Concentrix (CNXC) 2026 財年第三季法說會：AI 營收突破 50%

Concentrix (NASDAQ: CNXC) 公布 2026 財年第三季營收約為 24.5 億美元，按固定匯率計算下降 0.5%。儘管 AI 自動化部署加快、客戶支援需求減少，以及將工作轉移至低成本地區造成約 3% 的營收逆風，獲利能力仍有所改善。

重點總結

• 第三財季營收約為 24.5 億美元，按固定匯率計算下滑 0.5%，略低於該公司 6 月提出的財測預測區間下限。
• 非 GAAP 營業利益達 3.09 億美元，非 GAAP 營業利益率年增 30 個基點至 12.6%。調整後 EBITDA 利益率亦增加 30 個基點至 14.8%。
• 管理層表示，目前有超過 50% 的營收來自過去三年產生的業務，包括受 AI 影響的轉型業務、經由 iX Suite 驅動的服務，以及較新的高價值產品方案。
• 調整後自由現金流為 2.18 億美元，創下 Concentrix 自 2020 年拆分發行以來最高的三季度水準。該公司在本季度減少了 2.11 億美元的總債務。
• 展望第四財季，管理層預期營收介於 24.1 億至 24.6 億美元之間，意味著按固定匯率計算將下降 3% 至 5%。該展望反映了自動化進程加速，以及兩家超大規模雲端服務商客戶的部分顧客支援活動減少。
• Concentrix 預期 2026 財年調整後自由現金流將達 6.3 億至 6.5 億美元，年底淨槓桿率約為調整後 EBITDA 的 2.6 倍。

核心財務業績

GAAP 業績包含 10.5 億美元的非現金商譽減損費用，主因本季度公司股票交易價格區間觸發減損評估。

業務與營運表現

管理層表示，Concentrix 營收已有超過 50% 來自過去三年開發的業務。公司將這些較新的營收來源分類為：30 億美元與轉型或受 AI 影響的客戶工作相關；13 億美元的淨營收與透過 iX Suite AI 平台進行精簡的傳統服務相關；以及 7 億美元來自風險與合規等較新的高價值服務。

根據管理層說法，這些營收來源預計在 2026 財年將實現約 30% 的年成長。其獲利能力也更高，客戶留存率更是傳統業務的四倍。Concentrix 預期新業務營收將在 2027 財年突破 60 億美元。

涉及 AI 的全新客戶銷售額季增 63%。在四項最大的 iX Suite 簽約案中，有三項來自既有客戶擴大應用場景。第三季期間，Concentrix 將 61 個合作機會以及超過 30,000 名顧問上線至該平台。

該公司仍步入正軌，預計在 2026 財年結束時，來自 iX Suite 的軟體授權年度經常性營收（ARR）將達到約 1.2 億美元。管理層指出，目前約有 13 億美元的營收透過該平台運作，成長速度比傳統營收更快，利潤率也更高。

全體客戶留存率維持在 98%。自 2023 財年年初以來，前五大客戶以及前 100 大客戶中的 90% 以上均已擴展使用新服務。

管理層財測

第四季獲利財測的中位數意味著非 GAAP 營業利益率約為 12.9%，年增 20 個基點。

Concentrix 預計在 2026 財年償還超過 5.5 億美元的總債務，並將淨債務降至約 38 億美元。此展望已納入收購 CastleHill 的資金安排，該收購旨在強化公司的風險與合規服務方案。管理層亦將季度股利提高至每股 0.37 美元，於 11 月發放。

管理層並未發布正式的 2027 財年財測。目前預期新業務成長將可抵銷自動化帶來的大部分（甚至全部）營收影響，利潤率將保持穩定至改善，且下半年成長動能更強。調整後自由現金流預計將超越 2026 財年的水準，進一步支撐總債務再度減少超過 5.5 億美元，並使 2027 財年年底的淨債務降至 33 億美元以下，約當調整後 EBITDA 的 2.2 倍。

風險與關注焦點

兩家超大規模雲端服務商客戶正比先前預期更早終止對某些客戶群的支援。管理層目前預計該過程將在第四季末基本完成，對第四季營收產生較大影響，並在 2027 財年前兩季持續帶來壓力。不過，相同的客戶正在其他服務領域擴大與 Concentrix 的合作。

交付地點的轉移在第三季造成約 3% 的營收逆風。管理層指出，2027 財年的影響可能維持在類似區間，但可能略低。到 2026 財年結束時，預計僅約 10% 至 11% 的營收仍屬於可能轉移至海外的工作範疇，顯示該壓力應會隨時間趨緩。

AI 部署加速也在壓縮部分傳統營收。管理層認為這是一項暫時性逆風，長期來看有助於建立黏著度更高、成長更快且利潤率更高的客戶關係。

分析師問答環節亮點

管理層將 2027 財年成長預期偏重下半年的原因歸因於三項因素：完成兩家超大規模雲端服務商客戶的過渡、消化 AI 自動化加速部署帶來的影響，以及今年晚些時候潛在的產業整合機會。

針對代理型 AI（agentic AI），管理層表示，像是 Meta 的 Muse 與 OpenAI 的 Dots 等方案，代表了產業演進的另一個階段。Concentrix 正協助客戶了解如何使用與支援這些管道，並看好代理型商務基礎設施周邊的商機。

管理層表示，維持中單點數的穩定成長較可能在 2028 財年實現，而非近期的 2027 財年目標。然而，轉向新營收來源的進程比公司早前預期快了大約一至兩個季度。

在利潤率方面，管理層指出，由於產品服務具差異化，較新的營收來源相當穩定且擁有較高的獲利能力。Concentrix 無意低於價格門檻去爭取商品化的傳統業務，並預計新營收與自動化的貢獻增加將支撐 2027 財年的利潤率穩定。

完整法說會逐字稿

完整財報電話會議逐字稿

管理層陳述

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Concentrix Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Elise Brassell, Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Elise, please go ahead.

Elise Brassell

Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to Concentrix' Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. This call is the property of Concentrix and may not be recorded or rebroadcast without the written permission of Concentrix.

This call contains forward-looking statements that address our expected future performance and that, by their nature, address matters that are uncertain. These uncertainties may cause our actual future results to be materially different than those expressed in our forward-looking statements. We do not undertake to update our forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future expectations, events or developments. Please refer to today's earnings release and our most recent filings with the SEC for additional information regarding uncertainties that could affect our future financial results. This includes the risk factors provided in our annual report on our Form 10-K and in our other public filings with the SEC.

Also, during the call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted free cash flow, non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP EPS and constant currency revenue growth. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures is available in the news release and on the company Investor Relations website under Financials.

With me on the call today are Chris Caldwell, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Andre Valentine, our Chief Financial Officer. Chris will provide a summary of our operating performance and growth strategy, and Andre will cover our financial results and business outlook. Then we'll open the call for your questions.

Now I'll turn the call over to Chris.

Christopher Caldwell

Thank you, Elise. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm proud to start this call by recognizing a milestone that speaks to how far Concentrix has come over the last few years since generative AI was released and concerns for the viability of the services industry started. Over the last 3 years, we've steadily expanded the services we offer and invested in deployments of AI technology to evolve our business.

This quarter, we crossed the mark that 50% of our revenue now comes from businesses that we generated in the last 3 years that is very different than our traditional business. These new revenue sources are comprised of: $3 billion of revenue that is coming from new and existing clients that have either gone through heavy transformation or has AI influencing the revenue; $1.3 billion of net revenue resulting from the compression of our traditional services using our iX Suite AI platform; and finally, $700 million of revenue from new high-value services we brought to the market across growing segments like risk and compliance.

Compared to our traditional business, this revenue is growing faster at an expected 30% year-over-year growth rate in fiscal 2026, is more profitable and is stickier with a revenue retention rate 4x higher. We laid this out in more detail in the Q3 investor summary presentation you can find on our website under Investor Relations Events and Presentations.

We're planning more investor outreach in the early part of 2027 to break down how we are looking at our business in more detail. But as an introduction, let me share a few other stats that make me confident and excited about the future. We expect our new business revenues to exceed $6 billion in 2027. As we have talked about, we are seeing the margin progression we've expected in our overall business with a 30 basis point improvement year-on-year in Q3.

We are winning new clients and also evolving our existing clients to new services. As an example, all of our top 5 clients and more than 90% of our top 100 clients have expanded into new services and offerings with us since the start of fiscal 2023. Our average tenure with our clients remains strong at more than 16 years with our top 25 clients and 15 years for our top 50 clients, with a 98% retention rate across our entire client base. Together, these stats show we are building on a solid foundation, and we are pushing the evolution of our business as quickly as possible.

Turning to our third quarter, we can see these same themes reflected. We're continuing to prove that as clients scale AI, we create more opportunities to grow our business, expand profitably and deepen client relationships. We are actively focused on disrupting our own traditional business to take advantage of our momentum.

Our sales pipeline continues to be stable, with net new logo sales involving AI growing 63% quarter-over-quarter. Three of our four largest iX Suite wins this quarter came from clients who are already using the product and are now expanding their use cases because of the results we've helped them achieve. We also brought 61 opportunities, including more than 30,000 advisers live on our iX Suite this quarter, contributing to our margin expansion we delivered in Q3 and the impact to our revenue growth in our traditional business.

Our strategy, vision and execution is getting recognized by the market. We're building an identity for Concentrix as a partner that bridges the gap between AI ambition and operational reality through our New Realities marketing campaign that is resonating with clients, partners and the industry. We were recognized by research firms as a leading partner with multi disciplines and in strategy and vision.

As an example, this month, Everest Group recognized us as a leader in customer experience management with growth in vision and capability across every geography. We earned Best of Category honors from Globee for human-AI teaming and conversational AI. And together with our strategic partner, NiCE, we received an International CX Excellence Award for our work with U.K. technology retailer, Currys.

Our technology-powered consumer experience solution delivered double-digit improvements in customer satisfaction. And just as importantly, we exceeded our profitability guidance for the quarter and expect that momentum to continue into Q4. As a reminder, this marks our second consecutive quarter of record adjusted free cash flow while continuing to reduce leverage.

While AI is expanding our growth opportunities, we're also navigating industry shifts like hyperscaler spend priorities, which will have a larger impact than previously expected on our revenue in the fourth quarter. In addition, shore mix created about a 3% headwind this quarter, as we talked about in our second quarter earnings call.

As clients shift budgets and shores, we continue to use a combination of technology, rightshoring and services to create a balance for growth and long-term profitability in our traditional business. It's important to note that while the business is evolving, we are doing what we can to accelerate our rollout of AI. This causes temporary headwinds that result in [ growing ], stickier and higher-margin revenue and relationships.

While this evolution progresses, we're staying disciplined in how we allocate capital. This quarter, we strengthened our balance sheet by reducing net debt by approximately $211 million. And by the end of our fiscal 2026 year, we expect to have completed $900 million of debt paydown in the last 3 years. This puts us on track to reduce our net leverage to approximately 2.6x at year-end, with further significant debt and leverage reduction planned in 2027 to approximately 2.2x. At the same time, we're continuing to invest in our future by upskilling our people and expanding specialized AI talent to grow new capabilities.

Looking ahead to Q4, we are pushing accelerated deployments of AI, but we remain confident in the growth opportunity of our new business revenues and the overall market opportunities. We are focused on being the partner of choice to help transform operating models with the right mix of automation, technology, global talent and deep domain expertise. We're seeing a healthy, stable pipeline of complex, high-value opportunities where clients are looking for practical solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

While not providing guidance for 2027, we currently expect the growth of our new business revenue to offset much, if not all of our automation efforts in 2027 while driving stable to improved margins across our entire business. We expect the overall business to benefit from consolidation in the industry, with growth momentum to be more in the back half of the year. We expect our free cash generation to be above our 2026 levels.

Before I hand it over to Andre, I want to thank our Gamechangers around the world for their commitment to our clients and to each other. Their expertise and innovation make our success possible. And I'd also like to thank our clients for their trust they place in us as they navigate an increasingly complex business environment.

With that, Andre will take you through more details on our quarterly performance and outlook for the rest of the year. Andre?

Andre Valentine

Well, thank you, Chris, and hello, everyone. I'll begin with a review of our financial results for the third quarter and then discuss our outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2026. In the third quarter, we delivered revenue of approximately $2.45 billion. On a constant currency basis, this represented a decrease of 0.5%, which is slightly below the lower end of the guidance we provided in June. Our revenue for the quarter reflects an acceleration of our deployment of AI for clients, as well as client decisions to reduce support for certain customer sets that we have supported.

Turning to profitability. Our non-GAAP operating income was $309 million, above the high end of the guidance range we provided in June. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $363 million. Our non-GAAP operating income margin was 12.6%, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 14.8%, with both measures up 30 basis points from the third quarter last year. This increase in margins demonstrates our focus on winning the right business, as well as our discipline and execution in aligning our business investments to areas that we have identified for profit-enhancing growth while reducing costs in other areas. This is consistent with our commentary throughout 2026 that we would see year-over-year margin expansion in the second half of the year.

Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $2.92 per share, above the guidance range we provided in March and June and up $0.14 from the third quarter of 2025. Our GAAP results for the third quarter reflect a $1.05 billion noncash goodwill impairment charge triggered by the trading range of our stock during the quarter. Complete reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures are provided in today's earnings release.

Adjusted free cash flow was $218 million in the third quarter, the highest level we've achieved in the third quarter of any year since our spin-off in 2020. We returned approximately $23 million to shareholders in the quarter through our quarterly dividend. Consistent with our commitment to reducing net leverage at the end of the year, we did not repurchase any shares in the quarter.

In the quarter, we reduced total debt by $211 million. Our debt reduction in the quarter included the repayment of $200 million in senior notes that matured in August. At the end of the third quarter, cash and cash equivalents were approximately $256 million. Total debt was approximately $4.375 billion, and net debt was approximately $4.119 billion.

At the end of the quarter, our liquidity was nearly $1.5 billion, including our $1.1 billion undrawn revolving credit facility. Included in our outstanding debt at the end of the quarter is $375 million in term loan borrowings that mature in December 2026. We expect to repay these borrowings using free cash flow generated over the balance of the year and existing sources of liquidity. In total, we expect to repay over $550 million in gross debt this year and reduce net debt to approximately $3.8 billion by the end of the year.

Now I'll turn to our outlook. For the fourth quarter and full year 2026, we expect the following: fourth quarter revenue of $2.41 billion to $2.46 billion. Based on current exchange rates, these expectations assume an approximate 65 basis point negative impact of foreign exchange rates in Q4 compared with the prior year period. The guidance implies a constant currency revenue decrease in the fourth quarter ranging from 3% to 5%. This leads to fiscal year 2026 revenue of $9.827 billion to $9.877 billion based on based on current exchange rates, which we assume an approximate 80 basis point positive impact of foreign exchange rates compared with the prior year. As such, we expect revenue for the full year to decrease by 0.8% to 0.3% on a constant currency basis.

For the fourth quarter, we expect non-GAAP operating income of $310 million to $320 million. This drives full year non-GAAP operating income of $1,206 million to $1,216 million. The midpoint of our profitability expectations for the fourth quarter implies a non-GAAP operating income margin of approximately 12.9%, up 20 basis points from the fourth quarter last year. This is consistent with our expectation all year that we would generate year-over-year margin expansion in the second half of the fiscal year.

This guidance translates into an expected non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.86 to $2.98 for Q4, assuming approximately $63.5 million in interest expense, 61.2 million diluted common shares outstanding and approximately 4.9% of net income attributable to participating securities. For fiscal year 2026, we expect non-GAAP EPS of $10.97 to $11.09, assuming non-GAAP interest expense for the year of $265 million, approximately 61.1 million diluted common shares outstanding and approximately 4.9% of net income attributable to participating securities. The non-GAAP effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 24% for both Q4 and for the full year.

We continue to expect to generate between $630 million and $650 million in adjusted free cash flow this year. With this cash generation, we expect to reduce our outstanding debt balance by over $550 million in the year. This expectation includes the funding of our acquisition of CastleHill to further strengthen our risk and compliance offering in the fourth quarter. We are committed to reducing our net leverage to approximately 2.6x adjusted EBITDA by the end of fiscal 2026.

Looking at cash flow beyond 2026, we expect adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2027 to exceed the amount we generate in 2026. Our confidence in our cash generation in 2027 reflects an expectation of reduced restructuring costs, lower cash interest expense and that our newer growing sources of revenue require less capital expenditures than our traditional business. Our 2027 cash flow expectation would allow us to reduce our gross outstanding debt by over $550 million once again in fiscal 2027 and bring our net debt to below $3.3 billion, or roughly 2.2x adjusted EBITDA, by the end of fiscal 2027. Our confidence in the continued strong cash flow generation of the business is reflected in our increased dividend to $0.37 per share, payable in November.

In summary, our overall demand environment remains stable. We're confident in our ability to drive margin expansion in the business. We're confident in the continued strong free cash flow generation of the business and our plan to pay down debt and reduce net leverage in 2026 and beyond. And we're in a strong competitive position to drive long-term outperformance.

Now operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

分析師問答

Ruplu Bhattacharya

Christopher, on your comment that growth in 2027 is going to be more back half-weighted, what is driving that? What specifically are you seeing in the sales cycle? You had talked about some hyperscale customers who might be reducing some support to their end customers, and you've also talked about offshore moves that could be impacting revenues. So help us kind of understand what is driving that back-end loaded nature of revenues in the next year? And I have a follow-up.

Christopher Caldwell

No problem. Ruplu, it's Chris. So thank you for the question. So two things. Just in terms of what we're seeing right now, just to put some perspective and size what we're looking at, the hyperscale customers we're talking about are 2 specific clients who, as we talked about in our Q2 call, are looking at stopping support for certain client sets. Originally, that was going to impact us in Q3 and flow through until sort of Q2 of next year.

Right now, the decision is really to have that completely finished by the end of Q4. And so you're seeing an oversized impact in Q4 and then clearly some impact in Q1 and Q2 from that. That, again, is only 2 clients. It's very defined. And those clients are actually growing with us in other areas of the business and other services. And so it's, again, a very, very confined part.

The second thing that we've talked about is our increase in AI automation sales that we've been doing. Not only did we have a very strong AI pipeline -- sales pipeline in Q2 which we called out, we also had another one in Q3. And what we talked about in Q2 was the ability to deliver on these AI automations at pace. We've been really happy with how the team has reacted in Q3. And we've been able to deploy those automations much faster than what we originally expected, which I think is a really good thing. And so we're seeing that impact in kind of Q4 and which will also impact into Q1.

And so really, when we talk about back-end growth opportunity in 2027, we're getting through these 2 clients who are looking at removing support for their base. We're catching up on the automation deployments that we're doing, and we're also looking at what we're going to be consolidating within the marketplace as we look at sort of Q3 and Q4, really, Q2, Q3, Q4 in 2027. So that just gives you some of the color around what we're seeing from a growth profile perspective.

Ruplu Bhattacharya

Okay. As a follow-up, can I ask you for your thoughts on Meta's new Muse offering, as well as agentic AI in general? And how are you thinking about your own spend on the iX Suite? And what revenue and margin targets do you have for that?

Christopher Caldwell

For sure. So clearly, Meta announced a Muse product. OpenAI announced a product they call Dots. We're seeing more and more companies looking at this type of technology. And in fact, we built our own technology internally just for ourselves that's very, very similar to this that we're finding productivity gains.

We're helping clients right now understand how to engage with it. We're helping clients understand how to support these channels. And we do see agentic shopping becoming more and more prevalent in the marketplace and see opportunities for us to grow with that, supporting our clients, supporting this infrastructure. And so we just see it as part of the evolution of the business.

In terms of how we're thinking about spending money on our iX Suite, as we've talked about, we are benefiting from some of the ability to lower our cost base with AI internally on our development. And so we brought down our expenditures on our iX Suite. We're seeing the growth that we've talked about. We've talked about exiting 2026 with an ARR of just kind of software licensing around $120 million. We're on pace to do that.

And then what we've also talked about is how it influences revenue that runs through this platform. And that was the number that I called out of the $1.3 billion that's running through our platform, which, as we've talked about before, is growing faster than our traditional revenue because we're getting optimized work out of it, and it's at a higher profit margin out of it. And so we expect that margin profile to continue to build up. And at some point, at critical mass, we expect iX Hero to have effectively SaaS-type margins, but that's a fair bit away.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research.

Vincent Colicchio

Yes, Chris, congrats on the milestone that you reached. Is there a way to think about what level you need to reach before you can consistently achieve solid growth, say, in the mid-single digits?

Christopher Caldwell

Yes, that's a great question. So Vince, we expected to reach this 50% milestone really at the end of Q4, maybe middle of Q1. And so we've moved it forward 1.5 quarters, which is fantastic from a momentum perspective.

Our belief is that we need a couple more quarters to continue to kind of drive automation in our traditional business. We believe that there's some consolidation that happens. But if you -- and again, not guiding for 2027. If you kind of read between the lines on 2027, we expect that, that momentum is not really going to happen until the back half of the year. So that's probably more a 2028 comment. But again, we're moving a couple of quarters faster than we expected right now. So hopefully, we can maintain that momentum.

Vincent Colicchio

And as a follow-up, are you able to articulate how large a headwind you'll see from offshoring in fiscal '27?

Andre Valentine

Yes. We're not really guiding yet to fiscal '27, Vince, but we'll provide some color on it. So we have talked about this year, seeing that accelerate to being about a 3-point headwind on growth for us. We see it in that same sort of range. We don't see it being higher, but possibly a touch lower. But so included in what we're seeing right now is our revenue expectations for next year, I probably think it's right in that same range.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jacob Haggarty with Robert W. Baird & Co Inc.

Jacob Haggarty

So just thinking about the revenue headwind from offshoring, does that start to abate as you get more and more AI revenues? Do people bring some of that work back onshore because it's AI-assisted and they're getting cost benefits there? Or how do you kind of see that evolving over time?

Andre Valentine

Jacob, I'm really glad you asked that question because it was actually kind of the second part of the answer to Vince's question that I didn't give. We do see it abating over time, but maybe not for the reason that you indicated so much as -- we're really getting to the point where we only, as we exit this year, have 10%, 11% of revenue that we see is as kind of in the pool of stuff that is likely over time to be movable offshore. So we do see it abating over time more because there's just not that much of it left to move as opposed to anything else. Chris, any impact from the AI playing any role there or not?

Christopher Caldwell

Yes, Jacob, we're not really seeing that. We're seeing clients who are moving the work. And the belief is that as we put an AI to it, they'll continue to leave it where it resides versus pulling it back into a higher-cost region.

Jacob Haggarty

No, that totally makes sense. And then can you just talk maybe about your confidence in margin stability, especially as we go into F 2027 and maybe even beyond?

Christopher Caldwell

So on the newer revenue that we talked about that we're just kind of crossing the 50% mark on, the margins are actually very stable. And it's competitive, but because we're bringing unique offerings to it, it's at an elevated level. Where we kind of look at margin pressure, for lack of a better term, is more of the traditional business that might be commoditized.

And we will only go to a certain price point. We're not going to chase price in that type of the business. And so our belief is that as we continue to add more and more of the new revenues, as we continue to automate more and more of our traditional revenues that we've got that margin stability, as we talked about in the prepared remarks, certainly in 2027.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.