Indiamart Intermesh Limited (INDIAMART) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Abhijit Vikram, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of India Mart Intermesh Limited, I welcome you all to the company's quarter four and FY2026 earnings webinar. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Dinesh Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Vijesh Agarwal, full-time director, Mr. Jitim Diman, chief financial officer, and Mr. Prateek Chandra, chief strategy officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve risk and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number 3 of the earnings presentation for the detailed disclaimer. Now, I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Dinesh Agarwal for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Thank you, Abhij. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to India Mart's Quarter 4 and FY26 earnings webinar. We have circulated our earnings presentation, which is available on our website as well as stock exchange websites. We are sure you would have gone through the presentation, and we would be happy to take any questions afterwards. India Mart has delivered consolidated revenue from operations of Rs. 404 crores in the quarter 4 and Rs. 1569 crores in the full year, representing an year-on-year growth of about 14% and 13% respectively. Consolidated collections from customer grew to 595 crores in Q4 and 1857 crores in FY26, representing a year-on-year growth of 10% and 14% respectively. Consolidated deferred revenue grew to Rs. 1965 crores, representing Y-on-Y growth of 17%. In quarter 4, unique business inquiries were about 27 million. In quarter 6, total number of paying suppliers increased by 3,200 to 2,20,000, while the quarter 4 saw a little decline of 1,200. This decrease can primarily be attributed to moderation and gross addition due to price increase we implemented in the silver subscription tier at the end of the second quarter. Our platinum and gold customer, which constitute approximately 50% of our customer base and more than 75% of revenue, continue to have good upsell and retention rate. On the platform side, we continue to take initiatives to improve the quality of inquiries by capturing relevant and more product specification. We are now delivering inquiries which are having higher intent and relevance to sellers. In addition to the seller side verification, we are now starting to do more buyer side verification as well so as to increase the overall trust in the platform. We also continue moving forward our AI journey by embedding AI capability across our platforms. By combining three decades of our proprietary data with next generation intelligence, we are making the discovery process much more precise and seamless for both buyers and sellers. Currently, AI is driving multiple parts of our ecosystem, and it is helping us improve the product quality and reinforcing a deeply trusted marketplace. We remain committed to ensuring that platform remains a reliable growth partner for businesses in a digital first world. Now, I will hand over the call to Bridgesh to update about Busy InfoTech. Thank you, and over to you, Bridgesh.

Hi, good evening, everyone. In Q4, Busy has done a billing of 45 crores, whereas in F526, in total, we did 170 crores of billing. The normalized rate of growth that we've had year on year, which excludes the impact of the change in the payout structure that we had introduced, is 24% and 43% respectively. The revenue from operations in Q4 were 34 crores, whereas for full year, this was at 119 crores. And the normalized growth rates of 53% and 44% respectively. The deferred revenue was at 124 crores, and this represents normalized growth of 44% year-on-year. The cash flow from operations in Q4 was 10 crores, whereas for the entire year, this was at about 49 crores for us. During the quarter, we also sold 11,000 new licenses, and this takes the total count of licenses sold to 4,42,000. The new licenses sold during the entire We continue to invest in improving the overall experience of the product. We are also now working upon adding AI-led features in the Busy product itself. And all of this should help us grow our sales further. This should lay the foundation for a sustained high growth at Busy for years to come. Now, with this, I'll request Dithing to take over and discuss the financial performance of the business.

Yeah, thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you through the financial performance for the quarter and year-ending March 2026. Consolidated collection from customers was 595 crores in the quarter and rupees 1857 crore on full-year basis. This represents buy-in-back growth of 10% and 14% respectively. India Watt's standard on collection from customer for the quarter was 546 crore and 1674 crore on full year basis, registering Y&Y growth of 8% and 10% respectively. Consolidated deferred revenue stood at 1965 crore, an increase of 17% on Y&Y basis. Consolidated revenue for operations was 404 crore for the quarter and 1569 crore for the full year basis, resisting Y&Y growth of 14% and 13%. Consolidated EBITDA was 133 crore for the quarter and 530 crore for the full year, representing margin of 33 and 34% respectively. In quarter 4, consolidated other income for the quarter stood at negative 34 crore. This was primarily driven by mark-to-mark losses on our treasury portfolio resulting from a significant increase in bond yields during the quarter. We view this as notional losses which would reverse on a long-term basis. Other income stood at 204 crore for the full-year basis. Consequently, consolidated net profit for the quarter was 50 crore and 475 crore for F526. Consolidated cash generation from operations was 290 crore for the quarter and 694 crore for F526. Consolidated cash and treasury balance should add 3280 to 280 crores as on March 31st, 2026. And finally, Board of Directors has recommended a total dividend of 60 rupees, which includes final dividend of 30 rupees and a special dividend of another 30 rupees. This is subject to approval of shareholders. Thank you very much. And now we are ready to take any questions.

We will now begin the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question to the panelists, kindly raise your hand and allow camera and microphone access. Alternatively, you may Write your question in the chat menu and we will revert on it. Please rest it to two questions so that we may be able to address questions from all participants. We will wait for a few seconds while the question queue assembles.

First question is from the line of Vivekanand from Ambit Capital. Vivekanand, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Vivekanand, you are not audible.

Hello, am I audible? Yeah, yes, you are audible.

Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Two questions. So the first one is on the gross ads. Thanks for the opening comments where you mentioned about the moderation in gross ads. So Dinesh, if you can just update us on the process changes that you were initiating in improving the quality of gross ads, where do you stand in the journey? And by when can we expect the business to go back to, say, a net ad trajectory of maybe 5% to 6% at least on an annual basis? That is question one. And secondly, if you can give us an update on the churn metrics across the various tiers in the platform and where they stand now versus last year on an annual basis, that would be great.

Yeah, so let me handle the churn rate first. As I've been repeating quarter on quarter, gold and platinum continue to do healthy business with the monthly churn rates in the platinum segment being much lesser than 1% and in the gold segment anywhere 1 to 1.5%. So on overall basis about approximately 1% per month. While on the silver annual, they are about 4% and the silver monthly, they are about 7%. There is not much of a change that is there in each one of them. Now, coming to the gross ad quality and quantity, we continue to put levers where we can apply better quality of suppliers by way of GST verification, by way of turnover qualification, by way of any kind of a third-party signals that we can get. But in terms of the quantity, as I said, there is certain decrease in the gross ads because of the pricing pressure. It took longer than we expected, especially in the March when the war also broke out. Otherwise, generally, March has a better February and March typically do a better job, which could not have happened. So, hopefully, this is going to continue a little longer with the pain in the market. In terms of net ads, I think until and unless the churn improves, no amount of gross ads can actually do that. So, we will continue to have no guidance on the net ads until we have multiple quarters of continual success. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks for the explanation. Just one follow-up. How much of the current quarters of muted gross addition would you attribute to the war that broke out maybe end of February? And how much would you attribute to, let's say, the price

So in terms of the about 1,200 odd customers decrease, I think if there was no war, we could have been probably 2,000 customers positive. So that gives you the entire quarter, maybe 3,000. And out of that, I would say 1,000, 1,500 could be because of the war, 1,000, 1,500 could have been because of the war.

Thank you, Vikant. Participants are requested to raise hand if they wanted to ask question to management. Next question is from the line of Anmol Gurd from Dam Capital. Anmol, please mute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of things that I wanted to understand. Firstly, have you thought about any value-added services that we want to provide to our platform to which we can charge higher prices and in turn could increase our through that aspect?

Yeah, so while we don't necessarily report value-added services as part of the financials or that, when we say platinum customers and platinum customers, all of it is value-added only. And platinum customers, typically, the top 10% customers that you see doing 50% of their revenue, they are all value-added services, whether while search targeting, whether location targeting, these are not typical subscription businesses. However, they are sold in the similar manner as yearly subscription and multi-year subscription, sometimes even quarterly and six-monthly subscription. Now, coming to the other kind of value-added services, which are not related to the access to market. So, for example, lead manager professional version or where you have a WhatsApp kind of an integration. So, that contributes to some value-added revenue. There are a few other planned items on the lead management side that we put, But they are not significant yet that that can be reported as a separate line items. Export again, we started sometime around 2020, become a separate business altogether with almost, you know, 50-60 crore rupees of collections. It was always there, even when we were purely domestic, maybe 20-25 crores, but now it has become 60-70 crores of business. And you can look at our export-oriented website at export.indiamart.com. So, that's there. We continue to maintain certain value-added experiments, which are towards logistics and credit facilitation. But those are still remain very, very pilot and experimental and not yet have resulted into anything substantial. Hopefully, that offers your answers your question.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that, sir. And secondly, just from a holistic point of view, I wanted to understand the market sizing right now. So according to you, how many in India would be currently GST-registered MSMEs and currently both non-paid and paid included? How many total MSMEs would be there on our platform as an overall basis?

Yeah. So, in total, 1.6 crore GST-registered businesses, typically about 5% churn in GST-registered businesses at the GST registration, cancellation, suspension that you will see. You can verify this data from the 7 years of GST and 6 years of GST kind of a publication that happens on the official GST website. They also publish data by way of turnover and by way of thing. Approximately 50% of them are at a lower turnover, less than 40 lakh rupees turnover, and rest of them are higher. About 85% of them are proprietorship, rest of them are company and partnership in equal numbers. Out of them, at our Indiamart level, when we look at the seller side of it, almost 50 lakh businesses with GST identified are registered with their own OTP of the common email on Indiamart. Out of that, about half of them or little over half of them have now been verified with the GST, where they are the true owners of that GST number, not only with the matchmaking number. Out of that, we now have 2,20,000 customers which are live online. In our lifetime, I think we would have brushed shoulders with more than 5,000,000 customers in the past 4-5 years or so.

So, sir, in accordance to that, we have almost 40%, if I consider 16 million total GST registered MSMEs. We have almost, you said, 50 lakh MSMEs which are there on the platform, either paid or non-paid. So, almost 30-35-40% of the total MSMEs is what we have covered. Do you think that right now with this number, we have largely penetrated the market on overall basis?

Yeah, on the free basis, I would say out of the out of the serviceable, obtainable instead of Sam and so on. I guess we would have gotten to 50% kind of a number. So any incremental benefit coming from there. So, on the variety of products that are available, on the variety of suppliers that are available on India Mart, I think from the buyer's perspective, they fulfill almost 80% of the needs which are required by the buyer, whether any particular unique product or unique location. So, almost 80% of the products and location you will be able to find in India Mart. So, from that perspective, yes, there is a limited headroom on the increasing more supply in order to get a better experience. However, now there are multiple levers that open up in terms of increasing the trust, in terms of increasing the discoverability, in terms of increasing the better digitization and accurate digitization of those products. So, there are many levers where supply itself can be improved multiple times. However, just by doing multiple numbers of the sellers, I don't think it is going to add incrementally very high value to the customers.

So, sir, if the volume growth from a SAM perspective is now limited, the other part to grow is through realization and through value-added services. But from that perspective as well, we haven't seen much happening over there. So from going ahead perspective, should we expect that the platform growth would largely come from increase in the pricing prices that we see, given that as silver monthly customers or silver annual customers churn persist, in that case, eventually the upgradation towards gold and platinum will also somewhere slow down. So, how do you think that the growth going ahead in the business would be from that perspective?

You can see, you know, out of our total growth number, when we were at upwards of 20%, half of that came from ARCO growth and half of that came from customer growth over a longer period of time. Currently, since the customer growth is hardly 1%, 2%, so most of the growth of ARPU growth is coming at 9%. I think until we fix the supplier growth, either directly acquiring customers through silver and retaining them and upgrading them to golden platinum or directly acquiring golden platinum, I would say that there is enough headroom. So, for example, N688.com in China typically has about a million paying suppliers. However, they continue to grow their revenue at 25% year on year with the R2 side of it. We have only recently started, last two, three years, started monetizing the differential category on a differential basis and location on a differential basis. There is a lot of optimization that can be done over the period by way of better demand supply curation and making sure that between us and supplier and buyer, there is a better distribution of margins for each one of them. So, I guess ARPU will continue. We continue to think that it is too early to completely focus on the ARPU side. However, given the organization size, I think now that we have matured enough organization with matured enough brand and cash balance, I think why should we not be looking at multiple ways of monetizing, whether it is through credit or whether it is through cash. Value-added services. So, you are right, but currently, let us, what you are thinking in terms of ARPU and paying supplier as the main growth operator remains the similar range as you can see. So, we'll continue to aim for a double-digit growth in the near term. As we continue to do multiple experiments on the value-added services as well as on the credit facilitation, until something becomes meaningful enough, Uh, the reality is that, uh, 10% ARPU and 10% dependent on paying supply growth is, uh, there.

And sir, uh, lastly, uh, just wanted to, uh, understand that, have we seen any impact in traffic on the platform, uh, coming from, uh, Google or direct, uh, on the platform because of a new chat based AI platforms, which might be used for, you know, discovery related aspects.

Sorry, I missed your question. Can you please repeat that again?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So basically, what I am asking is that, have you seen any impact on the traffic on the platform, which is coming directly from Google or direct on the platform because of, you know, new chat-based AI platforms, which might be used for discovery-related kind of aspects?

I don't know if there are significant impact started to happen on our kind of website today. So, in terms of our traffic, there is so much of bot traffic, and there is so much of real traffic, and there is so much of agentic traffic. So, we stopped reporting on the traffic side of it. But when we look at the unique business inquiries and all these, they are typically not yet declining any time soon. So, I can't say that there is an impact on B2B kind of inquiry have reached to the chat GPTs. I think ChatGPTs are still limited to more consumer-facing, entertainment, infotainment, but I don't think they are yet very, very good at the P2P kind of queries.

Sure, sir. Thank you so much for answering your question.

Thank you, Anmul. Next question is from the line of Nikhil Chaudhary from Nuwama. Nikhil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Hi, thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on unique business inquiries. This quarter, it declined 1%. Last quarter, also, there was a decline, and I think management gave commentary that due to low working days and more holidays, there were less spent, and that led to decline last quarter. But more important point is that last two quarter, it's been 27-28 million. And even last year, for most of the quarter in FY25, out of three out of four quarter, it was 27-28 million. So despite of us investing so much on performance marketing, why this number is not inching up?

Yeah, thank you very much. This is a very good question. So, if you really see the quarter three, quarter two is typically a softer quarter on unique business inquiry. But now, given the quarter four, why it is slower? Sure. So, few experiments that we are doing in the last three, four months is all these while we have been trying to improve the trust of the platform by putting more verification on the seller side. We started with mobile verification, email verification, GST matchmaking, and now GST verification, bank account verification, and things like that. However, the platform is still totally free for buyers to come and visit, and also you can put in any phone number and start interacting with the platform. Now, as part of our overall trusted ecosystem process, first thing was that we started to put about two years ago, we started to put multiple questions when you were asking for inquiry, and if you did not submit those questions, you still had to skip, skip, skip, so that we know that at least you have put in three times skip or three times Those questions. So, that increased the intent of the buyer that whether he wanted to actually put in the inquiry for that particular product or he was just looking around. Now, we are going ahead and also saying that if you are, you can maybe make one inquiry or two inquiry without verifying yourself. But if you are trying to make multiple inquiries, please verify your phone number through an OTP, please verify your email ID, please verify yourself. So, we are starting to do a more buyer verification also, and that is leading to probably 1% of drop in the conversion from traffic to this. So, this is going to be a little bit of a challenge in the medium term.

Got it, sir. But again, like you highlighted, just 1% drop in conversion. Even then, it means the overall increase is very limited. That was the point. And second, if possible, you can quantify the mix, how many of these queries you have acquired to performance marketing, if possible, and rest, which are organic.

I don't think I would be able to give you that number because performance marketing is very new and we continue to do a lot of experiment because which categories we want to put more budget, which categories we want to put less budget. So we continue to do a lot of experimentation on that side. Until we reach a 10 crore rupees per quarter continuous number, I won't be able to give you how much traffic is coming through organic search, how much traffic is coming through. So direct how much traffic is coming through Affiliate and how much traffic is coming through AdWord or Facebook. So there are now multiple channels through which the traffic comes, and I can't provide you, you know, a split on each one of them.

Got it, sir. Just last one on Grossad... Yeah, sure, sure.

Yeah, please just make it the last query.

Yeah, last one. The last one on gross addition side, I think two quarters back, you mentioned that when we increase our prices in August, September, that generally it takes two quarters for gross addition to normalize. So are we seeing that to happen, especially in the month of April? If not, when can we expect that?

Yeah, as I said, I have already answered that question in response to Anmolgarh or in response to Vivekanan. So, I think it is taking much longer given the geopolitical as well as the pricing because SMEs are really going through a lot of pain right now. So, and this price increase and our sales process and the silver share, elevated silver share is not helping, but we are not going back on pricing.

Got it, sir. Thanks a lot. Good luck for coming, Piretti. Thank you.

Yeah, so the participants are requested to stick to one or two questions so that everyone can get a chance to ask questions. And it's preferable if both the questions can be asked at one go, please. Yeah, Vikas, please continue.

Sure. So, next question is from the line of Hrithvik Agarwar from 3P Investments. Hrithvik, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Hey, hi. Thank you for the opportunity. Am I audible? Yes, you're audible. Yeah. Hey, hi. So, I just wanted, I just had one question. You implemented some price hike in Q2, Q3. Just wanted to understand why are we not seeing an uptick in ARPU? Not just on a whole level, but also on the silver, you know, membership subscribers. The ARPU has been pretty much flat. Any reason, any stress there?

We are seeing uptick in ARPU because here you are seeing a mixed ARPU of everybody together. So you will see ARPU uptick in time to come because it is only applied to new subscribers signing up. Not the entire base, an entire base over a period of time. So, every price hike takes one, two, three years. So, any price hike that we would have taken one year ago in the trust seal or two years ago in the start supplier or two years ago in the silver is still in the rolling out phase. So, both the ARPUs are growing consistently, whether it is the top 10% ARPU or whether it is the… And if you see the ARPU, you know, average collection per user, that will give you some better understanding because ARPU is the revenue per user and revenue itself is 18-month moving average. So, that is why you are not seeing immediate uptick.

Understood, understood. So, one more question. Assuming that we have all the pressures gone, where do you see the number of suppliers, the paid suppliers number can rise up to? Any directional sense, any way we can grow? How are you seeing it internally basically?

I think I've answered that question. 1688 does about a million sellers. Jezal does about half a million sellers. We do about quarter million sellers. We still feel that there is at least 2x more opportunity from here on. And we need to find a better, further improved product market fit for higher frequency of repeat buyers so that we are able to retain these sellers at the silver level.

Got it. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Abhishek Banerjee from ICICI Securities. Abhishek, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for your time. Sir, a couple of questions from Brian. This is the first time that I can kind of recall that there is a dialogue. Why is it not clear?

Either you are moving, so I can't make out. Can you hear me now? No, I can hear you, but once you speak the entire sentence, I can't make out what you're saying.

Oh, sure. Maybe you can come a little closer to the mic.

Yeah, yeah, trying. So this is the first time that we are seeing that registered buyers and your active buyers, since I was in, Racial bias is up 9% worldwide, and active bias is actually down 10% worldwide. Is there any analysis that you have done, kind of gives you an answer why this is happening, but is there a question of relevance coming down? And the second one is, we have often spoken about the purchase loop, right? When you do a net ad improvement and your buyers also kind of keep improving. Now, given we are seeing a negative trend in both, is that something that worries you of falling into a vicious trading cycle?

I could only make out the registered buyer versus active buyer. So registered buyers, there are a lot of agent traffic nowadays coming and we continue to deploy armors and other ways. So that, and that is why we started doing more OTP verification so that people writing simple agents to do multiple phone numbers to simply scrape the website or simply send one inquiry or read the data. So that is why registered users is also becoming difficult. I could not make out what you said in the second question.

I was talking about the virtuous loop that we used to talk about when our net additions were going up steadily and active buyers were also going up. Now that both are in a decline, is there a worry of falling into a vicious loop?

Yes, there is definitely a worry of falling into the vicious loop because that virtuous cycle where the suppliers were increasing And buyers were increasing. Suppliers, we were increasing and buyers were increasing because the total internet size was increasing. Now, it has to increase, the buyers have to come more frequently, and supply side has to become more trustable and more, you know, better. So, I think that's where we have hit a little bit of a saturation point, but we are trying our best to find out what will keep bringing the buyers with a better frequency and what will keep the sellers with a better retention. So, I think this is a typical S-curve that you find. It's the growth consolidation, growth consolidation, growth consolidation, and in every growth side of it, you will find that this virtuous cycle keeps on increasing and improving better and better and better. But every time you hit the plateau side of the S-curve, you need to further scratch the surface to find even better product market fit. Sometimes it is the… So, if I can go back in time, earlier we were purely, purely supplier name and phone number and email ID listing, and then we became a product listing, then we became a product with price listing, then we became product with price and specification listing, Then we became product with price and specification and photos and videos and reviews listing. So I think every time we improve the supply side better, and similarly, the verified self-supplier base and then the GST supplier base, I think we need to find one such more lever for us to go to the second, I mean, nth layer of the S-curve, and that is where we are.

I understand. And so just one last question. This is on cash distribution. We are obviously a cash pitch company and we generate quite a decent amount of cash. Are you actually thinking about changing the payout ratio or doing some sort of larger dividend or something on those lines?

So, Abhishek, thanks for the question. So, we have been pretty consistent in distributing the capital back in the last, if you see in the last three, four years, we have distributed about 40 to 60% of the cash which we have generated. As per the approval from the board, this time also we have gone in the similar trend and had a dividend of about 60 rupees per share. We have taken your suggestion. We'll probably discuss with the board again and come back. Next year. This year it is 60 rupees dividend.

Thanks.

Thanks, Abhishek. So, now we'll take a question from the chat box. From strategic point of view, what all measures have we taken to improve stickiness of suppliers? Secondly, we understand you are facing issues in silver segment. However, just wanted to know if this segment churn has always been this high. Has bundle selling of accounting softwares helped enhance this stickiness? The question is from Mr. Suraj Khwadeh Jandani.

Hello, Suraj. Very good questioning on the supplier churn. So, supplier churn on the silver side has not been this high. On a monthly basis, it was in the best-ever terms, it went as low as silver annual churns went as low as 2-2.5% side. So, I think we are on an annual basis around 10 to 15% down on the retention numbers. And same is on that monthly side. Monthly side used to be 5 to 6%. Now, we are running at 7%. About 2% per month, we have deteriorated. So, if you take the month-on-month decreasing value, I think 15% lesser retention on the – and this is pre-COVID versus post-COVID. On the platinum and gold side, I think we have been very similar churn ratio of about 1% per month, and that hasn't changed. Second question was bundling of the accounting software. So, we have not yet bundling of the accounting software. Accounting as a segment now has about 2,25,000 next paying customers currently. However, we have sold 4,000 licenses. Out of that, there are multiple people who were sold before the 2021 time where we didn't have the direct connect with the customer. And also, the software was being sold as a one-time perpetual license software. So, and that segment, now that we are 2,25,000, Busy is also 2,25,000, in times to come, we will start to see what kind of synergetic bundling can we do between Busy and this. But this has not yet been done. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next question is from the line of Swapnil from GM Financial. Swapnil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

I have just one question. This is pertaining to your employee expenses. Typically, 4Q is the quarter where employee expenses go up meaningfully on a quarter-to-quarter basis. But this time around, there has been a decent decline. Any particular reason for that? And a related question to that is with the number of employees. I think there has been some rationalization on the employees also. Can you kind of… Should I repeat my question? Hello?

Yeah, we got the first question on the expenses part. You may repeat the second part.

The second question was like the number of employees that you reported 6,200 something. It was 6,300 in the previous quarter. Is this some kind of a rationalization exercise? And is it linked to the employee expenses going down also in a way? Any particular reason for that? And what are the thought processes on the number of employees going at it? Thanks.

Okay, thanks. Let me answer the first question first. So if you remember, last quarter, there was a labor code impact which we had taken. It was about 8.5 crores, if I remember, which we had taken last quarter. And that's how it is looking like the expense has reduced. So that is not the case. On the employee count, it has reached to 6,200 as we speak. There is no rationalization at such. There are like campus hiring, etc., which we do on a periodic basis just to scale up our servicing and sales team, but no rationalization by design at such, which we are trying to do. I hope that answers your question.

Just the continuation of that, like, do you plan to add a more number of people? Or do you want to wait and watch for the collections growth to come pick up first and then, I mean?

On the basis of servicing and tailstream, what is required, we usually hire that. We are already at a level what we require, so we don't see any, like, gap which needs to be placed at this point of time.

Will it be fair to say that you should get some kind of operating leverage if you're not adding people?

No, it is variable as per the business grows. Expenses also grow, especially for the employee side.

Oh, cool. Thank you.

So now we'll take a question from the chat box. What are the updates we can provide on the trends with some of our key investing companies in terms of growth, competition, funding scenarios, etc. The question is from Mr. Krushi Parekh.

Can you put the investing slide here? So thanks, Krushi, for the question. As you know, we started investing sometime around in 2020 onwards. So in the last five to six years, we have invested almost 750 odd crores across 13 different investments, It's primarily in the area of business software, logistics, SaaS, and the fintech opportunities that we kind of came across. So out of 13 investments that we've made, so far, almost six companies have crossed more than 100 crores in the turnover. So they've been kind of doing very well and been kind of growing at a very reasonable rate that we foresee. So that's like, let's say, 15% of the investments we have done. And the other investments are also kind of doing good or there. But these six companies, particularly, we hope that probably the next two, three years may go down the more IPO path also. So that investment, what we have done is kind of playing out well in line with our own thinking that what we had at the time of making these investments. In the terms of, you know, specific of the matrix for all those 12-13 companies, you would be coming out with the annual report, which may have some kind of revenues and the disclosures that you would find. So probably I would suggest maybe once you go through that, you may find some matrix, you know, around those companies.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Pranay Jain from Banyan Tree. Pranay, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry for that. So I have three questions. Number one is you mentioned about 1688. Can we also assume that, you know, we'll see ARPU led growth in the medium term on a consistent basis? That's question number one. Question number two is, can you talk a little more about some of the value-added services that you are providing? What are our methods of monetizing them? Do we have any plans of getting into fulfillment as well? And the last question is on buybacks. So, what are your thoughts on buybacks, given the change in taxation policies? Yeah.

So, first on the 1688, as I said, 1688 has a million customers and ARPU of about $2,000 now. So, that makes it about $2 billion in revenue. And it has started to become a mostly ARPU led growth. Even today they have ARPU and customer led both. But I think they started doing that when they reached, when they crossed more than 750,000 paying sellers. And I believe that given that India versus China, manufacturing versus not manufacturing, services versus product, we also aim to become at least a half a million customer in times to come. So, I believe that it is too early to be purely and purely dependent on ARKU-led growth. So, we will continue to look for customer-led growth as well as ARKU-led growth in the medium term. And over the time when we are closer to 500,000 customers, maybe 400,000, that's when we will start to look at mostly ARKU-led growth. But currently, we are stuck in a position in the last two, three years that it looks like that we are mostly doing our bullet growth. That coming to the second part of the VAS, so if you compare the 1688 or Alibaba.com, how they, what portion of the subscription and VAS revenue they report, And I mean, what they report as subscription and what they report as VAS versus what we report as subscription and VAS is slightly different. So if you look at it, all the platinum customers' revenue that they report, barring the basic subscription they have, they report it as a VAS. So all the search and premium listing and the keyword listing and the location targeting, they report it as VAS. When we look at them, because there's not much of a detailed version available, it's only the 2011 version when they were listed as a B2B company that was available. So I guess you should see our top 10% customer's revenue as typically the VAS revenue, which could be compared with the Alibaba.com. Having said that, over the last 15 years or so, Alibaba has matured into a multiple revenue item, whether it is fulfillment, whether it is lending, whether it is software enablement, whether it is, you know, payments. So they have built an entire stack over a period of time. And fulfillment is just one of them. So we believe that fulfillment through sign-out or fulfillment through partnering with people like maybe Boater, Shiprocket and alikes, while trying to build other items like payment. We don't need much here in India because Indian payment infrastructure is very, very good, and we have done multiple attempts in the past when it was not good. On the other value-added side, I think we are continuously working towards the software value-added, which is accounting, lead management, you know, AI-based seller initiative for lead qualification and things like that. So, we'll continue to work on that. On the buyback versus dividend, I don't think there's much different now. Yeah.

No. So, we had evaluated in detail, and that's how we came to the conclusion. This is the amount of dividend to be declared, amount of money to be reallocated to shareholders. We decided dividend is the right way. So, next year, we'll re-evaluate it, and we'll come back.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Shreya Chatterjee from Ageless Capital. Shreya, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Yeah, thank you for taking my question. I'd like to understand more, like, what metrics are you exactly tracking, so to get a clear view of how, like, your buyers, whatever RFP they put out, is actually, like, close from the sellers that you have on your platform, apart from the metrics that you provide.

Sorry, come again, Shreya, but I didn't understand the question fully.

So, what are the metrics that you provide in your presentation? Do you actually track to actually understand that the RFPs that are provided out by the buyer is actually closed by the sellers? So, are there any closed metrics that you track that, okay, it will be closed with 80% or 90% fulfillment rate? So, anything on that?

Yeah, so there is no definite metric that we have because we are mostly advertising and referral platform. We are not a transaction and fulfillment platform. So we are infomediary rather than being a marketplace. Now, coming to the anecdotal and survey-based thing, we send out a survey to all the buyers whose email ID is available with us, and almost 60-70% of the buyers, we have email ID also available. So, in those cases, we send out an email after three days and after seven days, asking them whether their RFQ was fulfilled or if it was fulfilled, whether it was fulfilled through India Mart sellers, it was fulfilled from outside, or if they postponed their requirement. And that almost 2% of the buyers actually respond to those things. And given that our 9 million unique monthly buyers out of that 6 million typically have email ID, when we send out to them about 1.2 lakh, we end up getting feedback. And that 1.2 lakh feedback every month that we get, we get to see anywhere between 40% to 45% fulfillment confirmed by the buyer. However, these are survey figures, treat them more like yesterday's exit poll.

Got it. And secondly, on your product listing side, the number of active products has gone up. So are you trying to like focus on certain particular categories with this interest product listings? And on my first question, you say that you track it on a lag basis, like after you send out the mails, then you get to know what was the fulfillment rate. But do you want to incorporate some measures so that this can also help you to close more leads and that would actually get the buyers more interested?

Yes, we continue to, you know, so earlier we were looking at the payment as one more towards that. Now if you go, we try to do it as a, so we will, in a manner we will try to find whether, where, where we can I mean, fulfill across the categories, because if we apply anything which is category-specific fulfillment, that would be too restricted. I think we continue to love to be a horizontal platform where items from apparel to agro to machinery to raw material, I mean, if you go to one of those slides, which says end-to-end fulfillment. So, we continue to find levers so that we can actually do transaction by transaction tracking, but we haven't found much success on that side. Maybe some kind of a financial way or maybe some kind of a incentivization, buyer incentivization, and that has been difficult in any classified business or any informatory business. So we continue to read multiple business models across the world where there could be some innovation where you would be able to find, you would be able to track if the transaction loop closed or not. On the category side, there are category focus, if you see our paying customer distribution in the presentation. Our paying customer distribution in the presentation, you will find that industrial plant and machinery, construction, electrical equipment, these are some of the top industries that we focus on. And mostly in the plant and machinery and industrial equipment and electrical equipment. If you typically take these four, these four account for almost 30% of the total paying suppliers. And then there is a long tail of it. And we are now trying to work on a three-tier architecture of the differential pricing, where there is a standard pricing which is applicable to almost 95% of the categories, 5% of the categories are the premium ones, and top 1000 categories are the super premium ones. So that's where we get even better insight on category, ARPU, buyer demand, seller demand, location-wise demand, and that's where we try to increase category focus even better. But given that we are horizontal across thousands and thousands of categories, it is difficult to scale and manage. Even if we are able to manage a few category experts, as soon as you expand it to a couple of dozen category managers, it becomes difficult to manage. Hopefully, with the AI coming in, I think a lot of horizontal part can be taken care of it, and maybe then we can invest only on the vertical part of the business, where we would be able to focus mainly on few categories to be able to disproportionately generate better business from them. You can see, for example, metal, especially steel is one of the very large categories on India Mart. You will see simple plant and machineries like chapati making machine or chappal making machine or dona making machine. Those are a very tier three kind of a buyer is a very good use case for India Mart. Leth machines like that. Similarly, you will find, you know, industrial shed or industrial flooring, you know, color-coated roofing sheets, puff panels. So, there is a lot of variety of products that you can go into details, and some of them you can see on the screen on the end-to-end supply chain also.

Thank you. Due to positivity of time, this will be the last question for the day. I will now hand over the call to Dinesh Agarwal for his concluding remarks. Over to you, sir.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your joining our Quarter 4 and FY26 conference call. We have tried to address your queries in the time available, but if you still have questions, please flee to contact our investor relations themes. Thank you, and good evening and good night.

On behalf of India Mart, we thank everyone for joining us on this webinar. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.