Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question -and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two.

Participants are requested to use a handset while asking a question and to restrict themselves to two questions at a time. We will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Krushi Parekh from BugleRock.

Congratulations on good numbers, and it's good to see such a large panel on the call as well. So my first question is related to that. Over the last 1 year, we have actually seen some movement at the management level. So first, what is driving some of these exits and replacements? Secondly, as your operations are now spread across multiple geographies following the acquisitions, how are you ensuring operational continuity and cultural alignment across the organization? What measures have you put in place to integrate the acquired bu sinesses while maintaining a consistent way of working and preserving the MPS culture?

As an organisation, while we discussed Vision 2027 and FY’28, we are building for 2032. That's the overarching long-term planning we are doing. And as we are building towards that, the talent machine is growing both internally as well as externally. Now, as the talent machine expands in a quick span of time, sometimes you make mistakes, sometimes things go well. Overall, both the management team and the Board are pleased that, more often than not, we get those decisions right. If you benchmark us against the market in general, MPS is performing better than the market when it comes to external talent acquisition in terms of success rates. In terms of internal talent, we saw far more promotions this financial year than in the prev ious couple of years. So, the internal talent machine is also producing good managers from within the system. In addition to that, your question was about how we maintain culture. Going bottom-up, we are grounded in our core values, which we call the EEE- excellence, efficiency, and empathy. Those values have stood the test of time and are translated into every asset and every business that we acquire. These values are then executed through one singular cultural principle, which is an ownership mindset. So, between that cultural principle and the EEE values, we integrate acquisitions across the globe, not just in India.

Okay. Great. On the second side, we have seen a reduction in our employee base. I believe some of it may be because of our acquisitions having some redundancy in terms of employees. We were also looking to outsource or use gig workers as part of our proces s. And I'm sure there is also productivity involved over the last 1-odd year. So, from that, when we specifically look at the productivity part of this reduction, how are we looking and ensuring that we are not diluting the quality of the offerings that we have with our customers? You have highlighted how you are using AI, and I think even Sukhwant has touched upon it as well a little bit in your opening remarks. But if you can just ensure how we are looking to ensure that the quality remains at what we are out to deliver?

I'll ask Soma to specifically answer this from a Corporate Learning perspective: what has been the impact because the whole gig worker approach, having a network, etc., are more consistent with the corporate learning business. Once Soma is done, I'll come back and talk about this from a standalone MPS perspective that doesn't include the Corporate Learning business.

The Corporate Learning headcount is down about 33% year -on-year, and it breaks into 3 parts. The largest is structural redundancy. After last year's restructuring, we consolidated duplicated roles, and we delayered the delivery model, which was more like a one-time reset rather than a recurring part. The second is the move from fixed to variable capacity. We are shifting a share of delivery to a gig and associate model, so that we flex cost with project demand instead of carrying it throughout the year. The third and smallest today, but growing, is productivity because as AI-enabled authoring and content and quality workflows are coming into the picture, that lets smaller core teams deliver the same or more. And then quality, which is the right thing to probe, and thank you for touching upon that. If I talk about Corporate Learning, we did not touch the senior instructional design or the client- facing bench, to be honest. The reductions were concentrated in redundant and nonbillable layers, and our delivery quality and client retention have held through this transition very well. We monitor quality at the engagement level, and the margin has expanded without any corresponding rise in rework or client escalations, which is proof that we have cut structure, not capability. I would also like to add that the improvement that we have seen has come from the mix and the operating leverage, where in Q1, we've been able to show both of them working. Our revenue has grown in respect of Corporate Learning at 6.9% to INR 27.6 crores, but EBITDA grew 60.7%, and the margin moved from 16.9% to 25.3% because we rebuilt the cost base rather than chasing volumes. That would be my answer. Rahul, please add.

The reason I pointed to Soma first is that the question was more about headcount. But I also want to double -click on expense because that's where the rest of the story played out in the business. So if you see on the Research side, headcount grew from 2,262 to 2,452 over last year. On the Education side, headcount went down from 799 to 765. So the headcount was fairly stable. The reason why the increase was nominal is that all the increases that we saw, whether it was from the increments or the addition of Unbound, were nullified by AJE being entirely offshored. All the U.S. roles were brought to India by the end of Q4 of the last financial year.

In Q1, we had very little U.S. headcount. And our Net Promoter Scores during this period went up, not down. I've never seen a transition like this where quality improves. But while this may sound counterintuitive, we now have more control of the operation s, and therefore, the quality has gone up. Overall, we've been able to manage this balance where, as certain costs have gone up in some parts of the business, we've also been able to bring them down in other parts of the business.

The next question is from the line of Kashish Mehta from Dolat Capital.

Congratulations on a very good quarter. I just wanted to have some color on the number of clients built during the quarter. So Quarter-on-Quarter, it has gone down from 906 to 841. So is there some client rationalisation or account pruning that is going on?

The only space where there's been pruning in the business is AJE, which Christine already described. That's the only pruning that's taken place in the business.

The next question is from the line of Ravi Kumar Naredi from Naredi Investment.

Rahul, you've done a fantastic job over the past year and have transformed the Company. Earlier, you had guided for an EBITDA of INR 300 crores for FY’27, while the topline target was INR 1,500 crores. Have you now shifted your primary focus from topline growth to achieving the EBITDA target?

The INR 1,500 crores is for FY’28 next year, and that probably will translate to more like INR 450 crores EBITDA. FY’27 guidance is that we will comfortably cross INR 300 crores this financial year. So, to summarize: for FY’28, the targets are approximatel y INR 1,500 crores in revenue and around INR 450 crores in EBITDA.

Please keep a balance between cash and whatever acquisition we are going to do because raising equity is very costly to shareholders, including you. I hope you will abide by this system and not raise any equity.

From my perspective, as I shared with you previously, the first strike is cash accruals. Prarthana pointed out that's about INR 138 crores. The business is throwing up INR 15 crores to INR 18 crores of cash every month. So that's the first area of attack. Second area of attack is, again, let's assume PAT of INR 200 crores, similar cash flow, is normally fairly similar to PAT. So corresponding to that, debt of INR 200 crores is comfortable. So doing an acquisition in the INR 300 crores to INR 500 crores range seems fairly doable between internal cash accruals as well as debt. I don't see an equity play here unless-again, never say never, right? But most likely, this is a cash-plus-debt financing story.

So, as I've shared previously, there's something always in the works. We have an active pipeline. We're trying our best not to look at assets with less than $ 15 million in revenue . We modified that for Unbound simply because of how good the asset was in terms of its strategic synergies. But really, we don't want to be looking at businesses that are below $ 15 million in revenue. In terms of the types of acquisitions that we're looking at, Education is the area that has been growing for us. We want to acquire more businesses in Education. In terms of domain, Science is the core of MPS. As I shared previously, 25% of our revenue is from outcome-based partnerships, and 45% of our revenue is coming from recurring themes. So overall, we want to keep that going, and that is something we will look for in an asset as well. And third, we want to look at subject matter where AI is a tailwind, not a subtractor. And what we've learned is that when the subject matter is high stakes, think of where the cost of getting it wrong is so high that you will never go to 100% AI. For exam ple, in the nursing world or the medical world, if AI hallucinates, the cost is a patient dying. In cybersecurity, if AI hallucinates, there's a cost of an enterprise dying. So those are the kind of assets that we're looking at where the content itself is such high -stakes content that AI, instead of being a subtractor, becomes a huge multiplier and a tailwind, and that's what we're looking at. So between these broad themes, there's an active pipeline. Now, the invisible theme is that we also need a motivated seller, and that will allow us to acquire the asset competitively, and that then determines the close.

The next question is from the line of Mahesh BP, an Individual Investor.

It's been 5 months since you took over Unbound Medicine. What new things and challenges have you learned about the sector and the Company?

The biggest learnings from diligence are the things we have shared with you previously. If your question was about what's new , the new learning was the synergy between Liberate and Unbound, and Soma, I'd like to bring you in here for a minute. Soma will talk about what those experiences were in the roadshows, as she recently did a roadshow in the U.S. where she and the Unbound sales team met with the Unbound customers to talk a little bit about Liberate. Yes, I'm inclined that there could be some synergy, and that's why we went on this roadshow. But we saw some massive opportunity between Liberate and Unbound where there is a need for experiential learning by doing. And that's an area where, in the digital world, Liberate is strong. So that's one new area that we tapped into this past quarter.

The second thing we learned was how a strong culture can help you punch above your weight. For example, if you look at the ownership culture at Unbound, it's a 35 -person team delivering $ 9 million of revenue and actively growing. And that softer piece is something that has been heartening to learn from. The third thing, and even though this is competitive information, I'd like to share it because it's available in the public domain. When your solution or your offering has significant value, you hold pricing power. And Unbound possesses exactly that. While Unbound is the most competitive in the supply chain, they compete with much larger companies; every renewal with a customer, whether it's a 10 -year-old customer or a 3-year-old customer, there is a price increase. Every year within a term of a contra ct, there is a price increase. And as MPS, we've learned that within our portfolio of solutions, there are tremendous areas where there's disproportionate value being created by MPS, and there's potential opportunity to increase prices. So that's been the third surprise learning. But again, I'll go back to Soma to talk about the synergies between Liberate and Unbound.

One of the things we realized, as Rahul touched upon that a lot of the nursing and the medical, paramedical, and the pharmacy-related world that Unbound caters to is a huge advanced market with some of the biggest names in the industry. And our capability when I say “our”, I mean the Liberate or the Corporate Learning side of the business- our experience in having worked with the medical and similar world; the synergies we saw were immense. One of the discoveries we had was that everything is more physical and tactical even now; while there is a beautiful platform with a lot of content that Unbound already has and shares, there is little around learning by doing, which is so critical in the m edical and especially the nursing world, particularly for continuity and so on. So, this is where we see ourselves coming in. It is a huge cross-selling opportunity, with a lot of AI-enabled immersive and enterprise platform solutions segment that we can partner with Unbound, building on what is existing, increasing the value and the margins for the customers. And the other very good part is that we're increasingly seeing opportunities where we've been able to speak with, or very kindly been given an audience by, the most senior leaders, including the chairs of different institutes or universities that we visited. And there was an extremely open thought process about how instructional value, clubbed with tech and AI enablement, can create continuous education, with the digital world opening for that side, which is still largely untapped. The synergies and possibilities are more like working into the renewal and recurring model that Unbound has; it is more of a top-up that we can do on top of that.

If I can ask a follow-up question on Unbound Medicine, Rahul. What's the monthly run rate and the margins? And where do you see those 2 metrics in a year or 2 from now?

I'll get Prarthana to talk about where we are today, and then I can talk a little bit about where we are headed.

The monthly run rate is around $ 800,000 per month, and the margins currently are in the range of 18% and 20%, and then we increase from here.

At MPS, we've, over the last few years, embraced the Rule of 40, where the arithmetic sum of your EBITDA margin and your growth rate should be over 40%. In fact, in Q1, we are now a Rule of 50 company. The same principles will apply to Unbound, where the expectation is, first, Unbound climbs to Rule of 40, which is hopefully an EBITDA margin in the mid -20s to late 20s, and the balance of it flows through revenue growth. And ultimately, as the business se ttles into MPS, it crosses the Rule of 50 as well.

The next question is from the line of Nachiket Kale from Emkay.

Congrats on a great set of business. One small question on the segmental breakup. I noticed that the Corporate Learning segment revenue has gone up around 7% Y-o-Y. PBT is almost 2x. So, is that the trajectory which Unbound is on, and is there any forex component to it, or could you give further insights on this?

Soma, talk about the operating leverage in the Corporate Learning business, and don't worry about repeating yourself.

In a steady state, the business should operate at a 30% EBITDA margin, and organic growth should be closer to 12%. As I mentioned earlier, our improvement from here would come from the mix and the operating leverage. And we've been able to show that already taking shape in Q1 with the results, where our revenue has grown about 6.9% to INR 27.6 crores. Still, our EBITDA has grown 60.7% with our margins moving from 16.9% to 25.3%, now all of this was because, as I mentioned, we rebuilt the cost base rather than chasing this volume. Two engines take it further from here. The first is the shift towards AI -enabled, immersive and performance -focused solutions. And this should raise the value of each engagement and carry way better margins. The second is, of course, the depth we see inside the accounts we already have through cross-selling, managed learning services, AI platform enablement and enterprise-wide rollouts; the capability increases from here.

With multiple enterprise engagements approaching the $1 million mark and a healthy pipeline of new logos, we are confident that Corporate Learning will continue converting growth into profitability, while it will still be building a stronger base for recurring and sticky revenue.

Thanks, Soma. On that forex question, what I can say is that North America is not as big for corporate as it is for research and education. There is less of a dollar improvement in the Corporate Learning business compared to the rest of the business.

The next question is from the line of Vikas Mhatre from Moonshot Ventures.

If you just strip off the Unbound revenue, we have found that the growth is in the early teens. And we also agree that AI will enable more reliable solutions. So why can't we think about a much higher organic growth than we have reported now?

Thank you for that observation and thank you for pushing us. We're not settling for achieved organic growth. Of course, the aspirations are much higher. The quarter that you see is in the rear-view mirror, not ahead of us. We expect that in all the 3 marke ts, MPS outperforms those markets on organic growth. Now the markets themselves, research growth at 8%, 9%, we tend to grow at 15%, so we tend to outperform. Education is more like a 15% growth market. We've been growing much higher than that. On the corporate side, the market is growing at 12%, 13%, and we've grown 6%, 7%. So that's the area where a lot of the catch-up has to happen. Given the type of business and platform that MPS is, we should be growing at a premium to the market rates and industry rates, and that is the goal here. We're not settling for where we are today.

Because if we look at the management and your commentary from all perspectives, you tick all the boxes. The only thing that is missing is the organic growth. If you can push it to maybe higher teens and then some inorganic acquisition comes through, then that will tick all the boxes for us. My second question on inorganic acquisitions. So earlier, we used to be acquiring smaller acquisitions. And now we have to plan for larger ones because that will only move the needle for us. So how does our strategy change in this direction so that we main tain culture and make sure that no acquisition we do will totally fit into our product portfolio and integration will be much smoother? How will both strategies earlier and now be different?

First, let's zoom out, right? Why did the strategy change? And what was the reasoning behind the old strategy? I'll start with the first one. The reasoning behind the old strategy was to do with the scale of the business.

At the end of the day, when we started this journey back in 2012, revenue was INR 125 crores with a loss in the Company. There was no cash. And as the business kept growing, we kept deploying internal cash towards acquisitions. And there was this period where, as a business, we could not afford anything except distressed assets. The pandemic gave us time to pause and reflect, and we realised that while distressed assets as a standalone investment are highly accretive financially. Look at our ROCE, for example; it tends to be north of 30%, sometimes for a period has been even north of 50%, so as a standalone investment, all of these have been phenomenal. But what an acquisition of a distressed asset does is that it distracts you from the very organic growth you're pointing us towards because the entire management team is rescuing a new asset every year. So that's why we decided to pivot and focus more on assets that have some inherent strength rather than a totally collapsed asset that we have to turn around. We've seen organic growth return to MPS as we've used this strategy. In terms of the filters that we apply to the acquisition targets, I answered that question a little bit earlier around scale and domain. In terms of other financial parameters, we make sure that the asset, for over 3 years, has been growing at a CAGR of at least 10% on a revenue basis. And EBITDA is somewhere between 5% and 15%. Where we come in is we improve the organic growth profile, take EBITDA from 5% to 15% to 30%, and kind of unlock the rule of 40 for each of these assets. So that's the strategic value that we add. In terms of how we make that there's continuity. Typically, during the diligence phase, we'll identify the team that will continue with the Company. We'll work with the owners to extend them. This is done both financially through stock options, but also mo re operationally as well by giving people larger roles on the MPS platform rather than working on the standalone business. As well, many of the deals that we have walked away from during DDA have been because of cultural misalignment. We're looking at an interesting asset on the education side recently, where we simply did not agree with some of the shortcuts the management team had taken with some of the customers. And at an advanced stage, even though it would have been a great financial deal, we decided to walk away from it because we were concerned about how it would impact our existing customers. A lot of work is being done around mindset and alignment on thinking, and that's typically done at the DD stage.

Great set of execution from the team. Really appreciate that you are delivering the numbers. I have a very basic question, Rahul. So now we see AI; I mean, it is advancing to a very high level with the new models, etc., right? And the quarterly numbers sho wcase that AI is not a threat to MPS. Just from an investor perspective, just to get more confidence, can you share use cases for every segment where AI or MPS has a real moat in the business and we can really benefit and get superior margins going forward?

Let us go across research, education, and corporate. I'll kick it off with Unbound on the education side, then Sukhwant can talk about how he is using AI in research, and Soma will come in at the end on corporate. The education side with Unbound, for example, within the Unbound platform, we have something called Unbound Intelligence, which essentially is using open LLM -kind-of models that are scraping a walled garden of content and working with the consumer of the c ontent to provide them information in real time. For example, if a nurse has a question regarding a specific disease in the flow of work through a mobile app, she can ask a question. And through a chat interface, the question is answered. What differentiates us from generic models is that we are not scra ping the web to answer this question. We are, in fact, scraping things that are behind paywalls from publishers, content assets that are behind paywalls from publishers as well as content assets that we built over the years. These assets are peer-reviewed, sound science assets. The Unbound evidence tool or chat cannot get it wrong because it's not coming from someone's opinion. It's coming from science. That's a very big differentiator for us. For example, if the same nurse went to ChatGPT, there's no guarantee whether ChatGPT would scrape the web, what it would scrape, and what information ChatGPT would provide. So that's kind of the defensible moat that is on the Unbound side. Let's go to research, Sukhwant, and you want to come in and talk a little bit about that.

Thanks, Rahul. As I mentioned, while I was speaking earlier, for us, AI has become embedded in our delivery, in our production ecosystem. We talked about 3 layers. So in terms of our production, we are using AI live in our workflows to ensure that the spee d and quality of the work that we are doing is improved. And also, in particular, on the platform side, we have AI support for every part of our workflow, right from hosting to publishing. So all our specific parts of our workflows are now being aided and enabled by AI.

And on top of that, we have this continuous R&D happening in MPS Labs, which is our AI and engineering engine. So overall, AI is compounding our deliveries across every segment. So that is the structural moat that I talked about earlier.

Soma, go ahead and talk about corporate learnings.

We are looking at ourselves as an AI transformation partner for our customers. And if I may, three areas we are pouring into are AI across the entire learning value chain, not just content or content creation. A lot of our clients have thousands of legacy learning assets on their LMSs, on their LXPs, on SharePoint. And we are enabling them to use AI and modernize, repurpose that same content, or add value to it in role -based learning - something that will enable performance. We have chatbots that can help you with immediate operational queries, responses, problem-solving, and reducing downtime. We have our Bridge AI, which we spoke about earlier, and that has multilingual experiences and capabilities. We're not rebuilding things from scratch. And for our internal processes for clients, there is an evident value. AI is also enabling our core instructional design process, the assessment and evaluation rubrics we create, of course, translation localization, the quality assurance process; we are building in AI models that can give us better results, media production, and significantly, of course, trying to reduce the delivery timeline while maintaining quality for our customers. It does. And I would say finally, AI is becoming a growth engine, as I see it, because we are increasingly winning enterprise engagements to build AI -enabled learning platforms, Copilots, simulation-based experiences for our customers. And this is allowing us to solve broader workforce performance challenges. We were talking about outcomes, right - how our organization, MPS as a whole, is becoming that AI-first knowledge solutions partner, a partner that enables performance. And rather than simply developing learning or courses, which any learning company or a corporate learning or e-learning side would do, we're increasing both the custom er lifetime value and our margin profile.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will take that as the last question of today. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rahul Arora for closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, for a truly engaged hour and for questions that, as always, were sharp and came from you looking outside in. Your outside -in perspective, as I've shared previously, is worth more to us than you might think.

This always allows us to step back, see our own business from different angles that we can miss sometimes from the inside. And we saw some of those themes today, both in terms of questions as well as remarks. There was a question on what new things you learned about Unbound. That was a very valuable question. There was an encouragement to understand that debt will always be cheaper than equity and to live that principle. So again, very well received. And finally, there was a challenge that we must aspire to drive organic growth in the late teens and not settle for anything less. So again, thank you for that encouragement and challenge. Let me leave you with one thought. If FY’26 was a year we proved that this operating system works, FY’27 is the year we let it compound. Q1 is the first quarter and the first evidence that we're doing exactly that. The two ideas I want to save with us today are the ones that run through every voice on this call tonight. AI is showing up in our revenue, not merely on PowerPoint slides, and more and more of the revenue is being paid for outcomes rather than effort. These are not slogans. This is how a 34% EBI TDA margin quarter gets built, and they are the reason the conviction behind our FY’27 guidance is as high as it is. You've heard me say tonight that we are a conservative lot here at MPS, so I will not oversell the year. I will simply say that the work to deliver is already in flight. To our customers, our employees, our partners and our long -term shareholders, thank you for the steadiness you give MPS through every phase of its journey. We have a great deal of work ahead of us. And if I'm honest, we're going to enjoy every minute of it . We look forward to staying close through the year and to updating you again next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you. On behalf of MPS Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ This is a transcription and may contain transcription errors. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability and is not intended to be a verbatim record of the proceedings. The Company takes no responsibility for such errors, although an effort has been made to ensure a high level of accuracy. No unpublished price - sensitive information was shared/discussed on the call.