Mastech Digital Inc (MHH) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to Mastech Digital, Inc. First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jennifer Ford Lacey, Manager of Legal Affairs for Mastech Digital, Inc. Thank you Ms. Ford Lacey, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to Mastech Digital's First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. If you have not yet received a copy of our earnings announcement, it can be obtained from our website at www.mastechdigital.com.

With me on the call today, our Vivek Gupta, Mastech Digital's Chief Executive Officer; Jack Cronin, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ganeshan Venkateshwaran, our new Chief Executive Officer of the Data and Analytics Services segment.

I would like to remind everyone that statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial growth and liquidity projections, as well as statements about our plans, strategies, intentions and beliefs concerning the business, cash flows, costs, and the markets in which we operate.

Without limiting the foregoing, the words believes, anticipates, plans, expects and similar expressions are intended to identify certain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those listed in the company's 2020 annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on its website at www.sec.gov.

Additionally, management has elected to provide certain non-GAAP financial measures to supplement our financial results presented on a GAAP basis. Specifically, we will provide non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share data, which we believe will provide greater transparency with respect to the key metrics used by management in operating the business.

Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings announcement, which are included in our earnings announcement, which can be obtained from our website at www.mastechdigital.com. As a reminder, we will not be providing guidance during this call nor will we provide guidance in any subsequent one-on-one meetings or calls.

I will now turn the call over to Jack for review of our first quarter 2022 results.

Thanks, Jen, and good morning, everyone. I'm happy to say that first quarter 2022 was a continuation of our strong financial performance achieved in 2021.

Considering that Q1 has historically been a challenging quarter for us, reflective the typical high project completions at the end of the previous year, and high benefit costs due to the repegging of payroll taxes at the start of the new year, our Q1 2022 financial results were very satisfying.

Revenues for the first quarter of 2022 total $59.8 million and represented an organic increase of 20% over Q1 2021 revenues. This revenue performance was a new record for our company, as both business segments showed sequential revenue growth during the quarters.

Our Data and Analytics Services segment contributed revenues of $10.2 million, which represented organic growth of 15% over last year's Q1 revenues.

Through bookings, total $11.8 million backlog increased from last year and our pipeline of opportunities continues to show promise.

In our IT Staffing Services segment, revenues of $49.6 million represented a record performance and a year-over-year increase of 21% over Q1 2021 revenue. Activity levels continued to remain elevated during the first quarter as we increased our billable consultant headcount by 3%.

Gross profits in the first quarter of 2020 total $15.9 million, or 24% higher than in the corresponding quarter of 2021. Gross profits as a percent of revenue in Q1 2022 was 26.7%, compared to 25.7% in the 2021 first quarter.

GAAP net income for Q1 2022 with $2.3 million or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $1.2 million per $0.10 per diluted share in Q1 2021, a year-over-year improvement of approximately 90%. Non-GAAP net income for Q1 2022 was $3.3 million or $0.28 per diluted share, compared to $2.2 million or $0.19 per diluted share in Q1 2021, a year-over-year improvement of approximately 48%.

SG&A expense items not included in non-GAAP financial measures, net of tax benefits, or the amortization of acquired intangible assets and stock-based compensation. These non-GAAP items are detailed in our first quarter 2022 earnings release, which is available on our website.

Addressing our financial position, on March 31, 2022, we had an outstanding bank debt, net of cash balances on hand of $4.8 million, no borrowings under our revolving credit facility, and cash availability of $35.5 million, which excludes $20 million of additional term loan capacity under our current credit facility accordion feature.

I'll now turn the call over to Vivek for his comments.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Jack, for the detailed financial review of our operating results for the first quarter of 2022.

Let me start by saying that I'm very pleased with our Q1 2022 financial performance. As Jack mentioned, first quarters historically and seasonally are tough quarter, for both of our business segments from a financial perspective. However, this quarter was different. Both of our business segments were able to execute at a high level during the quarter, despite several external challenges.

Our IT Staffing Services segment achieved directed results in both revenues and gross margins, and our Data and Analytics Services segment achieved solid revenues and bottom line results.

I'm particularly proud of our Data and Analytics team, who collectively kept the ship sailing smoothly without the benefit of having chief executive oversight in this business segment during the quarter.

I have a couple of comments to make around the workforce environment that we are facing, and about an exciting new service offering that we recently rolled out to the market in our IT Staffing Services segment.

On a macroeconomic basis, we continue to deal with the great resignation and the challenges it presents to all businesses around the globe. At Mastech Digital, we have made it a priority to not only retain our top talent, but also to opportunistically seek out new talent that is currently in the market today.

Like most services companies, we are squarely in the people business. We see the potential of adding and upgrading our talent base as a positive side of the great resignation, and we will continue to treat this challenge as an opportunity at Mastech Digital.

Next, I want to give you an update on our new service offering offshore staffing. At our last earnings call in February 2022, I said a few words about this new service offering that we introduced to the market in the latter part of Q4 2021. Offshore staffing is largely a step-up variant of a very successful MAS-REMOTE offering.

As you're all aware, COVID-19 forced companies to rethink the advantages of having employees, including their contingent workforce working remotely. And by doing so, gaining access to the best talent available beyond self-imposed limitations around geographic locations.

The adoption rate of the work-from-anywhere model has been stupendous. And we believe the market is now ready to embrace our offshore staffing model, that continues to deliver topnotch talent, but at price points that will generate material cost savings for our customers over the domestic model.

The rollout of this new service offering in late Q4 went very well, and the offering was one of the contributors to the record gross margin performance of our IT Staffing Services segment in the first quarter of 2022. We believe this model is both scalable and will provide our customers with an enhanced value proposition.

And now it gives me the immense pleasure to introduce to you our new Chief Executive Officer of the Data and Analytics Services segment, Ganeshan Venkateshwaran.

I can tell you that our Board conducted an exhaustive search for this critical role, leaving no stone unturned to find the right leader, to take Mastech InfoTrellis to the next level in its lifecycle.

As a search progressed, it became clear to me and our Board that Ganeshan was the ideal leader to take our Data and Analytics business on its next journey.

Clearly our organization is excited to have on board Ganeshan, who has already hit the ground running in his first month with the company. So without further ado, I will now turn the mic over to Ganeshan Venkateshwaran, our new CEO of Mastech InfoTrellis.

Thank you, Vivek, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today, talking to you on my first Mastech Digital earnings call.

As you are aware, I joined Mastech InfoTrellis as the Chief Executive Officer on March 28. So I'm quickly approaching my first full month with the company. Somehow it seems a lot longer than that.

Let me start by giving you a bit of my background and experience. Prior to accepting the CEO position at Mastech InfoTrellis, I held executive leadership roles at the Trianz and at Wipro Technologies. From an academic background, I hold an engineering degree and business management programs from the Indian Institute of Science and the Wharton School of Business.

Throughout my career, I have been involved with advanced technologies and enabling digital transformation services to enterprise clients. The pandemic has only accelerated the need for digital enablement, forcing CXOs across enterprises to think of cross-functional and a connected experience value chain for driving enterprise success.

I'm a hands-on leader and bring a strong blend of technology, execution, and management experience to drive a strong team collaboration, while delivering growth and profitable outcomes.

I was attracted towards Mastech, given the well-rounded capabilities that Mastech InfoTrellis has built around the data and analytics practice, covering core aspects of end-to-end data, which includes data management, data engineering, and data science, combined with a layer of enabling customer experience, which came as a part of the AmberLeaf acquisition that Mastech InfoTrellis made.

This positions Mastech InfoTrellis to engage with both the technology stakeholders, as well as the business stakeholders, which is a very strong position to be in. Also, I see the variety in experience that the Board brings, starting from scaling large businesses, depth in technology, making successful large acquisitions in the past as an advantage, as well as a leverage for me as a go after opportunities for hyperscaling. I believe I have a solid opportunity to make a profound difference at Mastech InfoTrellis.

Next, I would like to share my views on some of my first impressions of the company. It's almost 1 month in. When joining a new organization, particularly in a senior leadership role, your first instinct is to find out if anything is broken and needs to be turned around. I'm pleasantly surprised that is not the case at Mastech InfoTrellis.

I have been very impressed with the people that I have met, the strong work culture and work ethics that they demonstrate and more importantly, the burning desire to be successful.

I found the culture to be very collaborative, open to change and focused on success and innovation. Also, I found the competencies of our delivery center in Chennai, India to be outstanding, which explains the company's track record of near 100% customer retention.

However, what needs to be done to bring together an integrated and holistic view of driving enterprise customer experience, starting with digital strategy and roadmap, to enabling technology solutions and providing managed services. I will be working closely with my teams to shape this go-to-market approach. What this will essentially mean is a premium positioning at upstream and off the enterprise value chain and being able to command a premium pricing.

In summary, the digital transformation services is an exciting space that I know well and have been hands on. I'm looking forward to leading Mastech InfoTrellis in its journey ahead by enabling industry learning experience for our employees, capturing the growth wave and creating substantial value for our shareholders. Thank you and back to you, Vivek.

Thanks, Ganeshan. Operator. This concludes our prepared remarks. We can take questions now.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Lisa Thompson with Zacks Investment.

Nice to see a great Q1 and record revenues. I have to say it seems, I don't know if the word is ironic, that Staffing is doing better than Data and Analytics. Do you expect with a new CEO that, that might change or is there going to be competition on who can grow faster?

I would actually like to have a competition. That sounds pretty exciting. No, on a more serious note, I'd see no reason -- in fact, I see every reason why we should see scaling happening on the Data and Analytics side. We are very excited to have Ganeshan on board and he has the bright background, the right experience to take it forward. So we should see some healthy competition in the future.

Any prediction when that might cross over to them growing faster?

Lisa, you know we don't make any projections. But I think we just as Ganeshan mentioned, he's barely been in for a month. We need to give him a bit of time and I have no doubt as the year progresses, we will start seeing the uptick and the scaling happening on the Data and Analytics side.

A couple financial questions. It looks like in Q1, SG&A was a little bit higher than least I expected. Is there anything funny going on there this quarter? Do you expect that number to come down from the $12.6 million or not?

I'm going to pass this question over to Jack.

I think that the $12.6 million is likely to stay put in Q2 and increase a bit in the second half of the year. I don't think there's anything funny. I mean, we had a lot of variable expenses to increase just to support our revenue growth.

I know in the past you discussed how margins were benefited by that people -- consultants weren't traveling. Are they traveling now? Is that going to affect gross margins?

Jack, go on. Jack -- go on Jack.

No, I think traveling is going to open up a little bit. And on the D&A side, it could have some impact on gross margins, but I don't anticipate it to be a huge number. As far as SG&A expenses, I think in Q1, we did have some travel costs that exceeded last year's Q1. So that's part of the increase in overall operating expenses to come up with that $12.6 million number.

And just to clarify when you said that the consultants went up by 3%, you meant that sequentially to like 1,305.

Yes. It's a 3% increase for the quarter.

Sequentially, right from Q3.

Yes, right.

And then one last question is, I noticed when reading the 10-K that you went from having like 48% H1B Visa people down to 26%. Can you talk about how that happened, and is that's going to stay that way?

So Lisa, if talking about -- it wasn't very clear. You're talking about the H1B's percentage?

Yes.

I think it's -- that's just a sign that we are placing a lot more non-H1B people right now on billing. And we don't see any reason why that kind of ratio will not continue. It should continue. We should continue to have the H1Bs coming down as a percentage over the period of time, as the other side of -- the non-H1B side of the business keeps picking up.

Does that save you any money or how does that change anything?

Well, it does change -- it does save us some money. There is always the Visa processing fee, which is there. But I think at a larger level, it just means that we are addressing a larger pool of resources across the country and MAS-REMOTE is helping us as well. So it just helps us address the needs of our customers much better by going after the larger pool.

Lisa, this is Ganeshan here. Nice to have you on this call. And to your earlier question on the D&A business, a couple of points from my side in addition to what Vivek covered.

One, it is always nice to have a very healthy competition, so be prepared for it. I first want to comment the team that were holding the fort in the absence of a chief executive. I think the teams have done a tremendous job. But coming to the market itself for D&A, the data analytics market is booming. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 13% plus.

And the demand for data analytics professionals is also exploding. Nearly 90% of the corporations have predicted that analytics is going to be an essential competency this year. So that the positions Mastech InfoTrellis in a very unique position, of being able to enable growth and experience to all of our enterprise clients, given that we bring in a very holistic view of data.

So we should expect to capitalize on the market opportunity and you will see that reflect as we move forward. I'm still early, it's been 4 weeks since I came on board. But I think the indications look very positive from a market standpoint. I hope I answered your question.

I also remembered another thing. I know they have a pile of acquisitions for you to look at. Have you started at working on the stack, and do you see that happening anytime soon?

I have not yet started to look into it. I think the first order of priority for me as I joined Mastech InfoTrellis was to look at a couple of things. Number one, what is our opportunity for a go-to-market positioning, based on what we currently have?

Now when I look at both the Data and Analytics, as well as the customer experience in business, the ability to strongly influence a customer acquisition and the growth side of our enterprise clients is very, very high. What I mean by that is, the Data and Analytics segment will enable enterprises with a data-driven approach to architecting business intelligence and driving growth.

The customer experience enabled by AmberLeaf will enable enterprises with a customer experience driven approach to sales, service and marketing transformation. So there is an opportunity for Mastech InfoTrellis to operate on both the technology side of the business, as well as the business side of the business, so I see a tremendous opportunity to cross leverage upsell and influence the enterprise value chain.

The second area that I started to look at was the differentiated value proposition to clients or from a service offering perspective. I spoke about the strategy and roadmap, technology implementation, and then managed services. That will position us for an engagement with the clients upstream and also help us to engage with the clients at the CXO level, position as for premium pricing. And in that process create the downstream revenue at scale.

The third area of our focus was around scaling the Data and Analytics business strategically and rhythmically. What I mean by that is, from a growth standpoint, how are we focusing on achievability, predictability, repeatability? And I underline repeatability because being able to do more of [seeing], means less effort required to be able to sustain and grow the business and also look into opportunities for driving nonlinearity.

As part of my initiative to drive nonlinearity, I will be looking into some of these acquisition candidates downstream. I am not ready for that yet, Lisa.

And of course, the last area of our focus has been around people and culture and the leadership coming together as we scale. So these have been my areas of our focus in the last 4 weeks, but we will get to some of the acquisitions pretty soon.

Our next question is from Timothy Call with The Capital Management Corporation.

Congratulations on strong bookings and your increased backlog. The cash levels are rising and might exceed long-term debt later this year. Should we expect net interest expense to approach 0?

Jack, will you take that question?

It's clearly going to go down, absent an acquisition. Yes, we're paying off debt at a clip of $1.1 million a quarter, and that's going to continue. And so I -- and we're generating cash flows. So if we don't accelerate our or early payer debt, we're going to be accumulating cash. So I think our interest rates or our interest expense is clearly going to go down.

Absent from other effects, does the IT Staffing unit benefit from U.S. wage inflation? Do your revenues and profits grow because of wage inflation in that unit?

Yes, to some extent, definitely, there is -- you get the benefit of it in terms of the bill rates increasing and also for the same number of heads, you are able to get more revenue per head as a result of that.

There's not that much [uplift] for gross margin improvement because that sort of goes with the higher rates as well. The input rate also goes up or is going up as a result. But definitely, there is a bit of an upside on the rate increase as a result of this.

And do you see a shortage of -- the shortage of U.S. skilled labor, do you think that will lead to increase outsourcing in the United States and would that eventually increase business at Mastech?

Well, it's already happening. The demand is way more than supply. The customers are unable to fulfill those positions internally, even the permanent positions they have are lying open. And they are increasingly needing more and more on organizations like ours to help them find continued workforce. And we are sort of rising to that and in some of our growths that we've demonstrated over the last few quarters has been as a result of that.

Of course, when there is more demand than supply, we also lose people much more. So our focus has been how do we make sure that we pick up new business, we do new placements, we do new starts disproportionately more than the ones that we lose. And we've done a pretty decent job so far.

Our next question is from Marc Riddick with Sidoti & Company.

So I wanted to start with -- was there anything as far as any shifting of orders or business or any disruptions that we should think about during the course of 1Q that would maybe affect comparability?

No, I don't think so. I don't think there is anything like that to report right now. Jack, is there something that I may have missed there?

No. No disruptions that I'm aware of.

And then shifting gears, I wanted to talk a little bit about maybe -- and I know it's only been -- first of all, welcome Ganeshan. I know it's been a whole month that you've been there. So the stack of acquisition opportunities will still be there tomorrow, I suppose. But I was wondering if you could maybe update everyone as far as the general thoughts around maybe what the general pipeline looks like valuation? And if there's been much of a shift as far as the opportunity set that has been seen maybe over the last 3 to 6 months?

Marc, thank you. Is your question around the pipeline for acquisitions, or is it around the pipeline for the Data and Analytics business?

Well, the acquisitions first and then -- well, actually, you can answer both if you wish, but I was asking about acquisition.

I would probably turn over to either Vivek or Jack to answer on the acquisition piece, and then I can take the question around the overall business pipeline.

So as far as, Marc, the acquisitions are concerned, we did have a few candidate targets that we were considering and -- towards the end of last year. And I think I mentioned that in my previous earnings call as well, we had to kind of put them on the backburner. And it made -- didn't make sense to go ahead with any acquisition without having a new leader on board. So clearly, we've said that before that our acquisitions are going to be in the data analytics area and that strategy or that approach is still very much valid.

So we're just waiting for Ganeshan to settle down and have a look at the targets that we were considering. And also, there could be new injection of ideas from Ganeshan, and we would refine our target or the approach that we are taking. So we see that in the latter half of this year, we should start going back to evaluating what could be the next target to look at.

Thank you, Vivek. And Marc to the other question, see, what the pandemic has done is influenced the velocity of digital transformation. And as we all know, no industry is spared. But when you look at the sequence in which effective digital transformation initiatives happen in the market, it all starts with data and analytics. In order to get insights of your own enterprise, but the real end-user transformation begins with redefining experiences of your products and services.

Now when I look at Mastech InfoTrellis, I think we are very uniquely positioned to influence what I call as the customer acquisition and the growth segment of an enterprise, which essentially starts by driving your customer experience initiatives, starting from your product under service design, customer user journey mapping and then taking it all the way into your implementation under managed services.

So the ability for Mastech InfoTrellis to drive the transformation experience, starting with the business of stakeholders, be it in sales, be it in service or be it in marketing and then driving it down the value chain, through the technology stakeholders comprising of your -- be it on the data side or be it on the application side or be it on the cloud side. Since it is very seamless and the capability are very well aligned.

So I am very optimistic about the capturing of the market opportunity and being able to grow the business because it is not just the data business, which is seeing a significant growth in 2022 and beyond. But combined with the ability to drive upstream customer experience, I think we have a significant opportunity to tap into. I hope I answered your question, Marc.

Yes, absolutely. And a couple more for me. One, I was wondering if you could sort of give us an update as to where you are with the real estate strategy. And as far as with your offices and where you think it you can get to by the end of the year? And then I have one last follow-up after that.

Go ahead, Vivek.

No, I was going to respond to the real estate situation. So Marc, I think one thing that's happened as a result of this pandemic, where we all know that we don't really need everybody to be in the office every day. And what that means is that the office spaces that we have right now -- right now can handle a lot more people, because we will have the hybrid approach and going forward.

But having said that, I mean, we have large centers that we have. There's one in Noida, which is in India, in the National Capital Region. Then there is one in Chennai, which is the Data and Analytics center. And then, of course, the third large one in the U.S. one is, of course, Pittsburgh. And then we have smaller offices, quite a few of them, sales offices in different parts of the U.S. and in Europe.

So that kind of footprint that we already have. We did upgrade our Chennai facility to a much larger facility -- almost double the number of seats and that we did in January, because we expect that, that part of the business will probably scale on the offshore side of data analytics will scale the fastest and the quickest. So I think we are pretty comfortable right now in terms of the real estate footprint that we have, at least for the foreseeable future. And I'm hoping that we'll get to that point maybe in next year when we have to start thinking of what more to add, and that will be a great problem to have. That means we are scaling.

And then the last thing for me, I want to talk a little bit about the -- you talked about it in your prepared remarks, but maybe you could put a little more around the timing and what your thoughts are around the offshore staffing launch?

Yes. So the offshore staffing, as I mentioned, is basically in -- if you go back a little June of 2020, right in the middle of or the thick of the pandemic, we launched a service called MAS-REMOTE, which is leveraging the customer's readiness to work from home or from anywhere model. And that actually was very well-timed. And from that point onwards, all the way until the end of 2021, roughly 2/3 of all placements that we did were MAS-REMOTE. And what we found in -- when we launched this new offering of staffing is, if you think about it, it's just an extension or a variant of that, where we are not just having people working remotely, but they're working much further out. And the logic essentially is this.

If you look at the demand in -- for IT people, it's very heavily skewed towards to U.S. followed by Europe and then followed by the rest of the world, including Asia. But the availability of resources is just the other way around. The largest availability -- resources are actually in Asia, followed by Europe, followed by the U.S. at this point in time. So what we are trying to do is address that where the demand is and where the supply is through this offshore staffing. And we found that customers having experienced this work-from-home, work-from-anywhere model successfully are now ready and more amenable to having people work offshore.

An offshore model we already know has a lot of advantages. It's availability for a very large pool of topnotch talent and at a price point, which makes it a compelling proposition for customers because they can have a lot of cost savings or they may not want cost savings, they can have much more people for the same amount of spend that they would have had. So we launched this offering in Q4, and we are finding it's gaining traction very rapidly. So we are pretty excited about it.

So if you put this in -- along with MAS-REMOTE, I think we now have a pretty good sort of options in addition to, of course, the traditional on-prem or on-premise staffing. So our sales team is pretty excited that we now have a much wider complement of offerings to offer.

Our next question is from Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners.

With the solid bookings you've discussed in the first quarter and even what sounds like revenue growth as well, can you first talk about and -- maybe I missed it -- where demand is increasing most for both Mastech staffing, as well as the analytics business by industry? Is it financial services, is it health care? And maybe take us through which industries you're seeing the most demand?

Brian, thank you for your question. Actually, right now at this point in time, it's pretty evenly distributed across all industries. When we look back how things are in the last 1.5 years, we could see a skew towards health care more and it was followed by financial services, followed by retail or manufacturing. But at this point in time, the demand seems to be there across all industries. I can try and give them some kind of an order there. But actually, I don't think that's that relevant at this point in time.

So all our customers in all our segments, we are having conversations with them. And this applies to both sides of the business, IT Staffing as well as Data and Analytics. And maybe I'll ask Ganeshan if he seeing a skew on the data analytics side in his -- his analysis that he's done over the last 1 month or so, if there is a skew on the industries.

I think Vivek, you covered it. And Brian to add to what Vivek said, I think we are looking at banking, retail and high tech as industries where we are seeing a sort of a momentum. But coming to the Data and Analytics business from a core standpoint, it is industry agnostic. The way I would see this is, when I look at it from an industry perspective, is from 2 dimensions.

One is there are certain industries which have a high-touch impact with their consumers. For example, if you take either health care, media, high-tech or retail. What I mean by high-touch is the entire feedback loop with the consumers is extremely high. For example, if Apple were to release their phone, then you have a feedback loop into the adoption and the usage of the features very quickly.

These are industries that will continue to be on the cutting edge of digital transformation and also continue to keep growing and adopted faster. On the other side, there are certain industries that are low-touch. Examples would be the ones that are highly regulated, be it insurance, energy, et cetera.

Now the need for digital transformation and especially data driven is seen across the board. But where you will find -- where you will sort of see a flavor -- change in flavor is depending on the velocity of the transformation that each of these industries adopt. And depending on that, we will see a slightly skewed pipeline, but that does not mean that any of the industries that I earlier spoke about are the ones where there is transformation work that is happening. I think it is cutting across.

My second question is, as demand increasing, you touched on the difficulty on the supply side of resources. How long does it take you to find and onboard staffers to meet demand?

Actually, we have a very well-oiled engine for recruitment. We have a pretty large team, which is sitting in India. They are based in Noida. They're working to U.S. time. And we are able to find candidates in a matter of hours in some cases. And we are able to get customers connected with those candidates for interviews and get things done in a matter of days, when there is a crunch and the customers have that potency.

But a normal time takes about a week to 2 weeks for the whole entire process to happen from availability of the requirements, find the right candidates, going through the shortlisting, interview, selection, et cetera. So yes, it's really how -- and remember, we are not the only ones who are being offered those reqs. We have competitors or competition there as well.

We are able to do well because of the speed at which we are able to do and also the number of producers that we have, who can go after these requirements. Yes, we are able to move pretty fast and get ahead of the competition in the process.

When I see this question from the Data and Analytics side of the business, I have a very unique advantage of being able to leverage the strength of what the digital staffing business that brings to the table. You are very well aware of the great recognitions and the challenge is that the technology services industry is facing, both in terms of a talent acquisition as well as from a talent retention standpoint.

The great advantage for me to be able to drive a hyperscaling of the Data and Analytics business, will come from the fact that I can leverage the digital staffing of Mastech to be able to acquire talent at speed and have a big base of both process maturity, as well as recruiters who can help with the scaling. So I feel very nice about the fact that I can leverage the digital staffing business for the growth of D&A.

My last question is, as it relates to your bookings, how much higher is the implied pricing on your new business compared to the average rates of 2021?

Brian, let me ask you this question. Is this question about the IT Staffing, or is this the data analytics piece?

Well, on the staffing side because on the earlier questions, you talked about revenues will benefit from higher salaries or higher pay, of course, that you pass on. I'm just curious, as it relates to that, how much higher -- are prices 5%, 10% higher than they were last year?

Well, it actually varies. We are seeing anything from 0% to 25% as well. It also depends on the type of skills and how difficult or how scares are those skills in the marketplace and you can imagine scarcity drives up pricing. So many of the new positions that we are doing could come as much as maybe 10% on an average more. But then it's a bucket which has got already a lot of people, and you are adding more but it takes a little while for the -- overall, the average for the bucket to start changing. But there is definitely some increase which is happening in general, but it varies from technology to technology.

Brian, our average bill rate in the 2022 quarter was just under -- this is for staffing, just under $79 an hour. And in the first quarter of 2021, it was just over $75 an hour. So that's about a 5% increase. And some of that is inflationary pressures and some of it is just the type of skill sets that we've been working with on new assignments. But clearly, the trend is up.

Our next question is from [Russ Stephenson with Benetton Capital].

Just a question, thinking about all the positive outlook that we talked about with data analytics, all the great trends that the business is tapping into and Ganeshan’s spoke about. Reflecting back on Q1, 15% growth rate is great. But as we talked about, it sounds like there's some room for even higher growth there.

I'm curious in Q1, if there were things that you could point to in your mind, maybe limited that growth? Like what -- another way of thinking about the same question perhaps is, as you look out in the future and tapping into all the trends, are there specific tactical things or other parts about the business that you can identify that give you the confidence that you can step up that growth rate?

Thank you, [Russ]. From a Q1 standpoint, again, I think as both Vivek and I said, I commend the team for managing the foot in the absence of having executive oversight. But from where I see, I see opportunities for scaling and I have identified opportunities between both the customer experience side, coming from AmberLeaf as well as the Data and Analytics side and significant opportunities for cross leveraging and upselling.

There were some tactical things synergies around people alignment, which have already been fixed. I believe that when it comes to driving customer experience, we are already at a point where we are in a position to drive a holistic and rich customer experience. In fact, I called this as a 5-dimensional approach to driving customer experience, one that comes from the business development team, driving relationship experience and driving net new logo acquisition.

Second, coming from an integrated digital transformation practice perspective, which is an area that, as I mentioned earlier, is something that I'm shaping as we speak. And once we have that, we will be able to drive both the strategy and road map across all of our enterprise clients, which positions you as the upstream of the value chain.

The third, of course, is the global delivery, which is functioning extremely well today, delivering a 100% customer retention. And the 2 other areas that I'm looking into are bringing in specific industry domain expertise in areas where we have a strong positioning with the clients and also looking into possibilities of the platforms and IPs, as they get to understand the business more.

So that is where you will start to see a shift happening both in terms of not just the customer acquisition, but also the quality of revenue from each of these customers, being able to drive the average revenue within customers and bringing in some amount of nonlinearity through platforms and IPs. Russ , did I answer your question?

Yes. That's really helpful. I appreciate it and it's great to have you on the team.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Vivek for closing comments.

If there are no further questions, I would like to thank you for joining our call today, and we look forward to sharing our second quarter 2022 results with you in early August. Thank you all.

Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.