Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Soumya, moderator for the conference call. Welcome to 5paisa Capital Limited Q3 FY24 earnings conference call. We have with us today Mr. Narayan Gangadhar, MD and CEO of 5paisa Capital Limited, and Mr. Gourav Munjal, Whole-Time Director and CFO, 5paisa Capital Limited. As a reminder, all participants will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need any assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchtone telephone. Please note this conference is recorded. I would now like to hand over the floor to Mr. Narayan Gangadhar, MD and CEO of 5paisa Capital Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, and welcome to our Q3 FY 2024 earnings call. On this call, I'm joined with Mr. Gourav Munjal, our Chief Financial Officer. Q3 has been a great quarter for investors and the broking industry. Nifty touched an all-time high, and the overall industry saw an addition of more than 96 lakh demat accounts. The total demat accounts of the country stood at 13.93 cr. In Q3 FY 2024, we acquired 2.3 lakh customers, reflecting a 71% growth quarter-on-quarter, and our total customer base has reached 39.6 lakhs. Further, our market share in incremental client acquisition has grown from 1.3% in Q2 FY 2024 to 2.4% in Q3 FY 2024.
During the past quarter, our total average daily turnover grew to INR 3.7 trillion, an 80% year-over-year growth. Our average client funding book stood at INR 317 crore, a growth of 18% quarter-on-quarter, and the mutual fund AUM reached INR 801 crore, a 20% quarter-on-quarter growth. We are happy to report that we have achieved our lifetime highest revenue in Q3 FY 2024 of INR 100.3 crore, and our profit after tax stood at INR 15 crore, a growth of 37% year-on-year. Further, we have ended nine months FY 2024 with a revenue of INR 281 crore, and our PAT stood at INR 48.6 crore, a growth of approximately 68% year-over-year. This quarter has been a marking quarter for our product.
In the last earnings call, I had outlined that we have undertaken a major initiative to overhaul our product and tech platform. I'm happy to report that we have taken significant steps in that direction. We have rebuilt and launched our entire product onboarding journey, placing a strong emphasis on UI and UX. We have introduced industry-first features such as Reverse Penny Drop, Account Aggregator integrations, and API optimizations to significantly speed up the onboarding process. We enhanced the option chain by introducing support for various indices such as Sensex, Midcap Nifty and FINNIFTY , alongside Nifty and Bank Nifty. We introduced bulk order modifications, a game-changing feature which allows users to edit multiple orders simultaneously. This is a game changer for high-volume traders, marking an industry-first launch.
We also optimized our option chain journeys to support straddle and bulk orders, allowing users to place multiple orders effortlessly in a single click directly from the option chain. Last quarter, we had also discussed various initiatives which we have undertaken to overhaul our MarTech stack. This is critical to help us scale and acquire more customers digitally. This quarter, we successfully implemented an omni-channel communication strategy, tailoring interactions to users and preferred channels. We curated the client communication plan that included best practices in terms of content, channel, and trigger time. Reducing the lead churn from 30 days to 7 days to connect with users very early in their onboarding journey has led to better conversions. We have been actively focusing on scale while optimizing on lower funnel events such as buy sell trades and F&O cash commodity segments.
More such initiatives are underway as we build in the best-in-class digital engine to acquire customers and scale. As we discussed in the last quarter, we expect these initiatives to land in the coming quarter and also in the next quarter. Finally, I want to end the call with restating that we are a technology-first company. We are going to continue investing in new technologies, especially in security, AI, and data science, and build fresh product capabilities to further scale our digital-enabled revenue pipeline. We will continue to invest in MarTech and augment our customer acquisition in coming quarters to set the stage for future growth. With this, we would like to open the meeting to any questions from the audience. Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you have a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad and wait for your turn to ask the question. If you would like to withdraw your request, you may do so by pressing star and one again. Our first question comes from the line, Devrath Himatsingka from Augmenta. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Very refreshing to see, you know, a good set of numbers. I just wanted to... You know, I was not able to understand the ESOP bit and, how, you know, you are, you are continuously issuing, new ESOPs and taking approvals for that. So can you give us some guidance on, on what that looks like and what kind of expenses, you know, can be incurred, because of that, going forward? That would be very helpful. And, sir, after you answer this, I'll just come to my next one.
So right now, our ESOP is, you know, at, we have get it approved from the shareholders, and, the same, has not been granted, to the seniors as of now. But, currently it is approximately it is in the range of, you know, that, INR 60 lakh-INR 80 lakh in a quarter, which, going forward, which may increase, which may increase going forward. And, because once it is granted, only then we can take into the final account.
Okay. So what kind of impact could we see this having on the employee costs, like, overall, if you can, you know, shed some light on that?
So, that depend upon the, you know, the numbers and the, the people who are going to be joining in future. So once it is granted, but yes, we need to follow that, you know, that Ind AS and all. But generally, in, in that case, major of the costing comes in first year, and then, it's reduced in second and third year.
Okay. Okay. Thank you, sir. And, sir, one other question I had is that, you know, we are planning to move from T+1 to T+0, say by March, April. Do you think it can be seamlessly implemented? And, do you think this would increase volume significantly going forward?
So first of all, I think, yeah, it can be seamlessly implemented, but I don't see it impacting the volume. If anything, it impacts more, it does introduce slightly more liquidity in the market, but the measured impact is not really going to be that significantly high. But I do believe this is a good step forward in terms of clean governance.
No, right, sir.
Right.
Absolutely. Sir, and just one last question. Sorry.
Yeah.
How much free cash do you have on your balance sheet?
So it will be approximately INR 70 crore-INR 80 crore right now.
70 crore-INR 80 crore?
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Thank you so much, sir.
Thank you.
If I have any questions, I'll come back in line. Thank you.
Sure.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Krishna Prasad, an individual investor. Please go ahead.
Hello. Hi, sir. Am I, am I audible?
Yeah. Yes, you are.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Yeah. Hi, sir. Good, good afternoon. Congratulations for good set of numbers. Sir, I want to know that your market share has reduced in this quarter. So any reason, sir?
What has reduced?
Market share.
Market share. What's my market share? Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. So over the past, you know, if you look back at the history of 5paisa, going back to the start of the year, right? From June of last year, we actively were in a phase where we wanted to improve our digital efficiency. So as a result of which, you know, we really the focus was on, you know, was on essentially achieving more profitability and getting the system to a state where we can again get back to scale. So as a result of which, our goal was really not to acquire customers. See, it's very easy to throw money and get customers in the market. Everybody is doing it. There's no rocket science. We believe that's, that's not a strategy we want to pursue just yet. As a result of which, after I joined, we made an active decision to actually decelerate growth.
So whatever you see is completely planned, and I expect the market share to stabilize only in a few quarters, because it doesn't make sense to continue spending money when we are not able to get the ROI we want. So right now, the growth that I'm reporting, that is coming at the right level of unit economics, which we can support. So the key is going to be to scale that, and that's the reason why you see a deceleration. And you will expect-
Um-
to see this next quarter as well, before we stabilize.
Okay, sir. So, sir, so in the medium... I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that.
No problem. Yeah.
So in the. Yeah, in the next six months or next year, so do you have any target in terms of OPM? OPM at operating margin at 30% in the finance. So any guidance on that?
See, we cannot. We don't give any guidance on that. But this year, as I have said, you know, in the previous earnings call, this year and the subsequent, you know, and the subsequent quarters to come, are going to be all about scaling and growth. So there will obviously be new costs. There'll be costs in terms of client acquisition, there'll be costs in terms of ESOPs, there'll be, you know, those kind of expenses, which a lot of which will be one time, in just getting the, getting the process and the build-up to scale. So I would say that, you know, as of now, we don't give any particular guideline, but we will obviously be within the same range as we have always been historically. You know, I don't see that changing, per se.
Okay, sir. Thanks so much, and all the best to for your future, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Nitesh Kamdar from Aditya Equity Investments. Please go ahead.
Hello. I had a question regarding the other expenses. There is a marked increase in other expenses this quarter. Any reason for the same?
There is a?
Marked increase in other expenses this quarter.
So actually, as you see that other advertisement cost is a part of other expenditure, and our acquisition, you know, has grown up from INR 1.35 lakh to INR 2.32 lakh. So yes, it is in the line of the acquisition.
Okay, fine. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Deepak Poddar from Sapphire Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello, am I audible, sir?
Yes.
Yep. Thank you. First, thank you very much for this opportunity. So, I'm a little confused, I mean, in the sense, now you spoke about that we had planned to decelerate the market share and at the same time, our other expenses and advertisement cost is increasing and our client addition is also increasing. So, I'm not able to understand. I mean, at one time we are planning to decelerate market share, and at the other time our cost is increasing and even our gross addition in clients is also higher. So, where is this mismatch you're talking about?
Yeah. So see, the costs are only increasing in this quarter, okay? So the decision to decelerate was taken around in June of last year. So it's been going on for the last two quarters, and only now we have decided to accelerate again. So the cost increase you're seeing is from there. Now, because of this, what has happened is, because we, the reason we decelerated, it's very important to remember this, is that the reason for deceleration is because we wanted to improve our digital acquisition engine. We wanted to build the product journeys, and we wanted to get that right. So we made a... That is the conscious call, you know?
So now we are at a point where we believe that in a quarter or so, we will be ready to ramp up the engine and scale it further, and this quarter onwards, we have just started that work. That's why you see the cost going up, and that's how you see the acquisition numbers where they are today.
Okay. So you do expect your market share, I mean, which has declined from 3.2% to 2.8% in this quarter to further decline-
Yeah.
in the fourth quarter, right?
Yes, I do.
From first quarter, you expect, I mean, to see the upward trajectory in terms of your market share?
Yes. See, I also want to add one more point, right? If you look at most businesses which are like ours, right?
You will see that generally when the deceleration happens, you grow only at the rate at which you incrementally acquire customers. This is the rule of thumb.
Correct.
So if you take any leading player, generally you will grow only at that rate because no one has a secret sauce to acquire better customers than anybody else, whether it is us or the next two players above us. There is absolutely no differentiation in the acquisition engine whatsoever. So whether you see 10 lakh acquisitions per month, 30 lakh, or even 1 crore acquisitions per month, the reality is, it's ultimately just a financial game and nothing else more than that. Now, the key is to play that, we have to get digitally highly, highly efficient, because the differentiator is who has a better engine, not who can invest more capital. So the way we are approaching it is that because for 5paisa, we. For many years we really never invested in technology. We never really invested as much as we wanted.
I mean, we always are a technology company, but we never really... It was not so much of a priority. So it was always, you know, the engine was not built to scale. But in these last six months, we have put a lot of effort in getting the engine back up, where we believe now, in a quarter or so, we will increase. So the deceleration is happening because of clients which have been acquired in the last quarters and the quarters before. Anybody who is acquired, who we have acquired now, you know, we are seeing excellent performance from them. And we will see their impact only in the coming quarters, because generally it takes the client a quarter or two to get settled in.
You know, just to learn the system, to get acclimatized and, you know, they look for the right opportunity. So there is a cool-off period, and that's why I'm saying that the market share will dip before it corrects again, you know?
Okay. Okay. But, but, I understood that point, but I think in the last call, we were of the view that we are looking to double our market share in one year, and accordingly, our revenue growth will also likely to follow. And it may not have 1-to-1 kind of a correlation, but maybe 1-to-0.5 kind of a correlation, or 0.5, 0.7. So, so is there any change in the view on that front, and, how, how do we see that going forward?
No, there is no change in the view. It's just that for accelerating at that pace, we can only make that call quarter-over-quarter. You know, there are some quarters where we want to launch something, then there are some quarters where we want to defer it. So we are not time boxing ourselves in the sense that if it makes no business sense, we are not going to spend the money. It's as simple as that. Even if it means we have to stay away from the market. So if the... right now, the market is hot. You know, everybody is acquiring a lot of customers. If you look at the top three, the numbers they have reported, it's through the roof, right?
Mm-hmm.
We believe it's not the right time to enter the market. For us, the game plan is we want to wait and watch, you know, and also we want to get our technology systems in order. What I'm you know, what you will see though, is you will see a systematic increase in our acquisition plan, and we will definitely have a roadmap to end the year, that is next financial year, at the numbers we talked about.
FY 25, and we are looking at what? 5%-6% kind of a market share. Would that be a fair assumption?
See, I don't want to put any number to it, but it will definitely be 2x what we have today, you know. The number is, again, it depends on the quality of customers also that we acquire.
Okay. Okay, and accordingly-
We can give away free ETFs and get 5% like some other competitors have done. You know, we can run incentives and get. You know, there are other security companies which have reached 6%-7% market share, but that's not meaningful because it doesn't result in any impact to bottom line. So it has to be 5% with the right kind of profitability and other metrics. So please remember that, right?
Fair enough. And revenue growth should follow, right? I mean, with some lag-
Yes, exactly. And that is what you're seeing in this quarter as well, right? You'll see, you will see this kind of trajectory. Yes.
So what sort of correlation we are looking at? I mean, would it be 0.5 or 1:1 correlation? Can it be possible, I mean, in terms of market share and your revenue?
No, those kind of correlations cannot be had in this industry. It's too immature to have that kind of... You can get that at a Hindustan Unilever, not here.
Okay.
Where the market is very new.
Fair enough. And, and your other expenses, I think, can you give the breakup of your fixed cost and the client acquisition cost out of this, I think, INR 50 odd crores you have spent?
So actually, approximately 45%-50% is related to the advertisement and the customer acquisition, basically, and approximately 30%-35% is our IT cost, and rest is the other business cost. This is the major-
45%-50% is your client acquisition cost, right?
Yeah. This includes everything. Right.
Okay, okay. And just my, my last query, in terms of your margin, you do expect to have some softness in your margin, largely driven by, the cost that is expected to come on account of your effort to scale up the business, right? And on the investment that we are looking to do in the tech side.
Correct. That is correct. Yes.
Okay. But is there any rough range that this is the, I mean, minimum threshold that we do expect that it should not go below that level? I mean, either it's for 25%, whatever, I mean, in threshold, minimum threshold?
No, that is nothing. No, it is. We are a growth company, so there is, there is no such range per se. Some quarters it can be high, some quarters it will be low. There's no such normalizations that we work for. We work for certain level of unit economics and certain high-level operating margins. Everything else is, I think, more sensitive information, which we don't disclose in the call.
Okay. Fair enough. I think, that's it from my side. All the way best to you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Vivek Joshi from Free turns. Please go ahead.
Yeah. So good afternoon, and, I guess congratulations for achieving the milestone of INR 100 crore on the revenue side. So, sir, I was just going through the data for January 2022 and January 2023. So the number of active clients which we have at 5paisa has reduced from something 12 lakh to 5 lakh, and our market share has also fallen from sixth largest broker to I think we are right now at twelfth largest broker. So where do we see, sir, this degrowth stopping and the growth picking up?
Yeah. See, that is why the company pivoted. You know, I joined the company in Q1, end of Q1 last year, and the main reason was to repivot and rechange this, this, this curve, right? So obviously, as I mentioned, that a lot of the deceleration that you see is very much in line with the strategy that was planned. And what I see is that over the coming quarters, I do see the trends changing, and I do see these numbers coming back to those levels. But it will take us a little bit of time as we figure out what is the right game plan to both ex...
You know, to both launch our new products, which we are working on, as well as also build and scale the new technology stacks, as well as the MarTech stack that we are continuing to build.
Okay. But, sir, any logical reason for just stopping the inflow for the client? Because, every broker out there is kind of acquiring customer like anything, and we are following reverse strategy, so.
80% of the customers they acquire. You have to remember that acquisition is a very meaningless metric, you know? We have to look at ultimately the thing that matters is whether we can curate that customer over a long period of time. So it... We want to make sure that when we scale, we have the right engagement story for the customers over a period of time, and for that there has to be proper digitization of all journeys. In terms of digitization, up until last year, we were not as, you know, we were not amongst the top brokers at all, the, the top digital brokers. Whereas now, our first objective is to get to that stage. Only then all these things can be worked on, you know, acquiring, acquiring more customers and scaling.
If you take an example, if you look from August, July or August, we were doing roughly only 25,000 accounts per month... and now we are touching almost 80,000-90,000 accounts per month. So there has been a massive growth, and this growth I do expect to scale, but there will be both cost, and it will take a little bit of time for the revenue to materialize, because there is a lead time of a quarter or so before the clients come in and start trading and things like that, you know?
Sir, can we expect something around, roughly a lakh or some ballpark figure for the monthly addition for the client, for the active side of the investors or the traders?
See, we don't discuss those kind of details here. We can only. I can only give you the... You know, you have the prior history. You have looked, you know, you have the prior data that we always publish in the earnings call. You can work backwards from there, you know. But we don't comment about our long-term strategy here.
Okay. As far as, sir, I remember, I think something around in 2022, June 2022, we discussed over the figure that something, around, you know, 100,000 addition is what we targeted, and, and we reversed to the strategy and we stopped the client addition. So that was the, context I was referring to. So any such kind of, figure you'd like to, you know, share with us?
No, no. As I told you, those taking a number in isolation is not a very useful metric to look at this business.
Okay. Okay, that's it from my side. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Dhaval Gada from DSP. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Just a couple of questions. First is relating to the point on market share. So, you talked about, you know, the digital strategy, getting the digital strategy right. You also talked about which is internal. The second point you mentioned was around competition being very aggressive on customer acquisition, and you chose to participate less in this market compared to your, you know, the opportunity that you wanted to capture. And lastly, you also talked about getting the right unit economics in place.
Just trying to understand, you know, say, about, 2 or 3 quarters from now, do you think all of this will be in place for you to, you know, sort of on a design level, start growing, you know, quarter-on-quarter, in a more, I would say, a more planned manner, even assuming-
Yeah.
the competition is far more intense, et cetera?
Yeah.
Or is there anything else that one should be cognizant of, that there can be some more delay or, you know, some other variable to watch out for?
Yeah, yeah, that's a very good question. So, so see, this is the main reason that in every quarter I give a very detailed product update, you know, and a very detailed business update as well, because we talk about the underlying engine and the improvements we are doing, both on product and tech, as well as on the business side. So as you have observed, right, is that there is. You know, our goal is in Q2, which is something I said in the earlier call, last quarter. In Q2 of FY 25, we are gearing up for a launch of our major product, you know, and there's a lot of improvements planned before then, but that's where we plan on, you know, launching our new services and new products, and this is something I've already mentioned in the earlier calls.
So to that end, we want to gear up for that. So for the next 3 months, 4 months, regardless of what is the client acquisition in the market, whether the, you know, whoever is, you know, the, the, top private players, you know, whatever they acquire is not very much meaningful to me, because we believe that there is enough growth in the market. We are barely at sitting at a 4% market penetration. Even if they win the whole race, within the next 2 years, that is not to say that they're going to be around in 5 years from now. Because 5 years ago or 10 years back, you know, the, the, there was, the, the market, the, the entire landscape was different, and now it's very different. So it's going to continue to change.
So it's very important that we build that playbook. So our first, obviously, our major launches are coming up in the coming quarters, which is why we give detailed product updates. And also, as I said, if you look at our marketing engine, in my very first earnings call, I had said that we are going to scale, right? And at that time, we didn't give any indication. But you can see that we have scaled from 25,000 to now ending at about 80,000-90,000, right? So I expect us to follow that trajectory. Now, sometimes it may not be as steep. If we hit snags along the way, if we realize that the product development is not moving as fast, then we will scale. We will, you know, we will descale accordingly.
It's very critical for us to not, you know, to not scale for the heck of scaling, you know?
Just one follow-up to this, and to understand it better is, let's say, you know, by August, September or October, whenever the new, you know, strategy is in place, the new design is in place, I mean.
Yeah.
Do you expect it to, you know, sort of, you know, go exponential from where you were, let's say, before this planned deceleration that you talked about? And, and therefore, you know, you're sort of building your platform and your stack, everything in place for a much bigger journey, compared to, you know, where you were, let's say, four quarters back. Would that be fair? Like, it should be-
Yes.
-comparable to what the top three or four players are doing right now in the market. Is that fair or, there, there's still some more thing to be done even beyond that, which may take another few quarters or years? I mean, just...
... No, it won't take beyond that. It won't take beyond that. It is exactly what you outlined. See, and, and, to give you some sense of our track record, you know, when I joined the company in June, our incremental market share and, you know, acquisitions, they, they stood hardly at 25,000 accounts, something like 1%. You know, obviously, we have doubled that while keeping our health metrics relatively constant. So this gives you some sense of what kind of North Star we are looking at. So what we have realized is that, and I have run a couple of other broking firms as well, so I can give from my own experience, is that it is extremely critical to not, to scale only when the digital infrastructure is actually ready.
Otherwise, you know, success can mask a lot of the other inefficiencies digitally. So, and it is not, and it won't be scalable. So for us it is very important because we are- we've just started the digitization journey, okay? And, it is very important to keep continuing to build that and to scale only in accordance with that, you know, to, to support future growth. So this is how we see it. But as rightly said, it won't take around Q2 as we go ahead and launch that and then beyond. Yes.
Understood. Very interesting. So just one, one last thing, you know, on the unit economics. So, you know, and this, and, and somewhat relates to the point that you mentioned about previous organizations. You know, so obviously they have a sort of, significant head start, and, and sort of a strong, you know, cash flow, at this point of time, which helps them, being slightly, you know, more generous in new, new acquisition, et cetera. So, and from where you start this journey, do you see that this, unit economics, the, the ideal unit economics to be fi-, you know, different for this company, especially in the first few years, of the journey, let's say FY 2025, 2026, and thereafter-
Yeah
... you know, somewhat stabilized to where some of the, you know, other leading players are? Or we think there is something out there which we are not tapping in the right way, and which you, you'll be able to, you know, optimize in much, much better fashion. I mean, just some thoughts around how one should think about more next two, three-year unit economics and then beyond.
Yeah. See, we can only comment about our business, so I will tell you that, that first of all, see, our business is very different than some others, okay? We are not, we don't have any B2B business or anything like that, okay? So we are not showing any, you know, our, our RPCs and our, customer metrics are completely digital, both sourced and serviced and also operated off, where we don't have any kind of a B2B model in place. Secondly, like, unlike some of the other, privately held brokers, you know, we don't have a focus on mutual fund or anything of that sort, where because... And I don't even believe that those journeys are very meaningful for our product.
So from the get-go, you know, the way we think about the way I'm thinking about the business here is that we really want to get the core journeys correct, and we want to focus on exclusively, fully digitally engaged and fully driven by the product experience to launch more features in the coming quarters. And I believe that as far as your question on unit economics is concerned, you can do the math with, I mean, everybody's numbers, at least, some numbers are public, and now even Zerodha's numbers are public, so you, we don't want to talk about them. But if you... Basically, everybody's publishing the numbers in some shape or form, and you can see that everyone's RPC is down.
There is not a single one who's been able to keep the RPC at the, you know, at the same growth rate that they saw even a year and a half ago. So that tells you that the quality and the deceleration has been much more rapid than the acquisition rate. So it's very important that we do a very critical signal-to-noise test before we acquire. This is why, unlike any strategy I've executed in the past, in 5paisa, the focus is very much on that, and that is how we are looking at growth. So I believe that's the only way to responsibly grow from here on out.
As far as the lead time to catch up with other brokers and all is concerned, see, the simple thing is that these kind of, with the right capital infusion, you know, anybody can catch up with anybody in no time. And you have seen the example, you know, where a privately listed broker went from nowhere to number two, you know, over number, number two or number three last year, right? And that privately held broker really was not able to scale. So I think that's those kind of metrics are not very meaningful. The key is, can you build that stickiness on the platform and the right digital engine?
Got it. Very useful and useful to everybody.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. We will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our next question comes from Nagaraj Chandrashekar from Emerge Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. You answered most of my questions. Just I wanted some clarity on note five in the notes to accounts. There is a reversal of around INR 7 crore, which is taken as an expense this quarter. What exactly is it, and why has it been reversed?
Actually, that has marked not for this quarter, that has marked for the previous year, because we have to give the comparison. I mean, in the December and the December 2022 and in complete financial year, we have done a reversal of INR 7 crore. This is- this was in line with, you know, SEBI circular that you need to reverse the upfront margin penalty, which we have charged from the customer. And this is in the same line, which they have, you know, given instruction to every broker. So every broker has done that, and we have also done that.
Okay. But it's a non-cash expense that's relevant to a prior year that's taken with corporate?
It's actually the question is pertaining to last year. First of all, it is not-
Okay.
It is nothing, it is nothing that you do for this current year. The second is, it's not expenses, it is an income which a broker has recorded in the earlier period, and after the SEBI involvement, they had to reverse it.
Okay, so your cash expenses are broadly flat QOQ, your actual cash expenses, if you remove this one-off at around INR 43 crore, has not changed much.
Yeah.
But your, your customer acquisitions have gone up significantly to this 80,000 a month scaling. So, you, you mentioned earlier in the call, you said the industry is fully commoditized, but you have the scaling for 80,000 a month now, do you think will be profitable clients for you in trade optimally going forward? Just any further clarity on what you are doing specifically to make them come to you, what you are doing product or margin or other incentive-wise to come, come to them to trade with us? Where else they are trading, who else are they trading with, and why exactly they're coming to us, who, who are they coming to us from? Any sort of color without any, you know, whatever you can leverage given competitive,
I, your voice is not proper audible. Can you. I mean, you know, if you are speaking with your earphone and something else, so can you change that? Because it's not proper audible.
Hello?
Hello, yes.
Hello. Am I audible?
Yeah, yeah.
I just want to understand the clients that we have started adding now, and we say we will ramp this up. You said they're going to be profitable, so why exactly are they coming to us? What are we doing, product or incentives or margins and otherwise, that are making them come to us?
Yeah.
Who are they coming to us from, mostly?
Yeah. The market acquisition, you know, we have obviously a multi-pronged strategy. Some of them have come... A lot of customers come to us from other brokers, where they are not getting quality of service or better product experience. And, some of them come from new client acquisitions. We really don't, you know, discern at that level. For us, it's important that, you know, as the product experience has gotten much better, you know, our app rating, for example, has dramatically improved, right? So, and the core journeys have improved. So we see, organically, we see people coming and obviously from our own efforts as well, that is showing a lot of, that is driving a lot of inbound traffic.
Other than that, I think the other features which we, you know, which you described, they are. We think that those are table stakes for us to execute the business. You know, that's not really a core, you know, there's no core value proposition there, you know?
Right. Understood. Just one more balance sheet clarification on the free cash. Can you give a sense on the September cash you had on balance sheet, how that translates to free cash flow? How much is margin, how much is client margin, how much is free cash? If you wanted a product clarity on that.
So approximately, you know that we have INR 500 crore net worth, and out of that, approximately INR 420 crore is the liquid net worth. Another thing, we have a margin in exchange, approximately, you know, INR 1,700-INR 1,800 crore. And now with the SEBI circular and the rules that every client money is with the exchanges, and apart from that, we have also kept margin in MTF form.
Okay. So your free cash, including the margin, is INR 70 crore-INR 80 crore or is it more?
No, it's INR 70 crore-INR 80 crore. Yes, it's INR 70 crore-INR 80 crore, but actually you can't say it's a free cash. It's a cash which you may require at any point of a time. If the market is volatile, then you need to give to the exchanges for the margin purpose. So not exactly it's a free cash, it is a safety cash which we have, a safety margin cash which we have, so that, in volatile market, we can put more in exchanges.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Dhaval Gada from DSP. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks, again. So just a couple of other questions. One relating to the, you know, acquisition of clients from IIFL Securities. What's the update on that? And also, on a steady state basis for next year, what should one think about from an employee cost perspective? If you could give some, you know, clarity, excluding ESOP costs. I know that that's a variable, but just outside of that-
Yeah.
What's the more stable number to look at?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think for the first one, we are, you know, the discussions are on with the regulators, and once we don't have any further update really to report on that. Once we hear back, we will be obviously announcing, you know? So the discussions are on-
Okay.
I expect it to take little bit more time. Right? Now, regarding the costing: See, as I mentioned, right, we have most of the cost for employee growth, in the sense the team size, the team calibration. I would say we are pretty well staffed. We are pretty well, you know, we are pretty well actually staffed up from a human capital point of view, especially on engineering and product, and that's been the focus. Now, there may be expenses on the other teams, you know, like call center sales, whatnot, but those I expect to be very much in line with our growth. And I expect, more importantly, I expect those to only grow with revenue, you know? I don't expect too much of a upfront hit.
Now, ESOP, as you very rightly pointed out, we have not taken any ESOP cost at all so far, and we expect that—we expect to take that sometime, you know, as you know, in obviously in the coming quarter or so, because that's something that, as a, is a part of our long-term plan for incentivization of employees, you know? But that typically, as a company, we only do that once a year, and just historically, we have done it only once a year and at the March, April timeframe, you know?
So just to be clear on the ESOP costs, that would likely come in first half of next year in a meaningful way, and then get spread over the following years in a more normal way. I mean, so there will be a-
Yeah.
large non-cash cost, which can come in the first half of next financial year.
Yes, yes, yes. That's the way, you know, that India works.
You, you heard the answer? Sorry, no, I missed it. Sorry.
No, no, you are right. Absolutely right, what you are saying, because that's the way that India works. Most of the cost comes in first year, and then, it's followed by the second and third year. So yes, we will see the cost in the, either in Q4 of this quarter or in likely, most likely in Q1, but there could be some in Q4 also, but not beyond that, and the rest will get split over the subsequent years, as you, Gourav was mentioning.
Got it. Got it. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Thinnai Nima from Ravean Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. So thank you for taking my question. As you said, that you are only interested in acquiring high-quality customers, the ones that stick around, so could you help us understand who exactly are, you know, the high-quality customers? Is it, is the stickiness determined by the kind of services they avail? For example, is it that the F&O trading customers are more volatile than the ones who simply invest in equities? Any color on client profiling or any trends that you see?
Yeah. I mean, we, this is, this is very sensitive to our core product, you know, to our core business strategy, so obviously we cannot comment on this. But, but I'll just give you some broad guidelines, right? I mean, as you, as, as, as we have seen, the, there are a lot of new entrants in the market. Most of them are F&O players. Most of them come in and they experiment with it. 90% of them will leave the system, and, for the, from the ones you are, who are left, they will rise up the food chain, and they eventually give more RPC than everybody else. That's typically the client profile and behavior. And, there are many strategies to retain customers, you know? One of them is obviously you pursue a super app strategy.
The other one is, the way the private players are going about it, you know, where you build like a good portfolio of alternate adjacencies. Just as you know, the other, the has excellent mutual fund business, right? So you kind of build off something like that and grow. But for us, we are not looking at any of those plans, because we believe that the audience we are after and the market we want to curate is really exclusively for traders and F&O customers. So for them, we believe that there's a different playbook that has to be thought out, and that market is actually Nobody has a handle on that market today, neither of the top four players. So that is something that we have to work on actively, you know.
Got it, sir. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions. Now I hand over the floor to Narayan Gangadhar for closing comments.
Thank you very much for joining our quarterly, for joining our quarterly earnings call. We look forward to meeting you all again next quarter and keeping you abreast on the progress. If you have any further questions, please email ir@5paisa.com. Have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. Thank you for your participation and for using Durbhash Conference Call Service. You may all disconnect your lines now. Thank you, and have a pleasant evening.