Latent View Analytics bets on AI, M&A to hit $200 million revenue target under new leadership

“The focus this year will be to continue to make investments on both these fronts,” Venkatesan said, referring to AI and partnerships. ”Latent View expects financial services and retail to be among the key drivers of growth as it works to offset an $8 million revenue shortfall caused by insourcing at a large technology account.
9 crore in the June quarter. 7 percentage points on EBITDA margins. Venkatesan said the leadership transition was aimed at helping Latent View move into its next phase of growth. Financial services remains key growth engineFinancial services is expected to remain a major growth driver for Latent View.

The weakness in the consumer business was largely concentrated in CPG rather than retail. Q: Since you've had the CEO change come in in the month of July, what does that mean in terms of a strategic direction for the company? And secondly, a quick word on your margins.
Rajan Venkatesan: To respond to your first question on the leadership change, our current CEO, who was in charge before Sonal Ramrakhiani joined us, Mr. Rajan Sitaraman, took over as the CEO in 2019. Of course, he's had a fantastic run in taking the company public, and from the year in which we took the company public, the company has roughly grown about threefold, right?

We were close to about $44 million in revenue the year before we went public. Your second question was specifically on the slippages that we saw on the margin front. So you will note that Q1 typically is impacted. So, in this particular quarter, for close to about 70% of our entire workforce, we did wage hikes averaging close to about 8%.
5% on the overall margins, which we expect, by the way, will get reversed in the following quarter. Q: Is bringing margins back to normal levels also an agenda for the new leadership because the margins took a big hit this time around? What led to that?

And, of course, what are the steps that you would be taking to bring them back to the levels where they were? Rajan Venkatesan: So this year, our focus, by the way, like I said, right, I think the focus will be to make investments both on the AI side as well as on the partnership side.
So the focus this year will be to continue to make investments on both these fronts, plus the fact that we've also had a leadership change, right? But the focus will be to deliver the $200 million revenue goal that we have, right? Q: $200 million revenue growth is something that the Street would like, Rajan.

You know, because my question was pertaining to that itself. I look at some of your segments. There was quarter-on-quarter growth in financial services. I reckon this was more seasonal in nature. Retail and CPG, however, fell about 32%, and then you had this 18 to 20% growth guidance for the consumer sector as well.
So, given all of this and the pace at which you've been growing, the growth has been declining year-on-year. At the same time last quarter, you grew at 32% year-on-year. That came down to 23%, 24% in the next subsequent quarters, and now you're at 21%.

So what's the year-on-year growth run rate that is likely to play out over the next few quarters with this 19 to 20% margin growth that you're giving? Rajan Venkatesan: Yeah. So specifically, I think financial services will continue to maintain this strong growth momentum.
7 million. So you will see that that's almost like a 70 to 80% jump in relation to what we delivered last year. So, financial services, the momentum will continue. We do see very, very strong growth momentum over there, specifically on the softness that we witnessed in the CPG and retail practice.

So maybe if I were to just bifurcate the CPGR, right, between CPG and retail, retail, by the way, is very, very strong. What we've been particularly impacted by is actually the CPG sector, right? There are two reasons for it. But more importantly, there were a few one-time projects, we've outlined that in our press release as well, there were a few one-time projects that we had executed in the CPG segment specifically in Q4, where we didn't have the follow-on revenues to show for in the current quarter.
But on a year-on-year basis, right now, the visibility that we have on a full-year basis is to deliver close to about 12% of revenue growth over the previous year. This is lower than our historical growth rates. That is primarily because of one large technology account.

That has impacted the overall growth rate. But our focus is to balance that shortfall through growth in financial services as well as our retail practice.