Good evening everyone. Welcome to Brainbees Solutions Limited Q1 FY26 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, Mr. Vivek Goel, Chief Business Officer of the company, Mr. Abhinav Sharma, Country Head of Middle East Business Operations, and Mr. Anuj Jain, CEO GlobalBees. 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 from the management concludes.
We'll be covering the presentation in the beginning of the call and will thereafter open for 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 a disclaimer to this effect has been included in the investor presentation shared with you. With this, I hand over to Mr. Supam Maheshwari.
Thank you Anish. Good evening friends. Welcome to our Q1 FY26 performance update meeting. We are very happy to report 25% growth in our adjusted EBITDA for the consolidated business for the first quarter, vis-à-vis Q1 FY25, and also at a consolidated level, for the first time we have become free cash flow positive at a consolidated business level. Growth in quarter in Q1 in India Multichain has been moderate, has got moderated on account of several factors. Broadly, broad slowdown in consumer sector consumption side and macro factors including changes in the last-mile delivery ecosystem, which also impacted our performance in Q1, and a bit of an elevated geopolitical tension in North India. All of these have led to a little slower growth than what we had anticipated. However, we see encouraging signs in the month of July. We have observed an early teens growth over July, over the previous July.
Overall, our India Multichain business continued to be PBT and free cash flow positive in Q1 FY26. International business continued to deliver as we have discussed in our few previous calls. We have been able to deliver sustainable growth with an improvement of 30% year-on-year in adjusted EBITDA that you'll see in the subsequent slides, and w e will continue our path on this sustainable growth for the international business and reducing our burn materially. On the GlobalBees front, we deliver another strong quarter of organic growth with core categories driving the significant momentum close to around 40%. I hand over now more detailed discussions and updates to Gautam.
Thanks Supam . This is the performance summary for the consolidation business. The revenue in Q1 FY26 has grown by 13% year-on-year to reach INR 1,862.6 million revenue. Gross margin, we continue to improve the gross margin. The gross margin expanded by 82 bps. It's an absolute increase of 15% year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA, which Supam talked about in the previous slide, it has increased by 25% in absolute terms year-on-year. If I talk about the percentage of adjusted EBITDA to revenue, it's 5% over 4.5% in Q1 FY25. Cash profit after tax, which is the net profit, the net accounting profit after adjustments of the non-cash items, it has increased by 197% over Q1 FY25. The next slide, we will talk about some of the KPIs, the consolidation KPIs.
Annual unique transacting customers, this is for trailing 12 months, is 10.8 million, which is an increase of 14% over June last year. Similarly, GMV for the consolidation business, which is the India Multichain business and the Middle East business, it has grown by 9% over Q1 FY25. The next two pointers we have talked about in the previous slide, that is the revenue from operations on a consolidation basis as well as the adjusted EBITDA. India Multichain adjusted EBITDA, which is the core business, it has delivered a growth of 12% over Q1 FY25, largely driven by expansion in gross margins. We will talk about in detail for the India Multichain business in the coming slides. Cash profit after tax, we talked about in the previous slide, it's an increase of 197% over Q1 FY25.
Now I will hand it over to Vivek to take you to the performance of the India Multichain business.
Thank you Gautam. As Supam mentioned in his opening remarks, Q1 this year was a bit of a, it had multiple moving parts for us. While the broad-based consumer slowdown, which we mentioned in our previous calls, continued, we also faced challenges in our last-mile delivery ecosystem which actually impacted the consumer experience in our online business. Q1 also witnessed close to a week’s sale in northern states getting impacted due to the India-Pakistan conflict. We also saw an unusually soft and softened summer, which was caused by the early onset of monsoons, which further impacted our performance. In offline growth was also impacted by the store closures that we did in Q3 last year, as some of the sales remained in the base of Q1 last year for the same stores. However, as Supam mentioned, we have witnessed some very encouraging signs of growth in July.
I want to reiterate that while some of these things have impacted our growth in Q1, we have successfully navigated such challenges in the past, and we will surely do so in the coming quarters. In terms of numbers, our annual unique transacting customers in India Multichain business has increased by 14% to 10.3 million. Orders grew by about 6% to 9.5 million. Our GMV growth was 10% at INR 21,265 million. Anish, if you can move to the next slide. The revenue for India Multichain business grew by 8% to INR 12,366 million. Our adjusted EBITDA grew by 12% for India Multichain to INR 1,067 million.
Just to add here, we continue to expand our gross margins. You can see the numbers highlighted in green. Gross margin of 36.6% in Q1 FY25 has increased to 37.8% in Q1 FY26.
I'll hand it over to Abhinav for the Middle East presentation.
Thank you Vivek. Good evening everyone, and thanks for joining us over the call this evening. We'll quickly go over the international business segment. We are seeing continuous growth across all key metrics. The levers in play, you know, we have outlined this in our previous calls that sustainable growth is of prime importance and focus for us in this region for both UAE and KSA. We've been continuously executing our plans to achieve that kind of growth by essentially optimizing the top-line mix, which thereby yields a superior GMV to revenue conversion, which you will see in the subsequent slides, and also superior margins, and also ensuring that our quality of acquisitions are very, very high or very, very superior because this in turn adds to our overall sustainability sort of idea and vision going forward.
We saw a 14% increase in AUTC in Q1 FY26 over Q1 FY25, a 7% increase in orders in the same time period, and GMV grew by 3% in the same time period. However, we saw a 13% increase in revenue, and we've mentioned before that for the international business, revenue is a more apt number versus GMV. We grew from INR 183 crore to about INR 207 crore. Gross margin expansion was about 100 bps. More importantly, going to the sustainable, again, maintaining an equilibrium between growth as well as burn reduction, our adjusted EBITDA improved both in terms of absolute as well as percentage points. Absolute reduction of 30% from INR 30 crore to about INR 21.5 crore, and percentage reduction by 700 bps. Anuj, over to you for GlobalBees, please.
Thanks a lot Abhinav. Good evening, everyone. On the GlobalBees front, we're very happy to report a 31% year-on-year growth from INR 324.5 crores in quarter one FY2025 to INR 426.5 crores in quarter one FY2026. The adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenue was 1% in this quarter. Our growth has been completely organic. The last acquisition that the company made was in September 2022. GlobalBees operates in the core categories of home improvement and utilities, home appliances, health and personal care, and active lifestyle and accessories. These core categories contribute around 95% to our business. If we slice the numbers, revenue from core categories increased by 40% plus year-on-year, and these categories delivered an adjusted brand EBITDA post-corporate expenses of 4.5% plus in Q1 FY2026. As mentioned on the previous call, we continue to rationalize the brand portfolio across other brands.
Therefore, the margins will be weighed down due to that for a few more quarters this year. However, this rationalization will be complete in this financial year itself. Gautam, over to you.
Thanks, Anuj. This is a repetition of what we talked about in the first few slides, a summary of the consolidation performance. Revenue grew by 13%, margin expansion by 80 bps, and the EBITDA expansion by 50 bps, an absolute increase of 25% year-on-year. This is where we end our presentation.
Happy to take more questions.
Yes.
Thank you, team. We can wait for a few minutes for the queue to get formed, and then we can start with the Q&A. I request participants to raise the hand for asking questions. We'll unmute you one by one, and you'll have 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 a maximum of two. For any follow-up questions, you may join the queue again. First question is from Mr. Sachin Dixit. Sachin, please unmute yourself.
Hi, Gautam and Supam. This is Sachin Dixit from JM Financial. I had a couple of questions. My first question was on India Multichain business. We are obviously, growth continues to get worse. The question largely is, what can we do as a company to drive growth out there, right? The weather-related impact, late winter was there, then early into winter, now early into summer, right? These things will keep on happening. What as a company we are pushing to drive growth, right? Until now, our online growth used to be good, but if I'm calculating the numbers correctly, even online growth seems to have dipped to like 11.5%, 12% this quarter.
I think, Sachin, if you look at, I understand where you're coming from, and it's a very fair question. Some of these things, external events may continue to happen. It's not in our control. We need to focus on what is in our control. That's, I think, what we are sort of working towards. Part of it is visible, and part of it will probably, you'll be able to continue to demonstrate. First factual information is the July-over-July performance has been in India Multichain has been in early teens in terms of growth. I think we are back on quite a good sort of shape. We strongly believe that we should continue to deliver a similar trajectory for the rest of the year as well. Having said this, what are the factors that will help us that we are actually working towards?
One of the most important things that we are working towards is building our, you know, the impact that has been on us from a last-mile customer experience perspective. I can talk about both online and then specifically on offline as well. On the online, the impact has been largely because of the customer experience, and there has been consolidation in our sort of last-mile logistics sort of service network in the ecosystem of that. We all know that. That has shrunk some of the capabilities. At the same time, there has been a lot of demand that has been generated out of some of the players, which essentially lead to a demand-supply gap, leading to supply being constrained and leading to industry average going down in terms of delivery performances, which we believe we need to work upon.
As you would remember, we had started an experiment a couple of months back. We talked about it in the last quarter. Happy to report that we have expanded that experiment to now four cities, and we will continue to expand that to many more cities over a period of the next few months. There we have seen the results of a much superior growth year-on-year basis in those cities where our tech platform and our local, you know, regional logistics partners are able to deliver a much superior customer experience and able to have that growth back. We believe over a period of the next few quarters, we will continue to work on it. Probably it'll never finish, t hat work will never finish, but It's something that we want to really expand aggressively to control that customer experience and being able to get the growth back.
This is one thing that we are doing from an online perspective. The rest are things, you know, from an online perspective, we continue to, you know, depend on some external factors like, you know, environmental factors that unfortunately we can't control. From an offline perspective, yes, you know, there have been unseasonal rains that do impact offline stores. We believe that, you know, and the stores that we had closed in Q3, which Vivek Goel talked about, were there in the base of Q1. Hopefully, once that base is gone, I think you should be able to see superior growth. Some of the store size talking discussions that we have done last time around will help us in improving our capital efficiency. I think those are the ways that we are addressing the broad consumer slowdowns, especially in the offline.
We are very confident that what we have seen in July will continue to be able to live for the rest of the months in the fiscal year FY26.
Can I just have a quick follow-up on that? Are you happy with the speed of store expansion, offline store expansion that you are doing on COCO format?
See, look it's, you know, I think we have put ourselves in a constrained way to be able to deliver that. We have optimized that. I wouldn't say that what we had, we will add in FY26 close to around 90 to 100 stores, what we added in FY25 as well. That is what we'll be delivering for FY26 as well.
The focus, Sachin, is to better the capital efficiency of the offline business.
Right.
Got it. Sure. My second question is on GlobalBees, which is a business which continues to surprise positively every quarter. On that piece, I mean, two minor questions. The first one is, do you plan to start acquiring brands anytime soon there? Secondly, as FirstCry investors, can they anticipate any liquidity from that business getting demerged, having its own IPO, or anything like that? Those are my two questions. Thank you.
Anuj, you want to take that, or do you want me to take that?
I think the second question is for the group.
Second question we'll take because let's.
Yeah, we are just moving.
Can we go ahead with the first question? At least let's answer the first question on the acquisition bit.
Yeah. On the first question, I think we are in our core categories, we already have quite a few categories, and I think we have a very good spread of play to be able to grow. It is very important for us to prioritize consolidation and financial prudence for us to be able to sort of continue to grow with this kind of a margin profile. Therefore, acquisitions are not something that are on the cards or under consideration right now. On the second part, I'll let Supam take it on.
Just to add here, you know, Sachin, the last acquisition we made was in September 2022. Whatever growth we are delivering since the last couple of quarters is all organic growth.
Completely.
Yeah.
On the second question, Sachin, from an exit path perspective, from a monetization for the shareholders of GlobalBees, the company will look, the company has its separate management team, which is run separately. It also has its board, separate board, and also it has a separate set of investors as well, apart from Brainbees as well, which include BrainG, Lightspeed, and Chiragna, and so on and so forth. Having said this, probable, most probable outcome for GlobalBees as an outcome will be a listing, which a company and its shareholders will decide over a period of time, is when Brainbees also will find a monetization opportunity over a period of a few years.
Fair enough. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you, Sachin.
Thank you, Sachin. The next question is from Sachin Salgaonkar. Sachin, please unmute yourself.
Thanks, Anish. Good day, management. A couple of questions from me, one on the core multichannel business and one on international. On the core multichannel business, two parts to the question. One, are we seeing the impact of quick commerce on the business? The question is because, you know, you guys are experimenting with this faster delivery in four cities, and clearly, you are seeing traction. I guess there is appetite for customers to get products at a much faster pace out there. The second part of this question is clearly there were three factors which impacted the growth this quarter: consumption slowdown, last-mile challenges, and what we saw in terms of a geopolitical issue. Now, the geopolitical issue is behind, and I generally wanted to understand, Supam and Gautam, your thoughts on consumption slowdown, last-mile challenges. These have been there for a quarter or so.
What's the kind of a steady-state growth we should expect going ahead, at least for a few quarters before these things normalize? Just to call out my second question, I wanted to understand, again, the steady-state GMV growth for international business. We did see a 3% growth this quarter. How should one think about steady-state growth, and what are some of the things we should see from FirstCry to reach to that level?
Sure. Abhinav, you want to take the second question first, and then we can come to the first one?
Yeah, yeah. Before I answer that question, I missed an update, a very important one for everybody. Very happy to announce that in the Middle East, we'll be setting up our first store and operating our first store out of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, well within the timelines of this quarter. Before the end of this quarter, we'll be live. This is our first step, baby step, while we go towards our omnichannel play, and a great testament again to the India playbook that we've evolved and developed over the last decade and a half. Sachin, first off, on the GMV, I would like to mention that for the international business, I think the right sort of a number to look at is revenue growth, not GMV growth.
In terms of your question on the sustained growth or a steady-state model, I think too early right now because the reason why I'm saying this is because KSA is just three years old in the market in terms of business, and UAE is about five. We are still early days. However, when it comes to growth, we are very clear on our focus of having a sustained model of top-line growth. When I say sustained, I mean maintaining an equilibrium between generating top-line, which is also helping us at the same time reducing burn because that's what we mentioned over the last few calls, and you've seen that in the second slide where we've reduced the burn in absolute terms of about 30% or so.
While we do this, we are very, very clear on acquiring customers that are having a very high or a superior quality in terms of retention and thereby a longer sort of LTV for us generating or helping us expand our gross margins, as well as strengthening our moats while we do this. This journey is, I would say, in its infancy right now. We need to give it some bit of time, but the light at the end of the tunnel is very clear. You've seen that the cost or the losses are cut quarter on quarter, and you would see that progressively from here on.
You will see growth coming as well on the back of both our home brand share improving, the acceptability of our home brands in both markets, UAE and KSA, while we improve the product assortment, product quality, and we sort of acquire and retain our customers, fending off any headwinds that we see continuously with heavy or deep discounting and very robust or aggressive postures on marketing spends in the ecosystem. Our first sort of focus is unit economics improvement. From there on, while we do that, we then double down on our growth and marketing spends. That gives us the, you know, sort of an open playing field to expand and to grow sustainably.
Sorry, Abhinav, what kind of steady-state growth are we talking? India business is early to mid-teens. Is that something similar as a growth we should look at the international business?
In the foreseeable future, I think yes, because that would be a more sort of a sustained number. Like I said, once we achieve a unit economics that is helping us, you know, allowing us to double down on our marketing spends, we can then, you know, achieve certain higher growth numbers as well.
Got it. Foreseeable future is one to two years, I presume, right?
I would say the next couple of quarters for sure.
Okay. Got it. Thanks.
Yes, Sachin. Coming back to the first question, there are certain factors that are, we talked about those factors leading to the kind of growth. I think, look, we are putting our efforts as the, you know, Sachin Dixit asked that question. I think July is a testimony of that. Somewhere, some efforts are being put by government policies. Some efforts are being put by, you know, sort of our own efforts in terms of improving the customer experience and the planning that is underway. Some are external factors that, you know, have, you know, should be helping us during the course of our journey, should not surprise us negatively. With all of those, I think July has been a month that looks to give us the confidence that clearly we should be in, you know, as I mentioned, it was in early teens for us, July over July.
We believe for the rest of the sort of a fiscal year, we should be able to demonstrate or we should be able to deliver the similar kind of a growth for the India multichannel business. While our focus on our effort will remain what we can influence, which is delivery experience and a bit of, you know, the rest of the stuff, there are so many finer points that we don't want to get into that. Those are related to, you know, tech merchandise and, you know, a lot of list of activities that we will end up doing as a management team. However, the key focus area will remain delivery experience. We hope we continue to strongly believe that we should be able to demonstrate what we saw in July.
Supam, any thoughts on quick commerce? Is that impacting business or not so much?
Nothing has changed, Sachin, is what we have mentioned in the last quarter update or the last couple of quarters updates. Nothing materially has changed for us from a quick commerce sort of a perspective.
Sachin, the overlap at the category and the brand level is quite small. That has not changed per se from a quick commerce point of view. As Supam said, the core focus remains on customer experience improvement and the delivery experience improvement, which had actually suffered in the previous quarter.
Got it. Supam, just a clarification. When you talk about early teens growth, are we referring to GMV growth or revenue growth?
We mean revenue.
Okay, al right. Thank you.
Thank you, Sachin. The next question is from Vidisha. Vidisha, please unmute yourself.
Yes, hi. Thank you. Some of my questions have been answered. Just one more from my end. In the PPT, the positive free cash flow which you're referring to would also be a function of relatively slower network expansion, right? Once that picks up, do you expect cash flow to return to the negative terrain as the company would want to focus more on growth or customer acquisition?
Sorry, Vidisha, we could not hear your question properly.
Is my voice better? I mean, is it more?
Can you please repeat your question?
Yeah, sure. My question was pertaining to the cash flow. In the deck, it's mentioned that at consolidation level, cash flow has been free cash flow positive. What I wanted to understand was that that would also be a function of relatively slower network expansion or relatively slower store expansion as well, right? Once the store expansion momentum picks up, do you expect the cash flow to return to the negative terrain as the focus would be more on growth and customer acquisition?
In fact, Vidisha, Supam mentioned that we plan to open a similar number of stores in FY26, which we have opened in FY25 last year. It doesn't create a significant difference, especially on the CapEx front, even if we slowed down a bit in terms of opening the number of stores. You see the cash generated from operations, even after working capital at this point, that's very easy.
Thank you, Vidisha. The next question is from Garima Mishra. Garima, please unmute yourself.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. First question is on the India business. This quarter, you posted EBITDA margin expansion of 30 basis points. Could you highlight to us the levers available in this business to further increase these margins? Do you think the current pace of margin expansion is somewhat constrained because revenue growth has been under pressure?
The encouraging sign is, I would say, a gross margin expansion. If you see, gross margin for the India multichannel business is continuously improving. Even in Q1 FY26 over the previous year, Q1 FY25, we have improved the gross margin by almost 120 basis points. We could not get the same benefit in the EBITDA margins largely because of two reasons. One is because of the constraint in the offline growth. We got a de-leverage on the fixed cost. Plus, the experiments we are doing to improve the last-mile delivery experience for the online business and the mix between the online and the offline has slightly changed because the online business tends to have more logistics costs compared to the offline business. That cost has also increased, and that's the reason the EBITDA margin expansion has reduced by almost 90 basis points.
What I would say is the healthy thing to see is the gross margin expansion, which is continuously improving. Once we see a positive moment in the industry growth, I think this de-leveraging the fixed cost should start reversing. We believe that the increase in the varied cost, largely coming out of the logistic cost, is also temporary and in the longer run should give us positive results. I think what we should see as a health of margin expansion is the gross margin expansion very well.
Okay. Understood. Now, again, sticking to the India business only, your CACs in the business have traditionally been very low, right? Do you think you need to spend more towards customer acquisition or maybe even retention to sort of drive up GMV, etc.? Any other growth driver, really?
Garima, in the India multichannel business, we have a very clear focus and a direction on the unit economics we are working on, right? That focus continues. What we believe is, as some of these factors in terms of consumer experience and broad-based industry growth factors start turning around, we should be able to double down because there's an incremental benefit that we can get out of it. Primarily, we are currently on the path that we have defined for ourselves and I think we are going to maintain on that direction.
Garima, just to sort of add on this, I would say that, look, gross margin and our growth, or let's say, these are two independent, I would say, objectives or independent paths.
They're not interrelated in that sense because we will continue to see a gross margin improvement because of several reasons we have talked about in our previous calls. Those are structural plays that will continue to help us to generate more gross margin. While our business is slightly different than other businesses in the online space in terms of spending more to generate, you know, customer acquisitions and cohorts and so on and so forth, we are at a, it is more of, we need to fix a certain bit of a delivery experience to be able to ensure we are on track from a new customer acquisition window, as you're seeing in AUTC as well.
At the same time, once overall consumer slowdown also changes and our delivery experiences also improve, I think some of those things we'll actually start seeing in the yield that comes out of the marketing spend that we do. Otherwise, it'll not be as productive as we would wish to be. We are on track. Hopefully, in the next couple of months and quarters, we'll be able to improve what we want to control. Once that happens, I think our similar marketing expense will deliver a lot more superior result. You will see the benefit of what Gautam also talked about, the benefit of gross margin expansion yielding to the higher EBITDA expansion as well.
The last one.
Remember the slides, you know, which we have presented during the last call? You know, that was largely on cohort. You know, the cohort is continuously improving, you know, year on year. We talked about cohort for the four different periods. You can see, you know, that's the power of the omnichannel business, the multichannel business. The cohort is continuously improving.
Understood. Got it. Maybe, you know, last one from me, if I may. Is there any SSSG number that you can share for the India offline piece?
Garima, on that, I would, you know, it'll be difficult as we have already explained to you that, you know, our model is, you know, not a traditional retail model. At a catchment level or at a city level is what we should look at. We have spoken at length in previous calls as well that the model is, you know, offline, our store model generates a similar kind of contribution margin. There's no material difference post-marketing, post-rent between the two, online and offline. That is what gives us the encouragement to continue to expand at a wallet share basis in that catchment for those customers and increasing our market share. That is what we look at, we want to focus on rather than pure SSG because that may not yield us the right outcome for us as a team.
That's how we are maintaining, and that's how we will continue to maintain going forward our capital allocation, our focus on the mix of the online and offline to meet those objectives of wallet share, converting those footfall into gaining more wallet share with the customers going both online and offline, or offline and online, both ways.
In fact, I'll take you to the last part of the presentation wherein we talked about the cross-pollination. 38% of the customers transact both online and offline. That was our FY25 data...
For the top 20 cities.
Yeah, for the top 20 cities.
All right. Understood. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Garima.
Thanks very much.
Thank you, Garima. Next question is from Tejas Shah. Tejas, please unmute yourself and ask the question.
Hello?
Yes, Tejas, we can hear you.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I joined in a bit late, so apologies if this question has been asked earlier. India multichannel margin, just 33 basis point expansion year over year. I believe that this particular aspect of the business was irrespective of revenue growth because we were working very diligently and in a calibrated way on private label, or sorry, your home brands expansion. I just wanted to know, is this quarter an aberration and can we see acceleration in this going forward in the year, or are there any more factors which are putting pressure over here?
Tejas, yeah, we did cover this particular point. Happy to sort of repeat it as well. Look, we delivered 120 bps increase in our gross margin in India multichannel. Although only 30 bps got translated into EBITDA, the loss of 90 bps happened on account of largely, you know, a few factors, but largely, we want to call out two factors. One is some of the experiments that we are doing on the last-mile improving delivery experience, and plus some de-leverage that has happened in the offline stores business because of the growth. I think over a period of the next few quarters, as what you see in July, the growth is back in early teens for the entire India multichannel business, which will help us to reverse the de-leverage. Also, the experiments that we are doing on an online sort of a logistics, it is a temporary phenomenon.
Over a period of time, we will be able to, as we build volumes, bring that back into normalized sort of a direct cost. Thereby, we will be able to translate a large significant part of our gross margin expansion to the EBITDA. Gross margin expansion will continue to happen over a period of time because that's quite structural in our framework.
Clear. Second, when I scanned the broader retail universe, what has happened is that there was a phase of bunched-up demand post-COVID, and a lot of players responded to that by expanding retail footprint. Now, for the last one and a half year, we are seeing that there's a lot of consolidation of demand in terms of footprint happening across, just in line to in tune with the demand scenario. I just wanted to know, we also had a very phenomenal run there. Looking at the new macro realities and consumption in particular, do you think we'll go through that phase of consolidation? First of all, do we warrant that?
Look, it's a fair question, Tejas. I think players who are nimble, who are agile will evolve. You're right in the observation that we had all seen a very good flip post-COVID, during COVID and post-COVID period. Retail saw a lot of jump. I think in this phase of the journey for at least maybe till the time the whole macros change, I think some of these moments give us, give opportunities to players. At least that's what we believe, at least the management team of FirstCry believes that periods like these are good periods for us to be able to strengthen our moats, strengthen our operating capabilities.
As and when the winds turn around, will give us the significant flip in a very short period of time to be able to capitalize and deliver sort of an outperformance on numbers because those factors that would have helped us to be on improving and perfecting some of those things, whether it is related to last-mile logistics, whether it is related to tech, merchandising, personalization, store sort of wallet shares, unit economics. I think all of those things will actually make us more nimble, more, and I can only sort of comment and assure, you know, all of you that we as a team are at least in that cohort of companies which will be far more nimble and will be able to deliver and be able to capitalize when the wind turns around. I think that's how I would summarize it.
Yes, we are all going through that phase, but we will, you know, we remain very confident. We as a team in the over the last 15 years have seen some several cycles like that. Personally, I've seen more, but as a team together also, we have seen a few cycles like that. I think it just makes us stronger.
Sure. The last one, if I may, customer additions have dropped dramatically. Just wanted to know, how should we read on that from a market share lens perspective?
Yeah, Vivek, do you want to take that or do you want me to?
Tejas, customer additions in terms of both all our numbers remain pretty stable, right? The CAC and other factors are also quite stable from that window. I think some of the challenges which we mentioned earlier, as they get solved, we can potentially see that we can see a better acceleration in that front. In July, we have already seen that. As Supam mentioned, it'll reflect in overall numbers as well as the individual acquisition numbers as we move forward in the following quarters.
Sure, thanks and all the best for the coming quarters.
Thank you, Tejas.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tejas. Next question is from Sucrit. Sucrit, please unmute yourself, introduce yourself and the organization, and please ask your question.
Yes, good evening to the FirstCry team. Am I audible?
Yes, Sucrit.
Yes. Yeah. Good evening. My name is Sucrit Patil from Eyesight FinTrade Private Limited. My question is to Mr. Supam Maheshwari. First of all, I'd like to congratulate the entire team on a strong traction in the omnichannel engagement and private label growth. My question is, given FirstCry's deep access to early parenting cohorts and the expanding offline footprint, how are you thinking about evolving the platform from a commerce-led model to a lifecycle-led ecosystem, potentially integrating services like early education, health, or fintech, specifically tailored to parenting milestones? Is there a roadmap to monetize trust and data across the many verticals beyond retail? Yeah, thanks.
Good question, Sucrit. I think I would just simply say that we're already in early education. As you know, we have 300-plus preschools that we operate quite profitably. That is part of our fourth segment, and it's a small one for us. From a strategy window, it has very beautiful outcomes for us. Over a period of time, when we will have 1,000 preschools, you will imagine that the strategic benefit that preschools will give us along in any catchment, in 1,000 catchments over a period of time, we'll have our stores. We'll have a preschool that essentially helps us to build brand salience with the customers in an offline way while online, obviously, we are present. That helps us to reduce our marketing spend over a longer period of time as we continue to reinforce our brand in those vicinities of that catchment.
That's while generating an asset-light, profitable, very strongly profitable business sort of a model as far as preschool is concerned. That is an identified opportunity. We started in 2019. Obviously, we had COVID, and then we continued post-COVID a good traction on that front. While on some of the other opportunities that we talked about, whether it is health-related or fintech-related, at this moment, we are not going for any new opportunities. Yes, these opportunities, over a longer horizon, we will evaluate. At this moment, we will remain focused on largely the four verticals that we have been working towards, which is India multichannel. We strongly believe it's a very huge opportunity for us to continue to nail down that international UAE KSA business. We have to make this business profitable on a shorter time frame, t hird, GlobalBees continues to do well and f ourth is this preschool.
We'll continue to remain in this sort of a spectrum right now. Once we have outperformed in some of this where we feel we have reasons to think beyond, that is when we will probably think about moving towards a health or fintech kind of an opportunity. They are relevant, t hey can add to our ecosystem. You're absolutely right but a t this moment, they may not be the right set of opportunities for us to address.
Great, Supam. That was a very good guidance. Just to close the loop, I just want to understand, I want to pick your brains as CEO of the company. As you explore these adjacent opportunities, I want to understand how do you internally evaluate which verticals to pursue, whether it's early learning, health, or financials? Is there a strategic framework that guides you on how to balance between the brands, evaluate the monetization potential, and the execution complexity in each of the frameworks?
Sure. Sucrit, while I can answer on this and to save everybody's time, we can discuss this particular question offline. I can just guide you. Simply, you look at strategic benefit for the company for the core business. That's the fundamental point. The strategic benefit has to be really, really super strong. You look at it from a ROSA window in terms of time frame. A health business can be very investment-unfriendly for the initial few years, which is what we don't want to do right now. School business, preschool business was very friendly from a ROSA perspective because pretty much it is an infinite ROSA. While it serves our strategic objective, that's how we got into it, and we are scaling it up, and we'll continue to scale this up. This is a broad framework, strategic benefit, and a clear focus and eye on the ROSA perspective.
You align these two. Once these two things filter out some of these opportunities, you think whether you want to. You go to the execution part in terms of how you execute, how easy it is to execute, and so on and so forth. That's a broad framework, but we can get into more specifics maybe offline. I hope that helps.
Great, great. Thank you very much. I wish the entire team best of luck for all your future endeavors.
Thank you, Sukrit.
Thank you, Sucrit. We would request the participants to raise your hands in case anyone has any questions.
Perfect.
All right. Thank you, everyone.
Okay.
Thank you, everyone.