WNS Call Insights: Contract Wins and Market Competition

WNS holdings ADR (NYSE:WNS) recently reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Contract Wins

Paul Thomas – Goldman Sachs: I guess first up you mentioned several new project starts in the quarter. Was any of that related to the two large contracts we have been talking about that have been in discussions for a while now?

David Mackey – SVP, Finance and Head of IR: I will take that Paul. The two – we now have four large contract wins to-date. Of the four that we’ve won, the two that we’ve been speaking out most recently are not included in the that number. Both of those deals still remain in play. We believe we are still very well positioned for both of those projects, but the client has yet to make decisions in terms of finalization and contract discussion.

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Paul Thomas – Goldman Sachs: Then I guess with respect to margins, speaking about those contracts, if you’re expecting margins to be under pressure for the next couple of quarters here from the current ramps, I guess we will continue to see that if those bigger, larger wins come through later on?

David Mackey – SVP, Finance and Head of IR: I think, Paul, the impact on margin is going to be more about the relative amount of transition cost to the total revenue within the quarter. So, depending on what’s ramping up or what’s ramping down in any given quarter, that transition revenue can present the opportunity to either expand or contract margin. This quarter as both Keshav and Deepak mentioned, we had an additional $2 million of transition revenues related to the projects that we have underway. If we do kick off several new projects over the next couple of quarters, we would expect that to continue to pressure margins a little bit; but again, as that happens, we would expect the transitions from the project we’ve just discussed in Q3 to begin rolling off.