The top five customers accounted for 16.6% of revenues, similar to the previous year. The company remains committed to diversifying its client base and expects revenue concentration to decrease over the long term.

Acquisitions contributed to revenue growth in certain segments, but the company acknowledges the risks associated with integrating acquired companies, including potential disruptions to ongoing business and the assumption of unknown liabilities.

The company is rebalancing its geographic concentrations due to the war in Ukraine, which has had a material adverse effect on business, customers, service delivery, and financial results. The company has shifted portions of its work occurring in the region to other countries, and may continue to restrict our ability to engage in certain projects or with certain customers.

The company initiated a Cost Optimization Program to streamline operations and optimize corporate functions, including workforce reduction and closure of underutilized facilities. This program is expected to be completed by the end of the first half of 2024.

The company endeavors to recruit for careers, not for short-term projects, and actively foster feedback from employees so the EPAM employee experience can improve. The voluntary attrition rate was 8.6% in 2023.

The company invests significant resources in training and developing employees through learning and development programs. Employees consumed 2.6 million learning hours in 2023.

The company acknowledges that the war in Ukraine has had and could continue to have a material adverse effect on its business, customers, service delivery, and financial results, including potential cyberattacks and disruptions to service delivery.

The company has experienced uneven growth and expansion of its business over the past several years. Rapid growth followed by decreased demand places significant strain on management and infrastructure.

Competition for highly skilled professionals has intensified in the markets where the company operates, and the company may experience significant employee turnover rates due to such competition. Higher wage expectations driven by wage inflation could also create challenges for recruiting efforts.

The company faces competition from multiple market participants such as other global technology solutions providers, specialized consulting firms, boutique digital companies and outsourcing companies based primarily in specific geographies with lower cost labor.

The company's ability to adapt to rapidly changing technologies, methodologies and evolving industry standards is critical to meeting changing customer needs.

The company's services are marketed to customers and prospective customers based on a number of factors, including reputation. The corporate reputation is a significant factor in customers' evaluation of whether to engage the company's services.

The company's global delivery model and centralized support functions create a delivery base whereby applications, tools, methodologies and infrastructure allow the company to seamlessly deliver services and solutions from global delivery centers to global customers.

For the years ended December 31, 2023, 2022 and 2021, the utilization rates of the company's delivery professionals were approximately 74.3%, 75.8%, and 78.7%, respectively.

Cost of revenues (exclusive of depreciation and amortization) was $3.257 billion, representing a decrease of 0.9% from $3.287 billion reported last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in compensation costs, other than stock-based compensation expense, resulting from a reduction in variable compensation expense attributable to a lower level of financial performance for the year.

The company believes that its focus on complex and innovative software product development solutions, its technical employee base, and its development and continuous improvement in process methodologies, applications and tools position it well to compete effectively in the future.

The company is increasingly incorporating AI, and particularly generative AI, into its products, services, and business, both due to customer demand and because it expects that integrating generative AI into its services is required to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

The company is continuously investing in systems, applications, tools and infrastructure to manage all aspects of the global delivery process in order to manage quality and information security risks, while providing control and visibility across all project lifecycle stages both internally and to customers.

On February 13, 2023, the Board of Directors authorized a repurchase program for up to $500.0 million of the company's outstanding common stock. EPAM may repurchase shares of its common stock on a discretionary basis from time to time through open market purchases, privately negotiated transactions or other means.

The company's primary uses of cash from investing activities consist of purchases of computer hardware, software and office equipment, as well as investments into office buildings and new businesses.

The company has not declared or paid any cash dividends on its common stock and currently does not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Instead, it intends to retain all available funds and any future earnings for use in the operation and expansion of our business, and to repurchase our common stock.

The company is committed to integrating positive social, environmental and ethical practices into its business operations, corporate governance, and strategy.

Through the company's focused efforts in the areas of Education, Environment, and Community, it is committed to sharing the expertise and attributes of its highly skilled global workforce to effectively support the needs of, and positively add to the world at large and the communities where we work and live.

The company believes responsible stewardship of the environment is critical, and we take this responsibility seriously. We continually strive to improve our environmental performance through implementation of sustainable development and environmental practices including recycling and upcycling electronics and computers, designing and releasing a carbon footprint calculator to our employees and the general public, and building new offices according to the conservation standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system.

Revenues have been negatively impacted by reduced demand for our services as our customers took action to reduce spending, in light of the uncertain economic environment.

The market for the company's services is highly competitive, and the company expects competition to persist and intensify. It faces competition from offshore IT services providers in other outsourcing destinations with low wage costs, as well as competition from large, global consulting and outsourcing firms and in-house IT departments of large corporations.

The company's global operations require it to comply with a wide variety of foreign laws and regulations, trade and foreign exchange restrictions, sanctions, inflation, unstable civil, political and military situations, labor issues, and legal systems that make it more difficult to enforce intellectual property, contractual, or corporate rights.