TELUS International (Cda) - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, everyone. Welcome to TELUS Digital's Q1 2025 Investor Call. I would like to introduce your speaker, Ms. Elena Lobach. Please go ahead.

Elena Lobach (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Carl. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the TELUS Digital First Quarter 2025 Investor Call. Joining our call are Jason Macdonnell, Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience, Tobias Dengel, President of Digital Solutions, and Gopi Chande, our CFO. We'll begin with prepared remarks from Jason, Tobias, and Gopi, and then open the line to your questions. At the end, Jason will offer his closing remarks. For our cautionary statements and further details on certain non-GAAP measures used during today's call, please refer to the earnings release issued this morning and regulatory filings available on SEDAR+ and EDGAR. With that, I'll pass the call over to Jason.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Thank you very much, Elena. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today. In the first quarter of 2025, TELUS Digital delivered operating and financial results in line with street expectations. We are also reiterating our full-year 2025 outlook. Our global service diversification, as well as our relationship with TELUS Corporation as an anchor client, provides two distinct advantages among many others that offer a certain level of insulation and stability in the current environment and set us apart from many of our peers, offering important levers to navigate market uncertainties to some extent. From a diversification perspective, in the first quarter, our team secured wins across many geographies, industry verticals, and service lines.

For example, we welcomed several new clients, including a global player in IT services, consulting, and business solutions, a Canadian energy marketing and trading company, an American manufacturer of secure identity products, and a Singapore-based platform for AI startups and research institutions. Diversification across industry verticals, client size, locations, and service solutions. We also saw growth with existing clients. With our third-largest client, a leading social media network, we are rebalancing our engagement across geographies and diversifying across service lines. Additionally, in the quarter, we grew with yet another social media client, particularly in our AI and data solution space, and increased our share of business with a European mobile games client as a result of their vendor consolidation efforts in Latin America, where we have a very strong footprint.

Consistent with our pursuit for greater share of business, we continue to elevate engagement across our client base to drive long-term retention. As part of this effort, we're deploying AI tools powered by Fuel iX to deliver granular, real-time insights at the account level. These tools provide real-time coaching coverage and effectiveness insights that span everything from absenteeism and staffing statistics to performance-based measures. These capabilities, along with the plethora that we test with our partner TELUS, help us bring valuable methods to our clients as we support their customers with respect to next best action, higher sales close rates, higher sales value per transaction, accuracy improvements, reduced handle times, and better yield rates. This proactive fusion of technology and humans also allows us to identify and address performance risks, optimize resource allocation, and ensure consistent service excellence, ultimately driving superior client satisfaction and sustained growth.

We remain focused on delivering on our clients' needs, challenges, and opportunities, operationalizing data-driven customer insights through targeted solutions and positioning ourselves as the number one preferred partner. Now, the findings of our recent research in trust, safety, and security conducted in partnership with Ryan Strategic Advisory underscore the critical role our trust, safety, and security solutions play in delivering customer experiences. Enterprises are substantially increasing their investment in key areas such as ID verification, fraud detection, know-your-client processes, and certain forms of content moderation. This is driven by the financial impacts of fraud, regulatory pressures, and the need to adapt new technologies. Our survey also identified that scaling trust, safety, and security efforts presents some very unique challenges for enterprises, such as compliance with regulations, shortages of technical talent, and the complexity of fraud prevention among the top concerns of business leaders today.

We're well-positioned to address our clients' evolving needs. For example, our recent partnership with Sumsub allows us to expand our capabilities in end-to-end identity verification and fraud prevention tools. Our ability to combine human expertise with advanced technologies allows us to offer scalable end-to-end solutions that help enterprises navigate the complex landscape of trust, safety, and security, and bring the right mix of technology and human expertise. We also continue to see growth in AI and data solutions, particularly in our services to support clients' large language model development. Let me give you a few recent examples of our work. For one of our clients, we're working on a training solution for LLM that powers enterprise applications to better understand and interpret images and tables and documents. We're also helping improve the usage of chemical formulas and diagrams in various models.

For yet another client, we are providing a training data set solution to improve a STEM reasoning algorithm. For yet one more client, a major player in LLM development, we're providing a data set to train the model on complex reasoning, challenging the LLM in specific domains, and in particular, looking to learn from complex prompts where the model might falter, which is a critical step in its development and continuous recalibration. We've been successful in diversifying within this service line, as evidenced by our growth with two social media networks. While Google is a key client in this service line, our diversification efforts with other clients help us be well-balanced to capture further growth and mitigate typical volume fluctuations that you might see with clients in this rapidly evolving project-oriented business. We look to continuously progress and upgrade our offerings within AI and data solutions.

This area continues to evolve, and our leading abilities to mobilize human talent and expertise, either on-site or crowdsourced, especially for highly nuanced work around LLM training, continue to be key. While simpler tasks and data annotation workflows will be increasingly automated, current industry trends point to demand for the vast and evolving workforce of experts behind AI development, training, and maintenance over the next few years. In both of these service lines, AI and data solutions, as well as trust, safety, and security, we have created focused teams and will continue to evolve our offerings to ensure we are well-positioned to meet and anticipate our clients' needs. We have invested in great new leadership to drive and advance both these service portfolios, creating clear accountability for client growth, diversification, focused factories, and service line evolution.

Now, speaking of great leadership, with that, I'll hand it over to Tobias to discuss our digital solutions portfolio.

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

Thank you, Jason, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. In digital solutions, similar to other players in our industry, we're closely monitoring client sentiment trends during this recent period of market volatility. At the same time, we're seeing good engagement with clients on their automation and cost efficiency needs. We're encouraged that our positioning as a differentiated provider of end-to-end customer journey innovation resulted in a year-over-year revenue growth in digital solutions in the first quarter of this year. Our findings and pilots across some of our largest clients, spanning technology, e-commerce, and financial services, have translated into new digital solutions opportunities, while differentiating our customer experience management offerings. Importantly, our proof of concepts are now translating into customer-facing deployments.

Focusing on the longer term, we believe the demand for transformation of consumer-facing digital experiences should provide a solid basis for our future growth. For the foreseeable future, we believe there is a significant need from our current and future clients to deploy AI and leverage our global footprint to optimize both the cost and quality of their customer experience. We also expect to see an acceleration of a demand for AI-first software development and have launched our own AI-first lean teams offering, whereby we are testing significantly smaller development squads operating at a higher velocity. These teams use new approaches to software development powered by AI tooling. In addition, we believe we are well-positioned for the continued interest in high-quality near and offshore development teams. In the first quarter, we registered sales wins with new clients, brought back a significant previous client, and saw meaningful expansions with several existing clients.

Among new clients, we saw growth in healthcare, including a leading global provider of clinical development and patient access solutions, as well as in financial services. In terms of client expansions and former client returns, financial services, and in particular, banks, coupled with our strong traction in the hospitality sector, contributed to the majority of our new sales. We continue to make progress in the digitization of customer experience management across our client base, with a target of up to 24 CX strategy audits done in 2025. Our goal is to position ourselves as a strategic partner with clients, establishing direct reach to the C-suite where cross-sell and growth opportunities originate, identify three to five actionable follow-on threads, and expand our relationship and impact with clients. Let me share two case studies that demonstrate the value we're delivering to our clients.

First, we developed an AI-based backlog prioritization model for a global cloud provider. This initiative is expected to save $10-$15 million by improving workload management, preventing escalations, and ensuring timely case handling. The success of this project has also led to multiple follow-on engagements across the provider's various subsidiaries. Second, a global payments platform is one of several pilots of our Fuel agent trainer, with a select cohort aiming for broader adoption across all teams. Early projections indicate a 20%-50% improvement in speed to proficiency for new hires on specific case types, while also helping prepare agents for upcoming product changes, particularly in handling more complex, hard skills-driven cases. While we track various metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, and average handle time, fundamentally, we focus on the value that our CX solutions deliver to clients.

This includes metrics such as decline in churn rates and increases in revenues. Especially when it comes to investments with a major long-term impact on business success or failure, such as the adoption of AI, companies have gone through phases of excitement and caution. As part of our digital solutions advisory services, we offer clients a very cost-effective option to start implementing AI at their own pace and scale, moving as fast or slow as their strategy requires. Absolutely critical is offering our clients optionality to iterate along the way using a secure, reliable, tested, and continuously improving Fuel platform and/or third-party platforms and portfolios of tools. A core part of our strategy is ensuring we are deeply partnered with leading technology providers, including in cloud, digital marketing, CRM, and CCaaS, among others.

Each of these technologies plays a critical role in the customer journeys we orchestrate and are directly adjacent to the human CX experiences we support. Our clients expect us to be experts in these fields, and our partners turn to us for reliable and technology-forward implementations. For example, in Q1, we expanded our partnership with Zendesk, a pioneer and agentic AI-powered service, and held a number of go-to-market events with Adobe. You will hear more partnership announcements this year as it is part of our strategy to be a key integrator of best-in-class AI-powered solutions available in the market, whether developed in-house at TELUS Digital or gained through partnerships. Relentless follow-up and staying close to our clients is the nature of our business.

Especially during a current macroeconomic backdrop, you'll see our positioning include a heavy emphasis on helping our clients operate more efficiently and help them find new ways to reduce costs. Similarly to what I've read in some of the research notes from our stock analysts, I also believe that long-term, tariffs may create additional advisory, technology development, and outsourcing demand, as our clients may need to adjust their business processes in response to the tariffs or otherwise pursue a strategy of diversifying their exposures. As the global tariff policies and economic outlook remain volatile, we intend to stay very close to our clients to ensure we are proactive in supporting their needs as the situation evolves. With that, I'll hand it over to Gopi for the financial review.

Gopi Chande (CFO)

Thank you, Tobias, and good morning, everyone. Our financial results in the first quarter of 2025 were in line with expectations. We generated revenue of $670 million, an increase of 2% year-over-year or 3% on a constant currency basis. This reflected growth in AI and data solutions and digital solutions. We saw growth amongst the majority of our top five largest clients in the quarter on both a sequential quarter and year-over-year basis. Our largest client, TELUS, remains an anchor of stability and growth, a key client relationship that is unique across our peer base and we believe particularly beneficial during times of broader market uncertainty. Revenue with TELUS grew 12% year-over-year, driven by services we provide in customer experience management and digital solutions. With Google, the lower year-over-year revenue comparison is primarily due to a higher 2024 comparison base in addition to typical volume fluctuations in AI and data solutions.

I will point out that year-over-year, our overall revenue in AI and data solutions grew in the quarter as we continue to diversify across more clients in that service line. Revenue with a leading social media client, who remains our third-largest client by revenue, grew year-over-year. While we expect some normal course fluctuations quarter over quarter, we believe overall our relationship is moving in the right direction with our ongoing efforts to diversify this relationship across geographies and service lines. Excuse me. Across our industry verticals, I would highlight tech and games, being our largest in absolute dollar contribution, where revenue increased 1%, driven by growth with a leading social media client and other technology clients, but partially offset by lower revenue from other clients in this vertical. TELUS continues to drive growth in our communication and media and healthcare industry verticals, which grew 8% and 2%, respectively.

While still smaller in absolute dollar contribution, revenue in the BFSI industry vertical grew 11%, primarily driven by certain Canadian-based banks and smaller regional financial services firms in North America and a global financial institution client. Among our geographies, we grew in Central America and Europe, while revenue generated in the Asia-Pacific segment, which now also includes Africa, was stable year-over-year. Results were in line with expected fluctuations in service volume demands from our clients in each of our regions. In the first quarter, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 13.4%, with a year-over-year decrease reflecting several factors. The operational component of this was due to increases in salaries and benefits, as well as goods and services purchased, outpacing revenue growth for the period.

In addition, as we previously discussed, in the first quarter of 2024, our adjusted EBITDA included a material other income line generated from changes in business combination-related provisions, meaning an unfavorable year-over-year comparison for the first half of the current year. Also, current year profitability incorporates a higher run rate of share-based compensation. Unleverage, defined as net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio as per our credit agreement, was 3.4 times as of March 31st compared to 3.2 times as of December 31st. This remains comfortably under the threshold of our current credit agreement leverage covenants. As a reminder, earlier in the year, we proactively arranged for a credit agreement amendment that deferred the leverage step-down from 3.75 times to 3.25 times to commence in the first quarter of 2026. In the first quarter, we generated free cash flow of $41 million.

As expected, this was lower due to the timing of working capital net inflows from a couple of large client prepayments received in the previous quarter, in addition to typical seasonality. The year-over-year decline reflected lower profitability and higher capital expenditures. For the full year 2025, we are reiterating our outlook for revenue growth of approximately 2% on an organic basis, adjusted EBITDA of approximately $400 million, and adjusted diluted EPS of approximately $0.32. The additional commentary on the outlook that I provided in February also largely applies in terms of the timing of our investments and cost-saving programs. With that, let's move on to questions. I ask you to please keep it to one question at a time so that everyone can participate. Carl, over to you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you'd like to queue up to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your phone's keypad. Press two if you would like to withdraw from the queue. Again, please keep to one question at a time. The first question is from Puneet Jain from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Puneet Jain (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, thanks for taking my question and good quarter. Wanted to ask maybe Jason, Tobias, if you can talk about what's the operating model like when Tobias's team engages with TELUS, Heritage TELUS, on customer care operations to create AI-based solutions for their customers? How do they engage with TELUS team? What does that do to that contract economics, whether it's the pricing model or the revenue model on that contract?

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Sure. Maybe I'll start with that, and then Tobias, you can top up. Essentially, when we are working with TELUS, it's a fantastic relationship because it gives us an opportunity to explore end-to-end journeys across their ecosystem and the diversified business set that they have, whether it's being health, TELUS agriculture and consumer goods, or their core telecom businesses. What's really interesting is TELUS is constantly on the search for new efficiencies, new ways to drive customer experience, and to look at leveraging AI and AI applications in new ways. What we generally do is first do an audit and identify opportunities in the organization in a specific business or journey. That usually can involve some capital investment by TELUS upfront, which provides consulting services and development services for Tobias's organization.

We also look at everything from how we can generate a recurring service support for that business area, and then certainly look at what is it that we can do to create outcome-based pricing and value-add, both for TELUS and for TELUS Digital. It is sort of a journey that starts from a consultative basis and an exploration and investigation all the way through to the development, implementation, and then ongoing management of that particular project. Tobias?

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

Yeah. I think very much in line with what Jason's saying, this longer-term view in the industry, right, is that there will be more and more managed services kind of arrangements. One of the amazing things that our partnership with TELUS allows us to do is test those models. That has been very exciting. At the end of the day, it's the core thesis of these assets under TELUS Digital around digital combining with CX. The laboratory for that is really our work with TELUS.

Puneet Jain (Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. That's great. If you can also comment on the economics of those projects under new models, that'd be great. Thank you.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Sure. When you look at the economics of those models, just on a time and materials basis, the margins with TELUS are very strong. We have numerous revenue sources across dozens of different projects. The upfront capital that TELUS affords to drive capabilities within their organization is a revenue source for us. Certainly the time and materials that we apply to it, whether it is on a consultative basis, engineering, and development basis, also generate strong revenue and margins. That is essentially the model. It is everything from consultation services through to development and implementation project management services. Those are at market-competitive or better margins.

Puneet Jain (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you.

Next question.

Next question is from Stephanie Price from CIBC World Markets. Please go ahead, Stephanie.

Stephanie Price (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, good morning. You mentioned growth with your third-largest customer, the leading social media provider, across geographies and service lines. Just curious if you could dig a little bit deeper into what you're seeing there?

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Sure. When you look at that space, one of the theses that we had at the outset of this year was to make sure that we started to diversify not only geographies, not only clients, but also the services within a client. Those services, generally, when you're talking about that particular client or you're talking about that space in general, usually are a mix of trust and safety with moderation services, AI, data annotation, labeling, search accuracy, etc., or we get into things like the large language model work that we do. That's very project-specific. Imagine these sprints of large language model development that we would do in that space. When we talk about multiple services, it's usually some mix thereof of those in the portfolio.

Stephanie Price (Equity Research Analyst)

That's good color. You mentioned across geographies as well. Has there been any expansion outside of Europe with that customer?

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Generally, it's been within most of the expansions have been within Europe on that particular customer, but we also see some opportunities in Central America and potentially in Asia-Pacific. I would say, for the most part, it's been in Europe. When you're talking about Europe, what's really powerful with our presence in Europe is the different languages that we have available to us to help participate, especially in data and AI solutions.

Stephanie Price (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for the color.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Yeah.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is from Keith Bachman from BMO. Please go ahead, Keith.

Keith Bachman (Senior Research Analyst)

Yes. Many thanks and good morning to you. I wanted to just ask a broader philosophical question that picks up on the last question. You identified diversification as one of the key objectives, which certainly we would agree with. The question is, how do you execute on diversification and presumably revenue growth acceleration while also trying to improve your margins? Your growth remains relatively low and margins are down year-over-year, and there are certainly some reasons for that, as you called out. It is difficult to do both, particularly when you are trying to gather new customers. Where do you see the optimization of growth or margins? Maybe just talk a little more philosophically about how you improve your margins while also trying to execute diversification and revenue acceleration. Many thanks.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Sure. I mean, that's the challenge of every business, right? When you take a look at how we're doing it, we're essentially taking this year as an investment year, an investment in new capabilities, an investment in new talent, in developing our existing talent to be able to scale what we see as different growth areas within the business. I think one of the first things we're doing is using this investment year to put targeted investments in the areas that we think will grow the most. Whether that's digital solutions or whether that is in our AI and data solution set or in new evolutions of security and trust and safety, in particular when it comes to new technology partnerships. You'll see us talk more and more about that in the coming weeks. For us, it's about having the discipline to make those investments.

How do we make those investments and make sure that they're self-funded? We're targeting indirect costs. We're looking at how do we make sure that we can maintain relatively stable margins through this investment period, go after indirect costs, make sure we are being very disciplined in our execution of those cost reductions, and use some of that to reinvest in new growth areas for the business. Finally, considering the geographic requirements of our clients, the language requirements of our clients, it's making targeted expansion and then upgrades in areas and sites, location investments that we feel will generate the best return and that clients have indicated they wish to expand into. Creating a path of least resistance when it comes to getting ahead of clients' needs. You see some of that in the space as well.

We're mindful that we have to have a balanced approach. We have to earn the right to invest in particular growth areas. We can't just peanut butter spread that. It has to be an optimization formula, if you will. We have to be able to make sure we're driving efficiencies to reinvest and afford those investments in the business. Maybe Tobias, I'll get you to top up a little bit on the digital solution side as well.

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

Yeah. Keith, it's a great question. I think the way to think about it, right, is margin in any of our service lines is ultimately based on do you have a differentiated service and what's the supply and demand picture in that particular service line. For digital solutions especially, we spend a lot of time thinking about where are those areas that allow us to be differentiated. In those areas, you can charge a premium versus a more commoditized area. You'll see us address that via partnerships like what we've done with Zendesk, the ongoing relationship with Adobe and others, and you're going to see more of that. You're going to see a focus on new ways of operating. I think the biggest one is AI-first development supported by a number of platforms, including Fuel.

There is focus on digitized CX so that when Jason's and our organization go to clients together, we have a differentiated offering versus the marketplace. When you can do that, our clients will continue to pay a premium, and we will continue to be able to drive margins over time.

Keith Bachman (Senior Research Analyst)

All right. Makes sense. Many thanks.

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

I think, Gopi, you had some ideas too.

Gopi Chande (CFO)

Yeah. Yeah, Keith, I'll just double-click on a few of the items that Tobias and Jason touched on. On that tension between revenue and growth, we're also working very closely with existing clients or new clients on where there can be a win-win in terms of a benefit for them and a margin improvement for us. Jason touched a bit on geo, and we can partner with our clients to say where would be optimal to be able to deliver service levels, what they need, the hours that they need, depending on switching or changing the mix of their geo. That's a constant conversation we have with our existing customers and new ones. The other one is picking up on the earlier question around TELUS and moving towards outcome-based pricing, which, again, can be a win-win between our customers and ourselves.

With TELUS in particular, where we're trialing some of this, it gives TELUS predictability around the outcome of what they're going to be paying, what outcomes they're going to get in terms of sales, or in terms of first-call resolution. What it does for us is it incents us on our investment. To the extent we are working with TELUS on various AI initiatives, for instance, TELUS Expert Messaging, and we see an improvement in efficiencies, and we see an improvement in first-call resolution, TELUS starts to get predictability, and we, in fact, increase our margin for less time put in for the same outcome. Continuing to work with new and existing clients on where we can both benefit has been really promising so far, and TELUS is our test case with that as well.

Keith Bachman (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Many thanks. Helpful answers. Appreciate it.

Gopi Chande (CFO)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to queue up to ask a question, please press star one on your phone's keypad. Please note that the leadership team requests you keep to one question at a time. The next question is from Ramsey El-Asal from Barclays. Please go ahead, Ramsey.

Ryan Campbell (VP of Equity Research)

Hi, this is Ryan on for Ramsey. Thanks for taking our question today. I wanted to ask on headcount. It looked like it declined slightly on a sequential basis. How should we think about hiring for the remainder of fiscal 2025? Are you comfortable where you are? Do you actually see any opportunity to reduce headcount in favor of AI? Thank you.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Yeah, absolutely. We do see opportunity to reduce headcount in favor of AI in the absence of if you keep all things equal. The reality is we're seeing growth in demand in almost all areas of the business, especially when it comes to optimizing geographies. Even if you're downsizing in one geo for a client, you might be upsizing on another geo. We have to be fairly agile, and it's one of the benefits we bring to our clients is our agility to move from area to area to optimize their portfolio on costs. Generally speaking, I would say opportunity to see a reduction in total workforce size that we will be with AI because a lot of our work now is human working in concert with AI. That productivity lift gives us opportunity and gives our clients opportunity to have more efficiency and productivity.

I think you will want something we track is obviously revenue per team member, cost per team member. We look forward to seeing a progressive improvement in that regard as we move forward. There is, in this time of investment, definitely a need, though, to make some investments in key talent and new capabilities within our organization, bringing in new engineering talent, new large language model expertise, etc. As we continue to make those investments, there will be a period of time where there is overlap. Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that both from AI as well as overall operational efficiencies and methods, we will see a reduction in total team count.

Ryan Campbell (VP of Equity Research)

That's very helpful. Thank you. Congrats on the quarter.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for the question.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is from Aravinda Galappatthige from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

Aravinda Galappatthige (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you can elaborate a little bit on sort of the impact on tariffs on your clients and what you refer to in your prepared remarks about the potential opportunities there. More specifically, can you sort of talk a little bit about the conversations you're having there with clients? Is it more conceptual at this stage, or is that an ongoing dialogue with respect to the impact of tariffs? Secondly, longer term as we, or let's say beyond 2025, as we think about margins, maybe just remind us of the puts and takes there. Are you still seeing price-led competition that can sort of impact your ability to expand margins and maybe some of the other you talked about headcount. Maybe just remind us of all the puts and takes there. Thank you.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Sure. Maybe Tobias, you could take the tariffs question and Gopi the margins and headcount, Tobias.

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

Yep. 100%. On tariffs, the way we're thinking about it and the way our clients are thinking about it for most of them is that there are first-order impacts and then there are second-order impacts. The first-order impacts are obviously the impacts of the tariffs directly, and then the second-order impacts are is there an economic impact? Are we going into a recession, etc.? I think that's well publicized what the risk is there. On the first-order impacts, most of our clients, if you look at the industries that we operate in, are not directly impacted vis-à-vis a tariff coming in on a good that they're selling from one country to another country. Where they are impacted, for example, in financial services, is how that flows through to the financial services industry.

That is where we are spending a lot of time with our clients looking at second and third-order impacts of tariffs and how we can help them address those through changes in their operations, etc., etc. I think the other opportunity for us, and we hit it in our remarks, is if there is a slowdown in the economy, and we have already seen this, that folks are thinking about this, the primary objective of many of their investments becomes cost reduction. On technology investments, you go through cycles of investing in growth and investing in cost reduction. We are in a cost reduction-first environment for most of our clients.

You will see that positioning in our marketing materials, etc., that it is heavily about efficiency and heavily about cost reduction using AI, using global diversification, all the strategies we have, improving how we use technology for CX, how we use technology for trust and safety. That is really the stance we are taking. I think that is resonating very heavily with our clients because they are more conservative with their investments right now than perhaps they were 24 months ago. Gopi, I will hand it over to you for the second half.

Gopi Chande (CFO)

Thanks, Tobias. Good morning, Aravinda. With regards to margin, I'll start first with your pricing question. Still seeing a competitive environment, still seeing complexity in terms of servicing our clients, but we are seeing stability compared to what we saw earlier last year. We're hyper-focused on our performance and ensuring that we're in the top two, if not first, with all of our customers focused on introducing technology and bringing innovation and AI to our customers so that we are their partner in transformation. Overall, I would say we're seeing stability there, but still a competitive environment. If we look at the rest of the margin profile, Q1 in particular, we knew to be our low point. Coming in at just 13.4% on EBITDA margin, our average for the year is expected to be closer to 15%, and we are on track.

What the differences you're going to see through the year, we spoke earlier in the year about making investments. Jason spoke about this year being a year of investments, so $67 million between OpEx and CapEx in particular investments. Some of those are ongoing, but some of those are foundational in terms of some of the investments we're making in platforms and some of the growth we have in our sales and marketing team, some of the technology investments we're making. We have an efficiency profile that is tacked on to those investments, and we are very rigorous in terms of who owns those, what the delivery is to be, and agile as well in terms of if we're not getting the return we expected to pivot and try other pilots to ensure that we do ultimately get the $50 million in efficiencies that we're expecting.

That gives us confidence in terms of the trajectory of the increase of our margin as we go through the year. As we look forward, Aravinda, early to tell in terms of where we end up, but we're absolutely planning for a gradual increase in that margin. As I mentioned, some of those investments are foundational, so those will not repeat. Other ones, we're going to have to continue to invest in the transformation of our business and technology, so those will continue. Overarchingly, I think you can expect from us a gradual improvement in the margins, likely not back to the 20%-mid-20% of years past, but an improvement from what you saw or what we're forecasting for this year.

Aravinda Galappatthige (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. That's helpful and good to hear. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Cassie Chen from Bank of America. Please go ahead, Cassie.

Cassie Chen (Analyst)

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask for your revenue outlook. Saw that you guys obviously reiterated it despite the pretty strong first quarter. Just wanted to ask, are there any changes to FX expectations for the full year? Are you still assuming that kind of the macro remains relatively stable relative to the first quarter? Are you adjusting any of your expectations for performance from your top clients, just given the strength that you kind of talked about that you've seen in the first quarter so far? Thank you.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Thanks for the question. Gopi, do you want to take that?

Gopi Chande (CFO)

For sure. Good morning, Cassie. So overarchingly, it's an overused term, but we're having to stay pretty agile in terms of our forecasting for the year. I'll start with FX. We've started to see some stabilization between our U.S. and Canadian dollar, and we're expecting that that likely continues through the year. We're watching the euro and U.S. dollar fluctuation. Again, currently a little bit in our favor as we go through Q2, but again, expecting overall stability. That is the foundation as of we're looking through the year is we are expecting continuing fluctuations, but overall stability. There are puts and takes in our model, and that's how we built our plan for this year, which is we're expecting some wins. We're also expecting some hits, and we've built in some space to be able to take those puts and takes.

We've seen that come through Q1 and going into Q2. We are cautiously optimistic as we look through the rest of the year, barring material changes in the macroeconomic environment. We feel confident in reiterating our outlook for the year.

Cassie Chen (Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our final question comes from Jérôme Dubreuil from Desjardins. Please go ahead, Jérôme.

Jérome Dubreuil (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just as a follow-up on the previous question, you have maintained your guidance. If you can just maybe indicate if there's ballpark any change to your TELUS business assumption going forward in 2025, basically, has there been an acceleration of business TELUS for 2025, or as a whole, the business should perform as expected?

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Go ahead, Gopi.

Gopi Chande (CFO)

Yep. Thanks, Jérôme. As mentioned, we saw strength with TELUS in Q1, and we expect to continue to see that strength. Jason referred to the pipeline of projects that we have on the go with TELUS and that we have ready. We prioritize where we can drive maximum efficiency for them, and we can deliver value and get return ourselves. That pipeline is strong. We expect to continue to see consistent work with TELUS throughout the year. As we mentioned earlier and tied to the previous question, in this time of some change and volatility, it is really nice to have the stability and anchor of TELUS and the diversity of work we do with them. It is not just any one given project, but across multiple of their business units.

Not just in their consumer business, but across business, across health, across agriculture. A lot of opportunity there. We expect to see consistent work with them throughout the year.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Yeah. Maybe I could just paint a larger picture here too. What's really exciting about the partnership between TELUS and TELUS Digital is when you look at the AI economy and how we're tackling it, we're really taking a mid to long-term view and building end-to-end capabilities that allow us to participate, contribute, and extract value from the AI economy. If you look at TELUS's investments in AI data sovereignty and making sure that countries and enterprises can keep data safe and well-managed, and then you look at their leadership in privacy and policy around AI and what they've been able to establish there, not only on a Canadian basis, but on a global basis in terms of shaping and forming how AI is used for the safety and benefit of both business and communities.

Going along the value chain to how TELUS Digital participates in creating applications that democratize AI like Fuel and making sure that those applications then are tried and tested in a living lab across multiple functional dimensions in TELUS itself, but also our other customers. Moving from there to scalability and scaling them at an enterprise level and proving out how those use cases can really generate critical value. Going beyond that and taking a lot of those instances and experiences and shaping and informing how large language models are used. Everything from the accuracy of those models all the way straight through to developing new reasoning capabilities, new applications, new expertise for large language models. I mean, it really is quite a cohesive ecosystem of AI economy participation and contribution. That is the view we are taking.

We're leveraging the fulsome capabilities of both TELUS and TELUS Digital and bringing to bear a strategy that has both midterm and long-term sustainability. There is a mad thirst to extract value out of AI right now, and we understand that and obviously want to participate in that. Ultimately, underlying it all is a very cohesive strategy from end to end in a highly valuable partnership. Thanks.

Jérome Dubreuil (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. There are no further questions.

Thank you, Carl. We will turn the call back to Jason for his closing remarks.

Jason Macdonnell (Acting CEO, COO, and President of Customer Experience)

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Next week on May 15th, TELUS Digital will virtually host our annual general meeting of shareholders, and they would have all received instructions on how to join the meeting. For those of you attending the CIBC Innovation and Technology Conference in Toronto in a couple of weeks, our great leaders Tobias and Gopi will be there to represent TELUS Digital, and I hope you all have the opportunity to connect in person. Lastly, our next quarterly investor call will take place in early August. Until then, I wish you all a very good summer. Thank you for your participation today and for your great questions. Thank you and goodbye.

Tobias Dengel (President of Digital Solutions)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes TELUS Digital's Q1 2025 investor call. Thank you for your participation and have a nice day.