Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Q2 FY 2022 earnings conference call of IRIS Business Services. 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 presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Siddharth Shah from Christensen Advisory. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Steven. Good evening to all the participants on this call. Before we proceed to the call, let me remind you that the discussion may contain forward-looking statements that may involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. It must be viewed in conjunction with our business risks that could cause future result performance or achievements to differ significantly from what is expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Please note that we have mailed the results, and same are available on the company's website. In case if you have not received the same, you can write to us, and we will be happy to send the same over to you. To take us through the results and answer your questions today, we have the top management of IRIS Business Services Limited, represented by Swaminathan, CEO and Founder, Balachandran, Founder and CFO, and Deepta Rangarajan, Co-founder.
We will start the call with a brief overview of the quarter gone past and then conduct the Q&A session. With that said, I will now hand over the call to Mr. Swaminathan. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, Siddharth. I am gonna do it slightly differently. Some time ago, we uploaded the presentation that we're going to use. I first wanna apologize to people for this not being a Zoom call like it was last time. That's basically because the people who were transcribing it last time made a mess of the transcription, and we had to do the work all over again. It took a long time. We wanted to go with a vendor who could actually give us a reasonable quality transcription so that we could upload it quickly instead of wasting time. Which is the reason why we uploaded the presentation to the BSE and NSE.
If you have the presentation with you, it might be useful for you to have it in front of you because I'll go through some of the highlights of the slides to get started. I think the big event in the last six months has been the migration to the main board of the BSE and NSE. I think it's been very surprising. The results have been very surprising. While before we migrated, we had about 500 shareholders. Today we have about 1,400 shareholders. We have still got 415 shareholders who are holding over 4,000 shares or more, which is what the market lot was earlier. We've added 1,000 shares, 1,000 shareholders. A significant number are holding 100 shares or less.
I'm glad that we have shareholders from as far away as Tripura, Agartala in Tripura, from Guwahati and all those places, which basically increases our responsibility as a company towards them and make sure that we stay open, transparent and fully communicative so that investors know what's happening. I'm gonna also start with an apology to existing shareholders from before who already know a lot about the company and for whom some of the stuff I'm saying may actually sound very repetitive. Please bear with me, a special apology to them. Because with the new people coming in, I think I have an obligation to share with them what the company is all about0 in as brief a way as possible. You know, we call ourselves a RegTech SaaS company. What is RegTech?
RegTech basically is regulatory solutions for the regulatory services. It includes your regulators as well as the enterprise who need to regulate. That's why we call it. We basically use IT to enhance the regulatory process, either within a company who's filing to a regulator or at the regulator side. Typically, a lot of people will talk about RegTech only in the context of enterprises. We talk about both. Currently, you know, people talk about the supervisory, something called SupTech as being the technology being used by supervisors. We have lumped the two because we are in both parts. The benefits of RegTech are very well known and it's on the slide. Take a look at it if you want to. The opportunity is huge.
The only reason I'm saying the opportunity is huge because, I mean, no matter what targets we set for ourselves, the market is big enough to accommodate it. As long as we have a good product, which we do, as long as we have good clients, which we do, and as long as we have money, which we don't. But that's the way things are. We divide the business into three parts, what we call Collect, Create, and Consume. Collect is helping regulators collect data. The Reserve Bank of India collects data from all the banks in the country. They do so using our software, and all the banks file with RBI using our software. That's the Collect part of our business. We do this in about 24 odd countries, about over 30 regulators.
This business has completely slowed down to an almost standstill in the last two years because of COVID. We are hurting because of COVID. It's not been very present. It's only now that regulators are coming back to work and are beginning to draw up plans for going to the next phase of digital reporting. You may have seen a disclosure by us about a mandate that we won from Kuwait, and I'm hoping that's the beginning of a lot more to come. There are several other bids in the pipeline. We are hoping that some good things will actually happen in the next one to three years as more and more regulators hurry up to catch up with the rest of the crowd in terms of digital reporting framework.
Currently 70 countries accounting for 95% of the world's GDP have already set up digital filing platforms of the kind that we can set up for them. We expect many more to do it in the days ahead. Create is our business where we help enterprises create data for submission to the regulator. We do this for capital markets filings, for ROC filings, for banking filings. We also have a solution for TSP filings, which is used by some of the leading companies in the country. We call the division Create. Create, and we give them colloquial names. Collect, helping regulators collect data. Create, helping enterprises create data for submission to the regulator.
Consume, so once the data is created and generated and submitted, it needs to be analyzed, and that's what the Consume business is all about. We've invested a lot in Consume, not done much with it yet, but we see that as a huge growth opportunity going forward. This is the corporate journey. You would have seen the slide on thread number eight. It's a corporate journey of the company, our evolution from being a services company to a product company and now a SaaS company. Global footprint. We are in over 41 countries, as we added 14 countries some time ago. Today's been a good day. Every day we do an earnings call, it's a good day for us. Today, we've added one more client from a country called Estonia.
We keep adding client- by- client, one day at a time. We're very grateful to our customers for reposing their faith in us. The global map tells you where all we are located. Some of the marquee clients that we have, all top-notch clients. Among the regulators, we work with regulators in Singapore. That tells you how good we are. If people ask us, you know, about our credentials, I just say, "You know what? We're working with Singapore. That's more than a customer." We then work with RBI, who's one of the most outstanding regulators in the world, whether you like it or not.
In fact, when you talk about the NPAs in the banking system, many of you who are stock market investors will be aware that the banking sector is getting regulated in some ways. It's still the PSU banks. Basically because RBI has done some really good work in terms of improving its oversight over the banks, using solutions provided by us. The solution called CRILC. If you're a banker, if you've heard of CRILC is a solution that we created for RBI using our technology, and that has transformed Indian banking completely. It becomes difficult for banks to mislead RBI with wrong data, and that's been transformational for RBI. We work with exchanges, we work with central banks, we work with ROCs.
We also work with some big Indian companies like Reliance, like BMW in a couple of countries, like Larsen & Toubro for GST filings, Tata Motors, and so on, so forth. I mean, it's absolutely top-notch customers. What do we do for regulators? As I told you, we help them collect data that largely in an information standard called XBRL. XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It's a standard that I mentioned to you, used by 70 countries of the world, accounting for about 95% of the world GDP. There's a certain consulting component of the revenues. There's a certain product component of the revenues, and there's a certain system integration component of the revenues. That's broadly what it's all about. That's, as I told you, it's about 30 paying regulators and a few non-paying regulators as well.
The regulatory implementations are mentioned in the slide that follows. I've tried to add a couple of new slides for people who've been with us for a long time as shareholders, and so that they are aware of some of these things which they may not have seen before. Because I can't. Otherwise, it might have actually been repetition for them. We work with Bahrain, Malaysia, Mauritius, North Macedonia, Qatar. North Macedonia, for many of you may be interested in history, is the country where Mother Teresa came from. It's also where Alexander the Great came from. That's its connection with India. These are the regulatory implementations we've actually done. Next question. I keep saying that we are RegTech SaaS. What is SaaS? And how is SaaS different from other IT companies, other IT solutions?
You know, a lot of people end up confusing the whole range of IT possibilities, and I think it's important to provide clarification. Software as a service is, as I mentioned in the slide, is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. So it's almost like your Microsoft Office 365. It's centrally hosted. You log in there and you use Microsoft Office 365. That's the SaaS model. You could also have Microsoft Office installed on your laptop, and you could work on it. That's a software product model. And then there are people who create custom software for people. Those are software services companies. The software Saas market globally is growing very fast because of the cost benefit to the users.
In India itself, because of the deep penetration that we have in IT, because of the huge number of people we have in IT in this country, all of whom have worked in services mostly, the Indian SaaS companies, according to McKinsey, could win 4%-6% of the global market by the year 2030. We hope that we play a small role in making that happen. Most of the Indian SaaS companies are in the area of providing solutions for the software industry. We are an exception. We provide software for the compliance sector across industries, literally. Today, I got a report from a company called Zinnov, who've done a study along with Falcon Edge fund in Bangalore.
They basically say that the SaaS industry is well-positioned to overtake the well-established IT services industry by 2030. So if you are interested in IT, you may want to make a choice as to where you want to be, whether you want to be in the services side or the product side or whether you're on the SaaS side. I mean, the major software services companies in the country, you know, TCS, Infosys, Wipro. Accenture is a global company, as you know, in the software services side. On the product side, you use Oracle, you use Microsoft. We have Intellect Design Arena, which is a fine company from Chennai, which is in the software product side. On the SaaS side, you would use Salesforce. You may not use Salesforce, but you know Salesforce. They are probably the largest CRM in the world.
You may have heard of Zoho, because Zoho, I've heard, is used a lot in India, and many of you may also be users of Zoho. Adobe is an example of a SaaS company. IRIS, of course, is an example of a SaaS company. We are a RegTech SaaS company. RegTech solving compliance requirements. SaaS selling software as a license, selling software as a service, getting people to use it. Leave it there, let them come and start using it. These are broad offerings in the area of SaaS: IRIS CARBON, which is used for enterprise filings for ROC or capital markets. We also have on-prem solutions like iDEAL, which is not really a cloud solution. Banks don't like to operate in the cloud. Reserve Bank of India also does not like to operate in the cloud.
There are markets where SaaS solutions are really well, and there are markets where SaaS solutions will go up. We have two flagship SaaS products. The reason I gave this slide about source of recurring revenues, because we have recurring revenues which is SaaS, and we have recurring revenues which is not SaaS. That's the services. When people file, and I assure you, in every country, people make the regulatory filings only at the last minute, as we have found. They often want assistance. That accounts for a small percentage of our revenues, but we have to provide that, especially if it gets really complicated. Most people in most countries wake up to filings only close to the deadline, and therefore seek assistance at that point in time. We get paid for that separately.
Sometimes we bundle it along with the larger pricing, but that's the way it actually works. The flagship product of ours is CARBON, which currently is used for capital market filing, ROC filings, energy market filings in America, and very soon it will be used for ESG filing and municipal bond filings in the U.S. Municipal corporations and local government especially. The market is very huge. U.S. SEC alone is about 6,000 companies. Europe capital market is about 5,000 companies. U.K. capital market about 1,200 companies. South Africa Business Registry is about nine companies. U.K. HMRC, there's a tax authority as well as the ROC. There's about 1 million firms and so on, so forth. It's a very, very large opportunity. How good are we? In a recent market.
You know, in the market in America for the energy filings, you'll be surprised to know that our competitor, a very formidable competitor, against whom we are up in the SEC filings, has tied up with us for our product. We basically architected our product in such a manner that from one product, multiple filings can happen and multiple geographies can be addressed, and that's a huge thing. For Carbon users, there are people like BMW, a familiar name. Old Mutual, a company you would have heard of. We used to have OM. Old Mutual used to have a partnership with Quotas, if I remember right. Bidvest, you would know from the cricket sponsorships in South Africa. Reliance, of course, we all know. Enel is one of the biggest energy companies. The biggest energy company in Italy is a client.
The biggest energy company in Spain is a client. All these ultimately corroborate our point about how good we are. Most important thing going forward is our quality. Quarter after quarter in independent assessment, our quality of software has been ranked to be the highest in independent filings. Today, when you go to Gartner Peer Insights, you will find comments by customers about how good we are. These are all endorsements that have actually taken us to the next level. Our growth, we have a very strong growth focus in U.S. and Europe going forward. That's where we want to go. That's where we want to be. We've not done very well in the U.S. so far. We've had some reasonable success in Europe. We believe both are huge opportunities we need to work on.
Also, apart from the 70 countries, it's also expanding to other markets, but primary focus will actually be the U.S. and the U.K. going forward. I talked to you about our quality chart. Our Gartner Peer Insights I mentioned to you. We are on the recommended software list in Europe. We are on the Eurofiling Foundation's recommended software list as well, and we keep getting invites to come and speak. I'll now move to GST, where some of the top companies work with us. Finolex, Larsen & Toubro, Thermax, Tech Mahindra, Trent. You know, ultimately, the success of a company is a function of what sort of clients it has, paying clients it actually has, and whether they trust the company to trust their compliance with them.
You know, compliance is an area where if you go wrong, the customer can actually throw you out very quickly. You need to get it right every single time. It's like a batsman who can't afford to get out next ball. I think you need to be there, get it right every single quarter after quarter, every single month after month, every single year- after- year. That's what we need to do. The GST market is a very fiercely competitive market. It started with 100 players, now down to only 10. There's some interesting possibilities emerging from GST, including adjacent things. I don't know how many of you have heard of a product of ours called IRIS Peridot. If you please, I push you to download it.
It's a software which allows you to verify the GST compliance status of companies in the country. It's used by many people, including people on this call, to check out a company before they even invest in them. It's actually worked really well. IRIS iDEAL is our product for the banking sector. Again, it's an on-prem product and not a SaaS offering because banks don't like the cloud. Banks are scared of the cloud. I mean, they won't cloud. But we do an OpEx model where we charge them on a monthly basis. It's used by banks like ICICI Bank and Axis Bank and Standard Chartered and DHFL Bank and many others for their filing with RBI. Again, this one, this product incidentally is implemented by us with a lot of partners.
Tech Mahindra is a partner, HCLTech is a partner, Mphasis is a partner, Primus is a partner. We work with partners in terms of implementing this. We have tremendous confidence in our future. We have great clients who are referenceable clients. We have great products which ultimately have won us customers in about more than 41 countries around the world. We are currently serving close to 7,000 enterprises across the world, and we're in a good position to be able to literally grow from where we are right now. It's a pity that COVID actually has affected us. It's affected us in two different ways. First, the regulatory plans to implement new regulatory filing platforms has gone for a toss. I think it got delayed. Hopefully, in the next one, two years, it actually will take off. Secondly, when you are...
You know, we're still a bootstrap company. You know, we may have gone public and all that stuff, but we're still a very, very bootstrap company. When you don't have the funds to basically go out and launch a significant digital campaign, when you don't have enough people on the ground, even though we've hired two people in Europe and one person in the U.S., it's still a completely bootstrap kind of a company. Therefore, the amount of marketing muscle that our competitors have far exceeds what we have. It's something that we need to fix. We're trying to fix it. We are in a position with the referenceable clients that we actually have to build a successful cash-rich multi-year business. Governance, we are second to none.
From day one, we've had a majority independent directors on our board. We have an extraordinary bunch of people, a lawyer, an accountant, a marketing genius, and a gentleman who used to be a banker. They keep us literally, you know, straight in more ways than one. They ask very fundamental questions, and our board is truly independent. I will now hand over to Balu to take us through the finances. Balu, the finances of the company.
Thank you very much, Swaminathan. I hope all of you can hear me. I'll now dwell a bit on the more mundane movements in terms of financial numbers, among other things. Before I do that, let me also mention that the kind of business that we have and are building does not lend easily to a quarterly-based financial analysis. We do focus on acquiring customers, cultivating them, and building long-term financially profitable relationships. What happens is such a business tends to be a clearer picture when seen through the prism of a longer time interval. That is a bit of a caveat I want to mention.
The second point which I mentioned in the past as well is that we have talked about this in the past, that our business tends to be a bit seasonal, with the result that revenues typically increase in second half due to a combination of factors, including that of regulatory filing patterns, among other things. That is one significant factor as well. Now let me go to the numbers per se, and this time around I'll mostly restrict my commentary to the six-month movements of the financials. Our top line has moved by about 10% compared to the corresponding period. This growth percentage, though rather sedate, is better than the growth we showed in the first half of FY 2021 versus the corresponding half of FY 2020.
That was, however, you know, presented on an interim basis, and we all know that was during the COVID pandemic. That was during the you know initial peak of the COVID pandemic. Now while the revenue moved by about 10%, overall expenses, keeping aside depreciation or interest costs or finance costs, increased by nearly 21%, within which employee costs moved up by about 13%. Now this increased 13 looks rather high, especially compared to the corresponding period, which is also the onset of the COVID pandemic, and we were very, very careful about spending and you know really paranoid about preserving liquidity as well. On a sequential basis, if you look at it, employee expenses have been nearly static.
While we have started spending more on things such as cloud hosting, sales and marketing, headcount and R&D expenses, et cetera. Some of those things understandably given that our number of customers are increasing in India and in Europe, you know, we have the ESMA mandate in FERC, we have energy clients, et cetera. The point I want to essentially leave with you is that, you know, we have continued the spending trajectory that we moved into during the previous half that ended on March 31, 2021. Let me now come to the segmented revenues. You could see that the Collect segment revenues are dipped by about 8%, which was, you know, because the previous corresponding period, we had some, you know, tailwind coming from the previous half before COVID hit.
This time around, we drew a blank in terms of mandates and even, you know, even incremental changes because people just clammed up and they're waiting for, you know, the whole thing to blow away. You know, the pandemic induced risk aversion to blow away. Now coming to the Create segment. You can see, the growth is quite robust at about 27%. The Collect segment was of course coming out of the freeze in our fee activities, and, we witnessed that, during, the whole of 2021. I would say to some extent during the initial months of 2022 as well, and which Sunny also mentioned in his, initial, you know, observations.
Even in the Create segment, even though we grew 27%, in the carbon segment we saw, for example, the U.K. HMRC mandate, which we have been serving for many years now. There was some, you know, deferment of the files because the last day of action, there were three months, and now we expect this to speed up in the second half. There is, you know, those kinds of movements as well. If I look from a balance sheet perspective, we have seen a further drop in receivables. We have paid some more pending liabilities as well, with the result that our cash levels are relatively static compared to what we were in March 31. Liabilities increased, but not that significant as well.
Now the other very important indicator I want to talk about is our annual recurring revenue. Which has moved up sequentially by a little over 15% from the point at March 31, 2021. You know, at the same time, you know, happily, our recurring revenues also moved up as well, and now is at about 81% of the revenue for the year, for the past six months. Before I close, I can perhaps give a couple of observations on the Ind AS transition as well, which we completed. Now we are on the Ind AS, you know, accounting framework. This Ind AS transition has primarily some effect on our revenue recognition policy.
If you look at it, especially in case of Carbon, we have now moved to the revenue recognition framework for access fees from at a point of time to the over the period model. This has been, you know, what we've seen in other internationally recognized SaaS companies as well. We have moved to this particular model. The over the period approach is also adopted in a number of global implementations compared to a point of time where it considers license fee recognition because some of these are considered as a composite, you know, contract. This is a technical term. I also went into it. We have made a couple of these changes.
In the medium term, these changes would not matter at all. In the short term, there could be some impact. We need to wait and watch. I would certainly urge the participants to look at our ARR as the most appropriate indicator to understand the trajectory of the business. With this, I'll, you know, close my short speech. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Balu. Sudhir, I think we now open to questions.
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 Zaid Motivala from DAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Just wanted to check one thing. Who would be the typical guys that we compete with in the market?
It's a great question, but a very complicated question. Each segment, each product has got its own set of competitors. When you look at the Collect segment where we work with regulators, we have four global competitors, but the biggest competitor is very often the tendency of a regulator to go for a bespoke solution. The four global competitors are a company called CoreFiling in the U.K., a company called Wisr, which recently got sold to Vendpoint, a company called Invoke in France, and a company called CoreFiling, Wisr, Invoke, and Fujitsu in Japan. In the case of the Create segment, there are different competitors. The biggest competitor in the world, an outstanding company, the company that we all want to emulate is a company called Workiva, which is listed in America.
They are phenomenal, and in the middle of the pandemic, with all the world in crisis, they managed to increase the price. I mean, that is audacity. That's the kind of company we all want to be at the end of the day. Huge in terms of. I think Balu, $4 billion market, $5 million market now? Balu?
Yeah, I think a little short of INR 4 billion, if I remember. Let me double-check. Yeah.
It's almost 18-20 x revenue. That's the biggest competitor in the world. We have local competitors in every country, usually mom-and-pop shops of local with local strengths. For GST, ClearTax is a competitor, Cygnet is a competitor, and there are several others like that in the country who are competitors on the GST front. On iDEAL, there aren't too many competitors. People go for bespoke solutions, and that's why 45 large banks work with us already. We've done well there. In the case of the Consumer segment, most of the products are freemium, therefore there's not much to talk about. I think it's important to look at each segment separately in terms of competition. Did I answer your question?
Sure. I understand. Sorry, you mentioned quite a lot of global companies. Are all of these companies operational in India?
None operational in India. Because we, by the way, win 55% of every project we bid on globally for XBRL implementation. 55% has been the success rate. 45% we've lost, not only because we are more expensive, but also because their governments back them to do certain things. There are no local Indian companies. Whenever local Indian companies have tried to do something, it's actually been for reasons because, you know, very often the customer preferred a bespoke solution. For example, we lost an IRDA project to somebody else where the customer wanted a bespoke solution. They don't understand the significance of having a product. Some people do, some people don't.
Last question. How much of the revenue will be coming from India vis-à-vis other geographies?
Because we are currently working with RBI, there is a skew in the revenues towards India to some extent, but even then it's less than 1/3. By steady state, our India revenue will be less than 20%. At steady state, when we hit that, once the RBI project goes away, our revenues from India will actually drop as a proportion to rest of the world, because our biggest focus going forward is gonna be U.S. and U.S. and U.K. and Europe.
Sure. Got it. These are all subscription-based.
Absolutely, right.
Okay. Do you have long-term contracts with these guys, or these are all yearly?
Even if they do a long-term contract with you, it's very difficult to celebrate that because, you know, if you make one mistake, they throw you out. Fortunately, we've not made a single mistake. In the compliance space, you can't afford to make mistakes. Even people do three-year and five-year contracts with us, we behave internally as if it's only a one-year contract. Fortunately, our year-on-year churn is low. We've not lost anybody, but we live in perennial fear of losing people because of some stupidity somewhere.
Got it. Got it. Sorry, last question from my end. Do you track the ARRs?
We do.
What would that be, currently?
Balu, what was it? 46?
Our ARR is at about INR 46 crore as on September 30, 2021, which I mentioned in our presentation earlier.
Got it.
We track a lot of SaaS metrics. In fact, one of these in the next couple of months, we'll actually do a reasonable, reasonably intensive SaaS workshop for investors who want to look at SaaS, and we will share with you the metrics that we track. We track a lot of SaaS metrics internally within the company. We did not expose all the metrics to all the investors at this point in time because many of them would be meaningless for investors until they're prepared for it. We do track exactly SaaS metrics in the company, including customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and so on and so forth.
Got it. That will be helpful.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you. A reminder to the participants, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one at this time. The next question is from the line of Rohith Potti from Marshmallow Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. First, congratulations on getting listed on both BSE and NSE Main Board. It was nice to see the listing ceremony where the theme was gratitude. I have few questions. My first question is on the Create business, given that is the major driver.
Rohith, can I interrupt for a second?
Yes.
If you had been there, we would have had a little thing for you in gratitude as well, because your questions at every meet have actually been very insightful, and we are grateful to you for that. Please, accept my open expression of gratitude for the homework that you do and the questions that you ask. Thank you very much, Rohith.
Yes. Thank you for the compliment, sir. I appreciate it. So I'll get right down to it then, and hopefully impress you again. Regarding the first segment I have questions on. Maybe my set of questions here are if you could start off with the client count in Europe right now, it will be helpful, because I believe this year onwards, the implementation of ESEF is mandatory. Next, on the ESMA ESEF implementation, again, I believe that the notes to accounts are also supposed to be in XBRL from FY 2023. What does this mean for our realization per customer? Does it help or does it not? Also, my next question for Europe is the UK business.
I understand the requirements for U.K. implementation of the standard. The XBRL implementation has higher requirements as compared to the ESMA ESEF implementation. If you could give us a UK client count and what the realize. Are the realizations higher there? That would also be helpful. This is on Europe, and I have similar questions for U.S. in both SEC and FERC, how the traction is, how many clients we have, et cetera, et cetera.
On the footnote implementation, which I think was your second question, because I missed the first one. I'll have to repeat that. On the footnote, yes, it will lead to a high realization of revenues from the customers. The 2024, I think it puts 2025, FY 2024, because, you know, with the pushing back of the mandate here, we don't know whether everything gets pushed back even one more year. It's quite possible. We don't know yet. But it will lead to a disproportionate increase in revenues compared to the increase in costs. That's one thing that you need to know on that front. In terms of numbers, Balu, do we have numbers for different countries in Europe?
Can you hear me? You can hear me now, right?
I can. Yes.
I was saying that, you know, if you look at Europe, for example, the first half were, you know, typically the traction is lower than the second half. We had done about, you know, 35% growth compared to the base we had in March 31.
Okay.
Do we have numbers for the total in Europe? In fact, one more thing I'd like to add, Rohith, is our freemium offer in Europe turned out to be a mixed bag. We had a freemium offer in Europe for the small caps, and we basically said. You know our freemium model, right, Rohith?
Yes, sir. You mentioned that first year is free and next two years is chargeable, if I'm right?
Right. Absolutely right. We call it a freemium model. It did not get the traction we thought it would get, because, you know, maybe the company did not think it was very worth, very worthwhile or whatever it is. We had about 450 companies. I think between the two number of companies in order would be how much value? Or between the freemium and the paying companies.
We will be at about 155 customers as on March 31.
155 as on March 31st.
Different pipeline as well.
As of today, it'll be about 174-180?
Yeah, yeah. Right, right. I believe it's definitely, you know, close to 180.
Rohith, out of 2,000 companies in Europe, with two people on the ground in Europe, one of whom joined us only 3-4 months ago, and one was there earlier, and the rest of them calling from India, I think having 180 customers in a year, in a country of 2,000 customers with no marketing budget of any kind is not a bad job.
Yes. That's great. The market share we have in Europe. I believe the addressable market is 3,000 or is it 2,000, sir?
Let me restate here. In the ESEF filing, some of the companies have to file in XBRL. Some of the companies have to file in something called XHTML. Now, many of the smaller companies are in XHTML. The total addressable market is 3,000, more than 3,000. But the number of companies who need to file in XBRL is about 2,000. We deliberately focused on these companies because the ability to charge them is much more, and also we reach out, and they're also much bigger companies compared to the companies who got the exemption on the other side. We focus on them. Right now we are focusing on the 2,000 where we have the kind of margin.
Perfect. That was helpful. Could you speak about U.K. as well? I believe the implementation there is a little more, the requirement is a little higher. Even that's beginning this year onwards, if I'm not mistaken.
Right. In fact, U.K. decided that even though they're out of the EU, they will continue to respect the legislations in EU that they have signed on to, like this ESEF implementation. They call it by a different name. Balu, I don't have the UK numbers. Do you have them with you?
Right now, no. I think, you know, we are slowly making a beginning there. I think we'll have to get a much better picture once the second half, you know, winds down.
I'm sorry, Rohith, I don't have specific numbers, partly because, you know, this time we were marooned in Chennai, as you know, knee in 2 ft of water. I basically could not push her to get some of these things done while being surrounded by water.
Sure, sir. Am I right in thinking the high realization on average would be higher than Europe in U.K.?
It will be U.K., Europe about the same. It won't be very different.
Okay, could you speak about the similar metrics for FERC, which we were very confident about in the last call? Are there any SEC and FERC client wins that we saw this quarter? How do you see that pipeline over the next few months?
Great question. Let me before that say one thing else to you. For example, there are companies in South Africa who are also listed in the European markets, so we've been able to convert those companies into users of Carbon. That's how BMW actually came to us. BMW came to us because they work with one market, and therefore, they came to us in a different market. There are other companies like that who've actually converted to us. There are companies in Latin America who want to file in the U.S. and other markets, and so on, so forth. The cross-selling has actually worked really well between Europe and South Africa and between Europe and the U.S. as well. That's one part.
In the case of FERC, we've gone with the partners, you know, and the partner and we together put on a reasonable fight in the marketplace. I think the price is falling in that market, and that's affecting us, so we don't know how this will really pan out at the end of the day. We have not done too badly, but could we have done a lot better if we had significant marketing muscle? Probably, yes. But I don't know the exact number because this whole thing is not timed. The whole thing has not kicked off yet. The live filing is starting even as we speak. It's only now that the live filing is starting, and once the live filing starts, we will know exactly what the numbers work out to be. The contracts have been signed in many cases.
I think a significant number of contracts have actually been signed. I don't know the exact number. Again, the reason I'm not being difficult with. I'm basically saying that the visibility was not there to the extent that we normally have in the other markets, partly because, you know, I can tell you how many demos have happened, and many of the clients are beginning to sign up only now.
No revenue has flown through this particular FERC mandate so far yet, right?
Revenue has-
Revenue has flowed through.
Revenue has come. Revenue has flown through. Revenue has also been booked. The point is, it is still minuscule. Now, there are two, three kinds of customers of it. Some people wanted to use this for test filing before they did the real filing next year, so they paid us some money for it. Some people wanted the test filing done for free. Some people wanted to sign up a contract only when they did the live filing. The live filing actually went live only about two weeks ago, but they're still not required to do live filing. We are well-positioned, we think. You know, like in every market, the flurry of activity happens once the live filing starts.
We have done well in terms of the number of demos we've done, the number of customers we've talked to, but we will start looking at the numbers only around the first two weeks of January.
Okay, understood. That was helpful. I think for now, I'll get back into the queue, sir, and come back for follow-up questions.
It's after they come back from Christmas is when the filing will start.
Okay. Again, sorry, one follow-up here before I get back into the queue. I'm really sorry. The FERC, when you said you booked revenues, has it been booked in the last quarter already, or only once the live filing is done, the major revenue will flow through, and I mean, we'll see most of the revenue flowing through only in the next half?
Let me answer that.
Yeah.
The FERC contract, once you sign that, we do the revenue recognition across the period of the contract. It's an access fee. Okay. We have taken some revenue in the second quarter for a few companies we just signed. Not all have signed. Negotiations are going on.
Okay. Perfect. Perfect. Is the revenue recognition smooth, as you said, spread over the contract, or is it, I mean, as when specific events like the live filing happens, that's when majority is-
Spread over the contract.
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I'll get back into the queue for now.
Basically what it means to you is deferral of revenue that we are able to understand.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Satwik Jain from RH Perennial Fund. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. Like, this was my first investor call, so I was just wondering, like, despite, you know, such marquee customers and huge addressable markets, say over the last nine years from, say, INR 38 crores, we haven't been able to scale up our revenues a lot. Like, that was my initial observation, so I was just wondering why.
We are a bootstrapped company. You know, I was doing an exercise a little while ago as to how much money it actually cost to build this company.
Right. Right.
I did a little exercise earlier today because I knew this question would come. In a world where, you know, I just received a report this morning about companies in the SaaS space and how much money has gone into them to build a unicorn. Companies have received investments of $100 million or more to build unicorns. Today we live in a world where your Series A investment is still about $5 million-$10 million. Am I right?
Right.
We live in a world where Series B investment is like $30 million-$40 million. If you take a look at the total money that IRIS has raised so far in equity and debt, and if you net off the money we've repaid and the interest that we've paid off, the total net investment into IRIS to build our products has been less than $2 million. That's how well we've used our capital. We're a bootstrapped company. We were a bootstrapped company then, we're still a bootstrapped company. Could we have grown faster? Absolutely, yes. Could we have grown and got a significant share of the market in America? Absolutely, yes. I'm extremely grateful to the investors who came in the IPO, and, I hope they are relatively happy to be given a 4.5x in the last four years.
These investors who just came in the IPO ensured that we had some money to put feet on the street to grow our business. We've gone from INR 22 crore in the year of the IPO to INR 55 crore today, which I think is what we have done, what we have achieved. Could we have grown much faster? Absolutely, yes, if we had significant marketing muscle. The key to growing faster in the SaaS space is spending money to acquire customers. In fact, if you look at the McKinsey report that's come out on SaaS, it basically says Indian companies don't spend enough on marketing to acquire customers. That's partly because companies like us don't get funded to be funded well enough to acquire, to have the marketing muscle to fund marketing.
Right. No, that was very helpful. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thank you for your question.
Thank you. A reminder to the participants, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one. The next question is from the line of Vikas Kasturi from Focus Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir, and congratulations on migrating to the main board. I also watched your ceremony.
Thank you.
Sir, I had a couple of questions. My first question is, what is your strategy for acquiring clients, especially given that you are SaaS and the product that you're selling is a sticky, kind of a product. How are you acquiring clients? Number two, see now if you miss this time window in terms of signing up UK clients, for example, does it mean that it'll become harder for you to acquire new clients next year because they would've signed up with, let's say, somebody else. Is that how it works? Just these two questions for now, sir.
Excellent question. Let me answer the second question first. You know, if the bus has left the station, you have to wait for the next bus. No other option. We lost the bus in America when it comes to SEC filings. But the good news. You said your name is Vikas, right?
Yes.
The good news, Vikas, in America is that the churn of customers in the US market, when I say customers looking for a new vendor every quarter, if they were looking for a vendor every quarter is about 5%. There will always be a churn in the market. I think it's always easier to acquire the customer early on than later. Currently, our entire strategy of acquiring customers is with freemium strategy. We have one colleague based in Barcelona who deals with some parts of Europe. We have a colleague based in France who deals with France. We have two, three colleagues in India who are dealing with rest of Europe, and we have one colleague in Chennai who's dealing with U.K. We are doing the best that we can. We go through partners.
If I had a significant money in the bank, I would also add significant digital muscle, which will allow me to acquire more customers sooner than later. We also have good relationship with the regulators, and because of our ability to understand the complications of this whole compliance space, we're also attracting a lot of people to our webinars. We use the webinars as a means to attract customers. We do all kinds of events like that, which basically brings companies to us, and therefore use that to convert them. But if I had a significant bank balance, I could do a lot more. I could do more. Now, I'm gonna answer your questions slightly. Very, this is a very important point to make here.
In South Africa, we have a 7% market share because we had somebody on the ground, we had a good partner, and we went hell for leather on it in South Africa. In Europe, with 4-5 people, we've done really well in terms of the market share. Could we have done more? We could've done more. Can we do the same thing everywhere in the market? Absolutely yes, if we had the resources. The struggle will be constantly keep having the resources. That's what we need to fix in order to go forward.
Thank you, sir. I have attended a couple of your webinars just to understand the products a little better. I have just a follow-up question because you at this point you keep raising again and again regarding the marketing regarding having money you know to sell better or to market better. Sir, would you you know now that you've crossed one hurdle of getting to the main board would you consider, let's say, a rights issue or something like that just to get more money into the company?
We could do a rights issue, but you should also know that for the last five years I've not taken my salary, therefore I have no money to subscribe to a rights issue. I also have to be mindful of the signal that we send to the market in order to be able to raise money. We need to raise money. We need to raise money at the right price. We need to raise money at the right valuation. I've said this in previous calls as well. I think now.
Earlier people said, "You know, it's difficult to raise money because we are on a small exchange." Now people, we are in the process of trying to figure out whether it makes sense to raise money at this current valuation level, or whether we can command a premium or whether we will have to go at a discount. These are all questions that are being asked internally. Even if we did not raise money, we've not done too badly in terms of growth. Given the resource that we have had, we've done okay. I mean, having 175-180 customers in a market of 2,000 customers is not bad by any yardstick. I mean, sitting out of India literally.
Having the kind of traction that we are getting in terms of demos in FERC, we're not doing too badly. We're getting demos. We've not converted the customers. It happened just before filing actually starts. Looking at what we've done in South Africa, where we've added so many customers in the last one year. We added more than 500 customers, SaaS customers in the last six months. That's fabulous. I mean, with the kind of resource that we have and with the kind of I mean, no, I don't know how better it is done in terms of capital utilization. We've done extraordinarily well. We need to figure these things out. We are in the process of discussing internally whether we are happy with the current levels of growth or whether we need to raise capital to do that.
Price won't work for the simple reason I mentioned to you, but something else could actually work. We don't know the answer yet, but we are in discussions right now internally, as we have been for the last two years with no resolution in sight.
Okay.
At the right time, we'll make all the right announcements. I promise you that.
Sure, sir. If I may, you know, as an investor, right, so, you know, since you're selling a product which is sticky in nature, so the more customers you acquire today, you know, the pain will be shown in your, let's say, in your P&L and in your balance sheet today. Because these are sticky in nature and because they bring you annual recurring revenue, so you will be that much better off in the future. Whatever you can do in terms of raising money to get more clients, I think would help the business, sir. Just my two cents.
If you can help us do that, happy to talk to you as well.
I'm not a VC, sir.
Okay. I mean, I'm not saying. See, you would be surprised at how people can actually help. The kind of people who actually helped me get. For example, the person who actually helped me get out of my problem in 2011 was not a VC either. He introduced me to somebody who and vouched for me, and therefore the gentleman gave money. Not a lot of money, INR 7.5 crore, but it took us to the next level of growth. We used capital well. I mean, how many companies do you know with a presence in 41 countries, with an ARR of INR 46 crore today, with a net investment going into the company of less than $2 million, $2 million? I mean, we've done well. We need to do better.
If we had the capital, we would grow faster, and that's what we need to do. Listen, even we are getting older. I mean, we're getting older, and we also have to have a clock ticking on us. We need to figure out how soon we can scale it up to a level where the next level of people can actually take over and run the company, and we then transition into whatever. I'll be turning 60 next year, so everybody has a shelf life.
Sure, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the answers.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Just wanted to ask two questions. One is that if you can tell us what has been the churn in our customers year- on- year. If you can give that number for past 2-3 years. Secondly, sir, on a longer term perspective, just wanted to know that if you can discuss the future plans of the company in terms of where we want to be. If we want to be on the regulatory side only or we also want to build up more SaaS products into the newer industry. Given that we have so many customers so are we planning to leverage these customers by building up newer products and selling it to them?
We currently want to be in the regulatory side of it only? Thank you, sir.
The customers that we have are good for several adjacent stuff. At the same time, the product that we have can be used to leverage and get more customers. See, the nature of the animal is like this. Have we saturated the market? Absolutely not. What is a reasonable number to aspire to in every market? Maybe a market share between 10% and 20%. Where we are close to 10%, I don't think we will do much more. We see some adjacent possibilities in terms of additional revenues. We can't keep adding newer and newer products until we flog the existing products. In terms of churn of customers, it's not very significant. I think I don't. You know what?
Every time we lose a customer, I normally get to hear about it, and I probably hear about a customer loss once a year or once in seven or eight months. There's no significant customer loss to speak about at this point in time. That's also because it's the early days of the mandate, so only when the mandate settles down. For example, in America, the mandate's been there since 2008, and that's why churn is happening. Churn will be happening from day one. In Europe, it's still very early days, so there's no possibility of a churn. It's only people have not even done the first filing. Some people have done the first filing. I think it's maybe that's the reason why we've not had a churn, but we've not had a churn problem until now.
Sure, sir. If you can also tell just one more thing, what has been the average deal tenure that we have for our products.
Once customers get into bed with us, they stay with us. When you look at regulators, for example, India Post signed with us in 2009 or 2010, I'm not sure about it, they're still with us. RBI signed with us in 2007 or 2008, they're still with us. Most people stay with us for a long time. The nature of the business again is such that it's very sticky. The relationship, once it's built, is one of trust.
In fact, during the lockdown, of the 300 people from RBI who were in quarantine, three of my colleagues were actually in quarantine with them because without our platform, without our solution, you know, very often they were worried that, well, about their RBI ability to collect the data because it's become so central to RBI. In many markets, this is how it is. Very sticky. But in the enterprise, they stay with us. There's not been a churn. Contracts can be for three, five, one year, whatever. It's one year, three year, five years. We, as I told you earlier, live in perennial fear of losing a customer because of a mistake. Fortunately, we've not made any mistakes, and therefore customers still stay with us. We are known for our service.
We did a little customer survey recently. In fact, if there's one complaint that customers made is that we do more than what they ask for but don't send them a bill. If we send them a bill, they probably won't even pay for it. That's a different story altogether. I think we have a bunch of happy customers, and you will see that in the presentation as well, we quoted some customers.
Sure, sir. Thank you.
You know, people keep thanking me for an opportunity to be on the call. Actually, it's I who should be thanking you for coming on the call. We're a small company. We're really into what? Nano cap, micro nano cap. Each of you on the call, I wanna thank you for being on the call and listening to us. I can tell you one thing, SaaS is the way to go. SaaS is where the money is to be made. Whether you look at IRIS or some other company, please keep your eyes and ears open for SaaS. I think there's one SaaS company that's going public in the next month, if I recall, RateGain. We're in the travel software business. I saw the prospectus some time ago.
You will see many, many more SaaS companies going public in India in the days ahead. Sorry, go on.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Milan Shah from Urmil Research Consultancy. Please go ahead.
Hello? Hello?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Your line is in talk mode. Please proceed.
Okay. Congratulations for Magnus and made.com. Very congratulations because we are a quality one customer in XBRL, sir. Most important thing is Swami is going to always disclose the company to me. I am attending so many con calls, but no one going to disclose the competitor name so boldly. Swami has disclosed. Very good to know the company, sir.
Sir, investors need to know who the competitors are. I can't live in a cocoon. Thank you. I don't know how much time I have kept. I wish you all the best. Thank you.
Thank you. I only want to appreciate you, so I attend the call. I am attending last five, six call, and every time I very happy. This time I get chance to talk to you, sir.
Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is a follow-up from the line of Rohith Potti from Marshmallow Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you. My follow-up question is on Collect Business. Is the India project with TCS done, revenue flowing from that, or is it still left? Next, there is the Kuwait deal that we won with PNY recently. Are you open to sharing the deal size there? In general, if you could also share the outlook for Collect over the next one, two year.
Current outlook for Collect is not in my hand. It's a function of when the regulator wakes up and wants to do certain things. There is a part, there are bits that we have actually put in. As you know from your previous interaction with us, many of the regulators take one to one and a half years to decide to award a contract. It takes a long time. For example, you know, I can give you examples after examples. You know about them. RBI, there is still seven years of contract left, so they will keep flowing over seven years. Some recognition happened, some more will happen going forward. I'll leave Balu to answer the question about the revenue flowing from RBI and the other question you asked. Balu, you want to take over?
Yeah, yeah. I can do that. The RPI part, you know, of course this is spread over the period of implementation, and of course there is the AMC as well, as far as this platform is concerned. If I look at the implementation part, I would say maybe 30%-40% is still left, because the whole implementation happens not only on our part for the whole thing to be commissioned. That's where we stand as on September 30. In terms of the Kuwait bid, we got an award letter, but the contract has not been signed, so I would be little you know wary about discussing you know the size of the contract at this point of time.
Finally, as far as the IFM, you know, prospects are concerned, let me say that, you know, things are slowly changing. We do get now inquiries to look at how to build an RFP and how to go about, you know, looking at the specifications required, et cetera. Things are moving. My sense is the outlook, I'm, you know, cautiously optimistic about that.
One more thing. One more thing, Rohith, in the context of what Balu said in the case of Kuwait. The reason we are slightly, I'll say, reluctant to disclose is not because the contract is not signed. The order has actually come. The contract generally takes about a month to two months to get started. Now what we certainly don't want to convey is until the contract actually comes, you won't know which year the revenue will accrue to. I think that information is more important than anything else, and that's a function of how soon the contract is signed. Please bear with us. The moment the contract is signed, we'll share the information.
Thank you. That's helpful. My follow-up question is on Carbon actually now. You mentioned that the focus going forward would be Europe and U.S. In U.S., I guess the intent is to win customers in the FERC and SEC filing and perhaps the municipal governments and the compliance stream is what you're focusing on. In Europe, once the ESEF filing part is done, and you win customers there, and once the UK filing is done, is there anything else, like a new market that is opening up in the European continent that you are focused on?
Excellent question, but I'm gonna answer the question at two different levels. One is the financial sector in Europe have looked at iDEAL very favorably. iDEAL is a solution used by banks, as you've seen. iDEAL is one of the long-term solutions. It's won us customers in Cyprus recently. It's won us customers in a couple of other markets. We actually see the financial sector in Europe looking at iDEAL as a possible solution. We see some significant possibilities there, that's a huge thing. Certainly, Rohith, you invest in public companies, right?
Yes, sir.
Have you ever used XBRL data?
No, I have not.
That's an untapped opportunity. MiFID II, which actually came up last year. Do you know MiFID, do you know MiFID II?
No, I have not. I don't know what. Could you repeat that? Sorry. I've not heard of it.
Brokers until now were sending research reports to investors for free in the hope of getting business from the investors. Under MiFID II, brokers no longer send research reports to investors because investors have to pay for it. With the separation of research and transaction has happened in Europe in a very significant way. We believe this is an opportunity from an XBRL point of view, data point of view, and we believe there are some opportunities there that we can probably tap into, which will consume part of our business. There are adjacent areas that we will tap into going forward.
There's the ESG part as well.
ESG.
Which has been mandated.
I'll talk about ESG. There are 50,000 companies logging in in Europe. If you take a look at the presentation, Rohith. Rohithh, did you download the presentation by any chance?
Yes, yes.
There's an ESG which says coming soon. If you see the last one of the slides there, I said ESG coming soon. That's a significant number of companies in Europe. Again, it will start with the larger companies and go to smaller companies. Yes, there is a significant traction happening in ESG as well from among the companies we're currently serving and new companies as well.
When is this ESG implementation supposed to be from? I thought it was from 2024, 2025, right?
I think it's going to be 2024. Right.
Okay. You have both the NOS two accounts as well as ESG coming in Europe from 2024.
Right.
Is that right?
Right.
Okay. The ESG is the larger market because even private companies are expected to report. Is that right?
Huge segment. That's why, for example, the number of listed companies in Europe is about 2,000. The number of ESG-affected companies will be 50,000.
Understood. Okay. That's a pretty large market. Understood. Got it. That's it from me. Sorry, one last question is, would you be able to speak about accretion and employee attrition over the last in this financial year? That's it from me.
It's been tough. It's not been easy. I think we lost over 45 people in the last six months, and there are huge salaries being paid by the services companies and other people. We have lost people. We also added people. It's not been easy. It's not been easy retaining people. The fact that we have been bootstrapped, so we finally increased our increment, given some reasonable increments for the current year, which has led to an increase in costs, as you would have seen, and but not very significantly. It will kick in next year. Retaining people has not been easy. I think we lost 45 people. Balu? Balu?
Overall 45, and attrition rate could be at about 12% for the subsequent.
Okay. There you are. Good.
Okay. Any new ESOP plan to address this or any other, you know, strategy?
The ESOP plan that we had earlier, which is expiring next year, therefore we need to come up with a new ESOP plan. One more thing that's currently happening is, we are now actively trying to find some key leadership positions in the company because that will then take away. It's a lot of this work that we do is concept selling. At the same time, if you have to do daily chores and concept selling, it's a heavy load on yourself. We are looking at hiring some senior people to be able to take the load off us, that's Ritu, Balu and I, to be able to go to the next level of growth because we believe.
You know, I put out a statement some time ago, where the government of India has now decided to go into implementing data standards. The CAG's office has written a letter to the Prime Minister and the President. I met the Finance Minister some time ago, where she mentioned that some initiatives are actually being taken. We see that coming up over the next couple of years. All these things will require some significant. We need to free ourselves up to take advantage of those opportunities. That's where bringing in a stronger leadership team will actually make a huge difference.
Great. That's it from me for today. Thank you so much for your answers.
Thank you, Rohith.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Debanjan Neogi from Ratnabali Investments. Please go ahead.
Hello, sir. First of all, congratulations on migrating to the main board. I have just one thing to understand. Like, do you all provide, like, any kind of guidance going forward? Like some short-term, some midterm guidance, if you could just comment on the revenue part and on the margins going forward.
No, we don't provide guidance, but from the ARR and number of customers, you can draw reasonable inference for yourself. When I say we have a 42 ARR and we have contracts with these people, that automatically stays in the books for what, three, four, five years and, whatever time. If you, the ARR is the best possible guide of where the company is headed.
Right. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Debanjan.
Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Swaminathan for closing comments. Over to you, sir.
Thank you very, very much for participating on the call. I want to thank my colleagues who are also on the call. Honestly, the kind of support we receive from our investors, from our shareholders over the last four or five years is amazing. We've also been very fortunate to have shareholders who ask incisive questions, which has forced us to go back to the drawing board and ask some very, very fundamental questions. It's also forced you know, preparing for Rohith's interrogation is not very easy. I mean, if any of you saw the call last year, he went bang, bang, bang, bang. We actually had a meeting saying, you know, "What could he ask this year?" It's.
I think people who participate on the call keep us on our toes, so grateful to you for that. At any point in time, if you have a question to ask, please, by all means, ask. As long as it's information that I can share with the whole world, I will share with the whole world. We are grateful that we went to the main board. We're grateful to BSE, we're grateful to NSE for making it happen. I just hope we internally do the right things to be able to grow and get onto a faster growth path in the years ahead. Thank you. Balu might want to relate also because Balu is the CFO of the company.
No, I think you have said it all. I also want to, you know, express our gratitude for the investors who have come in for the call. A good number have come and asked very interesting questions. Thank you. That has helped us as well. We'll be back very soon. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. One more, one last thing. I don't think we will do quarterly calls. We'll do half-yearly calls. I don't think things change quarter on quarter that frequently for us to do quarterly calls. I think we will do half-yearly calls. We will put out a release saying that we're gonna do this. We will do a half-yearly call in the first half and second half, at the end of the year. I hope that's acceptable to people, because it's not like things change every day for us. On that note, thank you very, very much. If you don't like my mentioning what I just said about quarterly calls, please tweet to me. I'm very active on Twitter. I talk about all kinds of things on Twitter.
Please, tweet to me, please write to me, and we will certainly take a look at it. This is the current view that we have as of now. Thank you very much. Have a good evening and stay safe. Hopefully, the next wave of COVID will not come. Hopefully, we are over it. Thank you all. Bye now.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of IRIS Business Services, that concludes this conference. We thank you all for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.