Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Rajat Gupta from Go India Advisors. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Infibeam Avenues Limited Earnings Call to discuss the Q3 FY24 results. We have on the call with us today Mr. Vishal Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director, Mr. Vishwas Patel, Joint Managing Director, Mr. Sunil Bhagat, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Purvesh Parekh, Head, Investor Relations. Also joining us on the call today is Mr. B. Ravi, who's advising Infibeam on corporate and financial strategy as an independent consultant. We must remind you that the discussion on today's call may include certain forward-looking statements and must be therefore viewed in conjunction with the risk that the company faces. I now request Mr. Vishal Mehta to take us through the company's business outlook and financial highlights, subsequent to which we'll open the floor for Q&A. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Rajat. Good evening, everyone, and a very warm welcome to our Q3 FY 2024 Earnings Call. I'm very proud of the performance of Infibeam Avenues in the Q3 , achieving several historical highs. We added an impressive INR 1.2 billion, or INR 120 crores, quarter-over-quarter in gross revenue, which is a historic feat by the company, as we focus on scaling our business to newer heights with each passing quarter. Our digital payments business through CCAvenue led the way for the increase in revenue. Operating or EBITDA margins and profit margins continue to remain strong as we take advantage of steadily improving leverage as we scale up.
Especially if you look at our standalone financials, the standalone business, which now constitutes almost 94% of our consolidated gross revenue, compared to 92% a few quarters earlier, comprises of India Payments and our platform business, which has an operating margin of 67% and a profit after tax margin of 42.4%, which is the highest historically, excluding the mark-to-market impact of our investments. The movement, of course, in terms of mark-to-market is notional, which does not impact company's cash flow, and hence, we find it prudent to be excluding it from our operating performance for a like-to-like comparison. Consolidated EBITDA margins were at 61.2% and profit margins at 37.3% on a consolidated business basis, respectively.
The reason for the lower margin in consolidated business is on account of our focus to scale other subsidiary businesses internationally, where we are currently focused on gaining market segment share. Yet the consolidated operating and profitable margins are among the best in the industry and better than some of the top international players. I want to focus on India Payments. Our India Payments business continues to show strength as we added almost INR 1 billion in gross revenue in a single quarter. In CCAvenue, we added 200,000, more than 200,000 merchants. On an average, we added 2,500 merchants on a daily basis during the quarter, keeping the merchant addition pace consistent. We were able to incrementally add INR 50 billion to our India transaction processing volume in this quarter.
Total India Payments transaction processing volume rose to INR 663 billion, growing at 34% year-over-year, while the TPV of our payments business as a whole, including India, International, and Go Payments, was INR 709 billion for the quarter, growing at 32% year-over-year. In the Q3, India Payments business net revenue has grown 34% year-over-year, crossing INR 500 million mark for the first time. Net take rate for the India Payments business remains stable at 8.5 basis points sequentially. As you will notice, we are not compromising growth or optimizing one metric while compensating on another, and yet we are able to grow profitably, registering the highest-ever PAT in a single quarter. On our international business, while India Payments business remains strong, we'll continue to grow in Amrit Kaal.
We are also focusing on growing our international payments business and working towards scaling the business from here onwards. You will hear more from us about our plans to scale the international business in the coming few weeks to months. I would now like to give you an update on our contract with GeM, which is the Government e-Marketplace. GeM continues to use our marketplace platform for all the buying and selling happening on the platform. To give you a brief idea, December 14th was the last day of our contract as per the old RFP, and we have recorded revenues and taken a conservative view so far and recorded revenues only up to the 14th of December.
The intellectual property of the e-marketplace platform belongs to Infibeam Avenues, and we are in discussions with GeM on the scope on the protection of the intellectual property, along with the commercials associated with the same, as the new MSP has taken over. The resolution of the same is expected within this quarter, and we will provide the right accounting treatment to record the revenues accordingly. We will update everyone about the same once we hear back. As far as our recent announcements on artificial intelligence, in the Q3 , including the month of January, we took multiple strides to build artificial intelligence business in Infibeam to bolster on both our payments and the platform business both from inside out as well as outside in.
We believe that AI will take the center stage, not just in the world, but also across all businesses, as well as with its infinite use in various facets of our business. India stands to gain hugely through implementations across multiple areas. Our central focus will be on the retailers and how we can grow sales for the retailers and improve the experience. We've made investments to create an AI hub. We launched India's first AI hub at GIFT City, Gandhinagar, and christened it as Phronetic.ai. We've signed an MOU with the Gujarat government for INR 20 billion at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit, held earlier this month in January, for building and developing a state-of-the-art AI hub. We've also appointed Rajesh Kumar as the CEO of Phronetic.ai.
Rajesh comes with a wealth of experience, more than a decade of experience, in building out his own company called Streamoid, as well as being the chief architect in some of the products at Yahoo. We think apart from the payments business, where we have established a growing customer base, including our expansion in international markets, it becomes crucial for us to build futuristic capabilities, this time through artificial intelligence, for the rapidly expanding Indian sector to achieve several objectives: enhance operational efficiencies, improve security measures, improve customer experience for retailers, and also to advocate for policy development tailored to meet the needs for small and medium retailers. Additionally, the company anticipates that through the gig economy and full-time employment, AI can add a lot of employment opportunities across.
I will now hand over the call to Sunil Bhagat, who is our CFO, to quickly give you a synopsis of our financial and operational performance for the Q3 . Sunil, over to you.
Thank you, Vishal. Good evening, everyone. I'm pleased to state that gross revenue for the first time crossed the $100 million in a quarter, reaching at INR 920 million. That is approximately $111 million in Q3 of FY 2024, which is growing at 120% year-over-year. The robust increase is on account of strong growth in India payments gross revenue, which is growing at 147% year-over-year. This is largely due to rising contribution from credit payment options, which is now reaching at 53% to 55% levels across nine months of FY 2024, compared to under 50% levels in FY 2023. Our market share in only credit card spends has increased from 9% in FY 2023 to over 10% in the span of nine months of FY 2024.
Not only has the TPV increased, but the gross and net take rates have also increased, leading to such high performance. Even the take rate has remained stable at 8.5 basis points, which is due to our deep relationship with banks and many large merchants over the last 25 years, where they pay for superior quality of our service and for our robust and secure service. Now, on the financial performance for the quarter 3 of FY 2024 against quarter 3 of FY 2023, our TPV has reported 75% increase year over year. Our gross revenue is increased by 120% to INR 912 crore. Our net revenue increased by 33% to INR 113 crore. Our EBITDA for the quarter increased by 45% to INR 69 crore.
Our PAT increased by 64% to INR 42 crores in this quarter. If we consider the financial performance of nine months ending on December thirty-first, on consolidated basis, our TPV again increased by 61% year-over-year basis. Our gross revenue increased by 87% to INR 2,400 crore plus. Our net revenue increased by 36% to INR 322 crore. Our EBITDA increased by 48% to INR 193 crore. Our PAT increased by 82% to INR 112 crore. Just to apprise you, we have almost achieved the same net revenue in the span of nine months of FY 2024 as that of the entire FY 2023, while we have already surpassed the entire FY 2023 EBITDA and PAT in the first nine months of FY 2024.
It gives me immense pleasure to state that this year has been the best year of Infibeam on a comparable basis since we have been listed, and we are bearing the fruits of a sustained philosophy of going after profitable revenue and not chasing growth at any cost. I will now request the moderator to open the floor for Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Pranay Jain from DealWealth Capital.
Thank you for the opportunity, and congratulations on a robust quarter and nine-month performance. Just wanted to understand, how is 2024 year looking based on early trends at the start of this year? What are the milestones we can look forward to in terms of TPV, margins and profitability, because we have now resolved to grow profitably instead of just growth at any cost. So wanted to understand with our stance at present, what milestones are we aiming ahead?
Sure, Pal. So, basically, typically, we generally do our guidance for the next year in the Q1 . Looking at the trends, post Q3, Q3 being a seasonal quarter, because a lot of holidays and festival seasons happen, in Q3. So far, Q4 has been strong for us. I n the first three weeks of January, we still continue to see strong performance. A s we actually approach, you know, towards the Q1 of next year, we'll have more indications on 2024. If you look at our growth quote year-over-year, since last year, we have grown upwards of 60% in terms of revenues, gross revenues. I n terms of, overall performance, also, we've kept on looking at profitable growth, which is what we mentioned earlier.
So, the three drivers of growth we believe for next year would be, one, our continuous focus on adding merchants. We've added 250,000 merchants. While adding merchants is not linear with our growth, we bear the fruits of adding merchants over quarters. There's a latency between the processing versus the addition of merchants, so we believe that we should continue adding merchants. Even this quarter, we added 250,000 merchants. So we'll continue that track in India. Second is we will offer TapPay solutions. TapPay shown, you know, very good promise. What we've done is we have white labeled a solution for several providers.
Right now, you know, fortunately, the Chalo app, which is used in Bombay and many of the other locations, we white label it for partners when we are underlying processor on the same, and more than 2.5 million passengers will benefit out of the same. So we believe that such implementations with partnerships will add to our overall transaction volume and growth. We also believe international, we've only scratched the surface. Currently, in UAE, we process AED 1 billion a month now. While in terms of revenue, overall revenue from international is less than 6% or 7% of the overall, we believe that it has a potential in the next two years to get to 25% to 30%. So while we will be focused very much on India, we believe international can also add significant growth opportunities for us.
So we will, of course, tell you a little bit more in terms of the overall guidance in the Q1 of 2024.
Okay. So, three things from what you said. One, not just from a yearly point of view, but say, over the next, two to three years, what is the size that we are aiming to be in UAE? Basis of partnerships that we are doing, basis the conversations that we've had, basis the traction in transactions we've had, since it was earlier mentioned that our profitability rates are already superior compared to some global peers. So how do we see it in UAE? That is number one. Number two, what is the net take rate we see in terms of trajectory going forward?
Three, with regards to the partnerships in India, I mean, GeM has been fantastic for us, but otherwise, what kind of partnerships have we struck and the investments that we are making, for example, Sohum Bharat is one. What kind of investments we are doing in India to increase our opportunity size here?
Sure. I'll answer the second question or, you know, and then the third questions first. In terms of, you know, our presence in UAE, we've grown significantly with, we've crossed AED 1 billion a month. And if you look at, the number of clients we have in UAE, it's about close to-
Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your questions to two per participant.
Yeah, thanks. So basically, for UAE, we have double-digit bps, you know, and, you know, we process it in the teens. And, we've been able to, you know, grow significantly. We have about 7,000 odd clients in UAE, and we've been able to process AED 1 billion. So we believe that, we'd like to grow the trajectory from, 7,000 merchants to 70,000 merchants in the next 12 to 24 months. You know, that's the kind of growth that we'd like to see in UAE. As far as India is concerned, we've guided everyone, that right now we are at 8.5 bps. We'd like to reach double-digit bps in terms of, take rates. So I think that's the India business.
I think, you know, to answer your question about GMV, and we've added two clients this quarter. And so, we expect that, you know, in the next one or two quarters, you know, even if there is a deficit, we are able to come back, overall in terms of our platform revenue. So I think, you know, we, we mentioned the same earlier as well, but, we believe that, you know, going forward, you know, given that, the artificial intelligence layer that we've built out, and you'll hear more about it on [Solanet] in the next few weeks, including the products that we have built out, we believe they're transformational. They're very interesting. And just so that you know, we have thought about it in two ways.
One is how do we increase productivity within the company for everything and every task that we do? Second is how do we work on high-impact opportunities? We'll be working on both, but we'll have more to share with you in the coming months.
Thank you so much for the detailed response. I'll get back in the queue.
The next question is from the line of Kunnj Lalka from Golden Trunk Capital Venture. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello? Hello, is my voice audible?
Yes.
My question is, could you please share your strategy behind acquiring, you know, Pirimid FinTech, and what do we see in the future from here?
Sorry, there is a slight background noise. Can you just adjust?
Yeah. If I heard your question correctly, what is the strategy behind, like, you know, the investment?
Pirimid FinTech.
How does it benefit us?
Yes.
At NCD? So, Pirimid is a company that focuses on building out capital market software as well as, they build a lot of frameworks for, lending. I think, you know, they've been able to give such frameworks, not just in India, but international companies. They know how to build out zero latency frameworks. And, the two opportunities that we think are interesting in that is, we think that we can increase payments as an integral part of, whatever we look at doing. I think, you know, you must have heard a lot of information and conversations about real-time settlements, not just payments, but settlements. We think there's a role to be played there. So that's one thing that we think we will want to explore with them further on.
The second thing that we'd also explore is how does AI work on transaction volumes? There are a lot of things that we can actually work on in terms of, you know, sifting through all these transactions become interesting. And then the third opportunity that, you know, they work on, which we think is also interesting, is the lending frameworks. You know, as you think about FinTech, while there's a lot of discussions, we have been appropriately conservative in terms of how we think through lending. We are building out the thesis, a stronger thesis by the day in terms of what that looks like. And we expect that, in the next few weeks, you will hear more from us in terms of what we'd like to do in that, in that space as well.
So my second question is, the number of investments we are making, you know, into the international avenues. So how do we see this? Like, what is the targeted, you know, CapEx for the coming years?
We will have more to share with you in the next quarter, for FY 24, and we'll give you guidance. But one thing we know is that, you know, we will be wanting to grow. You know, in the earlier question, I'd mentioned that we try to grow from, seven thousand merchants today using our, our payments framework to seventy thousand. So we try to grow 10x. And, you know, we've done some CapEx. You see there's a lot of, compliances on data localization in every international country. There are a lot of GDPR guidelines in terms of what we need to comply with, and every country is also coming up with a payment aggregation license. Just like India, RBI has given payment aggregation license, every country is going through the same.
One needs to comply, not just from a, from a regulatory perspective and compliances, but also ensuring that the data privacy and many other components of that have been met. You know, only after the audits do such licenses come through. You know, in, in Middle East, we've rooted ourselves. You know, we would want to make such investments. Compliance-related software and frameworks also need to be in place. So I think, you know, one can expect that, you know, as we build up more and more international regions, the two regions in Middle East today that we are focused on is UAE and Saudi. You know, we've also opened up our framework to banks and institutions in other regions like Oman and others.
So as we build up each country at a time, we will ensure that level of CapEx. The good thing about that is that, you know, it's incrementally highly accretive for the company. So we believe that if we can scale up and if we have an aspiration to scale our international business from a single-digit percentage to a two-digit percentage number in the coming, you know, 24 months, we'll do the appropriate level of CapEx funding for the same.
Are we done with the questions? Hello? Hello, are we done with the questions?
Yes, I think so.
Yes, we are.
Okay. Okay. So the next question is from the line of Pranav from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello? Hello, can you hear me?
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. So just one thing from the net take rate. So sequentially, we have dipped from about 9.3 to 8.4. Is this primarily attributed to international business?
Yeah, we've tried to scale the international business, so you're right. It's attributed to the international piece.
Okay. So we face some higher processing costs over there.
Correct.
Pranav, Pranav, this is Purvesh. Pranav, Purvesh here. So in our international business and, one of our subsidiary, Go Payments. We are scaling up the business significantly because we think there is a lot of opportunity to grow, as our chairman was just speaking, you know, in the previous question. We have a lot of opportunity there to scale and even increase our market share. So currently, we are in a mode to grow in these areas where we've seen a slight dip in our take rate. But we also mentioned that our India take rates are at the same level, like we had in the previous quarter, and we are profitably growing in India.
So international is probably just a little bit of blip, maybe for a quarter or two, as we keep scaling and we expand in the international geography. You'll see the overall take rate maybe has slightly come down, but the future prospects are very bright in these markets.
Second one would be on the AI piece. So, maybe if you could just elaborate what kind of opportunities would we be seeing in terms of enhancing our core business? I understand we've made an acquisition, but for our own transaction business, how can we use AI to, you know, give us the next leg of growth process? Sure. So the way that we look at AI is there are two ways, you know, in terms of the abstraction. One is how can we use AI to improve the productivity of everything that we do within the company? That's one. And second is, how do we use AI to make transactions more efficient, better, you know, security-related, you know, issues, fraud-related, you know, issues, so on and so forth?
How do we do it across billions of transactions that we do, so that we can make it smarter, better over time? What we find is that as far as the productivity is concerned, if you look at the globe, overall ecosystem, 80% of the people we believe who are working in the ecosystem are working on productivity-related solutions. In other words, we believe that AI has an opportunity to make every job within the company more productive. You know, what you could do, maybe in few hours, you can perhaps do it in minutes. You know, for each of the productivity-related metrics, you can have tools that can come up.
But these productivity-related tools will not be a competitive advantage, in our opinion, in the long term, because we believe that, you know, the adoption of productivity-related tools will be pervasive. It will happen across the board, not just in one company. What will be really, defensive and which will be, extremely thorough, would be the frameworks that we develop, you know, which potentially allows us to make our business smarter, better, more productive. And that's where we believe that, you know, AI plays a role. We've already started, you know, implementing, the training frameworks for the same. We believe there are two aspects of this: training and inference for everything that we do, and we are trying to get more and more better by the day.
I think, you know, you have to go multimodal in this case. It is not just transactions, it is authentication as well for the user that essentially originates even before a transaction, because a fraudulent transaction happens because of an authentication failure as well, or a spoofing of an authenticated, you know, agent. So you may have heard that we have launched something called THEIA, which is a tool which is in data mode for visual AI. It identifies quite a few things visually when you want to do Video KYC and many others, all the way from there to transaction processing, how we process transactions, how do we look at not just checks and balances.
Unfortunately, we've got significant amount of data that we, we sit on top of, because finally, you see, we are sitting on a lot of data, and a lot of people say we are sitting on data, but it's basically fool's gold if you don't use it properly. So in order to make it gold, we need to actually make sure that we are using those right frameworks that give us very high level of accuracy in terms of what we'd like to accomplish, and remove all the false positives and negatives. So we believe that these tools and frameworks that we build out are not just going to be utilized by us, it'll be used by several financial institutions across.
We think that maybe in the next one or two quarters, we'll be publishing a few frameworks out there for people to utilize, for the larger community to utilize. And there will be enterprise-level products which will be utilized for financial institutions, banks and others, which we want to publish. Well, we'll use it for ourselves, we'll also open it up for others.
So I do have a few other questions. I'll just get back.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mayur from Profitmart. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity, and congratulations on good set of numbers. My first question is related to regarding your AI advancement and the MOU signed with the Gujarat government. Could you please provide more details about the AI hub that we envisioning?
See, fundamentally, what we realize is that retailers have two major problems. First is, you know, being able to look at the entire framework and when you think about smaller retailers, not everyone has an ERP solution. Not everyone actually works with ERP. You know, I mean, larger retailers definitely they do, but, you know, when you think about small and medium-sized retailers, they don't. O ne of the things that we are looking at doing is visual AI, which means that through a simple camera, how do I identify small objects, inventory within the retailer. You know, a lot of companies, if you think about retailers, they use CCTV cameras. T he CCTV cameras have now no use, only when there is an issue, it's more like an insurance.
Whenever there's a theft or an issue, they actually go and look at what is the frame by frame, what happened. So what we can do is, we can actually use that same framework and use a software framework on top of it to be able to identify every single small object, which is there: quantity of inventory, the kind of inventory which is out there. And that becomes the basis of being able to, I won't say, share, but through a single click, be able to publish that inventory across multiple, multiple places, including ONDC and others.
So I think that becomes the first element of how one can utilize visual AI frameworks to be able to help retailers. And then to be able to offer payments to all these retailers using TapPay, because one would want to actually accept, you know, any kinds of payments.
In artificial intelligence, it's not going too technical, but there's something called supervised learning. So through these supervised learning frameworks, you can actually identify whether the models are communicating properly and being able to identify objects properly and be able to assist the retailer in terms of being able to communicate and do whatever they want to do. So this is just one example of what we would want to accomplish.
There are three phases in which we would implement this project. And, you know, it essentially gives both. I think the world is very close enough where you can actually start talking to the video cameras. Rather than actually going and looking frame by frame, you can start talking to them. Every event of a consumer can be mapped out using artificial intelligence in terms of what they are doing.
You can give elevated levels of customer experience based on what each of the individual is performing. I'm just leaving you a very abstract concept, but when you actually look at implementation, there are thousands of training frameworks and things that you'd want to do to be able to accomplish the same. The MOU that we've signed up is the one that enables these activities, and we'll be implementing that in phases.
Okay. Could you please give me the details about the three phases?
I think we'll share more as we come through, but it's essentially the level of participation. It's actually about how many, t o become statistically significant in accuracy, you don't want to do it on five or 10 retailers. You want to do it on a few thousand retailers. And so, you know, what you want to do is work on statistical significance in terms of proving the accuracy and not necessarily just showing, well, a few implementations saying that, you know, it's accurate. So I think the phases are really about getting comfort on the statistical. See, one should know, I have yet to see any artificial intelligence model that does not hallucinate, as of today. I can promise you that. Even OpenAI will hallucinate. So the hallucination means that it will give you wrong results.
So what you want to do is actually increase the accuracy of each of these models to a point where they, they become important, they become relevant. So just going and communicating, saying that we have a model with a very low level of accuracy, will not help. You want to get to a very high level of accuracy. To give you an example, somebody like a, like a Waymo or someone who's actually driving their driving cars, you need an accuracy of 99 point maybe five, nine. You don't want to have an accident. But sitting with a retailer identifying objects, you may be okay with a 96% to 97% accuracy of small object identification and detections. So one needs to actually come up with the right kind of set of metrics.
The more we process and the more we do, the models become smarter. Because the only way to actually make them better is with some human-reinforced learning, as well as being able to have more data. So I think, you know, for us, rather than going all out, we need to get it into phases. To answer your question, it's just about the number of retailers that participate.
Okay, thank you, sir. And my last question is: what key strategies are we implementing to gain market share in the payment space and maintain the competitiveness, especially in the face of an emerging market player across this space?
One thing you should know is that RBI has made it. RBI has been very proactive, and they have been very selective about who to grant the payment aggregator license to. So, you know, in some ways, you know, you weed out the bad actors and make sure that you allow everyone to become compliant. So that is one. You know, it is a competitive business, let's be honest about it. And we think that, you know, the thesis that we have is, it's very easy to compromise a few bits in payments to make more bits in lending. We have always taken the approach, it is not either/or, it's an end. One should be able to make money in payment as well as make money in lending.
That [thesis] means that you have to optimize, extremely optimize your framework to a point where you know that you squeeze out every penny, every bits out of it. So I think that that has helped us in terms of being able to remain competitive. I think with scale and with the network that we operate, we continue being competitive, and then we have to work on innovative solutions, which are AI-driven solutions that potentially allow us. We are very bullish on AI, just so that you know. I think that it has the potential to, I mean, somewhat overhaul quite a bit of whatever we are doing in the next five years. You know, the thesis and why, it's very hard to borrow somebody's conviction, but we are convinced that that is the case.
So as far as being able to make more efficient frameworks, being able to identify and predict activities before they happen, being able to ensure that we can become productive, all of those things will have a, will have an important, you know, participation in keeping us competitive, in my opinion.
Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for your clear answer. That's all from my side.
Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your questions to two per participant. The next question is from the line of Deepesh Sancheti from Maanya Finance. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello? Hello, am I audible?
Yes, Dipesh, you are audible. Please go ahead.
Okay. Yeah. Just wanted to know, the GeM, gross merchandise value has experienced a quarter-on-quarter decrease, dropping from over INR 100,000 crore in the previous quarters to around INR 91,000 crore in this quarter. Is this the first time that the quarter-on-quarter decline on GeM, gross merchandise value has happened, and what is the specific reason for this? And also going ahead, in Q4 and other quarters, how do you see the GeM GMV?
See, of course, we can't comment specifically on the reasons why GMV went down or up, but the sequential quarter over quarter has happened in the past also, so this is not the first time. You know what I mean. For the first time, what I can tell you is that what happened in the full last year, GeM has accomplished more of that in the first nine months of this year compared to what they did in the full last year. So I think, you know, overall, the value has gone up significantly. So that's the one part. The reasons behind that, so on and so forth, very hard to figure out, because they're a client, and they would know more about it than we would. Historically, Q4 is a big quarter for GeM.
Given the election year and given that, you know, there is a lot of, you know, incentive and commitment to actually make GeM successful, we expect that should continue building up from here .
Okay. The second question is: Can you provide me an update on your business in UAE? What kind of growth and revenues contribution are we currently experiencing? Additionally, I mean, could you also give me the TPV we are processing there? And do we have any other plans, and, I mean, also the plans what we are doing in the new geographies. You mentioned in the investor presentation, but, I mean, what are the CapEx which we are doing in the other geographies?
Vishwas, you want to take UAE?
Actually, processing numbers for this, you will give it out, right? So basically, we are doing about UAE. Vishwas is likely out of audible .
You want me to take that question now?
Yeah.
Yeah, on the numbers part, Purvesh, you take it, and the business side I will answer.
I'll give you the numbers, and then, I will hand it over to our Joint Managing Director, Vishwas Patel, to answer this. So, we don't separate out UAE, but I can tell you that UAE has been growing at more than 50% CAGR. Last quarter also, as in Q3 also, we've grown by more than 50%, as far as GMV is concerned. Take rates have always remained in the double digits. Just, as I just mentioned in the previous question, that we've been expanding on, in the UAE geography, and soon we'll be launching in Saudi as well. Due to promotional activities, and in the last quarter also we mentioned that we've launched the offline business in UAE, so we are seeing an extremely good response.
Q3, you will know that, even in the UAE space, there are a lot of travelers. There are a lot of people from various part of the world, traveling to UAE, especially in the months of November and December, where we saw a very good uptake of our offline as well as the online, which is why we, went a bit more aggressive on the promotional side to push our, UAE business, and we've seen an extremely good response to that, which is why the take rates have slightly came down, but they still continue to remain in the double digits. And whatever we are building with the partnerships that we have in the whole of the GCC region, I think from FY 2025 onwards, in fact, from Q4 onwards, you will see a better performance here. Much better performance rather.
Vishwas, over to you. Yeah. I hope, Deepesh, I have answered your question.
Yes, thank you.
Yes.
The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from-
Vishwas, wait. Vishwas, we haven't Vishwas, wait, we haven't completely addressed Deepesh.
Okay.
Deepesh, numbers are okay with you? So then, Vishwas-
Yeah, numbers, numbers-
Numbers are fine.
Numbers are good. If you can just answer that, how much CapEx are we planning to do for the other geographies?
Yes.
If you can CapEx on the business part on the UAE and Saudi. So on UAE part, we have grown, almost all the GMV is from the online businesses that are there. The focus is 7,000-odd merchants. So all the top merchants there in UAE, Damac, Nakheel, Dana, Gate, Khalifa, everybody, is coming from the online business. So now we are expanding the scope, as Vishwas said earlier. How do we go from 10x merchant from 7,000 to 70,000? So that's where, we are focusing right now on totally the offline solution.
That QR code is already deployed in many of the establishments there in UAE, and now with TapPay, we'll be getting into TapPay and our revenue solution, both will be getting into a lot of offline businesses for processing offline through our CCAvenue app there. Of course, we are also working on the platform side with multiple banks that will be that we will announce subsequently in the quarters. Same way for the CapEx part is already built out in UAE over the last five years that we are operational there. So it's just incremental operations that we are doing on certain specific solutions that is there. Saudi we are just starting off because of the licensing norms. We've got the in-principle approval from SAMA, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, to start business.
So the next quarter in Saudi will be, Saudi market will also be reflected in our business. In Oman, we have opened up our platform to three of the biggest banks there. There is Bank Muscat, Bank Dhofar and Bank Sohar, another one bank. So they're using our entire Platform as a Service there, and other things. So these kind of, I think, growth pattern in the Middle East, very quickly they are one of the small markets before we move on to another geography. On the CapEx part, as I said, Sunit, do you want to take that now?
Typical CapEx that you see, and one can reasonably assume that, you know, for every geography, we light it up and become data localized and so on and so forth, it will be a $2 million to $3 million CapEx.
Okay. That will be for each and every country or,
Yeah. Every country, depending upon the rules and regulations, because if you want to have localization in every country and become compliant, we expect that that will go that route, if not today, tomorrow.
Okay.
So while we can operate centrally, because every country will have certain rules and regulations around payments, and over a period of time, we will need to become compliant to these rules and regulations.
Right. So, if any AI module also, which we develop, that will also be expanded throughout the geographies, right?
Yes, that's correct.
The AI module we are developing, are we also talking to companies like OpenAI or Microsoft or Enterprise Bot or something like that? Are we open to that or, we are doing everything by ourselves?
See, fortunately, we are not working on large language models, LLMs, that we talk about. You know, to do LLMs is going to require, you know, in my opinion, you know, and it's open information, 16,000 GPUs is $1 billion CapEx, a very large investment. What we are looking at is training and inference. And when we look at video analytics, you know, we will work with companies to be able to build up. Everything that we are building out right now would be proprietary to us.
But if you wanted to actually go and say, "Vijay, listen, I want to start talking with videos, and not look frame by frame," then we'll look at partnerships where you would need a base framework, base foundation model, and then you actually allow the video to be able to talk to you in certain specific ways. So whatever Llama that you talk about or, you know, when you think about, I mean, what I talk about is large language video analytics framework, or when you think about LLMs, you would need to think about foundation models. W hat we realized is that there are several foundation models. It is not just one foundation model. T hose foundation models will go through their own ups and downs and turbulences.
But the thing that we realized is that each of these foundation models need applications for monetization. Otherwise, these foundations model don't have monetization opportunities. So, getting into the details of it will be hard right now, but you know, you can think of it as about us as we are building out our proprietary, we call internal proprietary, and then we'll partner with the right companies to be able to build up feature sets and functionalities that potentially make the entire offering very rich.
So you're doing partnering with the foundation model, and then over that, you'll be layering it up with what exactly is good for your application. Am I h ave I got this right?
Most likely, yes.
Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Just wanted to understand your thoughts on two aspects. Firstly, the transaction that we did with the Pirimid lending solution. What is the kind of synergy that we are seeking out of this transaction for our business? And secondly, on the investment that we have done in the for to acquiring the minority, the rest of the stake in the Sohum, what kind of investment it will entail, and what are the next two, three-year objectives that we plan to achieve from that?
Sure. To answer the second question first, Sohum was 50.5% owned by NVV. And this announcement is about, you know, acquiring the remainder, 49.5%. Sohum is the entity that was utilized to be able to apply for the new umbrella entity license for retail payment systems. Sohum had applied as part of a consortium, and we discussed this in the past. There are several consortiums that have applied for the new umbrella entity license with RBI. So far, you know, we've not heard back from RBI, but we believe that, you know, payment aggregator licenses were first evaluated, and with due time, you know, we'll hear more from RBI in terms of the overall perspective. The amount of investment is, you know, INR 45 lakhs.
So we are acquiring the remainder part for INR 45 lakh. Given that, the entity is a consortium partner, and it has to go through, you know, the process of RBI meeting. There are several consortiums that have applied. It's all public information of who has applied with whom and, you know, we react to here. So that's the part in terms of, Sohum. Once we get, and once we hear back and once we are awarded, as we're consulting, you know, any specific license from, from the regulator, at that point, we'll be sharing more information in terms of what it requires and what it entails. But as of now, we have taken over 100% of Sohum, so it will become a 100% subsidiary of ours, and the amount of investment is about INR 45 lakhs. So that's Sohum.
What's the second question, Rahul? So basically-
Yes.
As far as the rationale is, for Pirimid. Pirimid builds zero-latency software frameworks. They have frameworks for account aggregation. They have frameworks that they build for lending applications. Many of their clients, you know, they include large companies, including the likes of LendingKart and others who utilize them. And they've given trading frameworks, capital markets trading frameworks to international companies, as well, some very reputed ones. So our objective was twofold. One is how do we integrate payments? Because payments and settlement in capital markets will become a very important facet in the next few coming quarters. And we believe that they're the place to inject payments, you know, as a core competency into that.
So that is one place that we'll explore, you know, which we, we don't exist right now in that space at all. And we believe that, you know, with the capital markets, you know, and given that, you know, one needs to look at real-time settlements, I think there'll be an important facet of how one can participate in that, in that setup. So that's one area that we'd like to build out. Second is, when you provide such high lit- you know, zero-latency, high-performance frameworks to companies, role of artificial intelligence, big data becomes very important. And we'll be exploring frameworks. We have already started exploring frameworks in terms of how we can inject, you know, the frameworks that we build out into specific offerings to clients. And I think, you know, Rahul, to answer your question, see, data is everything.
Data will actually allow you to create it. You know, over a period of time, models are also important, but without data, you can't actually do much. And so what that does is for every client, we make it specific to the client, and they can learn from the generalized model as well as specific data for their own models. Particularly with Turbo, Turbo for, I mean, some days, ChatGPT-4 Turbo, where you can customize it based on your data. But, you know, rather than actually doing a generalized data, given that it's verticalized for fintech, you can actually do a much better job in terms of overall performance compared to any generalized model. So we'll work on those kinds of opportunities to be able to build up from there. We see good synergies in that space. Lending is important to us.
This is the third facet of it. We think that we have been appropriately conservative. We did settlement funding, that is express settlement that we talked about in the past, but we've also built out our thesis in terms of what we'd like to participate in, because that's a very large opportunity, given the number of merchants that we hold. And, you know, maybe in this quarter itself, you'll hear more about us, more from us in terms of what we'd like to do in that space.
Right. And just last bit on the GeM side of the business, you said you have this billing till this point, which you have accounted for this quarter. And since they continue to use the IP, is it safe to assume that till the point they use it, the revenue has to come in? It's just that it's not contracted at this point, or you see a risk of not getting paid for that part as well?
Yeah, thank you. Our internal bias is always to be appropriately conservative, much like an investor would think. And make sure that you expect the best and account for the scenarios that you don't expect them to unfold. So, you know, we've accounted for revenues only until December 14. And you know, until I have, you know, there's a difference between a cut and a lift, so until we have a contract, it'd be hard to actually comment on it. One thing we know is that, you know, our intellectual property is being utilized, you know, for every transaction that happens today.
Yeah. And just to reconfirm that, so essentially, we have booked revenue for 74 days and cost for the full 90 days in this quarter?
Sorry, 74 days in what? I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part.
In a way, we have booked revenue for 74 days-
Yeah, and-
But the cost is for the full quarter.
100%. Yeah, that's right. 100%.
Understood. Thank you. That's it from my side.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all participants in the conference, please limit your questions to only one per participant. The next question, the next question is from Hemal. He's an individual investor. Please go ahead.
Hello? Hello.
Yes.
Can you hear me?
We can hear you.
Okay.
Yes, we can hear you. Please go ahead.
Just a very, very simple question. I don't know if you publish this. If you do, how much is our revenue this year of nine months? W hat percentage of our revenue will be from GeM?
We don't publish that, but one can assume that it's less than a legitimate percentage.
Okay. Thank you. That's it from me.
Thank you. The next question is from Ayushi Shah. She's an individual investor. Please go ahead. Hello, Ayushi Shah, can you hear me? Hello? Hello, Ayushi Shah, there is no response. As there is no response from Ayushi Shah, we will take next question. The next question-
Hello. Hello, hello, hello.
Hello, yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
Ayushi Shah, right? Yeah.
Yeah, Ayushi Shah. Yeah, sir, so basically my question was, regarding the jump in of INR 120 crore in the operating expenses, so what does it pertain to? Like, what have you spent on?
Ayushi, the rise in operating expenses is basically the payment processing charges.
Payment processing charges. So can you elaborate a bit more on that? Nothing from, like, DRC mark- to- market or anything like that, that has come in over here, right?
Operating expense cannot include mark-to-market, right? So mark-to-market losses for this quarter have been recorded in the other expenses. This quarter, we've processed a lot of credit cards, whichever CFO was mentioning, somewhere around 53% to 55% is the contribution from the credit card. As you're aware, we've been saying in every call, that credit card cost to the company is on the higher side, say around 180, 185 basis points, for example, and we give it to the merchant at 200 basis point. So the operating expenses get recorded at, at this 180 or 185 basis point. Because the volume of credit card has increased, so the processing, payment processing charges have increased in proportion to the contribution from credit options.
Okay. And so, sir, where do we stand on the IPO of our UAE, like, venture?
We've not announced anything of that sort, so maybe you're referring to whatever you may be referring to, but one thing we know is that we, you know, that in certain subsidiary of ours, and we're building up the business. And as and when we have more information, we'll share with you.
All right, sir. Sir, and regarding the patent regarding TapPay, is there any update on it? I've been asking since a while now, and it's almost been a year since we applied for the same.
Vishwas, do you want to take that?
Yes. Yeah . So we have applied for the patent. We are waiting for the response from the respective trademark corporate patent office. We've not heard anything for it, so application is done. So, if we hear anything from the office, then we'll definitely update you in the next call, Ayushi.
Okay, sir. Sir, on slide 14 of the investor presentation, it is mentioned that we are awaiting a retail payment network license. So that is-
Ayushi, sorry to interrupt. Ayushi, sorry to interrupt, today we have many people in the queue.
Yeah, sure, sir. Don't worry.
Could you please come back?
Yeah, sure. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Pranav, from Dolat Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, can you hear me?
Yes, Pranav.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, so just on the tie-up with Bandhan Bank, so how does this expand our opportunity, you know, for our payment business, and what kind of partnerships can we expect going forward?
Bandhan Bank is a tie-up for different. They are in charge of instant EMI that we can get on cards and offering to the end consumer customers of the merchant. So if you are a Bandhan Bank customer and shopping on any of the websites that are powered by CCAvenue, you can instantly convert your transactions into EMI, giving you more flexibility to buy higher ticket items for yourself. So these kind of tie-ups we already have with almost 17 or 18 of the banks, and we are going to be able to give instant EMI with the agreed rates for specific purposes for specific periods. So that's one part. Of course, there's some processing and there's also of our platform usage with Bandhan Bank relationships.
As we said, we have almost 75+ bank relationships going on with various services utilization from acquiring to other. Bandhan Bank is one of them.
Okay. Yeah, [whatsoever].
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Pranay Jain from Deal Wealth Capital.
One, I just wanted to understand, when are we expecting the retail payment network license? That's on the retail side, and on the ERP, could you give us a flavor of some of the clients we could see in the presentation by the end of the year, other than the big names we are seeing on a regular basis?
Sure. So, in terms of the retail payment license, the NUE license, which is the one that you're referring to, Pranay, first of all, that particular license, we've heard as much as you've heard from the news, in terms of, you know, when RBI is expected to pick up, not pick up, so on and so forth. But, you know, we'll hear more from them, from the regulator. As soon as we hear, we'll let you know. The thing that we know is that, you know, several consortiums have bid on the new license. It's a very large license.
Because it enables you to do a lot more, you know, and not just payment aggregation, but a lot more in terms of coming up with your own, you know, in some ways, competing framework to NPCI and many others, possibly. So when we hear more about it, we will let you know. Our consortium, we believe, is a strong consortium that we've established, and we think that, you know, as soon as we hear back from the regulator, we'll update you in terms of the next steps, process, so on and so forth. You know, the application was made several quarters ago, if you recollect. So
But, you know, in terms of the priority, you know, the focus was really about Payment Aggregator License first. You know, as you know, we believe that, you know, since, you know, Payment Aggregator License has been awarded and continues to be evaluated, we think that, you know, hopefully we should hear back shortly. But we will confirm timelines on the same.
On the ERP side, customer sheet, what's it looking like?
On the sorry? On the...
On the ERP side, I mean, we generally see examples like J&J or Sony.
Yeah.
So, what's the addition?
Yeah, we will, we will be talking about that very shortly. So by the end of the year, you'll have more information.
Okay. And the second part was internationally, what are we penciling for US, Australia, next couple of years as we are making a foray there? And on a consolidated basis, anything that we are aiming on ROA and ROE? It's single digits at present. Just wanted to know what's the path we have.
Sure. So, internationally, I think, you know, for each geography in Australia and U.S. also, they're very large geographies. And, you know, we mentioned earlier that today, international business is a single-digit percentage of our overall revenue, and we expect in the next two years it should be a good 25% to 30% of our overall business. So while India will also grow, international should grow, and that's the [thesis] that we want to work with. And that will involve, you know, us to actually build up quite a bit of our, our frameworks in, in international. Fortunately, we've seen success with UAE geography. You know, we know the pieces. We've tried it out. We've been present, and it's growing significantly well for us. So we believe that we can replicate the same model.
We call it Country in the Box, which means that we can actually build up a team within the country, and then we can actually make it work. For you to set up from ground zero, it will involve good amount of CapEx. But with incremental CapEx, we can actually build out our country. And countries where we believe that we don't have huge, you know, opportunity or, you know, maybe the volume is not as high, we actually work on the CGP solution, which is where we provide our framework to a bank, so that they can give it to clients.
For example, Oman may be a small geography today for us to pick up, but we gave it to a bank who eventually onboards clients. So it, it comes as a bank white label solution and not a CCAvenue white label solution, white CCAvenue solution, let's put it this way. So I think that, you know, in geographies, so it'll be like a pick and choose approach. In certain geographies, we'd like to work with a bank because we don't think that the geography is large enough for us to actually get a team out there, or in terms of our priority of the countries that we want to pick up, you know, that is not very high up on the list.
If you go to anyone in UAE, and maybe if you have asked if you have processed through CCAvenue payment gateway, they would have, maybe most of the times they would say, "Yes," they would have recollected us. And I think, you know, with the QR code solution that Vishwas has brought up, where we are increasing TapPay, it will become even more pervasive in that geography. And we believe that that's a good base for us to start building up on top of.
So UAE is well installed. For U.S. and Australia, I was asking what kind of partnerships we see as vital, whether with the financial players or fintech players. I mean, we have solutions which are tested, but like you said, these are very advanced large financial economies, and perhaps the strategy needs to be tweaked a little bit. We must have identified collaborations and partnerships over there that we are working on. So, any light you can throw on that?
Sure. So to give you an instance, in the US, we think that just going as a payment infrastructure provider may not work. We need to work on solutions and payments together. Vishal has brought up something called ResAvenue in the past, where we provide frameworks to hotels. And so when we provide solutions along with payments to such aggregators, then it makes it very interesting. And fortunately, on a lighter note, most of the hotel owners are Patels in US.
So we think that there will be some chemistry out there that we can perhaps work our magic through. But, having said that, I think, you know, you need to work on your strengths, and we think that the strength is that we vertically focus ourselves where the margins are significantly higher. You mean, you know, in the entertainment business, the margins are very high, the inventory is perishable.
So if we are able to make it a win-win situation, you know, for someone who is utilizing us by providing infra with payments, and also, on the other hand, allowing them to monetize better, I think that that becomes a good combination that we can, you know, take over quite a bit of further volumes. And on the partnership side, you need to work with acquiring banks. Also, large enough acquiring banks who have a huge set of margins, where, you know, given the efficiency and the prowess with which we have our framework built out and the solutioning capability that we are looking at, including the frameworks in AI that we bring up, that they would want to migrate the merchants onto our framework.
All right. And the consolidated numbers on ROA and ROE?
Pranay, I will answer that. This is Purvesh here. So if you, if you notice, we had just mentioned in the beginning of our opening remarks, the standalone constitutes about 94% of the consolidated revenue that you see. Majority of the business comes from our India payments and the platforms business, the marketplace software, and the entire suite around this marketplace that we have sitting in our standalone business, where we are generating about 66% EBITDA margin. This business is the core of Infibeam Avenues, which we have been doing for the past couple of decades since we began. This business, if you see, has been generating an ROE of somewhere close to 25%. How 25% and not the single digit, as you were mentioning?
We've made investments in a lot of subsidiaries just about a year or two before the COVID, and these are startup kind of businesses. So when they just started in about a year or two, we were hit by COVID, and there was a slowdown in those businesses, but the investments were already made. So you will see a large chunk of investment in our standalone balance sheet as well. So temporarily, if you keep those investments aside, which are for, you know, the long-term prospects of the investments that we have in these subsidiaries, and we have a large part of goodwill also sitting in the books, you will see that the standalone business itself is generating an ROE of somewhere close to 25%.
You will also notice that in our presentation on the last slide, the way we have shown it. So, the ROE is not single digit. It's actually somewhere close to 25%, for the whole f or the core business that we are into. The last page shows 19% ROE for standalone. That's FY 2023. 'm talking of, H1 of FY 2024, when we already had a balance sheet and a cash flow published.
This is going to look like what over the next one to two years?
We plan to sustain it or grow it in future. We also mentioned that we are getting the benefit of operating leverage because of the scale that we are into. Going forward, we will try to sustain or increase our ROE levels somewhere.
Anything on the assets?
On the assets, can you touch base with me offline? Because I'll have to work that out. I don't have it readily available, but I think it is somewhere in the range of 5% to 6%, if I'm not wrong.
Okay. All right. Purvesh. Thank you.
Okay, Pranay. All the best.
Thank you. Due to time constraint, the management will take one last question. The next question is from Souvik Kumar Ghosh. He's an individual investor. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir. Thank you for the opportunity, and congratulations on the great set of numbers. So I primarily had two questions for the AI domain. One is, when do you see the AI offering start to contribute meaningfully to the top line? That is the first question. And second question is, what has been the operating expenditure relating to the AI vertical in this quarter, and what could be the run rate going ahead?
Sure, I'll take that. So basically, we don't dissect, you know, as a segment, and then publish the numbers in terms of, you know, the OpEx and so on and so forth on the AI business. But as far as the overall opportunity is concerned, you know, we think that in the first question is that when will AI significantly contribute to the numbers? AI will, the framework is built horizontally, which means that our existing businesses, both the platform and payments business, will continue to grow. AI will support those businesses by being a horizontal layer, you know, as far as the core business is concerned, which is what I was talking to you earlier. It will make the business more smarter, intelligent, optimal, and be able to, and as well as in some cases, productive and marketable.
So we think that that will be the core competency for us. The second piece on the impact of it, you see, the moment you actually go into retail stores, and you know, what I talked to you earlier about was the visual AI component of it. If you are able to, and you know, in our opinion, not many people work on those frameworks, but if you are able to actually make it very meaningful, and you provide some security solutions, payment solutions and inventory, you know, tracking solutions, customer experience solutions, and if you're able to make it statistically significant and make a big impact, then those solutions become very critical, because you know, without data, nobody can build out such solutions. You know, that's...
I think that that is where we feel that there'll be a significant impact. My expectation is that you'll start seeing, you know, impact in our, in our numbers, both for payments and platform business, you know, in the coming quarter. And, you know, as far as AI business specifically is concerned, which is outside, you see, it is TapPay, where it goes into typical retail stores. So if we have a solution where we are offering, you know, visual AI with TapPay, we always think of combination packs which, which actually makes our model more predictive and also allows us to increase our core business.
So I hope I answered your question, but we'll not segment out AI as a separate line item until it becomes, you know, business that we offer as a standalone to third party, at which point we will.
Understood, sir. Thank you.
Thank you. That was the last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to management for closing comments.
Thank you all for visiting our Q3 Earnings Call, and we look forward to keeping in touch with you and update you on the latest in the company. Thanks again.
On behalf of Go India Advisors, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.