Urban Company Limited (URBANCO) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Urban Company Limited's Q4 and FY2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the management's remarks. Please note that this call is being recorded. On behalf of Kutak Institutional Equities, I welcome the urban company management to discuss earnings for the fourth quarter, and year ended 31st March, 2026. I welcome Mr. Abhiraat Singh Bhal, co-founder and CEO, and Mr. Abhay Mathur, CFO. The results and investor letter have been uploaded to the stock exchanges and are available on the company's investor relations website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that certain statements made on this call may be forward-looking in nature and should be viewed in conjunction with the risk factors disclosed in the company's filings. With that, I'll hand the call over to Abhiraaj to share the key highlights of the quarter.

Thank you very much, Garima. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Urban Company's Q4 FY26 earnings call. Let me start by saying that Q4 was amongst the strongest orders that we've ever had in the history of Urban Company in what I believe was a defining year for the company, our first as a listed company. We delivered our highest ever consolidated NTD growth in 15 quarters, crossed 10 million orders for the first time in a single quarter, and meaningfully improved the profitability of our core businesses. And I'll walk through each of these one by one. Let me start with the headlines. On a consolidated basis, Q4 net transaction value grew 42% year-on-year to reach 1148 crores. And revenue grew 43% year-on-year to reach 426 crores. For the full financial year, FI26, consolidated NTB reached 4,290 crores, which is up 33% year-on-year, excluding the impact of Saudi deconsolidation. Our transacting user base also grew by a healthy 24% to reach 8.4 million unique annual transacting users. And today, 83% of our net transaction value comes from retained users. Now, four very important points that I want to talk about before we get into Q&A. Four simple but powerful points which, in our view, help capture the story of urban company. Where is it today and where is it heading? Let me start with the core business, India Core Consumer Services, ExoGinstahel. In our view, the core is accelerating with structurally improving margins. If I look at India Consumer Services, ExoWinstahelp, we grew by 26% in Q4 for NTV to reach 808 crores. This was our fastest growth in 11 quarters. Our adjusted EBITDA margin also improved from 1.6% of NTV a year ago to 3.3% of NTV. And as a result, for the full financial year, the business delivered 131 crores of adjusted EBITDA, or 4.1% of NTV, which was about 80 basis points ahead of the initial view that we had at the beginning of the year. To put things in context, this core business was loss-making as recently as FI24. That's the first point. The second point is international. I want to highlight for investors that international is now scaling rapidly and is profitable. Our UAE and Singapore businesses delivered 84% NTV growth in Q4 to reach 211 crores of NTV, and this was despite some demand headwind in UAE in the month of March because of the escalation of the Middle East conflict. For the full financial year, international NTV grew 75% to reach 700 crores, and the business turned adjusted EBITDA positive, 6 crores for the entire financial year. This business for us is now four times larger than it was four years back. Third, I'm going to talk about Natanth, a business that we started barely two to three years back. has now become meaningful in scale, with a clear path to profitability. NTB grew 67% in Q4 to reach 89 crores, and it reached 345 crores for the full financial year, up 122% over the previous year. The adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed from 39 crores in FY25 to 31 crores in FY26, even as the business scaled more than 100%. And margin trajectory improved from negative 25.1% of NTV to negative 8.9% of NTV. What's even more encouraging is that the earliest cohort of users who have completed two years, almost 75% of them have come back to us and gotten their replacement and renewal cycle through Urban Company. That number is almost 4x of what the industry averages. It's a strong signal of consumer stickiness, and this number will only compound further as the installed brace grows. Last, but by no means least, is InstaHelp, our most significant investment today, and one where we are leaning in heavily. This business did not exist a year back. And in the fourth quarter of FY26, it delivered 2.7 million orders, with as many as 1.1 million plus orders in March alone, and 40 crores of NTB. This business did incur a meaningful loss, 119 crores of adjusted EBITDA loss in the last quarter. And this loss reflects the cost of building the market, consumer acquisition, network density subsidies, and supply onboarding. We are very clear that we are investing to win here, and we intend to stay ahead and cement our market leadership. Given the competitive dynamics in this space, we've shared everything we will be able to share on InstaHelp in the shareholder's letter. We won't be going beyond that on this earnings call. I hope you all understand why. Finally, a little bit of a housekeeping point. The consolidated P&L for this portal. was negative 160 crores of loss. However, adjusted EBITDA was only 98 crores. The delta was going to a reversal of VTA of about 61 crores, the details of which are there in the shareholders' letter. Overall, we believe we're in a very confident position. Our businesses are accelerating as far as growth is concerned, excluding the investments in Instahel. Our businesses are profitable, with the poor delivering about 22 crores of adjusted EBITDA profit in the last quarter, and 106 crores for the full financial year of 26. We ended the financial year with 2021 crores of cash on the balance sheet. So we believe we are well positioned both from a balance sheet cash perspective, as well as the poor generating increasingly larger profits to fund InstaHelp's growth journey while maintaining a decent balance sheet. We retain our target of consolidated adjusted EBITDA break-even by Q3 FY28 and 1,000 crores of adjusted EBITDA by FY31. With that, I will hand it back to Garima for Q&A.

Thank you, Abhiraj. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press the raise hand button on their Zoom screens. Please introduce yourself and then proceed with your questions. First question from Manisha Dukia. Please go ahead.

Hi, are you able to hear me?

Yes.

Perfect. Thank you. Hi. Good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. And congratulations on a great set of numbers. Growth really, really strong. And also wanted to commend the team on the extensive disclosures in the shareholder letter. They're really helpful. I have a few questions. Please feel free to stop me. And I'm happy to jump back in the queue. So first one is on just the growth bits. And I know you've talked about it in the shareholder letter in a fair bit of detail as to what drove the growth. But when I look at just the India Consumer Services x InstaHelp, even in the top 10 cities, despite no category expansion, you've delivered 25% growth. Now, one wanted to understand. Have you seen this kind of acceleration in your business in the past as well? What I mean by that is the core consumer services is not a new category for you. You've been doing this for a long time. And has this time's growth acceleration been different in the past? And why has it been different? Like what is driving this acceleration versus what you may have seen in the past? And how much of it a contributor is the instant delivery of services that is leading to growth? That'll be just helpful to understand. And maybe a follow-on as to, I know you talked about durability will need to be tested over a few quarters, but any color on your sense on visibility of how long this could sustain? That's my first question, please.

Yeah, that's a great question, Manish. So Manish, you know, just to... For the listeners to understand India Consumer Services, this is a very large and complex business. We have 60-plus service categories spread across 47 cities in hundreds of micromarkets. And across each and every service category and micromarket, one has to carefully build supply and demand density while ensuring quality control, training, consistency of service, and go the whole nine yards. So. So we've been hard at work for many years now doing that. We believe that many of our categories and micromarkets are hitting an inflection point from a densification standpoint, which is driving the simple flywheel, what we've talked about in our shareholder's letter, or faster, cheaper, better. I'll spend a minute talking about this. Now, once you cross threshold density in a category in a micro market, what ends up happening is that service professionals start getting utilized much better. Consequently, their earnings go up, and the cost to serve for the entire business comes down. Some of these benefits can also be enjoyed by the customer in terms of better value. Also, travel distances come down, job packing efficiencies move up, and therefore service professionals are spending more time inside the consumer's homes delivering orders, and less time either waiting for orders or traveling towards orders. And therefore, customers also start to enjoy what we call faster, which is faster fulfillment. We have started to roll out UC instant where you can get the service within 30 to 60 minutes. And we're in the early innings of UC instant getting rolled out and the goodness of UC instant playing across the marketplace. And then better, because service professionals are more dependent on the platform, they're seeing higher earnings, we see better retention, their propensity to follow UC SOPs, UC's quality protocols, etc. All of that improves and that translates into better service for the end consumer. And simply put, a professional who's earning more and traveling less is generally more likely to deliver a service to you with a smile. And we've always maintained that happy professionals lead to happy customers. So that trifecta of faster, cheaper, better, which is, you know, seems like a simple playbook, but it's very hard to execute across so many services and so many micro markets. When it starts to get going, you know, that Acceleration is possible. Now, why do we not yet want to call it a long-term trend and want to observe for a few quarters? Because we're just getting started on this. Yes, NTV growth has been accelerating. In Q2, FY26, it was 19%. It jumped to 21% in Q3 and 26% in Q4. As prudent management, we want to wait and watch, see another two, three, four quarters, and then see if we believe that the acceleration means that from a five-year length, vis-a-vis what we had imagined earlier, this business can be much larger.

Very helpful, Biraj, for that. One, I was just curious that you operate in like multiple cities. Let's say if we talk about your top 10 cities, I'm just surprised that all of them are seeing acceleration at the same time. I mean, I've thought that some cities would be in different places on the curve where some would have seen acceleration two years ago, some may see two years later. So is there like a common thread as to why they are all seeing acceleration at the same time? Or have you seen some cities already, let's say, peak in terms of growth and some that are accelerating a lot? Like just any dynamics you can share, that'll be helpful.

I would say for the last few months, we've seen very broad-based demand acceleration to the point where internally we feel that the real challenge is building high-quality supply across these cities and categories and micro markets. And we know that we've left demand on the table across cities and categories.

Thank you. Second question is just on InstaHelp. And I appreciate you mentioned you won't be able to share too much detail, but still trying my luck. I mean, when you say losses remaining elevated for the foreseeable future, are you expecting potentially losses to also increase from these levels? And when you say elevated for a prolonged period of time, are we talking about like four quarters, eight quarters, longer than that, any color you can share, that'll be helpful. And also maybe a related question, average order value continues to get lower. My concern there is, would it be that much more difficult for you to recover AOV if they keep getting lower and thus maybe take you further away from whatever your steady state margin expectations are in that business?

Yeah, no, thanks for that question, Manish. So I'd say, I'll just take a little bit of a step back. You know, one of our... One of our messages to the investor community is that at this stage of our company building journey, we believe the investor community should hold us very much accountable to disciplined high quality execution in our core India services business, in international, and even in native, which means continued growth and compounding, improving margins year after year. Some quarters will go up, some quarters will go down, but a consistent margin upward trajectory every year and cash generation. For InstaHelp, we believe that right now, the most important thing is market leadership. We believe we have a strong balance sheet. We believe we have cash generating core business. And we've given two clear guidelines that we will hold as guardrails for ourselves, which is a consolidated break-even at an adjusted EBITDA level by Q3 FY28 and 1,000 crores of adjusted EBITDA by FY31. And we're committed to sticking to those overall guardrails. Within that, the rest of it, I think the management needs the maneuverability. You know, it's a dynamic market. Some quarters, EOEs will move up, some quarters will move down. It'll be a combination of, you know, tactics and strategy. We're very much focused on, you know, seeing that this shapes up well in the medium term. We have our eyes on all of those numbers that you spoke about. We believe right now the most important thing for us is continuing to cement our market leadership and staying ahead of the game, while longitudinally making sure that loss per order keeps coming down and over a period of time losses come down. How much time it will take, et cetera, is something we will convene regarding.

Very clear. Just maybe last question from me before I jump back in the queue. I know you have an answer or a question around artificial intelligence, but if you can just maybe help summarize for us, both on the demand side and maybe also on the cost side, what are, let's say, the changes that we can expect from an AI perspective in terms of revenue levers or cost levers? That'd be helpful. Thank you.

Hi, Manish, this is Ramay. I'll take that question, and thank you for asking it. I think this is an area which is full of potential for us, and we've taken initial steps. So to start with, we've actually built a solid layer of AI on top of our core platform, which is now embedded in everyday operations. I'll call out a few areas where we've made progress and where we're excited about for the future. I think the first one really is on quality. So we are leveraging AI extensively in proof of work. We're auditing 100% of images. We've made a fair amount of progress in customer and partner support, where 55% of all partner support queries are now handled effectively through AI, and this is helping us deliver a low cost as well. We're also generating top of funnel for partners through AI by asking existing partners to refer jobs that were done by people earlier. We've always been using AI for demand forecasting. AI has only made our demand forecasting and trend lines simpler and more accurate. We've started deploying it in a couple of areas for revenue as well. So for native, for example, if your filter life is about to expire, you will get a call from urban companies reminding you to refresh it. We are visualizing interior spaces for our revamp using AI, which helps make decision-making much simpler. So, you know, these are early steps on the new generation. On code, I think this is the area where we've seen the maximum progress, you know, conservatively, more than 90% of our code is being shipped by JNI. And this was not the case some time ago. So a lot of the basic work is being done leveraging AI. And we're also using the fraud detection. So I think we're just getting started. This is a space with a lot of potential. We're actually driving usage within the organization. And we'll keep on updating investors as we see more progress.

Thank you so much for patiently answering all my questions. All the best.

Thanks. Next question from Sachin Salgankar. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Karima. Hi, management. Good day. I have three sets of questions. First question on native. Your losses have expanded on a Y1, QOQ basis. Anything specific happening out there? And Abhira, any specific timelines we could have from a native break-even point of view?

Yes, nothing specific as such to call out. I think the business trajectory has grown well. Business has grown by 67% on an NTV basis, even faster on net revenue. And the margins have improved. So, same time last year, the margin trajectory was negative 14.7% of NTV, and now it's negative 9.9%. So, margins have improved. We are fairly confident, I would say, on the trajectory from here on to achieve break-even. We don't want to give a timeline yet, but, you know, it should happen in the next few quarters.

Got it. And this break-even will happen despite launch of new products in the native category?

Yes, we believe so. It should happen despite any new products that we launch. Some of the elevated losses are on account of R&D for new products. So our call is actually already approaching close to break-even.

Got it. Second question is on InstaHelp, and I completely get in terms of management having the flexibility, it's a new business. But what we are actually seeing is both your competitors raise money in pockets, one could see competition getting irrational. So any guardrails you want to indicate to the analysts and investor community here, these are some of the things like, for example, on a loss per order basis, there is no intention to become, you know, much higher than that. Because I understand your medium term and longer term targets in terms of EBITDA break even, as well as, you know, where you want to have an EBITDA. But, you know, I mean, if on a quarter to quarter basis, losses are expecting, you know, we do expect, you know, some comfort in terms of, you know, this is a threshold, where one could get a sense that competitive intensity is getting completely rational. And perhaps it's okay to let go a bit of a market share, just in case, because things are a bit bad. So, again, wanted to understand any color you could give. And, of course, a follow-up is, because this is relatively new business and it is not there in most of the countries across the globe, how could one think about any range for a steady-state unit economics or EBITDA margin in the medium term?

Yeah, no, both fair questions. And, you know, appreciate where you're coming from, Sachin. I think, you know, we've been doing this now for close to 12 years, 11 and a half years, Sachin, and we've seen various cycles of competition and irrationality. So it's nothing new to us. I'd say the level of competitive intensity that we're seeing and irrationality that we're seeing right now. It's pretty manageable. We are not perturbed by it. If anything, we're very clear that we're playing to win and not playing to look elegant. And sometimes in the short run, you know, either you can optimize for market share, or you can optimize for on paper elegance. And we're not optimizing for elegance. We're optimizing to win, we're optimizing for market share. And which means if we have to be rational from time to time, we should be willing to be rational as well. I don't worry about competition too much. I think our eyes are on the customer and the service professional, and we're playing to win.

Got it. Related question on the InstaHelp is, there are adjacencies and potential new services also one could look to explore. For example, cooks, drivers, help for elderly, and so on and so forth. Are these some of the areas or are there any adjacencies you guys are experimenting and looking to expand into?

We keep experimenting, Sertian, but, you know, strategically right now, we think all our energy and resources and focus should actually go into densifying and winning in the core segments. We know that some of our competitors are experimenting with some of these adjacencies, but we are focused on core. We believe the player that will win the core segment in the core micro markets will, that's essentially the turf to win. And that's all our attention and focus right now. And, you know, we have limited resources as a company, monetary and people, and we want to focus all of them towards winning the main segment in the main micromarkets.

Very clear. And lastly, Middle East clearly, you know, is now seeing some signs of recovery. How is your business? Are we back to square one in terms of recovery or it's still a gradual recovery?

No, more or less back to square one. In fact, the dip for us also was not, I mean, it was there, but we were far more resilient than most other businesses, and that's visible in the numbers that you would have seen that you put out there on the month-on-month trajectory. So there was a dip, but, you know, the year-on-year growth continued to be pretty healthy, and the business now is almost back to full recovery.

Perfect. All the best. And very much, thanks again. Thank you, Sashant.

Thank you. Maybe I'll go next. I also had a few questions. First on the core business, right, the acceleration and NTV growth is very encouraging. Very near term, do you think there could be some hiccup in this accelerated growth, not because of lack of demand, but because of lack of supply, right, due to elections and the resultant temporary workplace displacement?

Hi, Ghanemar. This is Raviyal. I'll try and answer that. So, you know, in the last quarter, we didn't really see any disruption. I think in the month which has gone by, we are seeing, you know, some level of demand loss, but nothing unusual. I think we had seen some of this coming and, you know, we had prepped in advance. We had one voted, you know, more and more professionals. So I think, you know, for a services business like ours, this is a BAU problem. And there's nothing, you know, which we are really concerned about here.

Got it. Okay, good to know. Second question that I had was on native. Now you've given a target of quadrupling net revenue of this business. Could you give us some sense of the pipeline of products you are building that would enable you to achieve this target?

For the large part, we believe this will have to come from the current two products that we have. Which is water purifiers and smart electronic door locks. We've not put a timeline to it deliberately, which we don't know how long it will take. But we believe that those two segments should be meaningful enough over a period of time to get us there. And a little bit of the revenue, and this is also because it's not just the revenue from product sales, as in water purifiers, the installed base increases garima, the service revenues also start to kick in. And over time, they can be quite, quite meaningful, especially given that our retention, early retention signs are very, very healthy and a meaningful multiplier of what the industry averages. Some of that number could also come from new products that we launch, but for the large part, I think it will be the existing categories.

Got it very clear. Third piece of the question, you know, on InstaHelp, in your view, what could be the potential market structure here, say two, three years out? Do you think two or more players can coexist? And a related question here is, with some competitors raising money, in fact, some of them very, very recently, do you think they might want to diversify into what is your core business?

Very hard to say how, both how large this market is and what the end-stage structure could look like. Generally speaking, I'm of the view that in businesses of trust, it's a winner-take-all. And, you know, this is a business of trust, so I really don't see any reason why there should be multiple players over time. And that's at least the mindset with which we are approaching this market. In our poor business, we have lion's share of the market, and we'd like something similar to play out here as well. But of course, we... We are mindful that in order to achieve that, we have to deliver a superlative service to the end consumer, win on execution. And there are other funded competitive players who are also attacking the market. So, I think this will eventually boil down to execution over a period of time. We don't know which other services they will launch. Honestly, beyond a point, we are It's not something that we worry about because our core business is very, very large. We're still scratching the surface. We're probably sub 1 to 2% of the total market, addressable market. So we're focused on what we have to do there.

Got it. And you raised this important point of, you know, building a trustworthy service. So any, you know, one or two points you want to highlight, particularly on the InstaHelp business, which sort of differentiate your service, you know, beyond the availability part, compared to whatever else is available in the market.

I think our view is that this is a service of trust. It's a service where the quality of the service professional, the training, the effort that you put into selection, onboarding, the details that you go in into SOPs, etc. These are the things that matter. They will compound slower than discounts and instantaneous availability and throwing money at the problem, but they will compound in the long run. And that's what we're focused on. And we actually do not dilute our quality selection and onboarding and training processes for this business vis-a-vis our core. That playbook that we have developed on the core business over the last 10 years is something that we have extrapolated to InstaHelp as well. We talked about average ratings in InstaHelp, which are at 4.7, very close to where the core is, and we believe materially better than the rest of the industry. We also believe our repeat rates and retention rates are, to the best of our knowledge, industry-leading at this point in time. And that's part of the reason why we are the clear market leaders today. So, in our view, it will eventually come down to quality of service, quality of the supply side. And like our core, this will be a supply first business and whoever wins the supply side of the market will be the winner.

Very clear. Thanks for that, Abhidaj. Our next question from Gaurav Rateria. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Congrats on great execution. My first question is on the densification that you talked about. Have you seen any impact of Competition in those micro markets. My sense is that there will be meaningful difference in the consumer experience because of the instant service that you are launching versus what competition would have been doing in select categories. And therefore, they will be years behind to catch up. So there would have been some consolidation in those micro markets. Any anecdotal evidence if you can share on that?

This is with reference to India Core, right?

Yeah, India Core.

Yeah. To be honest, in India Core, we don't spend a lot of time looking at or tracking competition. Part of the reason could be that competition is very distributed across categories and micromarkets. I think much of this growth is actually just driven by internal factors around what I refer to as faster, cheaper, better. And as I mentioned, we feel we left demand on the table because we were supply constrained for most of the quarter. So I think that's really where our effort is. It's on the supply side. It's on making sure that quality of our supply side, of our service professionals, training, SOPs are top notch. And we continue to drive densification and consequently roll out instant. And I think the goodness of that, in our view, those are strong inputs. If the service is available faster, it's better value for the end consumer, and the quality of service is improving, in our view, that should translate into growth.

Got it. Secondly, on the, is there a sensitivity to AOV from demand perspective? I know that for a lot of the basic categories, the AOVs would have remained largely similar across last couple of years. And if there is an inflation related problem, even if it is a transient one, there could be some impact on the AOVs. And I'm just trying to understand based on your historical experience, have you seen any sensitivity or it doesn't really matter.

I would say in the core, the sensitivity is low. In Insta Help, of course, it's very high. But in the core, there's always some sensitivity, but it's very much manageable.

Okay. Last question on your outlook on consolidated break-even. Nothing has changed, right? While external environment on Insta category has changed in terms of potential fundraising, etc. Is it coming from greater confidence in the core business, given that you have executed or out-executed your own expectations in fiscal 26, which gives you a very strong confidence that even if the Maybe investments were to remain higher than what you would have thought through Insta, you would be more than. Are you able to offset that with better profitability in the core business? Or is it your view that the external environment could change fast? Thank you.

It's the former. I think we feel that the way we're executing on the core will give us enough buffer and cushion, even in the external environment, for instance, to deteriorate. Yeah.

All the best. Thank you.

Thank you, Kaurav.

Next question is from the line of Pranav Kshatriya. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Please, go ahead.

My question is, you know, the first question is regarding the volatility

of the margins.

And, hello, can you hear me?

It's better now. Please, go ahead.

My question is regarding the volatility in the margin for the India core business. So, while the EBITDA margin has structurally sort of trended up. In this quarter, as you said, you were supply constrained. Hence, one would have expected the margins to go up, but that has not really happened. So what exactly led to that situation? And my second question is that, you know, for InstaHelp platform, what kind of cohort, you know, are we getting? Is it the same cohort which was sort of using other services is now coming to InstaHelp or there is a new set of customers who are coming? And is there any rub off of those customers because of InstaHelp?

Yeah. So thanks for the question, Pranav. On the India consumer services, just the EBITDA margin is a percentage of NTV. We've mentioned this in the past that the right way to think about this is year on year versus quarter on quarter. And that's because there are multiple factors every quarter around seasonality, etc. And therefore, you know, Q1 and Q3 in every year are structurally better quarters than Q2 and Q4. Why is that the case? It's because... You know, Q1 and Q3 are seasonally stronger quarters. Therefore, a lot of the marketing, supply ramp up, etc. for us happens in the preceding quarters, which is Q2 and Q4. Q4 also happens to be the quarter where we have our annual appraisals. So for a variety of factors, if we look at this business on a quarter on quarter basis from a margin standpoint, we'll not be able to fully understand and appreciate. Now that we have eight quarters of trajectory, we can actually compare year on year. And that's what we've always told investors that don't look at it quarter on quarter, look at it year on year. Year on year, Q4 has gone from 1.6% in Q4 FY25 to 3.3% in Q4 FY26. And also the entire India consumer services business has gone from 3.3% to 4.1%.

That trajectory, we believe, should continue.

And eventually, this business should get to about 10% adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of NTV over a longer period of time. And every year, there will be margin expansion. Some years, it'll be faster. Some years, it'll be slower. But the right way to think about it is year-on-year. So that's the first question. Second question on InstaHelp. I think we're seeing both existing cohorts of urban company consumers adopted, but we're also seeing newer cohorts and newer customers first time to the platform adopt InstaHelp. And so InstaHelp to that extent is also helping us expand it over time.

Okay. Thank you. That's it from my side. Thank you.

Next question is from Srinath V. Please go ahead.

Hi, Abhiraj. Congratulations on the good set of numbers. First, I wanted to understand, you know, as we go into FY27, how do we look at, you know, between adding new micro markets and deepening our supply in InstaHelp? You know, how many new micro markets are we looking to open or cities are we looking to open? Because, you know, for example, in our office, more than 50% of the staff don't have access to, you know, InstaHelp. So, how, when would, you know, our top three cities get fully covered for us, you know, across say Bangalore, NCR and Mumbai, for example.

Yeah, good question, Sreenath. I think it's hard to give a precise timeline, but what I'd say is that our leaning is always towards densification. And going deeper and penetrating existing micro markets. We'll continue to expand coverage in a calibrated fashion. But we do believe that the most important micro markets have to be won. And therefore, densifying and penetrating them deeper will be priority over proliferation.

Perfect. Any broad thoughts on getting full coverage in the top cities?

I think full coverage may not happen even for a long period of time. Because in certain parts of the city, there might not be adequate density. For me to be able to have effective cost to serve. So micromarkets that we're prioritizing are the micromarkets where we believe that as we densify, we can eventually get those micromarkets to break even and eventually become profitable. Even if in the interim, they're loss-making. There'll be some parts of the city where just the demand density is so spread out that at least so far we haven't cracked the model to serve them well. Now, work on that will continue to happen. But, you know, if you think about how demand density and cost to serve plays out in InstaHelp, it is actually far more hyperlocal than quick commerce. And so to that extent, you know, the prioritization playbook here is even more important. Yeah.

Perfect. On the strong India services growth, would it be fair to assume that some of the InstaHelp flywheel is playing out? Any qualitative comments on how cross-sell is playing out with customers who are, you know, InstaHelp customers as the app moves to the front page, you know, of the phone? Are we seeing any higher, you know, repeat usage for those particular cohort of customers that could be helping the strong growth in India services?

Too early to form a view there, Srinath. But if anything, we know. We think the growth is in and of its own merit.

Got it. And the last question would be, you know, given that some level of marketing activity is also started for InstaHelp, the losses that we are posting, not necessarily all of these losses are coming from a CM level of, you know, MG and consumer subsidies. Would there be some amount of spends, you know, on performance marketing or advertising, you know, in a way fixed cost of InstaHelp?

Yes, absolutely. And we've mentioned that in the letter as well, that this quarter saw elevated marketing to acquire new users and build the brand, including for the Cricket World Cup. And actually, all other metrics, which formed part of the loss per order, moved in the right direction and moved positively. It was only largely on account of this one metric that the loss per order swung in the reverse direction. But everything else actually moved in the right direction.

So, to be clear, contribution loss per order was actually down, but it was largely losses from fixed cost. Fair enough. Thanks. Thanks a lot. I'll get back to the question.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Abhishek Pathak. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks, Garima, for the opportunity. Hi, Team Congress. Great quarter. So my question was kind of a follow-up on the InstaHelp offering. Is it fair to assume that as compared to other services which require densification, the degree of densification required here is far higher because, you know, You know, I mean, the maids, etc., they might not really have modes of transport. And from that perspective, the TAM would probably be even more constrained considering it requires hyperdensification. In that context, considering, you know, we've got, let's say, two to three players attacking this particular sort of, you know, TAM in a very irrational way, how long or rather what are the kind of, you know, criteria we set ourselves to In the sense that when does this market, if it becomes irrational for too long, do we choose to kind of, you know, pair back sort of our investments or do we double down here, you know, considering InstaHelp can be a funnel to our other offerings, which may be slightly sort of, you know, which may have slightly higher time. Thank you.

Yeah. Short answer to that question is, you're right. Insta helps density is far more granular compared to core or perhaps any other consumer internet business to the best of our knowledge. Does that constrain the time? Maybe, you know, and maybe playbooks can evolve to So medium density micro markets as well. So I think that's, that's to be seen. How large as a consequence of that, how large is the dam and the size of the price? We don't know, and honestly, beyond the point, that's not the most important thing we're worried about today. Whatever it is, we want to win it. That's how we think about it. I think we don't have a choice. We have to win, and we have to win big. If it's a very large stamp, great. If it's a medium-sized stamp, that's also good for us because we have other businesses that we live and eat our bread off. So this business only helps accelerate those, and it plays a certain role in terms of frequency and engagement on the app. We have discussed and debated this internally, and our view is, you know, whether it's a mid-sized dam or a very large dam, right now, from our perspective, strategically, the only thing that makes sense is to attack it aggressively and win it.

Very clear. Thank you so much.

That makes sense. But that's how we're thinking about it. Like actually thinking about it pretty simply rather than trying to overcomplicate it. Whatever the size of the time is, we have to win it.

Understood. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Sure. Thank you. Next in line is Swapnil Podduke. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for the opportunity. My first question is with respect to InstaHelp versus international markets. Now, the question out here is like, is winning in the InstaHelp market in India more important than opportunity available in, let's say, some of the other geographies where your services are not available beyond UAE and Singapore today? And there could be a potential time available there also, and with limited competition compared to what is happening in Australia right now.

Yeah, no, good question. And strategically, we mentioned that in the past and a few shareholder letters as well. I think we've strategically chosen to prioritize India and the two overseas markets that we have wholly owned subsidiaries in, UAE and Singapore, as well as KSA through a JV. We are clear we're not launching any other international markets. I'm sure the opportunity is good in some of these markets, but from our strategic prioritization standpoint, we are focused on India and these two markets for now and for the foreseeable future.

So will it be fair to say that till the time you achieve your guidances, the medium-term guidances, any incremental international geography is broadly out of question?

Yes, absolutely. And we've said that in one of the past letters in as many words as well.

Got it. The second question is with respect to, is there any seasonality in your customer marketing expenses for the India business? Because it seems from 3Q to 4Q for the last two years, these costs have been increased on a quarterly basis.

Yes, there is some seasonality in our marketing spend in the cadence there. So typically, as Amiraj mentioned, you know, Q1 and Q3 are the quarters where we see a lot of consumer activity. And before the beginning of those quarters, you know, and to some extent during the quarter, we do increase our marketing spends at that time. Overall, if you've seen, we've seen consistent operating leverage in our marketing spends over the last couple of years. But yes, in the year, there are spikes depending on when the season is about to start.

Got it, got it. Thank you guys. Those were my questions on all of this.

Thank you. Next in line is Pranay Jain. Please go ahead.

Hi, am I audible?

Yes.

Okay. Thank you for the opportunity. So I have three questions. My first question is, could you help us understand, you know, how the instant India consumer business works operationally? Like, how do you transition from a scheduled services marketplace to an instant service model? Like, do you require excess capacity initially in order to, you know, do like ensure timely supply? That's my first question, and I'll then follow it up with the other two.

Yeah, no, great question. And how this works, I won't go into the inner level of detail here, but It's a reasonable change management that we do at the backend. Operationally, realigning the micromarkets in terms of their size, realigning partner expectations, calendar management, availability, etc., etc., before we flip a micromarket in the category and make the instant proposition available there. We also have to ensure that there is adequate supply and demand and density therein. The interesting point here is that, and you've shown this in our letter as well, we're achieving this with increasing utilization on the supply side and not decreasing utilization. So conventional wisdom would say that in order to offer instant, you'll have to keep slack and therefore utilization should fall. What we're experiencing is that utilization is actually improving. That's because we're offering instant in the sweet spot of 30 to 60 minutes. Which doesn't require us to break the back on capacity and utilization. If anything, those orders see fewer cancellation rates vis-à-vis scheduled orders, and back-to-back packing and efficiency is better. And consequently, we're actually seeing better utilization as a result of that instant rollout. So it's a real win-win in our view. You know, it helps improve backing efficiency and overall utilization for partners and consequently improve their earnings. It helps bring down time to serve for end consumers, and it's also more profitable for us. Obviously, if we were to take the core marketplace also all the way to 10 minutes, that would mean what you're saying, which is keep a lot of excess capacity, but we don't think that's needed. We think 30 to 60 minutes is adequate for most of our core services. As long as we can deliver that reliably, consumers are happy with that change and shift.

Got it. Understood. Thank you for that. My second question is on the fact that, you know, you've spoken about it earlier as well, and even in this shareholder letter, that there is a, there is deep trust that is embedded in the model, given that professionals spend significant time inside the homes of the consumers, customers. But at the same time, we are seeing new instant service platforms also enter, and they are also gaining a reasonable amount of customer acceptance. So, do you think the comfort of the customer with allowing service professionals into their home is becoming more standardized over time across platforms?

I think at the end of the day, any player that executes well, On quality, on safety, on trust, and doesn't take the customer's trust for granted, can eventually gain acceptance. And, you know, we don't make any tall claims that we'll be the only player who will enter the homes of the customers. We're certainly one of the trusted players in our view. We also think to be able to do this across 60 plus categories and hundreds of micro markets, It's in categories in our core business where the complexity of the business is much higher in terms of training, in terms of tooling, SOPs, etc. is not a main feat. Sometimes it's easy to execute that in a single category business, but not so much across multiple categories. And therefore, historically, we've also seen competition limited to one or two verticals rather than the entire horizontal skew. It's always possible that overtime players emerge in the entire horizontal skew, which is okay. At the end of the day, competition keeps us honest, keeps us charged up and delivers the best services to the end consumers. So it's a very large market, as we've emphasized multiple times in the past. The total market is more than 5 lakh crores. We're still a very, very small percentage of that market, sub 1%. And, you know, I think, if anything, the focus should be on how do we keep growing the pie versus, you know, zero sum of how we break a small pie today between players.

Right, makes sense. Last question is on the international business. Could you elaborate on the competitive landscape across your key markets, given that these markets are relatively more organized and structured? You know, who are your key competitors over here?

Yeah, I think in UAE, we have one more competitor, a major. I mean, there are lots of players, but there is a company called Just Life, who has been around in the market for as long as we have, a little bit longer than us. Pretty decent players. We do have respect for them, and we've learned a lot from them, and they've learned a lot from us, and we believe that the competition in that market has been quite healthy, and both players are growing well, and that market continues to be very attractive from a long-term growth and margin attractiveness standpoint. So, I think that's an interesting and exciting market. In Singapore, there are lots of smaller players, nobody meaningful to call out. Again, a very, very exciting market, growing well for us profitably. Both the markets, I think, you know, the headroom for growth is meaningful. We're growing profitably. Our proposition continues to improve year after year. The same playbook of faster, cheaper, better is playing out in those markets as well, if anything, in an accelerated fashion, because the demand density, you know, operates on steroids in some sense in both these markets. You know, we're quite excited by how our international business is shaping up across these two markets. Saudi, we don't recognize revenue, but that business is also shaping up very well. We've disclosed the numbers, and as you can see, the growth is in the right direction. Margins are improving. We now believe we have a clear line of sight towards profitability in our joint venture in Saudi Arabia as well, and we're quite excited by that.

Got it. Thank you for the answers, and all the best for the coming quarters.

Thank you.

Next question is from the line of Deepak Saha. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Am I audible?

Yes, please go ahead.

So first of all, congratulations on get great set of numbers. My only question I have on the international side, what I understood for the international business, you very beautifully laid out the fact that how your, you know, the subscription model has played out and meaningfully contributing to the overall numbers there. If you just can lay out what are the drivers that are working well for subscription model there, and secondly, how can we apply that model here, if at all the dynamics allow us to do that. These are the two questions I have initially.

Yeah, that's a good question. So, Deepak, one of the main services for us, a fairly important service in both UAE and Singapore is cleaning, deep cleaning of the home. And while some households there have permanent house help, as you can imagine, a lot of households don't. And therefore, they rely on platforms like us, all local players, offline players, and the larger unorganized market to get weekly, bi-weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or once in a while deep cleaning time. We have been able to launch subscription programs and lock in, essentially, these households and users into more high-frequency deep cleaning. So, for example, in UAE, many of our users use our deep cleaning. Not just once in a while, but maybe on a weekly or fortnightly basis. And quite a few of them use it multiple times a week as well. And that actually accelerates the growth of the business. Similarly, in Singapore, while the subweekly use case for our deep cleaning is not prevalent, many users use us on a weekly or fortnightly basis. And these users get logged into subscription programs and then, you know, it becomes sort of an annuity-like business. Some of those learnings can certainly be helpful for us here in India as well. We are toying with and experimenting with cleaning subscriptions. I believe over time we will experiment with versions of these in InstaHelp as well. And we also have bundling programs in India, which take a leaf off the playbook in our international markets. So many learnings for us from these two markets.

Got it. That's helpful. Just in the same context, when we see InstaHelp, you mentioned that for 10% of the users, you have eight times monthly orders. And for 1% of the top users, you have 21 times, right? So is there a scope? I know it's pretty early days, but is there a scope of enabling any subscription model for InstaHelp in India?

I'm sure it's possible. I'm sure the scope is there.

Super, super. Fine. And last question on InstaHelp side, on the payment side, so the payouts that we're doing to our professionals, so just trying to understand because the volume has gained meaningfully, say three months ago and currently, is there any change in the structure of payment as far as fixed payment is concerned and job specific variables are concerned? And is there any specific change which can improve the cost dynamics depending upon successfully delivered services or jobs?

Yeah, we keep experimenting and going with various structures tactically that we believe are sort of best suited to win different micromarkets and keep supply engaged. And depending upon the supply-demand situation in a particular micromarket in a particular point in time, we're quite nimble with some of these changes.

So does it have any fixed component or gradually we're moving to a lower fixed component in that context?

I mean, there's a per hour payout, essentially, but that can vary based on the quality of the service professional and the particular micromarketing time of the day and time of the week. It's quite dynamic.

That's really helpful. Thanks a lot. Last question from my end. On the user side, so say InstaHelp and consumer services business, right? So are we seeing incrementally any new users coming solely for InstaHelp? And again, you are able to cross utilize it for consumer or it's the other way around?

It's both.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Any distribution you would like to lay out in terms of proportion somewhere more? It's a core business, higher proportion leading to InstaHelp incrementally or it's the other way?

No, not right now.

Okay, fine. Thank you. That's brilliant. All the best for Hi527. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. That was the last question for today, and we would like to close the call here. Thank you, members of the management and all participants for joining Urban Companies Results Call. You may now disconnect your lines.

Thank you.