Item 1A. Risk Factors
ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
In addition to the other information set forth in this report, you should carefully consider the factors discussed in Item 1A, Risk Factors, in our 2019 Annual Report on Form 10-K , which could materially affect our business, financial condition or future results. In addition to the risk factors identified in our 2019 Annual Report, please consider the following additional Risk Factors.
Our business is adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and it may result in material adverse impact on our operations and financial condition.
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. Within weeks of this announcement, travel bans, the state of emergency, quarantines, lockdowns, “shelter in place” orders, and business restrictions and shutdowns were issued in most countries where TTEC does business. While we are unable to accurately predict the full impact that COVID-19 pandemic will have on our results from operations, financial condition, liquidity and cash flows due to numerous uncertainties, including the duration and severity of the pandemic and its containment measures, our compliance with these measures has impacted our day-to-day operations and disrupted our business.
We have experienced temporary suspension of operations in some of our TTEC Engage customer experience delivery sites as a result of COVID-19 pandemic and related government-mandated restrictions. To support the health and well-being of our employees and communities and to provide a stable service delivery platform to our clients, we made a business decision to transition as many employees as was reasonably possible to our work from home environment between March and April 2020. Such large-scale rapid transition resulted in certain inefficiencies, additional costs unlikely to be recouped from our clients, and heightened cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and fraud risks. Our inability to manage these risk and costs effectively could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.
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The social distancing rules and other government mandates that continue during the sustained pandemic are likely to impact the structure and configuration of large-scale facilities, like our customer experience delivery centers, where employees work in close proximity. These new regulatory requirements are forcing TTEC to make investments to reconfigure our existing customer experience centers and to accept lower capacity utilization than the utilization priced under our multi-year contracts. If we are unable to renegotiate our contracts to recoup these additional costs, manage these costs by continuing to maintain a large work at home delivery platform, or adjust our cost structure to absorb them, our margins and profitability will be impacted and will result in adverse impact on our results of operations.
The COVID-19 pandemic and government-mandated restrictions on business adopted to contain it, is resulting in what is likely to be an extended global economic downturn, which could affect demand for our services and impact our results of operations and financial condition, even after the pandemic is contained and the business restrictions and “shelter in place” orders are lifted.
Although COVID-19 pandemic disruptions did not have a material adverse impact on our financial results for the first two quarters of fiscal 2020, there can be no assurances that we will not experience such impacts through the end of 2020 and beyond. Due to the evolving and highly uncertain nature of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot predict at this time the full extent to which the pandemic will adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition, which will depend on many factors that are not known at this time.
The operations of some of our clients are adversely impacted by COVID-19 pandemic and it may have a material adverse impact on our business.
The operations of some of our clients, especially our clients in travel, hospitality, retail and automotive industries, have been materially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and government restrictions on travel and people’s mobility around the globe. Approximately 20% of our revenue for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 was generated from the clients in these affected industries. On-going travel restrictions and large-scale unemployment that resulted from government-mandated restrictions on businesses around the globe is likely to continue to affect certain of our clients and their business volumes through the end of 2020 and beyond. While we are unable to predict the magnitude of such impact on our operations at this time and to what extent this impact may be offset by other business that we are able to secure due to a shift in our clients’ and their consumers’ buying preferences during and in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of the business from the impacted clients may materially impair our operating results and financial condition. We may also experience payment defaults or bankruptcy of some of our clients, which could also have a material adverse effect our financial condition and results of operation.
Our ability to recruit, hire, and retain qualified employees at a price point acceptable to our clients may be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the US government pandemic recovery measures such as enhanced unemployment benefits.
Our business is labor intensive and our ability to recruit and hire employees with the right skills, at the right price point is critical to meeting our contractual commitments and attaining our growth objective. We sign multi-year client contracts that are priced based on prevailing labor rates in jurisdictions where we deliver services. The inability of some of our employees in some parts of the world to work from home resulted in the need to transition some of our service delivery to other jurisdictions where work from home is easier to facilitate, which further increases our need to rapidly hire qualified employees. The recent adoption of various pandemic recovery measures by the U.S. and other governments in jurisdictions where we hire employees is aimed at supporting citizens who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 pandemic. Such individuals may be attractive employment prospects for TTEC, but COVID-19 enhanced unemployment benefits in some jurisdictions where we hire may exceed local prevailing wages and may make it more difficult for us to hire a sufficient number of employees to support our contractual commitments or may result in higher costs, lower contract profitability, higher turnover and reduced operational efficiencies, which could, in the aggregate, have a material adverse impact on our results of operations.
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To the extent the COVID-19 pandemic or any worsening of the global business and economic environment as a result of the pandemic or government actions to contain it adversely affects our business and financial results, it may also have the effect of heightening or exacerbating many of the other risks described in Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors,” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for our fiscal year ended December 31, 2019, such as the risk factors relating to our strategy execution, cyber security of our information systems, consolidation activities being undertaken by our clients, geographic concentration of our operations in jurisdictions ill prepared to manage large scale health crisis and pandemics, our ability to comply with laws and regulations that impact our business, the reliability of our information technology infrastructure and our ability to delivery uninterrupted service to our clients; our clients’ ability to forecast demand for our services accurately; our ability to expand and maintain our customer experience delivery centers in offshore jurisdictions with stable wage rates, risks generally associated with international business operations, and the impact of the limited market float of our stock and potential volatility of our stock price resulting therefrom.
Text extracted from the filing as submitted to EDGAR. Formatting, tables and exhibits are simplified for reading; the original document is authoritative for anything you rely on.