EPAM Systems, Inc.

EPAM Systems, Inc. is an American digital engineering and IT services company that designs, builds, and modernizes enterprise software for global clients, generating $5.46 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1993 by Arkadiy Dobkin with roots in Belarus and a delivery model anchored in Central and Eastern Europe, EPAM has grown into a 62,750-person organization listed on the NYSE, with six industry verticals, a deepening AI-native services practice, and a balance sheet carrying over $1.1 billion in net cash.

This is a company whose fate is bound up in two forces that pull in opposite directions. On one side, the widening gap between rapidly advancing AI capabilities and enterprise ability to adopt them safely — what CEO Balazs Fejes calls "the build opportunity of our lifetime" — creates a structural demand tailwind for a firm whose engineering DNA spans three decades. On the other, EPAM's delivery footprint sits squarely on geopolitical fault lines: roughly 14,100 of its people work in Ukraine and Belarus, a concentration that has already cost the company revenue, margin, and clients, and that any escalation could cost more. The file turns on whether the AI build cycle lifts EPAM fast enough to outrun the geography risk embedded in its cost structure — and whether the stock, at roughly 14 times trailing earnings after a 25% decline from its March 2026 highs, is pricing that risk appropriately or overpricing it.

The investment case, stripped to its essentials: EPAM is a high-quality engineering franchise trading at IT services trough multiples, buying back 3–4% of its shares annually, sitting on net cash, and riding a genuine AI-driven demand cycle — but you have to be comfortable owning it through headlines about Eastern Europe. That trade-off is the whole game.