Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q4 and FY 2025 E arnings C onference C all of CarTrade Tech Limited. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements about the company, which are based on beliefs, opinions, and expectations of the company as on the date of this call. These statements are not the guarantees of future performances and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Vinay Sanghi, Chairman and Managing Director of CarTrade Tech Limited. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, and welcome to all of you in this FY 2025 E arnings C all. Thank you for taking the time out this afternoon. I want to first start with the presentation, which is on slide three to start with. I want to communicate to all of you that CarTrade Tech has delivered its best-ever revenue and profits in a year. It has delivered a revenue growth of 28% for the year at INR 711 crore, and of course, a 627% increase in profit after tax at INR 145 crore. I also want to highlight that three of our platforms, CarWale, BikeWale, and OLX, on a year-round unique consumer basis, get more than 150 million customers, which is a unique achievement for any company in India, but also not only in India but also all over the world.
Very few companies have three different platforms getting more than 150 million unique customers per year, as I said, on three different platforms. What is driving this growth? All our businesses have grown well this year, and margins have increased as well. The consumer group, during the year, quarter-on-quarter grew at 30%, resulting in 100% profit growth. We also achieved a 29% EBITDA margin. This is a benchmark of excellence. The remarketing business for Shriram Automall grew at 12% with a 47% increase in profitability, which shows, again, that it's on its recovery path to growth. OLX has consistently grown quarter- after- quarter with a strong 72% growth in profits in quarter four last year to this year. If I look at the next slide, which is slide four, I just want to reiterate again that we've achieved the highest-ever profit for the quarter as well at INR 46.1 crore.
We're number one automotive platform in India, number one used car platform, number one vehicle auction platform. Across all our platforms, we receive more than 70 million, approximately 74 million customers every month. 95% of them come organically, which drives the margins of the company and shows the brand affinity of all the three brands: CarWale, OLX, and BikeWale. We have 500+ physical locations, including Automall and App Store stores as well as OLX stores. More than 1.4 million vehicles got auctioned last year. Revenue for Q4 was at INR 189.5 crore, which is the highest ever in any Q4. Our adjusted EBITDA, which is almost like a cash proxy for the company, is at INR 71 crore. Profit after tax, as I said, is INR 46 crore, the highest-ever profit in any quarter. As you see, our cash balances have gone up to INR 954 crore.
I just want to highlight here, a year ago, the cash balance was close to INR 750 crore, which shows that INR 200 crore of cash profits got added by the company during the year. I also want to highlight that in Q4 itself, approximately cash profits of approximately INR 70 crore got added. If you see the Q3 results, you'll see the cash balance was close to INR 880 crore, which is now INR 954 crore. It shows the profitability, the unit economics of the company across all its businesses. If I look at the next slide, which is the consolidated results of the company, as I said, the profits of the company grew more than 6x to INR 145 crore during the year. Overall, during the year, revenues grew 28%. EBITDA grew 90%.
Margins went from 16% last year to 23% this year and 27% in Q4, which shows the continuous increasing of margins. When you look at profitability itself, from last year, INR 24.96 crore in the quarter, this year, INR 46.1 crore in quarter four. And on an annual basis, we reached INR 145 crore. All in all, strong results across revenue growth, profitability growth, and unit economic growth throughout the year, not only on a consolidated basis but also individually in each of the businesses. If you look at slide six, which is the consumer group of CarWale and BikeWale, quarters grown 30%, which has led to 123% growth in EBITDA. Again, here, I want to reiterate that it shows the operating leverage in the business with very little cost increase.
You see, the cost increase is only about 11% up in total costs, but the profitability has gone up 123% on a 30% increase in revenue. Overall, even during the year, on a standalone basis, expenses grew only 4% against a 27% increase in revenue, which led to just 279% EBITDA growth during the year. As I said earlier, PAT has grown at 100% for the quarter in the standalone consumer group business. If you look at the remarketing business, the total income is up by 12% in the quarter and the year. Profit increased up by approximately 19% during the quarter and profit after tax up by 47% during the quarter. I think the business has generally gone back to growth on a growth track after a few quarters of flattish performance, and we feel very enthusiastic about the prospects of the business in the coming years ahead.
If you look at OLX India, in the quarter, it grew by 12%. Profits up 88%, again, shows the operating leverage in the business. Profit after tax went up by 72%, which is up by INR 15 crore for the quarter. It is also the previous highest quarter ever during the last quarter. I must iterate here that the growth of 12% is something we feel confident which is going to change in the coming quarters and years. A lot of the product initiatives and work we have done has still to play out, and we are very, very optimistic about the future prospects of OLX. If you look at the overall traffic, I just want to highlight the traffic of the consumer group is actually up year-on-year by about 10%.
Normally, Q3 is a better quarter in terms of consumer traffic just because of the festival season, and therefore, you see a slight decline from Q3 to Q4. If you look at Q4 this year versus last year, there's a growth in traffic. We feel, again, pretty enthusiastic about or pretty positive about the consumer traction on the consumer group platforms or on OLX. All in all, I would again reiterate that we think with the current year being quite a landmark year for the company, margins have grown, revenues have grown, profitability has grown, our M&A has stabilized, and on the path to doing big things in the future. Shriram Automall just bounced back. We're generally very enthusiastic about the results of the company and the prospects of the company in the coming years. This is what I wanted to stress on.
As I said, this has probably been a pretty landmark year for the company, and we're very, very excited about the future prospects of the company. I also want to add here that we're making a lot of investments in production technology across the group, things like obviously AI and various other tools for enabling new products for customers, and that's in OLX and CarWale, BikeWale across our businesses. A lot of the investments we see in new tech and new products will also help us in the coming years ahead. Of course, all the production tech investment we're doing is part of our operating cost. Yeah, there's a lot of investment going into innovation for all our consumers across all our platforms. This is what I want to start off with.
I'm happy to now take up questions from all of you and answer any clarification or doubts you might have. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use hand checks 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 Vimal Jagannath Gohil from Alchemy Capital Management Private Limited. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity, sir. My first question is on OLX. You acknowledged you've taken some initiatives to bring growth back on track. If you could highlight what exactly are these initiatives, if you could detail some of them, that would be great. Also, despite lower growth, we've seen OLX's margins, despite lower growth, expand, not only on a sequential basis but on a YoY basis as well. What is causing that? I do see there's a reduction in the employee cost and other expenses. Is there some more room for these reductions, or is there some restructuring that is still pending since the acquisition happened?
Thanks, Vimal, and thanks for the question. I think the first part is when we took over, it's been about a year and a half since we took over OLX India. As I said in the earlier calls, a lot of the first six to eight months was about technology transition, transitioning the platform to our environment. In the next four to six months, we spent tremendous effort in stabilizing the platform and user growth as well as working on the current product and tech and making improvements there on the current technology and product which is there for consumers. I think in the last four or five months, after having built up the entire technology and product team and stability in the team, we have now started developing additional feature products for all our customers on the OLX platform.
As you know, OLX has more than 30 million customers a month and close to 180 million-190 million customers a year. It's a very, very strong digital brand. Our attempt here is now someone looking to sell a used product or buy a used product, which is, as I said, in India, it's the only destination or the number one destination by far to sell a used product or buy a used product. The features and products we're looking to add are enabling consumers like you and me to sell or buy a used product. There are multiple product features which are starting to get created or built for these transactions.
We feel pretty confident that in the next, I mean, not only quarters but years, a lot of this value add will get added to the platform, which should help consumer experience but also help monetization in the company, all of that. That is the first part of your question. I think the second part is margins have gone up. There is some cost optimization done by us. Generally, we do not think that there is much cost optimization opportunity in the business. The big opportunity here is to grow consumer experience and obviously then monetization, etc., etc.
Yeah. Vinay, in terms of monetization, that is exactly what I wanted to understand. If you can give us a couple of examples or a couple of instances where you have been able to monetize a few features or you've been able to add a few revenue streams to OLX, if you could just highlight those, that will help. Thanks.
No, till now, I'll be honest, till now, a lot of the revenue actually is a sequential revenue increase continuously over the last few quarters, right, as we've shown earlier. Even the reality is that a lot of what we are doing now, a lot of what we are monetizing right now, is not products we are rolling or going to roll out. They are mostly products which existed before where it's a little more of efficiency and optimization, etc., etc. We yet haven't seen a lot of the outcomes of many of the initiatives we've been taking on the product technology side, and that should come, as I said, in the coming quarters and coming years.
That's why we feel so enthusiastic about the business, that the business stability and growth in revenue and margin growth has happened before even we have gone ahead and created many more products for improving user experience on the platform further. Yeah.
Wonderful. The next question is just a small data point. For FY 2025, if you could just give us a sense for the consumer business, what would be the broad breakup between the actual sales from leads and the sales from used car and the subscription model that we give to the dealers?
No, Anisha, you want to take this? I think what we normally give is OEM sales and dealer sales. Right, Anisha? Am I correct? Anisha, you want to go up these numbers?
Yes. This is similar to our past trend, which is 65% 35%.
Yes. 65% is OEMs and 35% is dealers. Correct.
Yeah. In a similar range to what we've been disclosing on before, a similar range.
That's right.
That continues for F 2025?
There's not much change.
Not much change.
Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you so much. I'll come back to you.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for now.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Vijit Jain from Citigroup.
Yeah. Hi, thanks. Hi, Vinay. Hi, Vinay. Congratulations again on another quarter of 30% growth in the consumer business.
My question is, now you have two quarters here in the consumer business where the growth has clearly stepped up. My first question is, is your QQ seasonality here more aligned with auto OEMs, would you say? Related to that, you said last time around, I think demand-supply dynamics in the industry have shifted, and you've seen benefit of that in the dealers advertising on your platform and all of those. Do you see the same trend as you look forward into F 2026, more inclination from both dealers as well as OEMs to advertise more aggressively on platforms like you? Finally, related to that, what kind of growth do you think you can get in F 2026? That's my first question on the consumer business.
Let me just answer that. Yeah. First, I think normally we do not see much seasonality Q3, Q4. This is a very odd year where actually the industry saw seasonality, not just us, right? I mean, very strong seasonality. October was a very big high for the automotive industry, Q3. I think we benefited from that. Q4 actually grew substantially, the previous Q4 anyway, right? We did benefit from a Q3 seasonality, and that is shown in the consumer traffic, right? Even within the consumer traffic, even though we have grown over previous years, the number of impressions on the internet itself, automotive, at least what we see, seems to be less in Q4 than Q3, which shows that there was a very high seasonality this year, more than normal. Although in our financials, it is very marginal, the seasonality.
You see, from a profitability standpoint, we almost had a higher set of numbers. I mean, we actually had a higher set of numbers. It is not material or not significant to us as a company on a consolidated level, but we did, we have seen the automotive industry this time a stronger than normal seasonality in Q3, Q4, right? Although Q4 has been pretty good as well in spite of that, I mean, to be honest. That is one. The second thing is this OEM dealer part. I think our initial view, maybe a year or two years ago, was seeing other examples across the world, was that the OEM business grows faster initially, and then the dealer business takes over, and the OEM business slows down, and eventually the dealer business is higher than the OEM business. As it is happening, the growth rates are pretty similar.
If you can see, the ratios are not changing. It seems like just maybe towards India where it's early days yet, and the OEM is still heavily investing in digital, right? Therefore, the OEM and the dealer both are growing equally. It seems like that. Probably the trend, I don't see a reason why the trend won't be the same next year in terms of the OEM dealer share. That's the question.
Actually, my question was more along the lines of this 30% growth on the consumer business that you've seen in the second half of F 2025. Do you think the drivers are the same FY 2026 would look closer to that in terms of consumer business?
I can't give guidance, but I don't think much has changed in the industry, to be honest. I mean, it seems that the industry is in the 0%-5% growth for cars especially. Most analysts and economists are saying that the FY 2026 should be between 0%-5% growth somewhere in the automotive industry. That's a general view. I think we have taken that. That might be the view, which is very similar to last year, probably.
Correct. Vinay, within this, broadly wanted to get your take on what do new launches from companies do here in terms of, for example, in the bike segment, if you're seeing a lot of new launches, for example, do you see more advertising activity directly on your platform almost immediately on both bikes as well as car business? Related to that, is bike segment doing better growth than the car segment for you?
Actually, bikes and cars had reasonably similar growth this year. To be fair, the new launches do help things. I mean, people do spend money, more money on OEMs do spend more money on launches. Also, to be honest, the number of launches per year are not that different. I mean, you have an old COVID year, etc. Generally, otherwise, the number of launches per year are pretty similar. It's not something which is changing.
How about the new energy vehicles? Because I think in some other countries, you've seen new OEMs coming up or new energy vehicles coming up.
They're very small in India, right? They're mostly bikes, and they're very small in terms of market share, right? The number of vehicles being sold by them versus the entire TV industry is very, very small. It is not material. If I take out, if you talk about EVs and I take out Bajaj and TVS, the rest of the lot are really all numbers are not big compared to the TV industry in terms of size. They're very small yet. Therefore, the spends are very small as well, relatively small, right? Yeah, I do not think it is material yet whether TV energy kind of vehicles are getting launched. New vehicle launches in the whole, whether IC or EV or etc., hybrid, whatever that might be, it helps anyway. I think that's the point.
Got it. My last question. In the last month or so, we've seen a couple of automotive platforms, websites getting acquired, being BHP and AutoCar specifically, I think. Your thoughts on those assets? I don't know if you can discuss it, but did you consider those acquisitions as well? I think that was my second question.
They're very different. I mean, I don't want to get into whether we consider or not, but they're very different platforms. I mean, the ones you mentioned are more content-driven information places or enthusiast destinations, not really transaction platform like CarWale. I mean, and the scale of CarWale or BikeWale versus them is not comparable, actually, at all. As I said, CarWale and BikeWale both get more than 150 million customers a year, right? So unique. It's just a different level of scale. They're more enthusiast kind of platforms. I mean, CarWale is more or BikeWale is more a place you go when you're looking to buy a vehicle. Yeah.
Got it. Understood. One last question on the Shriram Automall. I'm just trying to understand the QQ.
May we request you to give us a QQ follow-up?
Sure. Sure.
Ladies and gentlemen, please limit your questions to two per participant. The next question is from the line of Siddharth from Nomura. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks all for the opportunity, and again, congrats on a good set of numbers.
Thank you, Siddharth. How are you?
First question, I would say, first question on this consumer business again. I mean, some color if you have in terms of the industry growth, how has it been, say, last year or maybe last quarter? Where is this incremental growth coming from? Because I like to understand the industry structure may not change materially in terms of demand-supply like we are seeing right now. Under that construct, how should we look at the growth? Should we expect the current momentum to sustain or some more normalization like we have seen in the last quarter? Some sense if we get will be really helpful.
The industry growth, as it's public information, as I said, the industry is growing at a low single digit, right? Generally, the view is that the industry is likely to grow at the same pace the next year. That's the economist or the analyst view. I mean, that it'll be in that same range. We don't see any basic market change or any kind of market dynamics change across the industry at all. I think that's the first part. The second part is we continue to play our role, which is helping consumers to buy cars or buy bikes or manufacture the dealers who sell them. The countries are building products to enable it, and more so now with a lot of new tools and analytics and AI tools available, etc., etc. We're getting closer and closer to solving consumers' problems.
We definitely see our role being the same, if not increase, right, in the industry. We seem to be very optimistic about the market sentiment and the fact that there is growth in the industry itself. Yeah, I would generally be quite positive about the new vehicle market.
Understood, sir. We have seen a bit of step-up in the marketing expense in the current quarter, obviously also seeing some slowdown in that visitors' run rate. Do you think this is something seasonal again and will normalize going ahead, or probably we need to sort of push marketing a bit higher to try to drive growth in the coming year?
No, I do not think. First of all, marketing is a very small part of our cost, right? It is INR 70,000 a quarter, INR 76,000 the whole quarter in the consumer group, which is just about over 10% of our revenue, right? It is not significant. We do not see much variation from here, right, overall in the marketing cost. As I said, the traffic year-on-year is up 10% overall. The reason one would think that it is down sequentially by about 8-9% is because this Q3 was a very strong quarter this year, right? I think that was the main reason. It has very disproportionate growth in that particular quarter. There is nothing here to be seen in the marketing cost line, not significant to the company on a whole. That trend did not likely change. It is not like traffic has come down because of competitive reasons.
Traffic is slightly down because the car searches are down itself, right? That was down. It's not that our market share of traffic is down.
Okay. Got it. Lastly, on the car business, I mean, we have seen a very healthy 20% growth in the CarTrade vehicle fold, but the revenue growth seems to be a lot lesser than the volume growth. What is sort of impacting here and when do you think that converges or picks up more going ahead?
Yeah. I think it's all, as I said, repossession seems to have gone up. Our repossession share has also gone up. It's now about 54% of vehicles of our inventory is repossessed, which is being sold. It seems like the market trend towards the cyclical part of the cyclical view is that it seems that repossession should grow and continue to grow over the next few quarters. Therefore, Shriram Automall should be able to benefit from that. I mean, that's the very single part. Of course, Shriram Automall, again, I think is any revenue growth dramatically affects profitability. That's why high operating leverage with business costs. Cost growth is the whole year cost growth is 7%, right? It does help when you have low cost growth. Margin and profitability should come.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Dhruv Bhatia from Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Please go ahead.
Hello.
Hello. I think we can't hear him. Hello?
Hi. Thanks for.
I think we can hear you. No, we can hear you.
Yeah. Firstly, I mean, just a data point I wanted to get is a bookkeeping question from the remarketing business. Could you just provide what would be the mix between the TV and CV in terms of volume and value, volume in terms for the quarter and for the full year?
For the remarketing, CV tends to be for us, we've said this before, around the 25% range. I mean, that tends to be the volume of CVs.
Okay. Secondly, just on OLX, the last six months, there was a lot of investments since the acquisition in terms of reducing scams on OLX, in terms of starting to verify dealers. If you could just talk a little bit about what investments are already done and what all are required to be done to accelerate growth from where we are? From a profitability standpoint, I think we've reached a fairly good number. From here on to drive incremental growth, what are those things that you need to do to get OLX to the next scale?
Sure. I think the product-tech investments I was saying earlier, there's a lot of investment product-tech maybe across different areas of the platform. The first is stability of the platform. Imagine there's a platform where 180 million-190 million Indians come every year, right? That's a massive number. I think it's probably one of the largest in the world of its kind, right? Very few platforms in the world get this number of users. Obviously, the kind of investment we do on stability and product and technology is going to be of global quality and global standards, right? They're probably the best in the world in what we do, number one.
Number two, when you look at safety or security in the platform or trust and safety, as we call it, there's continuous effort to make sure, like every other platform in India does, is making investments and providing an environment where customers can trade or buy products from each other in a trustworthy manner, right? That's a continuous effort. There's lots of AI tools, technologies which we implemented over the last few months, enabling or improving further security or trust and safety on the platform. It's something we continue to do. That's obviously helping the platform itself. We also are looking, obviously, in the coming months to, as I said earlier, a lot of other tools and features so that customers can interact and sell and buy these products in a free, easy manner. That's the intent.
There is continuous innovation going on there to improve or enhance the number of transactions done on the platform.
We can also just finish.
I think clearly, Dhruv, I think your line is.
Dhruv, we request you to return the question to you for a follow-up question. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sachin Dixit from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vinay. Commercial business analysis. My first question is on basically new auto business, right? Obviously, the growth has been good. Industry growth is whatever, but the dynamics are still renewed. I wanted to understand competitive dynamics, right? Relatively, do you think you are gaining market share over the competition? If yes, what do you think is driving? Are you doing some sort of strategic initiatives where you are creating new products, new benefits for your OEM and dealer partner?
Yeah. We feel obviously we're continuously working on improving our product so that we stay ahead of any other way to buy a vehicle, right? Whether it's our auto finance product, which is gaining traction on our platforms, whether it is other features we add for consumers. Our focus mostly, Sachin, honestly, is to add things on for helping consumers. If we help consumers, then the dealers and manufacturers automatically benefit, right? We mostly add more and more features which help you as a consumer to buy a car or a two-wheeler in a simple, easy manner, right? As I said, one example is adding our auto finance product. We started a year and a half, two years ago, which has now started getting us a lot of consumer engagement.
Every day, there are small, small things on our product and tech we keep adding, enabling, helping consumers find the journey a lot easier, right? That is a permanent effort. As I said now, with all the data and all the analytics in our business, how do we add AI as another way of helping a consumer buy a product or buy a vehicle online? There is continuous improvement and effort going on on the technology product side. One of the biggest efforts for the year for us internally is further working on our product tech across our group, not just in the consumer group.
Understood. On the same line, basically, are you also looking to cater to, let's say, some of the newer formats?
Hello? Hello?
It seems like they're likely to be connected.
Lost you.
Yeah. To ask, thank you. To ask the question, please press star one now. The next question is from the line of Deep Shah from B&K Securities. Please go ahead.
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Yes, sir, you are audible. Deep, we can hear you. Sir, you are audible. We can't hear him.
The line is not reachable. We'll take the next question.
We can hear Deep. Hello, Deep.
Ma'am, the line is not reachable.
Yeah, not clear.
Sure. I'll take the next question. The next question is from the line of Nishit Jalan from Axis Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, I've been adding conversations on both sets of numbers.
Thank you, Nishit.
Hi, how are you? Yeah. Two questions. Firstly, just wanted to get a sense on the remarketing business. You did mention that repossessed vehicles have started to come back. Any numbers you can share out of the total growth in auction volume around 18%? What was the growth in repossessed and retail segment? Because what I remember. To Aneesha what has been the kind of decline in repossessed vehicles that you have seen in the last three, four years? I remember that repossessed vehicle volumes have been coming down consistently while you have scaled up the retail volumes because of which your overall volumes have not suffered much. If the recovery cycle plays out, just wanted to understand what kind of growth trajectory we can look into for repossessed vehicles in the next two, three years. That is the reason why I'm asking this question.
It's hard for me to predict what might happen on repossession growth or other segments in the future. We have not been given any guidance. Generally, growth rates are similar across segments. Aneesha, would that be correct? I mean, it's not like repossession is growing faster than other segments, but generally, growth rates are similar across all segments.
Vinay, what I wanted to mean is if you look at if you go back in time when your auction volume used to be 60,000-70,000 per quarter three, four years back, right? Then what used to be the repossessed vehicles and what it's like now?
I don't think repossession has fully come back in. It is not, no, that's absolutely correct. I don't think repossession's come back to the volumes they were. It's just that from the base, they started growing. It just doesn't mean it's come back to where it was. That's the question. I think you're correct.
Yeah. No, it has not come back. That's why I want to understand to what extent it has come back. What used to be the run rate per quarter and what it is now right now? That's what I'm trying to understand.
Yeah. I understand. I don't think I have that answer to the question right now, but it did not come back to if that's the question. I mean, it definitely has not.
Okay. No worries. I'll take it offline.
There is an opportunity to grow even to come back to its original base. It'll have to grow substantially from here. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. That take rate seems to have come down.
Sorry, can you interrupt? Can you please return to the question queue for follow-up?
No, it's okay. Let's just finish this question. Go ahead. Sorry. Just go ahead, Nishit.
Okay. Thank you.
Just wanted to understand on this, our take rate in this segment has come down. Is it more of a function of the percentage take rate coming down, or is it like the ASPs in this?
In the auction volume, it's an ASP. There's a little upsurge in two-wheelers specifically. I think that's just a reflection of the industry itself. Yeah, that's the reason. It's not a percentage. It's probably the ASP. Yeah.
I had one more question on new cars. Can I ask that, or should I go back and forth?
Okay. Quickly. I think. Go ahead.
Yeah. Sure. So it was more of an industry question. See, when you see customers coming to your website, CarWale, BikeWale, what, according to your understanding, are customers coming to the website? What are the top two or three things a customer is coming and spending time on your website? What exactly are they trying to find? And why I'm asking this is now, obviously, you did mention that Team-BHP, AutoCar, they are also car enthusiasts kind of a thing, right? If they also put on their website a lot of details around new cars, comparison, and all those sort of things, do not you think that some traffic will get divided and they might also start taking a bite of the overall advertisement pool or marketing pool from the OEM and the dealer side?
Sure. Okay. The first part is why do they come to CarWale or BikeWale? I think people come when they're looking to buy a car or a two-wheeler to come, it's first of all, it's a very significant purchase for anyone in their life cycle, right? I mean, when you look at your house or your car, it's probably a top one and two purchases you ever have. It's a highly involved decision to buy a product of this value in India. Therefore, you try and understand what car to buy, from where to buy, what price to pay. Once you go through those hurdles on a platform like CarWale or BikeWale, you probably try and understand, "How do I get my loan? Can I get my loan sanctioned?" Probably even just my old car for sale so I know what that value is.
I think right from the time you start to understand that you want to buy a product to the time you actually get it delivered, you'll be deeply integrated with CarWale and its dealer set or its manufacturer set to run you through this process. As I said, we are probably trying to move over the years, we move more from an information provider to more of a transaction enabler, right? I think the next transition of CarWale, BikeWale will be to a transaction doer. Eventually, we'll probably say, "Listen, you press the button, buy a car, and we deliver it to you." We're moving from an information provider, transaction enabler to a transaction doer. That's the transition we're all making. The other couple of places you mentioned are mostly, they're mostly, as I said, enthusiast/places of content, right?
They've been around forever. I don't think it changes CarWale's market dynamics because they're not new, both of them. Both of them have been around for many, many years. Also, the scale of users is very, very different for different reasons. CarWale gets your users; it does over many, many years because it provides a certain role when someone buys a vehicle, which and Team-BHP or AutoCar provide a different or play a different role. I don't see that as competitive just because they've been acquired. I don't see those dynamics changing at all.
Okay. Thank you so much, Vinay. All the best.
Thank you. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sagar Arya from X ponent Tribe . Please go ahead.
Hi. Am I audible?
Yes, we can hear you.
Yes, sir. You're audible.
Yes. Just a couple of questions. First, on the consumer group business. Now, you've spoken about the inherent operating leverage that is prevalent in our business economics, right? If you look at the classified business outside of India, the dominant classified business in car classified, they operate at north of 40-50% of the margin. Even in other categories where there are businesses which dominate in classified business, they operate at significantly high margins, right? If we were to continue to grow at the 20% rates or slightly higher that we are anticipating, would you say that we are quite far from saturation of EBITDA margins in our business? If you were to look at a number, say, three, four years down the line, what would be a realistic target of EBITDA margin that you would have in the car classified business?
Yeah. I think not only the car classified business, I think across the group, Inshira, MotorMall, or OLX India, we have tremendous operating leverage in our business. Our costs don't go up in relation to our revenue. Our major costs are only manpower costs, which are mostly fixed in nature, not variable. It is fair to say that our margin is already getting best in class in India. We also believe that our margins will get better in the coming years, whether it will reach it'll probably get best in class, not only in India, and best in the world, just as the operating leverage we have in our business. We're very confident about margin growth. We actually talked to this last two, three years as well.
I think what we've been able to demonstrate as a company is that margin growth is happening over two, three years continuously, quarter by quarter. We don't see any reason why that would not continue to happen in the future.
Best in the world is quite an aspiration, right? Like I said, the best in the world are operating at significantly higher. Good to know this. Second, on the OLX piece, while we have a very large base of users who come and use our platform, at least one big challenge in India has been monetization of users, right, where the average revenue per user has been fairly low for a lot of platforms. What kind of challenges do you anticipate in monetization of your traffic on OLX, and what are the things that you're doing to improve that? If you could just give a specific example, that would be very helpful. Thanks.
Sure. I think on OLX, we monetize two sets of users. We monetize consumers, and we monetize dealers. It is the RPUs per user or the RPU per dealer is something which is, in our opinion, only likely to go up in the company, number one, on both cases. The way we feel the RPU will go up, I mean, is it's principally around providing more products and services to the same user, whether a consumer who's coming to sell or buy a product or a dealer who's coming to sell a product. The more we offer, the more ability we give you to perform transactions, the greater the ability to monetize, right, as far as we are concerned. We believe that monetization is going to grow. Monetization is going to grow with increased products and services delivered to the user, and RPUs will go up as well.
On the other hand, we also believe the number of users will go up. So it's a combination of all these things put together.
Is there a specific number you have in mind, say, if you're looking at used cars as an example here? Is there a specific number that you have in mind that will be able to monetize, say, X% of the sale value of?
No, we don't think that we have a transaction. We obviously want to be very cost-effective for a dealer to sell cars on our platform, but we don't have a specific target or goal in mind. We just feel that by offering more and more services and helping dealers sell more cars, which we do, we will keep increasing our RPUs as well as our number of users, both. We actually think there's a limitless opportunity both on used cars or used products on OLX at this point. There's no target in mind. You could continuously do this for many, many years ahead. Plus, you got to remember the industry itself, the used car industry itself is growing. Also, the RPUs of cars itself is growing. The ticket size of cars are growing.
There are a number of market indicators also which could help and benefit OLX on used products itself.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mr. Sachin Dixit from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vinay. Sorry, my line seems to be issued.
No problem.
I had just one more question, which was on OLX, right? Something seems to be not working on OLX clearly, right? At the time of acquisition, we talked about this entity historically has grown around 20%. In the last couple of quarters, we were around 15%. This quarter, we have dropped to 10%. Can you detail more of it so that we, as investor community, get understanding of what is happening, why are we where we are, and why do you think that we'll recover? Because otherwise, the trend doesn't suggest that way.
No, no. The trend actually suggests that because if you see the financials on previous year to this year, on a yearly basis, OLX has grown at 16%, 12% quarter on quarter, year on year, in the quarter, but annually, it has grown at 16%. We actually feel very optimistic about OLX, and we actually think that it is absolutely the right path to where it needs to go. I think what we are also saying is that it takes time to build products and services on a platform of 200 million, 190 million people coming. What has taken us time is adding products and services to what we do. We feel actually really optimistic about the revenue potential and monetization potential, even the consumer potential or number of consumers coming. There is a lot of work done on the 18 months from an M&A.
Just to tell you also, OLX has been the highest amount of profitability in its history. It came from a many years of loss-making background, right, many years of it. There are a lot of things which we had to do to get it right and get it here. At the same time, grow users, grow monetization, and grow revenues. They've always grown. Optimistic, I think, very we feel a lot of work on production technology will be done for building future products and services, which is underway, and then adoption of that. Very, very optimistic about where it's going and where it needs to go.
On the same line, basically, our employee expense in OLX has dipped by almost 25% when compared to 2Q of this year itself.
What is that? You don't know the exact percentage, but?
No, no. I don't know the percentage.
It was roughly 20% in 2Q. It's now 50%.
The cost.
Yeah. It is just optimization because when you do an M&A, you do not really need, you do not know what you need or not. I think we are all new to it in the first year or so. It is just a little bit of optimization, nothing more than that.
Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you and all the best.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sindhuja from LKR Advisory. Please go ahead. Yes, sir, audible. Please go ahead with your question.
We can't hear him.
Sir, your line is unmuted. Mr. Sindhuja, please go ahead with your question. Seems like the line is not audible. We'll move to the next question. The next question is from the line of Palak from MIV Investment Management. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vinay. Congrats for the good setup with Palak.
Thank you.
My question is again on OLX India. What I understand from the previous conversation is that last six months, there have been a lot of efforts in improving the platform, and now they are thinking about the monetization. What I'm not able to understand is that now there are two ways where we can increase the monetization of the platform. First is the existing revenue that we have for the revenue, that is the ad listing fees and subscription maybe. Can you help to understand what is our strategic plan? Whether we are thinking of the first step, that is to increase the monetization from our existing revenue stream, that is the advertisement or listing fees. The next part is what are we thinking about the new revenues? Can you give me a specific example?
I mean, you gave us the example of what are the efforts that we are taking, but how is it going to get converted into the monetization? Specifically, when we talk about when we are talking about such a huge user base, what is stopping us from increasing the monetization part? Do you think that the customer shipment will get impacted, or there are other platforms that are performing well on this aspect? I mean, because of the competition aspect, we are not increasing the monetization.
Okay. The first part is OLX is very dominant in used product selling or buying for consumers like you and me or dealers who are selling used products. I do not think from a competitive standpoint, there is any platform in the country which is even close to what OLX does. As I said, OLX has more than 30 million customers a month, which is unique. Imagine 90 million a year, which is just unique to itself, and it is bland. That is the first part of the competitive side of the question. The second part is what are we doing to increase the growth of revenue we have seen continuously over the last 15-18 months is growth in the current monetization models, which are listing fees for consumers and dealers. We have not added any new revenue streams.
It's mostly the growth coming from what we've acquired and the current revenue streams and products and services which we offer. I think our objective is, of course, to add new revenue streams to the business and continue to grow existing streams. The new revenue streams are products which we're still creating. There are multiple products which anyway help you and me to sell a product on OLX or buy a product on OLX. Those are underway. We are still under product development. In the next few quarters, they will start rolling out, and we obviously expect increased monetization from them.
Okay. So the 17% growth that we are talking about, is it purely from the increase in the monetization? Because I assume that the.
Which growth? Sorry. Which growth? What number?
Yes. Actually, a mix of user-based increase and the monetization. Could you help me understand how much perecentage was due to the user-based increase and how much percentage due to the increase in the monetization?
I mean, we normally have very marginal rate increases. They're mostly increases on more user engagement or user increases itself. The rate increases are very minimal.
Don't you think that this is part accelerating and charging users more? Because eventually, when we'll provide them, the service sets will have to start monetizing that part also. There has to be a slight acceleration in terms of growth of the amount that we are charging to users.
No, I think what we are trying to do here is add products and services and monetize that. We do not necessarily think the best way to monetize is just to keep increasing the rate. I think the intent here is to keep on giving more and more to the user to do more and more transactions and therefore increase our revenues. I think that is the intent here.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will take this as our last question. I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you all for joining this afternoon. We feel very enthusiastic and happy about the year gone by and also very optimistic about the year coming ahead. Thank you for joining, and look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. Goodbye.
On behalf of CarTrade Tech Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.
Thank you.