TeamLease: Transcript of Q1FY27 Earnings Call

August 04, 2026 To To Listing Department Listing Department BSE Limited, National Stock Exchange of India Limited, Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers, Exchange Plaza, 5th Floor, Dalal Street, Fort, Plot no. C/1, G Block, Mumbai - 400 001 Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra(E), Mumbai - 400 051 Scrip Code: 539658 Scrip Code: TEAMLEASE Dear Sir/Ma’am, Sub: TeamLease Services Limited (TeamLease/Company) - Transcript of Q1’FY27 Earnings Call Ref: Regulation 30 of Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) Regulations, 2015 With reference to the above-mentioned subject and pursuant to Regulation 30 of the SEBI LODR Regulations, 2015, please find enclosed the Transcript of Q1’FY27 Earnings Call hosted on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, at 05:00 P.M. IST. The same is available on the website of the Company at https://group.teamlease.com/investor/earning-call-transcript/. Kindly take the above said information on record as per the requirement of SEBI LODR Regulations, 2015. Thanking You. Yours faithfully, For TeamLease Services Limited Alaka Chanda Company Secretary and Compliance Officer Encl: As above TeamLease Services Limited, CIN: L74140KA2000PLC118395 Registered Office Infinix Square, B-4, B-5, B-6, HAL Industrial Estate, HAL GB Quarters, Vibhutipura, Bengaluru, Karnataka – 560037 Ph: (91-80) 6824 3333 Fax: (91-80) 6824 3001 Email ID: corporateaffairs@teamlease.com Website: https://group.teamlease.com Business Portal: https://www.teamlease.com “TeamLease Services Limited Q1 FY27 Earnings Conference Call” July 29, 2026 MANAGEMENT: MS. SUPARNA MITRA – MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER – TEAMLEASE SERVICES LIMITED MS. RAMANI DATHI – CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER – TEAMLEASE SERVICES LIMITED MS. NEETI SHARMA – CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SPECIALISED STAFFING – TEAMLEASE SERVICES LIMITED MR. BALASUBRAMANIAN A. – SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, ENTERPRISE – TEAMLEASE SERVICES LIMITED MODERATOR: MR. ARJUN SAVLA – HDFC SECURITIES Page 1 of 16 TeamLease Services Limited July 29, 2026 Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the TeamLease Q1 FY '27 Conference Call hosted by HDFC Securities. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Arjun Savla from HDFC Securities. Thank you, and over to you, Mr. Savla. Arjun Savla: Thank you. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of HDFC Securities, we welcome you all to the TeamLease Quarter 1 FY '27 Earnings Call. Today, we have with us the management team of TeamLease represented by Ms. Suparna Mitra, Managing Director and CEO; Mr. Ashok Reddy, Executive Vice Chairman; Ms. Ramani Dathi, CFO and COO; Ms. Neeti Sharma, CEO, Specialised Staffing; Mr. Balasubramanian A, Senior VP, Enterprise. I will now hand over the call to Ms. Suparna Mitra for the opening remarks, post which we can open the floor for the Q&A session. Thank you, and over to you, Suparna. Suparna Mitra: Thank you. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm joined by Ramani, our CFO and COO; Bala, who is the Senior VP in Enterprise Staffing; and Neeti, who's the CEO of Specialised Staffing. I will first take you through overall how the quarter looked like, after which my colleagues will cover general staffing, specialised staffing, DA and lastly, the financials. So the news is the consolidated revenue for the quarter was INR3,056 crores, which is up 6% year- on-year and 4% sequentially. PBT and PAT both grew 38% year-on-year. The PBT was INR36 crores, PAT was INR34 crores. And the business EBITDA, the operating businesses before the corporate cost grew 18% year-on-year. We added 127 new client logos across the group, and we completed INR238 crores buyback. As I mentioned earlier, the EBITDA grew year-on-year. However, there is a sequential decline quarter-on-quarter of 31%. This is on account of EdTech seasonality and appraisals. So EdTech, which is one of our businesses has a very high Q4 weightage. Our Q1 is structurally very weak for EdTech and that reverses through the year, and that has led to this 31% sequential decline. Two structural tailwinds have been strengthened. First, the 4 labor codes. These were announced earlier last year in November. The central rules were notified in May. The state rules continue to be notified. And -- in the direction in which we are going, a single central license, uniform wage definitions, mandatory formal employment letter, all of these raise the compliance bar in a way that will structurally favor large organized players like us over unorganized contractors. So this is one big thing. And the other one, which we see a lot of traction is global capability centers. GCCs are now the single largest driver of incremental staffing demand in India, and they account for about 45% of our specialized staffing associate base and 67% of the net revenue of specialized staffing. Both of these are multiyear and both play to where we are strong. Page 2 of 16 TeamLease Services Limited July 29, 2026 Coming to general staffing, over 65% of the new logos this quarter came in under variable markup or outcome-linked pricing, which is a structure that shares risk with the client and protects margin if demand softens. My colleagues will talk more about the specific business vertical update. If I look over to the next 3 to 9 months, there are a lot of forces. There are some headwinds, some tailwinds and there are multiple forces at flux. Retail inflation has risen to 4.38%. Monsoon has not been that good this year. Trade terms and there are a lot of other uncertainties. However, we are at this point, carrying an open position of 17,500 and a healthy pipeline, and we expect clients to remain on the path through the first half. So overall, our confidence in FY '27 comes from an improved portfolio mix, commercial discipline, much greater emphasis on execution, cost control and therefore, operating leverage, which will kick in. With that, I will invite Bala to take us all through our general staffing business. Balasubramanian A.: Thank you, Suparna. Good evening, everybody. In Q1 FY '27, the staffing ecosystem was shaped less by demand and more by cost. The conflict in West Asia kept crude, freight and insurance costs elevated through Q1 and the pass-through landed on our clients at the very start of the fiscal year, well before their annual operating plans had been tested. The response was consistent across sectors, protect margin first, defer manpower additions if need be and move from annual to quarterly manpower planning where possible. Against this backdrop, our general staffing business closed the quarter at approximately 2.91 lakh associates, which is a sequential net addition of 4,000 associates. That number is the result of 2 opposing forces rather than just a single trend. We absorbed drag from 3 distinct sources: deferred manpower additions on cost pressure, structural client exits driven by GST 2.0 and the pause in power distribution rollouts in certain states. Against that, we expanded our share of wallet at existing BFSI, retail and e-commerce clients, and that expansion largely offset the drag. Gross hiring was consequently our highest in 3 quarters. Let me elaborate a little bit on GST. We will at 18% and for clients now selling and exempt products in individual insurance or at 5% in several FMCG categories, that 18% is no longer predictable in their hands. It has become an annual loss. We tipped a few accounts towards in- house frontline models. These are structural rather than performance-based decisions. We added 28 new logos with 2/3 of them under variable markup or outcome-linked pricing. Of the approx [Showing first 8,000 characters — download PDF for full document]