COVID. EBITDA for the quarter came in at INR 823 crores, growing by 39.8% year-on-year and 15.3% Q-on-Q on the back of strong EBITDA growth in growth services, lower losses in innovation services and the one-off rental income that I mentioned earlier. Consequently, EBITDA margin came in at 22.9% translating into margin expansion of 530 basis points year-on-year and 200 basis points sequentially. On a full year basis, data revenue grew by 8.2% and came in at INR 13,692 crores in the back of strong growth across our portfolio, except the Payment Solutions business, where we have closed 532 ATMs. Our enterprise business grew by 13%, with India business growing at 16% and international business growing at 11% year-on-year. We also saw some growth in Service Provider segment, which grew year-on-year by 2%. Full year EBITDA came in at INR 3,026 crores, witnessing a 25.6% Y-on-Y growth with margin of 22.1%. This is on the back of strong profitable growth in traditional services, which grew by 19.9% year-on-year and growth services turning EBITDA positive with cost savings of INR 173 crores year-on-year. Moving to the performance of our traditional portfolio. Q4 revenue came in at INR 2,196 crores, recording a growth of 5.3% year-on-year and 1.7% sequentially. Within this portfolio, we witnessed strong uptick in bandwidth usage due to lockdown. And as Lakshmi mentioned, our IP traffic has also grown considerably Y-o-Y. EBITDA came in at INR 812 crores, witnessing a growth of 24.5% Y-on-Y with margin coming in at 37%. On an annualized basis, revenue grew by 4.6% year-on-year and EBITDA grew by 19.9% year-on-year. EBITDA margin came in at 37.7%, expanding by 480 basis points over last year. This expansion is due to cost efficiencies and also aided by IndAS 116. If we exclude IndAS benefit, EBITDA margins will be at 35.6% with year-on-year expansion of 270 basis points. Moving to growth services. Growth services continue to scale on the back of profitable deal selection, thereby witnessing a revenue growth of 9.8% year-on-year and 9.1% sequentially. Q4 revenue came in at INR 856 crores. We have seen a surge in usage services traffic in the last few days of the quarter due to lockdown. Our UCC revenues have grown 20% Q-on-Q, SIP trunking grew by 7.8%, IZO has grown by 7%. EBITDA for the quarter came in at INR 99 crores as compared to INR 42 crores in Q4 last year, witnessing a 138% year-on-year growth and 94.3% Q-on-Q growth. EBITDA margin for the quarter for the first time was double digit coming in at 11.6%. With increase in scale, we are witnessing significant operating leverage and margins expanded by 510 basis points Q-on-Q. On a full year basis, we recorded 14.3% year-on-year revenue growth with revenue coming in at INR 3,180 crores on the back of strong growth in IZO, grew by 70% year-on-year. Cloud and security witnessing a 23.7% growth. Media grew by 11%. Full year EBITDA came in at INR 199 crores as compared to a loss of INR 52 crores in FY '19, which is a swing of INR 251 crores year-on-year. Our innovation portfolio continues to scale. We are witnessing good traction and move in NetFoundry and IoT. Full year revenue came in at INR 110 crores, witnessing 68% growth year-on-year. Due to lockdown, we are witnessing some delays in signing and delivery of new deals and move in IoT. However, as the situation improves, we expect this portfolio to scale at a faster pace. Moving to our Transformation Services business performance. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 361 crores, witnessing a growth of 14.3% year-on-year and 10.2% quarter-on-quarter. EBITDA in this portfolio had turned negative last quarter due to an onerous customer contract and simultaneous transition of 3 large deals. We have been able to shed the customer contract and consequently EBITDA loss this quarter has come down to INR 16 crores as compared to a loss of INR 46 crores in Q3. We have a strong pipeline in TCTSL, and we expect profitability to scale in the coming quarters. Now moving to the performance of our Payment Solutions business. This business was affected by lockdown as we witnessed a drop in average daily transactions to 84 in Q4 from 89 in Q3. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 82 crores and witnessed a decline of 2.9% year-on-year and 6.2% Q-on-Q. With lockdown easing in June, the transactions are expected to increase, and we are hopeful that this business will bounce back. EBITDA for the quarter was INR 22 crores and declined sequentially by 6.8%, which is in line with the fall in revenue that we've seen. Moving to the voice business. This portfolio continues to decline in line with the industry. In Q4, the decline was less than expected due to uptick in traffic during lockdown. Revenue for the quarter came in at INR 803 crores and declined Y-on-Y by 10.9% and sequentially by 0.7%. For the year, revenue stood at INR 3,376 crores, a degrowth of 12.8% year-on-year. EBITDA for the quarter came in at INR 46 crores and witnessed a decline of 52.7% year-on-year and 3.2% sequentially with margins coming at 5.7%. On an annual basis, EBITDA came in at INR 263 crores, witnessing a decline of 21.6% year-on-year. Moving to CapEx. Q4 CapEx stood at INR 342 crores as compared to INR 490 crores in Q3. CapEx for the full year was INR 1,596 crores, which is well within the guided range that we had given to you. In FY '21, we aim to keep our CapEx in the same range as last year. Net debt at the end of quarter was at USD 1,216 million, a decrease of $41 million as compared to last quarter. Net debt in INR terms looks higher due to USD-INR conversion impact. INR depreciated by 5.8% as on 31 March '20 as compared to 31 December 2019. Average cost of borrowing for the quarter was at 3.73%, which has marginally gone up due to impact of unamortized arrangement fee on a loan that was restructured during the quarter. Our net debt-to-EBITDA has come down year-on-year and is at 2.8x as on 31 March '20, as compared to 3.18% last year. Return on capital employed for the year is at 11.8% as compared to 8.1% for FY '19. In conclusion, we have registered another quarter of strong growth with all our financial and operating matrices tracking in the right direction. We have generated free cash flow, EBITDA-less CapEx of INR 1,693 crores versus last year of INR 881 crores, an increase of INR 812 crores. Even after exclusion of interest and tax, we have generated free cash flow of INR 995 crores versus last year of INR 211 crores, an increase of INR 784 crores. We continue to drive the business towards sustainable profitability and positive cash flows. This brings us to the end of management commentary, and I will now request Vipul to open the forum for Q&A. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Pratibha. Just to reiterate, anyone interested in asking questions may click on the raise hand option right next to the -- in the participant pane.
The first question is from the line of Ali-- Aliasgar Shakir.
I had just a few questions on the business side. So first is on the traditional business, I mean, excellent growth in terms of volume growth that we can see. And you did mention that work-from-home is one of the key phenomena that is driving this growth. But from a revenue growth or a profit growth point of view, it was pretty much flattish. So do you think any specific -- like you mentioned media as a category, were actually impacted, and maybe that is the reason that we didn't see the volume growth not translating into revenue, EBITDA growth. Or I just want to understand, from a -- I mean, outlook point of view, how does this volume growth should translate over the course of coming quarters?
Pratibha, do you want to take that question?
Yes, I'll take that. Ali, to your point, even if we see quarter-on-quarter, so that affects -- traditional portfolio has grown by 1%. So I wouldn't agree with you that we are not witnessing growth. Having said that, we do expect this growth trend to continue in the following quarters. At this point, we are not seeing any COVID impact coming. Having said that, of course, as things stabilize, we'll have better visibility. To your point in the media portfolio, that actually sits in growth services. And very rightly, that is a portfolio that has got impacted. However, we are hopeful that from Q2 onwards, we should start to see some traction in that portfolio.
And also if I may add, I think, the volumes growth that we had indicated was over a period of March, April, May. So I think we haven't seen the full impact in the Q4 as well.
Got it. So are you saying this 24% volume growth should translate into better revenue, profit growth in coming quarters?
This is somewhat seasonal. I mean, seasonal in the sense during the COVID there was a peak requirement and I iterated in the commentary that IP traffic increased and the number of bandwidth for some of the customers that we had to increase the capacity. We don't know whether it will be permanent or transitional. But yes, there will be some impact in the coming quarters.
And just to add to what Lakshmi said, we should see a upside in ILL, IPT and NPL.
Got it. So the traditional low single-digit growth that we typically see in the traditional segment, does that have an opportunity to increase because of this work-from-home phenomena?
So I think on the traditional, there's also a price infill largely that is the wholesale to service providers and to OTTs. So we can't translate the volume growth to -- directly corresponding to growth. So I don't want to directly correlate it to this...
Yes. And I would say, our margins have remained stable for the traditional portfolio.
All right. Second question is, I'd just like to combine the growth and innovation as a category, which earlier was that -- was how the reporting was. So just wanted to understand, one is the work-from-home phenomena that I think as a big driver of -- for the growth services. On the other hand, I mean, innovation as a segment, we are seeing very steady volume -- revenue growth, but it's yet not showing visibility in terms of profitability. So could you just throw some color in terms of -- I mean what typically is the revenue mix that you think you will achieve in innovation as a segment that will show a stable state profitability and what time frame? And similarly on the growth segment, if you can share some pipeline -- the pipeline, revenue growth and what kind of steady-state margin targets that we have there?
So Pratibha, let me try to answer this first, and then you might want to add on. I mean I -- the way I look at it is broadly a data business. I really don't want to segment traditional growth and innovation. But our long-term goal is to grow the data by double digits. Because within the growth and innovation, there are multitudes of products and each one of them having their own dynamic and profile. So if you look at the innovation, since you raised that question on innovation, innovation, today, we have the MOVE IoT. We had the NetFoundry and India IoT as well. And the 3 are in very different spheres altogether. So in the NetFoundry, all software, zero trust, apwan, zero touch and zero trust and driving agility for our customers and military-grade security. And we are tremendously hopeful that, that can grow. But that is from a small volumes today, and we need to give it more space so that it can improve itself in larger enterprise segments. And we are very hopeful that it will see the volume growth.Similarly, when you look at the MOVE IoT, the large segments we are addressing is the auto OEM as a primarily one of the largest segments, and we have had one big success with [ J&R ]. But again, as we execute, and again, it's a combination of our customers' dynamic as well in terms of their sales and the launch of products and so on. But there is one segment, again, that will scale and we are looking to shift as and when we win other larger deals in this segment. Outside of that, we have other segments that we have at play. The airlines, as you know, we've announced in the past, we work with many major airlines helping their crews with the MOVE -- the SIM Connect product that we have. And that, again, in another segment, which will have its own course. But currently, with the airlines having their own difficulties, we will have to see how that plays out.So as that portfolio of these products, and rightly, as they have been called innovation, I would like to see that they're being given more room and space to grow. And at the moment, it's smaller in revenue size, it's not going to shift the needle very much. And -- but in due course, we would expect that to contribute a lot more. The rest of the data and the growth services, we definitely will see bigger uptake. And hopefully, in June, when we talk about a bit more in detail about our strategy, we can paint a bit more color to that.
Okay. I think this was a very useful detail. Just last question is on TTSL. Do we have any update? Are we still exploring to acquire the SME business? Or we have moved on a bit?
I don't want to comment anything on that at this stage. Nothing substantially to report. But having said that, we partner with them on the enterprise segment. Their voice communication services are resold. The partners in terms of sharing network and some of the fiber rollout. So that's basically what it is.
Okay. So at this point, we are not excluding anything, is that the right way to look at it? Forgive me for persisting on that.
No, that -- there's no -- yes. There's nothing that I would want -- I don't have any remit and I don't want to comment.
The next question comes from Riddhesh Gandhi.
Congratulations on your numbers. Just had a question on your internal return expectations around incremental CapEx, which you do, either in terms of the payback or ROCE?
Pratibha, do you want to take the question, please? Pratibha?
Yes, Lakshmi, sorry. I was on mute. For large investments in cables, et cetera, it's a longer duration. And for other investments, we typically look at a payback of anywhere between 36 to 60 months. I think we've delivered a very strong ROCE. And going forward, you're only going to see an improvement as the incremental EBITDA that we generate is going to convert into EBIT. I don't want to call out any number, but the very fact that you are seeing a trend where our ROCE is growing year-on-year is evidence itself of the fact that as an organization, we are very focused and committed to improve ROCE going forward.
Look, could you just expand on that slightly? And could you sort of actually split up how much of it is in terms of kind of cables and the wires? And when you say, like, longer gestation, how long is it? And with regards to the other stuff implying 3 to 5 years, which is an extremely broad range. So I [indiscernible] because almost actually 50% of our EBITDA is being reinvested in it -- actually into CapEx. So it'd be extremely helpful to get some sense on how you think about the returns on this incremental investment we are making.
So when you actually look at the way our CapEx is split today, there is a portion only that's really going for capacity building. And a large part of it, almost $100 million to $120 million, we do spend on sustenance or customer success base. Now if it is a customer success-based CapEx, we then look at a payback during the course of that contract, right? And hence, it will be very difficult for us to break it. But if you are asking -- if you're investing in a cable, which has a life of 20 years, then obviously, we can't expect an imminent payback. And it will be very difficult for me to break it in the way that you want to look at it, Riddhesh.
So then if you could just expand on how...
But typically a cable would take 6 to 8 years to recoup our investment.
No. So what I'm saying is, as an investor, we are seeing almost 50% of our EBITDA being reinvested in CapEx. So I mean -- maybe I'm not asking the question in the right way. But if you could throw some explanation to us as to how we should be looking at it to make sure that it's extremely accretive to our ROCEs and our earnings and everything in between.
Yes. And that's a point that I made earlier that we are not going to be increasing our CapEx envelop going forward. So we will remain range-bound at the current level. And hence, whatever is the incremental EBITDA that we are going to generate now is going to convert into free cash flow. And that's the way to look at it.
The next question is from the line of Viraj Mahadevia.
Fantastic results. Just a question regarding the setup of the P&L and the business. So Pratibha, revenues have grown at 3.7% FY '20 over FY '19, however, EBITDA has grown close to 20%. And when I saw that, that's because actually the network costs, which are a bulk of your -- or 40% of your cost line items between revenue flowing down to EBITDA actually dropped by 5%. So that's what's giving you the kick at the EBITDA level. Can you just explain to us conceptually for those that don't understand exactly how this -- the fiber optic undersea business works and traffic and operating leverage as to why you get so much of a kick at the EBITDA level when revenue is growing at low single digit?
So there are a couple of reasons. We have been talking about a cost optimization program that we are running. Also, last year, we had specifically called out that we had invested in WiMAX with some of the stress that we saw in the service provider segment. So we have made some investments there. This year, of course, those are not there. But additionally, I wouldn't say it's just a network cost. But across the cost lines, we've made significant efforts to bring our cost down. If you look at our employee costs, that is substantially down by over INR 50 crores year-on-year. Overall, our cost pool actually is down by over INR 200 crores.
Right. How do you actually reduce your network cost? Is it because you stopped certain unprofitable lines in the globe that you have? Or how do you reduce something that is fairly fixed cost in nature? That's what I'm trying to understand.
So a couple of ways. I mean, firstly, of course, as contracts come up -- as our access contracts come up for renewals and as some of those destinations gain scale, we are able to negotiate better. We're also relooking at utilization and redesigning our network to be able to optimize the cost. So there's a lot of work that goes across network redesign, negotiations. And of course, there are many times that we start paying for an access cost earlier, but a customer may delay. We are now getting smarter in ensuring that we only start paying for these costs closer to when the customer signs off. So different programs being led to bring these costs down.
Understood. And the second question is again around D&A in terms of how D&A works in your business. Like you said, a lot of these networks have a useful life of, I don't know, about 20, 30 years with incremental sustenance CapEx over the period. How do you think about D&A of these key assets that you own? Do you -- is it fast line depreciation? Is it straight line? Is it accelerated depreciation? What I'm trying to get at is, is there a point some down the road 3, 4, 5 years from now, where actually your D&A flattens or starts to reduce in absolute amounts?
If you actually look at our depreciation line, that's pretty much been flat barring this quarter where we took a hit of incremental depreciation because of some of the electronics that were on our cables, which we've now aligned to the life of the cable. Otherwise, we've had a pretty flat depreciation. Typically, our cable life is 20 years for the undersea fiber. And for the terrestrial, it's 15 years.
And do you depreciate equally over that 20-year period? Or are you accelerating the depreciation?
We depreciate it equally. On the network costs, this also includes an element of voice. And because voice declines, the interconnect job that we pay also comes up.
The next question comes from Sanjesh Jain of ICICI Securities.
Just on the revenue mix, what is the fixed capacity contract we sell and how much it is paid by use? And can there be a significant uptick from increase in pay as you go, given the COVID situation and incrementally as people move to home, probably the usage itself may go higher. So first is, is there any structural win for us in terms of change in the revenue mix? You did say that we have done some 650 order execution in the March, but just kind of clear on the revenue mix there?
I can compute this for you quickly, because -- but if you actually see our Q4 growth services revenue, which has grown by 7.6%, this growth has largely come from usage-based revenue. So as I mentioned, SIP trunking really was a growth driver for us. And this is both for the Microsoft and Cisco product as well as for our own enterprise customers. What is the explicit data point that you're looking at? I'm a little lost.
Revenue mix between where there is a capacity bought out? And what is the additional revenue we are getting from pay as you go, if we have any of those kind of a contract? So we have a fixed capacity contract or we also have a buffer wherein customer pay if they use over and above what they have bought?
No. For example, if I would look at SIP trunking, there, it is usage-based. But our entire GNS product, which is a traditional point-to-point connectivity, that is based on capacity and it's fixed. So the entire UCC portfolio is usage-based. Mobility, for example, our traditional mobility, the signaling business, would be is usage-based. But cloud and security would again be fixed.
Okay. So there is a direct benefit from rise in Internet traffic for us, right, apart from customer wanting for higher capacity, is that the right way to see?
Yes. But see, when the customer is wanting for higher capacity, say, in our network products, right, traditional network, that will be still fixed. It's a fixed MRC that we -- monthly recurring revenue that we get. But as I mentioned, something like a SIP or our Cisco product, that would be usage-based, depending on how much utilization is happening in terms of minute usage.
So if I may add, I -- in my commentary, I just said the overall network and the enterprise side, I mentioned that, that is a market of $145 billion globally, right? If you look at that market, it's the enterprise connectivity. So the enterprise is connecting their branch offices to their enterprise hub of a data center or them connecting to the hub, to the cloud or from the branches to cloud directly, all of them is part of their enterprise connectivity space. Also the large cloud players, cloud -- the connectivity between the data centers, all of that comprises of the $145 billion market. Okay?I also mentioned that there is another segment of the market, which is expected to be about $254 billion by 2023, that is largely the Internet. So if I were to simplify that ecosystem, that is an employee within the enterprise connecting to the enterprise through the Internet, right? Or for an enterprise, as they sell more through e-commerce, for example, and the consumers are connecting to the enterprise for e-commerce, that is also through an Internet. And third is that consumers are consuming their general infotainment, YouTube and other things, all of those is what is in the $254 billion market. That's the Internet ecosystem. Today, and as I mentioned, we participate in an indirect way in that segment. When I say indirectly, as the Internet traffic goes up and as the cloud consumption goes up, then the large cloud providers will have need for excess bandwidth to connect their data centers on the cloud traffic, and we participate in that. And we don't. So to your example of when the users are working from home, is there a usage-based service and is that -- and therefore do we do anything more than our core network? Today, we don't, but -- and I think, again, I alluded in my commentary that we have enabled a lot of our customers, tens of thousands of users with about 150 customers to actually enable them to work from home in a robust, secure manner. So we internally call that as Work from Home 1.0 and the WFH 2.0 will come where the users -- even some other banks, when I speak to relationship manager, for example, that person is not able to access the system from home. He has to go to the branch to do that. So while people have done the 1.0 now, the 2.0 will look very different. And that is when I said -- we are saying as to how we can participate in that world directly. So I'm sort of giving you a long-winded answer. But when we talk in third week of June, when we'll present our strategy, we can elaborate on this a little bit more.
Just one question probably related to that. See, when we were working from office, we were using the broadband of enterprise, right? Now we are working from home. A lot of it goes to mobile Internet, right? So we have seen surge in for the mobile Internet also. I thought intuitively, our capacity utilization to that extent will get negatively impacted.
No, that's why I think the enterprises, when they have their network, that's like that fixed cost. They have bought network. If they bought a 200 Mbps or 1 gig to connect their data center or branch to their network, today, for them, that is not usage-based. The industry is on a -- it's like a fixed cost. So while that has not come down, like you and I are accessing the broadband, we are increasing the broadband usage. And there, we don't participate directly. Now where we participate, as I said, is by enabling you to -- if your company has signed up with us, for example, you would have given them a VPN solution, a more secure multifactor authentication. So our solution is more enterprise-grade so that we can ensure proper security to the enterprise, so which is what I'm calling companies will shift to the work from home 2.0, then they will want to look at more. But purely as a broadband connectivity, Tata Comm is not in that space. There are other things that we can participate in, but not directly. I hope this answers your question.
And if I can just add to what Lakshmi said. So when we sell SIP trunking, we would sell it to Microsoft, Cisco and others. And these providers offer it as a bundle with their conferencing platforms, Teams, Cisco WebEx, et cetera. And the demand for those have gone up, which indirectly does benefit us. So for example, Zoom is one of our top 5 SIP trunking customers.
Okay. Got it. Just one question related to growth services. This year, growth services, at least revenue growth, if not for this sudden spurt in the Q4, it looks like it has decelerated very meaningfully. We were growing at upwards of 25% CAGR in last 3 years, and we are now coming to early teens. How should we see growth services from here, given that we shared a very robust order book last year? Now there's a missing between how the order book getting executed and revenue getting recognized, but we thought the growth momentum in the growth services was likely to sustain. So just wanted to understand how to see this.
I think the growth momentum is still strong. We are now talking about revenue of INR 3,000 crores. And revenue is growing at 14%, 15% on INR 3,000 crores, I think, is robust growth. When you're talking about the earlier CAGR number, that was at a much lower base. And we are confident that this growth rate is going to be sustained. However, this could be an exceptional year, given that we don't know the full impact on our portfolio for, say, the media or the hosting and security services where there could be -- for media, of course, we don't know when the events are going to come back. And for hosting and security, the implementations are getting delayed. And Lakshmi, do you want to add to something to that?
No, I think you answered. I would like to look at all data services as a bundling, somewhat the growth and traditional as -- when I looked at it -- when I came in -- I still see there is a lot more juice in traditional. And growth is a mixed bag of many things. And to put it all together and give a commentary on it will not be the right thing to do. So my -- our goal is going forward, I would like to see all of the data services to be growing at double digits. That is what we would be looking at.
I think that's a much better one to look at in that way. If you're saying entire data is growing double digit, I think that means we are going to accelerate meaningfully. Just one clarification, Pratibha, on transformation services. Last quarter in the earning call, you did mention that our margins will come back significantly from the Q1 '21. So that statement still stands through, right?
Yes, we should have positive margins. As I mentioned, we did transition 3 large customers this quarter. And you should now start to see revenue. Having said that, a part of the revenue is also transaction-based, and COVID has impacted that business. Hopefully, things should stabilize, and we are definitely optimistic that margins will bounce back.
So Sanjesh, my commentary on the data, when you're saying we're looking at double digits, so that's our sort of long-term direction.
We have next question from the line of Mr. Bharat Sheth.
Congratulation on a good set of numbers, Amur and Pratibha. [indiscernible]
Sorry, I'm not able to hear you clearly.
Yes. Lakshmi said that we want to look at, I mean, the data as a total rather than splitting of it, traditional, growth and all. So we have additional margin of around 22% and still we have, I mean, operating leverage in that -- if this business grows -- the data business, double digit, what kind of a, I mean, margin expansion that we have in that space?
So I would say our traditional portfolio and while Lakshmi did mention that we will look data as a whole, but I'd still like to call it out, because traditional portfolio, we should maintain margins at the current level, which is about 37%. Growth services, again, we would start to see margin ramp-up happening. That's already started to happen. However, having said that, there's a caveat on the current year, given the impact of COVID on some of our portfolio or products in that portfolio. And innovation is still a portfolio that we are continuing to invest in. At least in the next 2 years, we are not going to see positive margins in that portfolio. So it's more like FY '23 when we would see positive margins in that portfolio. But having said that, as we are getting scale, overall, you would see an improvement of margins, as you've seen in the current year, given that we are highly focused on cost. We are continuing to drive many programs around productivity and efficiency. So that impact should flow into EBITDA.
So have an innovation losses or EBITDA losses from now INR 148 crores to INR 133 crores. So we -- do we see, I mean, a directionally, EBITDA momentum will pick it up, I mean? And [indiscernible] full year EBITDA losses by INR 65 crores in FY '21, some kind of a ballpark.
Unfortunately, we don't give guidance. So I wouldn't want to give a number. But as I said, directionally, you will see an improvement in our margins.
Okay. And same will apply, I mean, to transformation service too, where we were once upon a time looking into high double-digit EBITDA margin, which is -- currently, it's negative one -- trending in negative. So how would we see, I mean, this transformation service? Is there a full year perspective?
Yes. So I think what we've seen this year is an excellent top line growth in transformation services. Unfortunately, that's not converted into EBITDA growth because of transition costs. They have good pipeline. And next year, we should see the margins come back to single digits. And the following year, they should bounce back to double digit.
Last question, Pratibha, I mean, this one-off with nonrecurring item [indiscernible] license fee, which has come up. How do we see this one-off? Will -- I mean over a period or still how do we really evaluate the whole company on the [indiscernible] perspective?
Interesting question. And the fact is because this is a one-off, we've not been able to predict it. And this year, our industry has been impacted by the AGR issue. And we did think it would be -- although it is conservative, but we did think we should provide for the INR 342 crores. And primarily because the -- while the license fee conditions did mention paid, however, we had a TDSAT judgment in our favor. But given that the DoT demand came, we just were a little conservative in our accounting and took this provision.
We are almost out of time. We'll take the last question. The last question is from Vivekanand.
I have 2 questions. One pertains to the domestic enterprise market. Can you talk a bit about the market -- your revenue market share among domestic customers? And it would be helpful if you can have a discussion on the segments -- the segmentation of the market and the capabilities versus other players in the market? That's question one. Question two is, what is the target net debt-to-EBITDA or leverage that you want to maintain in the long run? And that leads me to a question on the sustainable dividend or return of cash to shareholders in the long run.
Let me take the first question, Vivek, on the domestic enterprise market. I think we have a dominant market share as far as the domestic enterprise market is concerned. It will be around 30% plus. And our key differentiation is our networks are engineered to serve the enterprises. And in terms of delivering to the enterprise customers, I talked briefly about the shifts that we are making. We have multiple products, but we are looking more from a -- how do I combine these products to give an overall platform and a solution to the customers. And we have been on that journey. And that will be another major differentiator.Third is the enterprise segment requires a different level of management and expectations as well. And our teams are well geared to service this segment extremely well. And that is reflected in our NPS score, which is really industry-leading NPS segment. So -- and I think I mentioned very briefly that customer experience is going to be at the heart of our strategy, new strategy as well. I briefly talked about a shift from product to platforms and more solution orientation as opposed to the product out with our customers. We think all of these would be a major enabler for us to participate in that transformation journey as far as our portfolio of services and platforms are concerned.To look at beyond that, then we'd have to look at platform-by-platform, how we are enabling what the differentiators are, and that would get more complex in this call.
Okay. Just one small follow-up. Within the domestic revenue pool that you may have, how do you -- internally, how do you see the domestic market in terms of segmenting the offering? You mentioned that you adopt a more platform and solution-oriented approach. So it would help to understand the segmentation of customers and how your sales strategy is for these various sets of consumers.
Maybe can we reserve this question to the strategy session we will have in June? I can answer, but I'm just worried it might be a long-winded answer for this question.
No. No worries. No worries. Lakshmi, we can take it there.
Yes. Vivek, I'll take your question on net debt-to-EBITDA. You would have been seeing that this has been trending in the right direction. FY '19, we were about 3.1. We've now come down to 2.8. Ideally, we would like to settle at 2.5 levels, and that is where we are heading in that direction.
Okay. And you would look to maintain 2.5x as the long-term leverage?
We'd be comfortable at that, given that we would want to invest back into our business and look at other growth opportunities. So at this point, we would be comfortable at 2.5x levels.
Thank you. This brings us to the end of this particular call. I would now like to hand over the call to Lakshmi for his closing comments. Over to you.
Thank you, Vipul. Thank you, Pratibha. Thank you all for listening to us patiently and the questions. I would just round it off by saying that we've had a fairly robust performance this quarter all around. Our domestic business, our international business, our data, all of that have grown very significantly. We have seen fairly significant margin expansion as well. And going forward, we think post-COVID, there will be new sets of opportunities that we are working towards capturing those opportunities. So that would be my closing remarks and look forward to seeing you all in the third week of June.
Thank you, Lakshmi. Thank you, everyone. You may now disconnect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.