Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Brainbees Solutions Limited Q4 and Financial Year 2025 earnings call. This is Anish Arora, and I have with me Mr. Supam Maheshwari, Managing Director and CEO of the company, Mr. Gautam Sharma, Group Chief Financial Officer of the company, Mr. Vivek Goel, Chief Business Officer of the company, and Mr. Abhinav Sharma, Country Head of Middle East Business Operations. Kindly note that this call is meant for analysts and investors of the company. We wish to highlight that the call is being recorded, and by participating in this event, you consent to such recording, distribution, and publication. All participants have been muted as per the default mode, and participants will be unmuted once we open the Q&A forum for the members to ask questions after the presentation of the management concludes.
We will be covering the presentation in the beginning of the call, and we will thereafter open the Q&A forum. We would like to point out that some of the statements made in today's call may be forward-looking in nature, and the disclaimer to this effect has been included in the investor presentation shared with you. With this, I request Mr. Supam Maheshwari to take it over.
Yeah, good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining our quarterly and Q4 quarterly earnings presentation, as well as fiscal year ending March 31st, 2025. Today, we have reserved one and a half hours as we would like you to take through a little more detailed dive on our business, some more nuances that you have not seen in the past. I want to reiterate for some of the members who may have joined new. FirstCry, as a company, is a baby's first cry, is a special moment for parents. And at FirstCry, we always aim to make this and all such moments of the parenting journey filled with joy and happiness. This is our mission that we continue to maintain and do every activity towards accomplishing this mission. Today, we will be covering the following agenda items.
We'll be covering our entire fiscal year 2024-2025 financial performance along with Quarter Four, JFM. We'll also be covering our segments, four business segments: India Multichannel Business, which is core of our business, and International Business, then Globalb ees, and then other segments. All four of these we'll be covering. We'll also talk about our financial summary or consult performance of the total company. Moving further, let's just deep dive into our entire fiscal year 2024-2025 performance. Fiscal year 2025, we are happy to report a very strong growth momentum and improvement in profitability for the full year, FY2025 over 2024. As you can see, this consult performance, revenue of the company at a consult level increased 18% over FY2024, becoming around INR 7,600 crore of revenue from operations.
Gross margin has continued to increase with 159 bps , year-on-year expansion to 23% versus FY 2024, and adjusted for ESOP cost has also increased 90 bps , year-on-year expansion with 43% absolute increase from FY 2024. This in percentage terms means around 5.13 in FY 2025 over 4.2 in FY 2024. Also happy to report overall cash profit after tax increase of INR 2.09 billion, which is 96% increase over last year. Super happy to report that India Multichannel Business turned PAT as well as cash free flow positive in FY 2025. We remain very, very optimistic, and the entire team will be working super hard to deliver both on growth and profitability expansion across all our business segments. This is a new slide where we are disclosing gross margins for our different four segments, which earlier we used to report at a consult level.
If you will see all our four business segments, we have been continuing to increase for the entire fiscal year revenue as well as gross margin expansion and as well as adjusted EBITDA. If you look at India Multichannel, revenue increased around 15% over last year. Gross margin improved 20% over last year with 149 bps improvement year-on-year and adjusted EBITDA with 24% increase over last year. International also had 14% increase of revenue from operations, gross margin improvement of 13%. We will be talking about in detail some of the all four business segments, so you will get a more detailed color of the year as well as of the quarter. Our adjusted EBITDA also had close to INR 1.4 billion of adjusted EBITDA losses, which is similar to around FY2024.
Globalb ees had a 30% improvement in revenue terms over last year, and gross margin improved 36% absolute, 186 bps increase, and adjusted EBITDA improved 856% over last year to INR 220,000,000 crores with 121 basis points improvement year-on-year. Others, which is primarily our preschool business, another good year of performance with INR 420,000,000 crores of revenue with expansion of gross margin and almost INR 100,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA, leading close to around 24% of adjusted EBITDA over last year of 17.5%. All four business segments have done fairly well for us for the year. For the Q4 performance as well, if you look at our annual unique transacting customers, which essentially includes our India Multichannel and International Business, improved 17% for the trailing 12 months ending March 2025 over 2024, improved by 17%.
GVM, which is accounting for India Multichannel and International, increased by 14% over last Q4 of FY2024, and revenue from operation increased 16%, which includes other business segments as well. Consol EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA improved for Q4 at 20% increase over Q4 FY2024, which represents almost close to 5.2%. India Multichannel adjusted EBITDA improved 17% over Q4, which essentially was 9.3% over 8.9%. Cash profit evolving increase of 484% over Q4 over Q4 to almost INR 69 crore for the Q4. Now, with that, I would like Gautam Sharma, sorry, Vivek Goel, will take you through our India Multichannel Business. I would like to state that a lot of earlier calls, you had requests of certain more disclosures of some of our business, I would say performances of certain metrics.
This time around, we are sharing a little more nuance around some of our, I mean, some of those disclosures, which will help you to understand and appreciate our business in a little more detailed way. I will request Vivek to take you through some of the slides, maybe repetitive for some of you because the modes will remain same. Since we have more disclosures, you will have a far more appreciation of the quality of the business that we are building. Vivek, over to you.
Thank you, Supam. As Supam mentioned, in the next few slides, I'll take you through some of the important modes of the business along with some additional information which will help you appreciate what we are building as a business. As you already know, we are the largest multichannel retailer for Mothers', Babies', and Kids' products in India. Of our total GMV of multichannel business, India Multichannel Business, 78% comes from online and 22% of this GMV comes from our offline stores. Happy to report that this year we crossed 10 million annual unique transacting customers. Also want to mention that of our total modern stores, offline stores, almost 45% of our stores are Baby Hug or FirstCry company-owned stores.
As a business, we bring in a very unique proposition as compared to any other retail format, which is where we have both online and offline strengths. If you really see that our business, and Supam has mentioned in past few calls as well, that our business lends very beautifully for an omnichannel or multichannel kind of retail format because there are all kinds of customers who want to buy things with experience as well as they want to buy it with convenience. We serve both. Over a period of time, if you really see our data, there are a lot of consumers who start purchasing with us in an offline store and eventually become a very loyal online customer.
At the same time, a lot of our consumers actually discover us online and they continue to purchase in the nearby offline store as well. A testimony of that is that of the total GMV generated in the top 20 cities for us, almost 38% of GMV comes from these cross-channel customers, the customers who buy both in online as well as offline stores. Anish, if you can move to the next slide. Yeah. If I would say that mothers of a young baby is the busiest person in the world. As a team in FirstCry, we really appreciate that fact and we strive to make things easier for them when they come and browse our apps. One of the most important things we have done is we have personalized our app based on the age and gender of a child.
For example, if you are a mom of a six-month-old girl, you would see a completely different homepage as compared to a mom of a 10-year-old boy. For example, a mom of a six-month-old girl would see products like musical toys or strollers being promoted on our homepage, whereas a mother of a 10-year-old might see remote control cars and school supplies kind of products, which are more relevant for them. On top of this, we also personalize our app on multiple other axes, which would include consumer behavior as well as regional nuances. For example, if I would give you a very recent example, monsoons are slowly progressing across the country.
Some of the states in South India might see our product selection as well as promotion selection more conducive to monsoons, whereas certain other regions, which are still reeling under the heat, would see a lot more summer-related product selection and promotion. This curation and personalization really helps a mother in terms of making the right choices for the babies and easier for them. We apply some of these learnings of personalization also in our offline stores. As a brand, we address the Babies' and Kids' needs across age groups through a wide variety of assortment, which is almost 1.8 million strong in terms of SKUs, which are offered across over 8,000 brands. A typical journey of our consumer or the moms starts from the pregnancy and continues till the time their oldest child is 12 years old on FirstCry.
When we started our business, at that time, our focus was more in the age group of - 9 months to three years, till the time the child was three years. A few years back, we expanded our selection to cater to the needs of up to six-year-old child, and subsequently, we expanded it to the age group of 12 years. I also want to mention that as a brand and as a retailer, we are very fashion-focused, and that could be seen in terms of the ratio of fashion business in FirstCry. We offer total GMV of multichannel India business. 52% of our GMV comes from baby and kids fashion, which includes apparel and footwear categories. All the other categories, which contribute to about 48% of our business, are powered by almost 300,000 strong inventory selection, SKU selection.
This slide, we have added to give you a little more color in terms of stickiness and long-term cohorts of FirstCry customers. If I would try to attempt to explain it to you, in fiscal year 2013, in the acquisition year, if a consumer gave us a GMV of 1X over a period of 12 years, till the time over the period of 12 years, we end up generating almost 7.9X GMV from the same consumer. That was for fiscal year 2013. If you see this report vertically as well, for example, till year four column, which is five years post year of acquisition, in fiscal year 2017, the number increased from 3.4X to 3.7X. For the consumers who are acquired in fiscal year 2021, this number for the first five years of revenue increased to 4X.
Over a period of time, we can clearly see that the business has demonstrated increasing stickiness. As I mentioned, the 6- 12 months age group that we have launched sometime back is still to be completely baked into these long-term cohorts. We expect these numbers to further continue to improve over a period of time. This is another very important moat as a brand that we have built, which is the collection of highly curated home brand portfolios. We have built some of the most iconic brands in India when it comes to baby and kids products, which some of them include Baby Hug, PineKids, Cute Walk, and Baby oye. Over a period of time, what we have seen is our home brands have grown at a much faster rate as compared to the FirstCry GMV.
So for example, in FY 2020, the GMV, the contribution of home brands to FirstCry GMV was 37%. In fiscal year 2025, the contribution crossed 55%. The revenue coming from home brands crossed 55% of our total GMV. One of a couple of very important benefits and strengths that FirstCry home brands bring in is first that in a market which is highly fragmented, home brands bring in curated and high quality, much better quality as compared to the market, which helps in better consumer retention as well as the home brands at the second level also help us expand our gross margins. Amongst our home brands, you already know that Baby Hug is the largest Mothers', Babies', and Kids' product brand. We are the largest in terms of selection in Asia Pacific or assortment in Asia Pacific if you exclude China.
We are also the largest multi-category Mothers', Babies', and Kids' product brand in terms of GMV. In the next few slides, I'll show over a period of our journey, we have built a lot of important marketing strategies and moats for us, which have helped us in being very prudent with our marketing costs or optimize our acquisitions as well as increase the retention of our consumers. I'll discuss a couple of them in the next few slides. One of the most unique things that we have built from our strategies is that we are one of the unique apps to have commerce and community in the same mobile application. We operate India's largest and most engaged parenting community in our app, which is also called FirstCry Parenting.
FirstCry Parenting has educational information, provides educational information to the moms, which is both professionally generated content and also user-generated content. We also provide very important tools which are required by the mothers during the parenting journey, like immunization schedule tracker, growth tracker, Q&A, as well as content which is video as well as text. A lot of this content is actually personalized based on the child's age so that the mother, again, as I mentioned earlier, does not have to waste their time in looking for the stuff they do not need. Parenting actually helps us in consumer acquisitions on one end as well as retention during the most important formative years of a consumer coming on our platform. The second and very important strategy that we have is the hospital gift box program. This is a long-standing partnership with hospitals.
Some of those partnerships go as back as 13 to 14 years. We are partnered with almost 13,000 + clinics and hospitals across the country where we distribute almost 2.5 million boxes a year at the time of baby birth. This is very important because the time of baby birth is one of the most emotional moments for all parents, and it is the perfect point of market entry for a brand like FirstCry. Just to give you a color about the scale that we operate this program at, we cover almost about 10% of baby births in the country through this program. Now I'll hand over to Gautam to take us through the financial numbers for our multichannel business.
Thanks, Vivek. This slide talks about the growth in annual unique transacting customers, GMV, and orders.
We continue to see a very healthy growth in our AUTC in March over last year, March. This is the 12-month trailing number. Orders and GMV has almost similar growth for FY 2025 over FY 2024, which is 16%. The Q4 growth in orders as well as GMV is around 14%. This is a slight impact in Q4. It got slightly impacted because of three reasons. One is we have witnessed some slowdown, especially in the offline business. The second reason is we have seen a truncated winter. We talked about it last time that there was a late start of winter, and in fact, it ended early. That is one of the reasons because of that, the GMV has got moderated. The third one is we all know that we have closed a few company-owned stores in fiscal 2025.
These are the three reasons because of which GMV growth and order growth got moderated in Q4. Revenue growth for full year is 15%, and for the Q4 over Q4, it is 12%. Again, the moderation is because of the reasons I just explained. However, we continue to improve the EBITDA for the India Multichannel Business, both on quarter- on- quarter and year- on- year. FY25 EBITDA, you see, this is adjusted for ESOP cost. It has gone to 9.5% from 8.8% in FY24, and it represents around 24% growth year- on- year. Similarly, if we talk about the Q4 FY25 EBITDA numbers, it is 9.3% compared to 8.9% in Q4 FY24. This represents a 17% year-on-year growth. Now, I will let Abhinav Sharma, who heads our Middle East operations, take you through the International Business slides.
Thank you, Gautam. Hello, everybody, and thanks for joining us on this call this evening. I'll quickly walk you over the International Business, where we started, when we started, and why we started, what's the journey looked like so far. As you can see here, a very compelling reason why we initiated or started our business in both geographies in the Middle East, KSA and UAE. As you can see, KSA birth rates are even higher than India. The spend per child, to top that up, is about 8x higher as compared to India and about 17 x higher in UAE as compared to India. Very compelling reasons for us to be present here in both the markets. It represents a large market opportunity for us as well as very favorable demographics. Anish, go to the next slide, please.
Our journey thus far, we started first in UAE in October 2019 and subsequently in KSA in August 2022. The basic tenet of our business in both markets internationally has been replicating a very well-defined and evolving sort of a playbook that India business has created over the last 15 years. You can see we are online only right now in UAE and KSA, both the markets we are operating as a pure play e-commerce player in our vertical. The average order values in the International segment is more than 4x that of India average order value as of now. This is a very important slide. This shows you how the gross margin values or gross margin percentages have evolved in both the markets, India as well as international, in certain timestamps.
In India, as you can see, we started in FY2011, and after seven years, we clocked a GM of 24%. In the international Business, we've completed about four years now, and we are very similar in terms of the GM percentage. The playbook impact that I was talking about in the previous slide, obviously, it has a lot of levers. To speak of a few of the levers in terms of margin expansion that has played out in India, you can see in year 2014, a spectacular 36.6% clocked of GM percentage. Increase in share of home brands in the GMV is one lever. Share of fashion, which is kids and babies fashion in GMV. Better home brand and third-party margins due to economies of scale. Of course, operational efficiencies.
Now, these are some of the levers that the India playbook has handed over to us, which are also in play in the international market. Gautam, over to you. Thanks. Thanks, Abhinav. Again, similar to the slides we presented for the India multi-channel business, this represents the growth in AUTC, orders, and GMV. AUTC has increased 14% Q4- over- Q4. However, the growth in orders slightly got moderated in Q4 and even full year. We talked about a few horizontals. During our last earnings call, we talked about a few horizontals entering the Middle East region. That competitive intensity continues in Q4 as well, and that has impacted slightly the growth in orders as well as the growth in overall GMV. Next slide, please. Moving on to the revenue from operations, it has grown by 14% in FY 2025 over FY 2024.
However, the growth in Q4 FY25 is a little lower. It got moderated because of the reasons I just explained, the competition reason. However, the clear focus is on improving the profitability and sustainable growth. You can see from the EBITDA numbers, the full year EBITDA numbers, it has come down from -19% in FY24 to -16% in FY25. While the losses in absolute terms remain more or less the same, but we strongly believe that the peak losses now are behind us, and we will continue to reduce the EBITDA burn, both in terms of absolute value and absolute percentage quarter- on- quarter moving forward. Over to you, Supam.
Yeah. For Global. So on Globalb ees front, I think this is a little familiar slide. We continue to operate in our four segments: home, improvement, utilities, home appliances, active lifestyle accessories, and home and personal care.
As you know, we haven't acquired any business since September 2022, so all our growth post that has been totally organic. Now, if you will look at our performance for the full year FY2025 over FY2024, it is 30%, going up to INR 1,577 crore. For the Q4, we grew by 33%, Q4- over- Q4. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, as you can see, we continue to improve our adjusted EBITDA because this business is three and a half years old. In fact, first year went around in priming the engine with a lot of category acquisitions that we did. Really, the business is fairly young for it to be able to result into a more mature EBITDA.
As you can see, we continue to improve our EBITDA year- on- year, quarter- on- quarter basis, where for the full fiscal year, we have demonstrated 1.4% EBITDA over last same fiscal year. It was 0.2%. Likewise, for the quarter, where - 0.3% has become 0.7% +. These are still early days. The company continues to do business segment continues to do very well, both in terms of the growth and expansion of EBITDA is yet to materialize in a meaningful way. If you look at this, this is a little more detailed color on the Globalb ees. If you look at some of these segments for FY2024 and FY2025, we have tried to classify into five segments, although we just talked about four segments.
We have our core four segments, which is home improvement, utilities, and darker pink, slightly lesser pink, home appliances, and very light pink on home and personal care, and active life and accessories. These are our core sort of brands that have continued to expand. Other brands, which we have deliberately slowed down, and we believe because of certain evolution curve that have, if you look at even the right-hand side, the adjusted EBITDA from the core brands has been around 7.5%, and from the other brands, it's - 31%. The share of these other brands is reducing from 14% in FY2024 to 8% in FY2025 as a deliberate strategy.
Over time, as the other brands' piece of the business reduces, we will attempt at making it EBITDA neutral over a period of time while improving our focus on the core brands, which have a disproportionate growth, high growth, than the overall business growth of 30% year- on- year. It will mean a very meaningful outcome, as you can imagine, that over the next few years as we move along, the other brands reduce in size, and the adjusted EBITDA for those reduces in percentage terms as well. Effectively, our Globalb ees as a business will deliver a lot more EBITDA in terms of the bottom line, both at a consolidated brand adjusted EBITDA.
We believe we will obviously improvise on our corporate expenses and delivering a superior performance on the overall Globalbees adjusted EBITDA from 1.4% going forward to a much healthier number over a few quarters and years to come. I hope this gives you a little more deeper color on some of these were asked and questions that you had in the prior calls. Therefore, we thought to share this additional piece of information. I would now request Gautam to talk about the other segments and consol performance.
Other category largely includes our Preschool business. We have a strong growth in preschool partnership across 160 cities now. You can see the preschool numbers, number of operational preschools from 105 in FY2023. We have increased this to 208 in FY2024, and now we have 363 operational schools.
You can see a healthy jump in the number of students enrolled as well. For FY 2025, it is 18,470 students who have enrolled in our schools. Revenue continued to improve from INR 33 crore. We have posted a revenue of INR 42 crore for FY 2025. The same thing is with EBITDA. We continue to improve our EBITDA from - 13% in FY 2023. We have now reached to EBITDA of 24%. This is about the consult performance, all business segments put together. This is we are just refreshing this slide in the form of graphical presentation, which Supam has done initially. All four business segments, India Multichannel Business, which is the core, International, Globalbees, and others, all continue to grow their revenue and continue to improve their profitability year- on- year. From 8.8% to 9.5%, India Multichannel business from - 19% to - 16% in International Business.
Globalb ees business, 0.02% to 1.4%. In our Preschool business, from 18% EBITDA to 24% EBITDA in FY 2025. As a result, combining these four segments, we get an 18% growth in our net revenue, consult net revenue for FY 2025 over FY 2024, and a 16% growth in our net revenue in Q4 FY 2025 over Q4 FY 2024. The green boxes in this graph are the consult gross margins. You can see those are also continuously improving. From 36.7% in Q4 FY 2024, we have improved this to 37.5%. From 35.8% in FY 2024, we have improved this to 37.4% in FY 2025. Likewise, similarly, we continue to improve the adjusted EBITDA as well, consult EBITDA, from 5% to 5.2% Q4-o ver- Q4, and from 4.2% to 5.1% FY 2025 over FY 2024. This ends our presentation.
Yeah, happy to take now questions.
Thank you, team.
We can wait for a minute for the queue to get formed, and then we can start with the Q&A. I request participants to raise the hands for asking questions. We will unmute you one by one, and you will have the access to the mic. Please introduce yourself and the name of the organization you represent. The participants are also requested to limit their questions to maximum two. For any follow-up questions, you may join the queue again. First question is from Videesha. Videesha, please unmute yourself.
Hi. I hope I'm audible.
Yes, Videesha.
Yes.
Hi. This is Videesha Sheth from Ambit Capital. Thank you for the opportunity and really appreciate the granular data points. My first question was, if you can explain the gap between AUTC and the order growth that we've seen in both international and India businesses. You've talked about the reasons for subdued order growth.
But going forward, what can be done to narrow the gap, and when do you expect the order growth to be in line with the AUTC trend? That was my first question.
Okay. If you talk about, I think AUTC growth with respect to, you mean the order growth, right? I mean, that's what your question is.
Yes.
If you look at India, the delta is not that big. If you look at the full year picture. Sorry. Videesha, you've got to put it on mute. I think there was, yeah. If you look at the full year picture, Videesha, you will not see what you're seeing as the delta is largely coming from certain slowdown that we experienced in our offline sort of store network.
The footfall leading to lesser orders, lesser footfalls leading to lesser orders is what we experienced, especially in January, February, which obviously got corrected in March with the season change. If you look at your online, while the slowdown has an impact on the customers coming back and ordering, while the AUTC is registered once, it gets registered. Also, if you look at the online growth, online GMV growth for the year FY2024 over 2023 or FY2025 over 2024, it remains 18%. If you even look for Q4 online growth, it is close to around 16%, which we feel is a fairly good number in terms of the pure sort of online.
Just to add, Videesha, there is no major difference between the AUTC growth and the growth in number of orders in the India Multichannel Business.
However, if you see the difference in the International Business, it is, as I mentioned earlier, we have seen a few competition entering the market in Q3. That has led to a difference between the AUTC growth and the growth in the orders. While customers are coming in, the frequency of those customers transacting, they may be doing some transaction on other sites because of higher discounts or whatever. That is the reason there is a big difference between the AUTC growth in the International Business and the growth in the number of orders. Largely, India Multichannel Business is more or less in line.
Terms helpful. The second question was on the marketing spends. The ad spends look pretty elevated. If you could elaborate on how should one think about it going forward?
If you look at our consol, we share our total overall ad spends. Our ad spend, because Globalbees as a business has a higher percentage of marketing cost compared to the rest of the three business segments. The share of that segment has increased. Therefore, you see actually increase of the overall marketing spend. We have ensured that we have a much superior expansion in the gross margin as a business overall so that we can retain and keep expanding our adjusted EBITDA appropriately. That way, we have balanced growth with profitability while sort of managing these two expectations. One is more of a, I would say, weighted average numerical sort of modeling. Second is we've ensured while we do that, we continue to expand gros s margin to be able to pull it down towards increase in EBITDA as well.
Thank you, Videesha. Next question is from Sachin Dixit. Sachin, please unmute yourself.
Hi. Hope you can hear me. Hi, Supam, Gautam, and broader team. Thanks so much for the improved disclosures. My first question is at a slightly higher level, right? If you look at your businesses, obviously multiple businesses, segments, a lot of moving parts, what do you feel a lot more satisfied about sitting at the fiscal year close versus where do you think there's a substantial effort that you need to still put in?
Sorry, I'm not even clear with your question. Is there a question?
My question is, if you look at your business performance, right, obviously you cannot be happy about everything.
There might be pieces where you can tell me, "Okay, Sachin, I'm very happy about this, this, this, and this." This is where probably we need to do a lot more work going forward. That's the question largely. Yeah.
Look, I would say we would be, I mean, as a professional or as a team leader, our job is to be able to remain sort of hungry. I think we feel that we should have delivered more, both in India Multichannel, even in International. Rest, other two segments have done well. We would want to expand our EBITDA margins faster in Globalb ees. School business is small, and although it's doing well. I think both India Multichannel, especially in offline, we believe we would like to see better performance. I also would color it with the way that opportunity fundamentally remains solid.
There is a large untapped market, largely unorganized. We are the largest organized player. We are a true omnichannel or a multichannel player with 1,000 stores and a large amount of business coming online. None of our competitors are like us. We believe that the opportunity will be with us as it unfolds. Yes, could we have done in FY2025 more? We were doing fairly well, and we believe our online has done quite well. We could have delivered more in offline in India Multichannel. We have become more cautious in terms of capital efficiency. That is why we will remain that way.
We believe in the longer run or medium term, we should be able to pull back as overall consumer slowdown improves with some of the efforts by the government, some of our internal efforts that we have at our sleeve that we will unfold to be able to extract more growth both in India Multichannel. In the Middle East, I think our focus will remain very, very profitable growth. We believe that while we had expected a little superior growth, there is no point in getting that growth at a higher cost or a higher burn.
We rather believe that the way we have played out our story in India when some of these horizontals were there, especially in times like 2013 - 2017 when we played out, our similar modes are getting built up in a similar way in terms of gross margin expansion, which Abhinav talked about. What we delivered in seven years in India, we delivered in four years. I think once our home brands get acknowledged and get penetrated in those markets, we will continue to see superior adoption curve and improvement in cohorts, improvement in quality of customers that we will onboard and so on and so forth. Some of these metrics will improve, and the long-term journey is going to remain with us the way we have charted out. Short term, we might feel a little unhappy about the growth that we are demonstrating because of some external reasons.
Those are the two large points that I will color up. Rest of, I think everything how we have anticipated is playing out in the way that the modes are structured. They are very fundamental, and that will continue to compound for the next 10 years or 20 years.
Okay, Rav, that is very, very helpful, Supam. My second question is on the franchisee network side, right? Obviously, we have not seen any growth in the number of stores in the last six odd quarters. What is happening there? Is it you not proactively wanting more franchisee partners or franchisee partners probably shutting down because there is a COCO store which is much larger that they cannot compete with? What is happening ther e?
Sachin, I think our position has not changed as what we talked about in our last couple of quarterly calls.
We are very sensitive about we want to continue to grow our franchisee partnership. We have had strong partnership for almost 13 years+ with many of our franchisee partners as old as 10 years+ in the system. Some of them even have multiple stores. That remains very, very strong. They have seen our journey for a long period of time, and they continue to remain with us as long-term partners. Nothing has changed. Many of our franchisee partners are also partners for other retail brands in the country. They have seen some bit of a sort of a material sort of a slowdown. That is how somehow they also become very cautious. We have also become super cautious because we just do not want any larger store churn, although some of this is very controlled.
The criteria for us to select a partner has become taller and taller over time in terms of controlling the churn and in terms of superior customer sort of experience that we can give to the end customer. Those are the reasons why there have been gross additions while there has been a churn which is in late single digit. Therefore, the net number remains what you are referring to. I think over time, we have been adding, but because the addition is lesser because of the quality of the partners. Obviously, COCO, we have a far greater control, and it's relatively easier to have a say in that in terms of when the location is available, we can actually close and move on. No change.
Fundamentally, we continue to adopt more and more partners as we grow our business in offline, both for the franchisee partners as well as the COCO. Yeah, in the last couple of quarters, you may have seen that, but fundamentally, there is no change.
Makes sense, Supam. Thanks so much, and all the best for FY2026.
Thank you, Sachin.
Thank you, Sachin. Next question is from Percy. Percy, please unmute yourself.
Yeah, hi. Am I audible?
Yes, Percy.
Yes, Percy.
Yeah. I just wanted to understand on your margins front, for the India business, what do you think is the stable state margin of this business once we get enough scale? We are at around 9.5%. Where do you think we max out? Is it 12%, 13%, 15%? What do you think is that number? What will drive it?
Because if we are already at 55% private label, how much more can we push that? Because beyond the point, we are a retailer, and we want to give the customer as much choice as possible. If the entire platform becomes predominantly just a private label, then the customer experience will also be affected. Assuming that this 55% goes to a max of 65%, and that gives you some margin, what else will result in the margin expansion? See, now our scale is not small. We are close to INR 5,500 crore kind of a top-line company for India itself. That was my first question, really.
Sure, Percy. Percy, first of all, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that while we are at a 55%, we believe that we have a—and if you look at that slide that Vivek took you through, we have compounded on an average 50% higher than our overall India Multichannel growth for our home brands. That is the reason why we increased from 37% to 55%+ in the last 4-5 years. Having said this, the journey has not stopped. The growth has not stopped of over-compounding in our home brands. We believe that we will continue, and the reason is very, very fundamental. I mean, there are no big brands in, let's say, the largest category of babies and kids is apparels and fashion. You tell me a brand which is in mothers, baby, and kids in fashion, which will be, let's say, INR 400 crore+ .
You won't be able to find a large brand out there or multiple of them. Most of these brands either have withered away or have become very small. There are many of them which are INR 100-INR 300 crore or INR 100-INR 200 crore range. There is a range of hundreds and thousands of them which are mompreneurs and brands which are beautifully crafted by mompreneurs, or they serve a very specific design aspiration or quality aspiration or curation. We will continue to hold them beautifully in our portfolio to be able to solve for mothers who are trying to solve for a specific curation need. We believe that this partnership of holding them while we will continue to grow as a platform, we will remain relevant to most of our brand partners, 8,000 of them.
At the same time, be able to continue to compound because at scale, we can only do it. Building reliable supply chain, building reliable product, quality product at scale and at a price point that in a different set of price points that we will be able to bring. With that architecture, we are playing at a different price point, quality, and supply chain. At a scale, it's very hard for a small brand or sub-optimal size brand. That's not their aspiration. Therefore, the blend of these mompreneurs or these brands along with us will continue, and we will continue to compound much superior as we have done in the past. We will continue to perform that. We believe without putting a number, whether it's 65 or more, we will continue to expand our share of home brand.
We believe that we aspire, as we have shared in our earlier calls as well, we aspire to be as an India Multichannel to be at least late teens as an adjusted EBITDA. That is what we aspire to do, and we believe it is possible to deliver what the companies that we personally aspire and our management team aspire to be Page Industries, where we can get there. Now, whether we take four years, six years, seven years, is that something that we can deliberate how opportunity presents to us? We will not leave any stone unturned in terms of grabbing improvement of margin, both at a gross margin level as well as at a marketing efficiency level. Again, at a marketing efficiency, it's very unique to us. As you can see, the multichannel model that we have, it's very unique.
Obviously, our operating sort of leverage that we can get on a fixed cost because we'll not be expanding on our warehousing and so on and so forth. All of these will compound, as you will see, which we will deliver over at least for now. We have been with you guys publicly at least for a couple of quarters, but you'll continue to see us expanding gross margin as well as EBITDA for a significantly longer period of time till the time we believe that we have achieved our aspirational goal.
Sure. Supam, my second question is on the right to win for verticals versus horizontals.
Supposing if I just take the example of Nykaa, the two differentiations that I can see for Nykaa versus horizontals is that there is a big threat of fakes and counterfeits on horizontal platforms because Nykaa holds inventory and is not a marketplace and vouches for the products. That is one of the reasons why people buy on that. The second reason is that this is a category which has a huge number of SKUs. There is a huge long tail. Many of them are not available on horizontals, and that is why people go there. If I have to find reasons why people need to go to FirstCry versus other horizontals, what would be the reasons in your case?
Look, I think we are very different than some of our other names that you just mentioned.
First of all, our biggest differentiation is that as we see, 55% of our GMV comes from our own home brand itself. They are not available on any other, I would say, marketplace fundamentally. The end consumer, which is primarily the mother and young fathers, they are coming to FirstCry for two fundamental reasons. One, we are an NBO, which is solving for every curated need for a brand, for a product type, product size in a much more curated way. That is what we are solving for. We are a very, very highly curated platform. Vivek took you through some of the personalization at an age level, at a category level, at a climatic condition level. Some of those areas, when you club it with the age, it actually makes a world of a difference.
We are more of a discovery platform than a search-led platform. If you apply all of that with our share of a home brand and the curation of other mompreneurs, with fashion being the largest sort of segment for us, it presents a very different outcome from a young mother or a father to be with us compared to a horizontal. That is what—you know already, it is as a matter of fact that Baby Hug, just one of our home brands, is India's largest mothers, baby, and kids product brand in the country on GMV itself. It is not available. I mean, what are other moms buying on other, let's say, horizontals? The Baby Hug is not available fundamentally. The two reasons why they will come to us is simply it is NBO on multichannel, sorry, on online.
Just I'm talking about online because horizontals are only online. As a curation for solving every need. Then second is repeat cohort of our buying of our home brand itself because they are very highly, I would say, the products are superior in terms of quality and experience. They have done it over years, and they just want to, for lack of brands, known brands that they want to repeat, and they are satisfied. With these two reasons, they will continue to come back to us. That is exactly what we have seen even in 6 to 12 when our journeys are ending for mothers from 0 to 6 because Baby Hug is available now. It's PineKids, which is taking the journey and legacy of Baby Hug to PineKids for the older age kid.
The power of a superior product itself, apart from convenience of online and curation that we have built through personalization, is driving more and more consumers. Stickiness of those consumers, as you have seen in the cohort, which Vivek also took you through, is a result of all of this work that we have been able to deliver.
May I be permitted—sorry, yeah, please continue. One statement to this. All the horizontals actually are a reflection of the market, which is highly unorganized. That is where both in terms of home brands and the other brands as well, third-party brands as well, our curation ensures a superior selection as well as experience for the consumer. That is what Supam was mentioning. It increases our stickiness and strength for the organization.
Got it. Got it. If I might be permitted, one small question more.
On the India business growth, this year has been around 15%, which is a little lower than our expectation of around 17%-18%. Do you think this is a blip or an anomaly, and you will come back to a 17%-18% kind of number? Or do you think that what we have displayed this year is more likely to be the sustainable growth going ahead?
Percy, while in the short term, it's very difficult to sort of outline exact data point, what we collectively think is that the industry, which is growing at 12%-14%, is highly unorganized. This particular, I would say, year saw a slight bit of a—or rather, this calendar year, starting from January, February, we saw a little bit of a consumer slowdown, especially in the offline.
We believe that it is not a reflection of a medium-term approach of the overall growth that the industry will demonstrate. Being the largest player in the industry, we should be able to come back to a much superior growth. If you look at our online, even Q4 resulted in 16% GMV growth, quarter- on- quarter, quarter four over quarter four of—I mean, 2025 over 2024. Just the offline piece, we believe it will get—I think it's just a blip. Even the government is doing its bit in terms of reducing some tax slabs and some of the other areas where government help will also reflect in some more consumer pickup, plus some of our other efforts internally that we are putting up.
Maybe we can talk about, but those are also going to fill up, getting more and more customers and improving retention or improving frequency. We believe it is just a—I think a temporary blip is what we believe because we remain steady and strong as far as a ship in terms of grabbing more growth over a medium to long run.
An important thing, Percy, is that we are not losing our growth to any competitors or any new player. Got it. Got it. Better than the industry growth, while we have seen some slowdown, but we will continue to deliver a better growth compared to the industry growth, Percy.
Thanks, Gautam, Supam, Vivek. Thank you very much. That is all from my side.
Thanks, Percy.
Thank you, Percy. The next question is from Sachin Salgaonkar. Sachin, please unmute yourself.
Thanks, Anish. Hi, management. Thanks so much for the improved disclosure.
Two questions from me. First question is on International Business. Clearly, the business is in nascent stages, but we are seeing an order growth of 8% on a YoY basis. You guys clarified it's largely on the back of competition. The question I have is, is it only competition, or is it something else which is impacting the growth? The reason is, see, the players which we are talking about, like Temu and others, are here to stay in the market perhaps for a long time. What we are seeing in other markets is they tend to get aggressive over a period of time. I was wondering if there is any change in strategy from management to accelerate the growth out here, given the fact that the growth is slowing for the last couple of quarters.
Sure, Sachin. I'll just maybe start the answer, and maybe Abhinav can add to it, or Gautam can add. I think it was important for us, while this is some external factor that really played out. As I earlier also alluded, we have seen this in the past in India as well, when some of the marketplaces are very, very aggressive, but they became thinner over time. That same thing will play out in Middle East geography as well. It is important that we keep our head down and build the moat that we started our journey with because that is what will help us, not just discounts or higher marketing burn on higher CPMs. That does not result except for increasing your burn. It was easy for us. We had the money. We can do all of that, but we do not believe in that.
It is better to improve the quality of the customers, improve penetration of the home brands, improve assortment of the home brands that we have in India taking there. We have actually, in fact, tailored home brands for the Middle East market as well. We just want to focus on those, building those assortments because it takes time to build those assortments and get the penetration of those assortments into the market, get our product mix, the category mix, our home brand mix to a level that what India has already accomplished in an accelerated way. Once you deliver that, none of the horizontals will ever be able to sort of—they do not operate in that fashion. Therefore, we will be having a very superior economics over a period of time. We do not want to play a rushed game.
We want to play a very steady game to ensure that we build a sustainable, profitable growth, keeping a focus on reducing burn and making our Middle East operations profitable as per our internal plan of within a few years, we want to make it profitable, neutral EBITDA. That is what we want to focus more on through our own strengths rather than actually burning more sort of tire. I think that's how we are tracking ourselves internally, not a rushed approach. Abhinav, if you want to add anything, or Gautam, if you want to add anything here.
In fact, as Supam mentioned earlier, Sachin, we have witnessed the competition from horizontals in India as well during 2013- 2016. We stick to our playbook on building home brands, improving margins.
Today, we can proudly say that we are the largest multichannel player in India in terms of GMV. The largest brand, again, is Baby Hug. We have taken the same playbook in Middle East as well. We will be focused more on improving the customer stickiness as we have done in India. You can see the impact of the same or the strength of the playbook in the margins, what we have delivered in India in seven years in terms of gross margin. We have delivered that in Middle East in four years. Abhinav, you want to add anything?
I think, guys, you guys have covered it completely.
Great. Thank you. My second question is on Globalb ees. Clearly, a very phenomenal growth in the quarter given the context that there's a consumption slowdown going into India.
What we are seeing on the ground with multiple D2C brands, given the fact that consumer preferences are changing so fast now with how quick commerce is evolving, not many brands are sort of scaling up beyond a particular level. The question to you guys out there is, should this be a steady-state growth going ahead in terms of, let's say, 25%-30%? How could one think about sort of a normalized growth in this business? Same as in terms of long-term steady-state margins for Globalb ees, how to think about that?
Look, going forward, I think, obviously, growth has to moderate. It will not remain at a 30% level. Yeah, it will remain meaningfully high as we go along for at least the next few years to come. We are a young company.
We have some great, I would say, brands and great sort of founders that are working with us, hungry, and all of us are working together to grow some of these brands. As I said, in their journey itself, they are fairly young. They will have a very decent growth and a good, even profitability margin as well. The slide that we talked about, the 8% of our business, which was 14% earlier, it leads to a 30% negative EBITDA. Once you shrink that meaningfully low in terms of 8% becoming even smaller and 30% reducing to zero, you can imagine our business will be even more profitable at a current stage itself. I mean, even if you do not increase the gross margin or the operating leverage within the rest of the brands, which is 92% of the business, right?
Essentially, we are clearly saying that Globalbees business, over a period of time, will improve with just a little bit. No questions on that. Yeah, it will play out in an over, I would say, three- to five-year journey. It is hardly a less than four-year-old company. First year went out in a lot of acquisitions, as you know. It is not easy. I mean, I just want to make sure that while the business has done, segment has done very well, and so on and so forth. We continue to believe that we will deliver stronger performance, both in top line and bottom line for, I mean, many years to come because we believe the story is getting there. We have the playbook that we have executed well, and it is getting stronger and stronger.
Just to add, Sachin, while the console growth of Globalbees is 30%, if you see the growth in the core brands, the four core segments, the growth is disproportionately higher.
Got it. Okay. Thank you, guys.
Thank you, Sachin. Next question is from Garima. Garima, please unmute yourself.
Thank you so much for the opportunity. I also had a couple of questions on Globalbees. What was the loss Globalbees made in FY2025? And this CCPS infusion is essentially to keep funding losses for the next two-three years, or you have some acquisitions in mind? How should we read it?
At the EBITDA level, Garima, Globalbees is positive. It has given us a positive EBITDA of INR 22 crore.
The other thing which we post EBITDA, the large part of the spend is a non-cash expenditure, which is in the form of amortization of brands, which is roughly INR 1.00 billion every year, and some finance cost towards the borrowings made by Globalbees and their subsidiaries. Other than this, if we adjust these two items, we will reach to at a PBT level in Globalbees. One important thing I would like to mention is if you see the consol results, there is an exceptional item that we have taken roughly amounting to INR 370 million. Those are towards impairment of some brands in Globalbees. You will see that additional one-time impact in Globalbees as an exceptional item. Other than that, it's doing very well. Brand amortization, again, is the classification of investment done by Globalbees in the console financial statement.
We have to amortize it over a period. That is a non-cash expense. Once the company starts generating higher cash profit, I think the number should become better, Garima.
The CCPS is towards what?
This is largely for taking care of the working capital requirement, Garima.
All right. Understood. Globalbees also recently had a departure of the CEO, plus some Board of Directors resigning. What was that about? Who takes over the reins of this entity going forward?
Garima, I think some of these news articles I would like to clarify. First of all, obviously, Nitin, who was the CEO of the company, left for personal reasons. His role has been taken over by Anuj Jain, who has almost 10+ years of experience with ITC and L'Oreal. He was a thorough professional. He is an MBA.
I mean, some of these are public information, but sharing it that he was with ITC and L'Oreal before he joined FirstCry. He's been with FirstCry for 12 years. He has seen a 20-year+ consumer product journey, a playbook across ITC, L'Oreal, and FirstCry, and steered up the ship in India and multichannel and in Baby Hug, as well. He has seen D2C, he has seen online, he has seen offline. He has seen throughout our journey of FirstCry. Also, lastly, he was handling our school business. We felt he would be most appropriate, and he has now taken the reins of Globalbees. That's Anuj. About the Directors, I would just like to clarify. Look, the news article said that three Directors resigned after Nitin resigned. That's not correct. One Director resigned nine months prior to Nitin.
These are Investor Directors, Garima. Typically, Investor Directors, I mean, PeVC fund Investor Directors, have an internal policy. I cannot speak for any one of them on their behalf, but at a generic level, they have a typical policy of not being part of a Board of a publicly listed or deemed publicly listed company. Therefore, their request was to not be part of a Board member. That is, and while one of them resigned nine months prior to Nitin, which was early September or August, somewhere around that, the news article, you know how it was. Please ignore that. One of the Investor Directors remained as an observer as well. It is not that they completely removed away. That is all I have.
Just to give you additional comfort, Garima, a few of these investors who used to represent on the Board of Globalbees, they have participated along with us in the recent funding we have done for Globalbees.
Not a few, all of them. All three of them. All of them have invested in the last round. There is not even a single exception.
Thank you, Garima. The next question is from Madhav Yadav. Please introduce yourself and unmute.
Hello. Yeah. Am I audible?
Yes, Madhav. We can hear you.
Yeah. Hi, Supam. Hi, Gautam. This is Tejas from Avendus. Supam, with faster delivery becoming a baseline expectation across the ecosystem, including for the traditional online players, what steps are we taking to strengthen our delivery proposition?
I heard the second part of your question, but first, delivery becoming a base. I did not understand.
You meaning delivery experience or?
Yeah, Supam. I'll repeat it. Am I audible?
Yeah. You're absolutely audible.
I was just saying that now faster delivery has become a very hygiene baseline expectation.
Understood. Fair enough. Fair question. Look, you're absolutely right. What we are doing, Tejas, we haven't put a slide on it, but what we are doing is I'll also sort of share that I think some companies like us and online companies or e-commerce companies as well have experienced a little bit of a, I would say, customer experience being, I would say, not up to the mark that we would have wished as operators because some of our delivery partners have had challenges. Those are because of the manpower constraints on the last mile end, which we are dependent on them.
I'm talking about India Multichannel, India online in that sense. Those are experiences that we have faced in the last, I would say, two, three months, a lot more than what we have faced in the past. I think some of other colleagues from the overall ecosystem have alluded to some of this commentary as well. Having said this, what we are doing to your answer to your question as well, while we are improving in some of the cities, we have done some experiments to take our tech infra and work with local logistics partners within those cities to be able to improve the last mile experience as well as improve and have faster delivery. Let's say in a city, we were delivering SDD, same-day delivery, in six hours. Our attempt is now to reduce it to four hours or a three-hour.
That is the experiment that we have taken into a few cities as of today in the last couple of months. Our endeavor will be to continue to expand on the journey that we are just talking about into many more cities so that we do not remain dependent or we do not really have to work at an industry average level, which has deteriorated in the past couple of months. Still, we will be able to improve the quality of the customer experience in terms of delivery performance. We will expand on our experiment that we have just in a couple of cities to be able to overall improve and at the same cost, not just increasing the cost.
I hope I've been able to answer your question in terms of directionally that what we are doing to improve the delivery experience, faster delivery experience for our customers.
Supam. Thanks. Supam. Second question pertains to private label ambition that you spoke about. Now, what we have observed that it's a double-edged sword from multiple dimensions, from working capital, from customer expectations, whether they are ready for it or not. When you look at our categories today, where are we underindexed, you think, materially in private label versus, let's say, company average? I'm assuming that our private label contribution will be higher on offline channel versus online channel. How should one think about from near-term, very immediate one or two-year perspective, how this can move in terms of low lever of private label?
Only two points that I will make.
First of all, I would request everyone to call it home brands. We just feel private label is just about margin and not about the love and the how we have built all of these products. We certainly call it home brands. In the home brand point, I would say that it's not like a double-edged sword because our long-standing partners, brand partners, will continue to grow with us. It's not that they are not growing with us. It's not that there will not be more partners that we will take in our partnership. If you see our disclosures on number of partnerships from 7,000 brands, now we are at 8,000 brands. Our number of brand partners have continued to increase.
Having said this, many of our brand partners are small, and for whatever historical or evolution curve reasons, they will remain while we will continue to overcompound on our growth journey in terms of home brand because it is a very structured playbook, structured homework that we do from design till manufacturing and capability and all of that. Therefore, we will remain, I would say, powerful enough while to continue to embrace our other partners as well. The ecosystem will continue to deliver a superior homegrown home brand share while at the same time embracing both brand partners and expectation of our end consumers and mothers who want to solve for unique attributed products as well while home brand solves for some of them.
I do not think that would be a challenge, and that has not been a challenge even in the past when we traversed our journey from 37% to 55% +. We do not believe that it will be the case unless we were not able to have brands which are not growing with us. In terms of gross margin expansion, home brands definitely give more home sort of margins, and therefore, that will continue to happen for us in terms of margin expansion. It will not be the case. We will see our journey together over the next few quarters and years.
We won't be able to talk about a short term, but I think over a longer period of time, there are no big brands that really kind of say like after Baby Hug or after some of these brands, no brand is like in a very even in a if I just remove India's, let's say, Pampers and Johnson's and some of these brands, in fashion, not even a mid-single-digit percentage in terms of the share. It is very comforting for us to embrace all of that and the best attributes that they make still embrace with us while we continue to compound on our home brand strategy.
Supam, if I may add one point on this, because you mentioned that we should not call private label, but we should call our brands home brands.
One of the core fundamentals in developing products in home brands is not to capture share in any underpenetrated category. The fundamental premise why we create any product is to give a superior experience to the end consumer. That is a very important factor for the over period of time how we have grown our brands. We continue to follow that philosophy as a company.
Thanks, Vivek. Thanks, Supam. Very clear. Thanks and all the best for coming quarters.
Thanks, Tejas.
Thank you, Tejas. Next question is from Nigel. Nigel, please unmute yourself.
Good evening, sir. Thank you for the opportunity. Firstly, can you talk about the unit economics for various types of offline stores in terms of store sizes, CapEx, revenue, and profitability for the FirstCry stores versus Baby Hug stores? How does it work for owned versus franchisee stores as well?
Okay. I think it's there in some of our previous sort of quarterly calls, but Gautam, we want to repeat at a high level maybe so that you know.
So the size of the store, if I talk about the FirstCry franchisee stores, are typically a 1,500-1,600 sq ft area. The same size we follow for our Baby Hug company-owned stores. However, when it comes to FirstCry company-owned stores, those are a little larger, probably 2,000-2,500 sq ft. In terms of CapEx that we do, the CapEx per sq ft is around INR 1,500 per sq ft. And a little lesser than the CapEx is the working capital that we put in each company-owned store. So roughly INR 1,100 per sq ft is the working capital we put in.
In terms of profitability, at CM2 level, if we talk about both offline stores as well as online, it gives us almost a similar profitability post-market expense, if you see.
Even in CM2 for stores, it will be post-rent. Some of these franchisee partners, Nigel, we have had a large number of our franchisee partners who have been seven, eight years plus. Many of them are 10 years+ . They have multiple sort of shops with us. They have seen the profitability in their stores over years with us, and they have continued to stay and have been a long-standing partner with us. Likewise, we have tried to look for such partners who can be long-term partners. On that basis, only we started our COCO journey roughly around 2021 because of having run the FOFO business for the first 10 years.
That's how the profitability was ensured in the FOFO network, both for the franchisee and for the company. Therefore, we took that journey ahead for the COCO journey as well.
Yeah. Thanks for the detailed reply. Second question is for the India business, what sort of growth have you had in the India online business versus the offline business?
Yeah. It's there in the disclosures further in the presentation. For the online business, Nigel, we had 18% GMV growth for FY 2025 over FY 2024. Even for Q4 of FY 2025, we had 16% growth over FY 2024 Q4 for the online. For the offline business, annual one, I wouldn't exactly remember. I think it is around 11% or 12%. Yeah. Slightly lower. Slightly lower. For Q4, it is around 5%.
That is largely because we mentioned that there is a slowdown we have witnessed, especially in the offline business.
Plus, some store closures that we had and the base effect of the last previous quarter, year quarter.
Thank you, Nigel. In the interest of time, we'll take one last question from Chintan. Chintan, please unmute yourself.
Hi. I just had one question, and that is on India offline business. I understood the external issues that we faced as well as some store closures that impacted the performance. It was slightly medium to long-term as a strategy. What are we doing or what steps we are taking so as to have more conversions from unorganized to organized as well as protect ourselves from the competitive intensity that keeps on increasing? That is one.
Second, how do you think in medium to long-term this online has saved 78% of GMV, and it's doing pretty well? Over longer term, how do you think offline as a strategy, where does this mix head to, and what are your plans for expansion in this segment? That's it from my side.
Sure, Chintan. Chintan, first, fundamentally, if you look at our business, mothers love to buy the product both online and offline. If you remember one of the slides that Vivek showed, this is the first time that we had done this disclosure. In the top 20 cities, 38% of our GMV comes from customers which have an overlap of online and offline. We have been seeing this very, very unique category where consumers or mothers typically love to buy products both online as well as offline.
They can start their journey online and go offline as well in the vicinity of their homes and the reverse way as well, which is going offline and come for convenience in the online because they build a trust with the platform as well as with the product and the brand or the curation that we have. I think fundamentally, nothing will change this. If you look at the last three years of our journey, our ratio between online and offline has not materially changed, maybe 100 to 200 bps here and there in terms of the share. Not material change as it has happened. We will continue to expand our offline operation as well in terms of the gross block that we will add in FY2026 will be somewhere similar to FY2025.
We do not feel that we will have a lot of legroom to play even to expand our offline network. We have become more cautious for the last few months that we have seen. We believe these are temporary because ultimately, the customer that we get, how we look at our offline business particularly is the footfall that gets the customer into our store, gets the experience of our platform, also then goes online. It has a material network effect on advantage both in terms of the experience and the CAC eventually even for online and so on and so forth. It is a very unique proposition of multichannel which you would not find in a very traditional or a normal business model in a retail model.
We believe that we will continue to play from a consumer insight or a mother's insight of buying both and also the unit economics benefit that will continue to derive from being both present online and offline. We will continue to play this card for a very long period of time. We may tailor here and there in terms of improving the wallet share of the customer in that catchment and the footfall optimization that we can continue to do. Those are efficiencies that we will try to drive to build more capital efficiency. Strategy-wise, nothing will change. We will continue to compound on both our offline, which will also deliver online, and online will deliver offline as well.
Thank you, all the participants. That was the last question. Back to Supam and Gautam and everyone for the concluding remarks.
Thank you very much, everyone, for being patient.
We had, instead of reserving one hour, we reserved one and a half hours so that you can have a lot more detailed conversation. Really appreciate your time and patience. Look forward to seeing you in the next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.