Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Brainbees Solutions Limited Q2 and H1 FY25 earnings call. This is Anish Arora, and I have with me Mr. Supam Maheshwari, Managing Director and CEO of the company, and Mr. Gautam Sharma, Group Chief Financial Officer of the company. 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 we'll 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 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.
Good evening, friends. First of all, I would like to say Happy Children's Day to all of you who have kids or have kids in your families or near ones, dear ones. So, Happy Children's Day. Welcome again to our second quarter's earnings call. So we'll just go through a few slides that this presentation has been uploaded. You may have already seen it, but we'll just go through it to take you through our performance for the quarter two as well as for the first half of the 25th fiscal year. Some of the slides might be, you might find it repetitive, but it is for the reason that some of our friends who have joined first time over this call, just to give them a little bit of a feel of our business. Otherwise, we'll stick to our quarter two performance.
These are the five broad segments that we will be covering. The fifth one is more for our extra information. So we'll be covering the first four: the quarter two snapshot, business overview, segmental performance, and financial summary. On the quarter two financial performance snapshot. Yeah. So if you look at it, we have continued to deliver growth momentum with improved profitability. And overall, if you will see, our annual unique transacting customers have increased 16.5% from September 2023 to September 2024 ending. And this, as well from a GMV window, is an increase of 21% to INR 2,528 crores for quarter two. Net revenue from operations at a consolidated level is around close to INR 1,904 crores, which is 26% growth over quarter two of last year. Overall, while our growth has been fairly robust, all of this has also been able to deliver bottom-line performance.
Our consolidated adjusted EBITDA has delivered around INR 80 crore, and this has been a 66% increase over our last year, quarter two. India Multichannel, which is our core business, which is the largest business segment that we have, has delivered a 38% increase in adjusted EBITDA, which is yielding INR 210 crore of adjusted EBITDA, over 38% over quarter two last year. This has also resulted in overall cash profit after tax to INR 27.9 crores, which is a 209% increase over the last quarter, same quarter last year of Q2 FY24. So with that, I would like to sort of give you a brief snapshot segment-wise. If you look at overall at a consolidated level, I just mentioned we have grown 26% year-on-year revenue growth for the consolidated business for Q2. If you look at our segment-wise performance, it's right here.
India Multichannel grew at 19% Q2, same period. International grew 25%, which is Middle East operation. Global Bees, D2C, 4A has grown 55%. We'll speak about it during the segmental performance as well. Both the top-line performance as well as the bottom-line performance, how it has stacked up. Others, which is primarily our education business, has also demonstrated a very significant growth of 44% on quarter two year-on-year. All our four business segments continue to demonstrate meaningful growth. In the subsequent slide, you will be able to see our bottom-line performance as well. Moving further, this is just a summary of what all I have spoken about. This is more for people who may probably read this presentation later. It is also uploaded on the stock exchange file.
So it's just a summary of what I've just spoken about of overall consolidated growth of 26% with an Adjusted EBITDA growth of 66% year-on-year and a cash profit growth of 209% for the quarter over the same quarter last year. India Multichannel grew 38% on Adjusted EBITDA and 19% on revenue growth. International grew 25% year-on-year with Adjusted EBITDA growth of lesser losses, which is 18.9%. 390 basis points we have improved year-on-year for quarter two from 22.8% to 18.9%. Global Bees also delivered a strong performance of 55% and 154% growth in Adjusted EBITDA over the same quarter.
So overall, if you look at it, the performance in the profitability at a consolidated level has been led by a gross margin expansion of 101 basis points year-on-year at a consolidated level and a bit of an operating leverage, leading to 4.2% Adjusted EBITDA margin for quarter two from 3.2% in the last year quarter two. So that's the overall sort of a summary of our consolidated performance, even segment-wise, that you have been able to see at a meta level. We'll go further down. Requesting Anish to change the slide, please. Yeah. So we'll go through the business review. Some of these sections, some of these points might be repetitive for some of you who have been in our earlier calls or were there in our roadshows or prior.
But for the new friends who have joined this call for the first time, I'll just give a brief summary and then quickly rush to the segmental performance. So this is our overall ecosystem, FirstCry platform. We are driving fundamental parenting needs of shopping, content, community, and education. Built a capability around data technology, deep understanding for customers, our own brands, and great partnership with 7,000-plus third-party brands. And we have deepened our moats with manufacturing as well as logistics and supply chain and manifested all these capabilities that we have built in the form of four business segments, which is India multi-channel, which is our largest core business segment, which constitutes modern stores and online platform and general retail trade distribution. And then second is international, which is our Middle East footprint, completely online as of quarter two. And the third is GlobalBees, which is house of brands.
And fourth is our others, which we call others in our segmental performance. But essentially, it is education preschool business. So these are the four segments I just wanted to refresh. Moving further, this is a data point that as of quarter two, our online GMV split and offline GMV split in Indian multichannel has been 77% versus 23%. We have added, as we discussed, 9.4 million annual unique transacting customers. And total store count that we have, including all modern stores, is 1,124 as of 30th September of this year. Our community continues to do very well. And overall, we have close to now, out of 1,124, 498 FirstCry and BabyHug COCO stores as well.
So our overall approach of multichannel, which is online, offline, and distribution, continues to do very well, where customers can purchase in a multichannel way, can shop at our own store as well as can research online and can do either way, vice versa as well, where they get the benefit of doing touch and feel on our stores as well. Moving further, this is sort of an overall breadth of our product range that we are addressing all kinds of babies and kids need, including expecting mothers right from her when she gets pregnant to up to a 12-year-old kid. We continue to operate across 1.8 million SKUs, offering from almost close to 7,900 brands on our entire platform. We are one of the widest and the most curated product range that we have. And within that, we have also built a very robust portfolio of home brands.
If you will recall, some of you that we had in our Redseer industry report made a statement around BabyHug, which is one of our oldest and the largest own brand. Incidentally, it also has been the largest mothers, baby, and kids multi-category product brand in terms of GMV. And also it has been, in terms of the product assortment, largest in Asia-Pacific, excluding China. We continue to believe that it has. We have continued to maintain that leadership from FY24 to quarter two, ending September 2024. And as I mentioned, BabyHug is available across. We have now 307 BabyHug COCO stores as of September 30th. This is for our international foray. This is very important to sort of. We wanted to highlight while India, we all know, is the world's capital of babies and kids. We make 25, 26 million babies a year.
While the international market in the UAE and KSA has a very meaningful birth rate, as well as spend per child is meaningfully higher than India, and overall, the childcare market is per capita sort of spend, as well as market size, is very meaningful for us. And our AOV in international business is almost roughly 3.9 times that of AOV of India business, and we continue to successfully replicate our India playbook toward our international Middle East market, UAE and KSA. With that, I come to the last segment on Global Bees.
We continue to operate amongst our four broad categories, which are home utilities, premium appliances, fashion, lifestyle, and home personal care, and continue to deliver superior performance through our Global Bees platform that we have built in terms of getting customer insights and able to build products as per the new developments that we are able to get insights from not just the third-party market platforms, but also from the social fabric of the country that we are able to get insights and replicate that into the products and therefore be able to drive our growth. So with all of that, I think numbers will speak more than some of the subjective points that we have talked about. So I'll hand over now, Gautam, to talk about the segmental performance across our four business segments.
So we will now talk about the four business segments, the first one being the India Multichannel business, which is the core business segment for us. After that, we'll talk about the international business performance. And then we will move on to the Global Bees performance before we talk about the consolidated performance for Q2 and H1. So this is for the India Multichannel business. So if you see, these are the three important KPIs which are also disclosed in our prospectus. That is annual unique transacting customers, orders, GMVs. You can see a very healthy growth in all the three important KPIs. AUTC grew by 16%. Orders in Q2 have grown by 19%. And so is GMV. GMV has grown by 21% in Q2 on a year-on-year basis. And for H1, it has grown by 19% on a year-on-year basis. Next slide.
So, net revenue growth: the Q2 growth over the last year, Q2 is 19% for the India Multichannel business. And for the H1, the growth is 18%. This growth in Q1 was around 16%. So we are able to increase the growth rate for the India Multichannel business. Adjusted EBITDA: it's improving year-on-year from 7.4% in Q2 FY24. We have reached 8.6% in Q2 FY25, which is a 38% year-on-year growth. Similarly, if we talk about the H1 performance from 7.6% in H1 FY24, we have reached 8.5% in H1 FY25, which represents a 31% year-on-year growth. Important thing to mention here is that generally, if we talk about the last year Q2 performance, the margins, the EBITDA margins are slightly lower than the Q1 margins.
However, given the strong growth and core focus on the improvement of margins, we were able to improve the gross margins in Q2 as well over Q1. This is about the international business. Again, the three important KPIs: annual unique transacting customers, GMV in orders. So while the growth in H1 clearly has an impact of the floods in UAE and the advancement of festivities, we were able to post a very healthy growth in all the three important KPIs in international business for Q2. Next slide. Revenue growth. So the revenue growth in Q2 FY25 over Q2 FY24 is 25%. So from INR 165 crore in Q2 FY24, we have reached to a revenue of INR 208 crore in Q2 FY25.
Similarly, for H1 FY24, which also has an impact of a lower growth in Q1, we were able to grow this by 16% on a year-on-year basis. EBITDA performance, it's year-on-year on a year-on-year basis. This is clearly improving from 22.8% negative in Q2 FY24. We have brought this down to 18.9% in Q2 FY25. Similarly, from a negative 22.8% in H1 FY24, we were able to bring this down to negative 17.8% in H1 FY25. We'll move on to the Global Bees performance. Very strong growth in Global Bees, a 55% year-on-year growth in Q2. One of the important reasons of this strong growth is also an advancement of some seasonal sales by the platforms on which the Global Bees sell their products. So that was an advancement in September. Last year, it has happened in October. So we got the benefit of the advancement of seasonal sales.
On an H1 basis, the growth is 41% year-on-year. EBITDA performance, it's improving quarter on quarter and year-on-year from 1.2% in Q2 FY24. So it's a 2.5x jump in EBITDA in Q2 FY25. So from 1.2%, we have improved this to 2% in Q2 FY25. Similarly, if we talk about the H1 performance, it has grown by 14.4x from 0.2% in H1 FY24. We have taken the EBITDA to 1.7% in H1 FY25. Moving on to the next slide. So this is about the consolidated performance. So while we don't have an additional slide on the performance of education business, Supam talked about the growth in the education business, which is classified in others. So the growth in revenue on a year-on-year basis is 46%.
Similarly, the EBITDA, if I talk about for H1, again, this used to be somewhere around 16% in H1 FY24, which has now improved to 23% for H1 FY25. There is a strong growth in all the business segment and a very good improvement in profitability as well in all the four business segments on a year-on-year basis. This is the consolidated performance. We will start with the green box on the left-hand side. That's basically the trend on the gross margins. Gross margins in Q2, it has improved by 100 basis points from 36.3%-37.3%. Further, for H1, it has improved from 36%-37.5%. Similarly, on the net revenue, consolidated net revenue, given the strong growth in all the business segments, we were able to post a year-on-year growth of 26% in Q2 FY25.
Similarly, for H1 FY25, we have posted a growth of 22% on a year-on-year basis. Consolidated EBITDA as well, it's improving every year from 3.2% in Q2 FY24. We have improved this by 100 basis points to 4.2%, which is a growth of 66% on a year-on-year basis. Similarly, for H1, we have improved the EBITDA performance from 2.9% in H1 FY24 to 4.3% in H1 FY25. This ends our presentation. Anish, over to you.
Thank you, Supam and Gautam. I would like to hand it over to Gautam back in case he wants to highlight, say something before we move on to the Q&A forum.
Yeah. So one of the important things which I would like to talk about is there is a recent search and seizure operation done by the GST authorities in Maharashtra in our corporate office in Pune as well as the warehouse in Pune.
We have given this information to the stock exchange. So this started on 6th of November, and this ended on 10th of November. On the findings, so the search and seizure was all about two points. One is the mismatch in 2B and 3A. That is what the vendor filed for us and what we show in our returns. So that's a mismatch. And the availability of GST credit for the IPO expenses, which is attributable to the shares issued by the company. So on this, we have paid a total amount of INR 1.74 crore to the GST authorities, which includes the mismatch amount as well as the interest component for four years, which is 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2021-22, 2022-23. So these are the four years. And necessary information in this regard has already been shared with the stock exchanges.
Thank you, Gautam.
We can now open for the Q&A forum. I request participants to raise hands for asking questions. We'll unmute you, and you will 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 maximum two. For any follow-up question, you may join the queue again. We have first question from Garima. Garima, we'll unmute you.
Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. And my first question is on Global Bees, exceptionally strong metrics, both revenue as well as EBITDA. So anything particular you want to call out here which worked well during the quarter? You did mention seasonality, but anything apart from that and any of the constituent companies here which have sort of delivered a great quarter?
So Garima, I will just take you down a little bit memory lane here.
And I think this is a favorite question for all investors as well, that this industry has been probably painted by the Thrasio sort of a sort of a, I would say, I won't call it a plague, but it's just a bad sort of a nomenclature. But look, I think India, for us, FirstCry itself is a great example that a business model like FirstCry doesn't probably exist anywhere in the world, at least what we have learned during our roadshows as well. So we have demonstrated what we have built. And I think similarly, GlobalBees with its consumer insights and ability to be able to innovate products based on those consumer insights, which it gets from third-party platforms as well as from social platforms, converted into products is what it has resulted into.
And then, of course, a great execution and great supply chain that we have built, all of that has resulted into a great performance. While the performance has been extraordinarily good because of seasonality being advanced, but overall industry continues to grow at, if you look at our industry report, which we had a couple of quarters back that CRF published, it is 30% plus. So we will strive our best, our hard to ensure that we continue to beat that. So I think that's where we are. On a full year basis. On a full year basis. And just to add that the growth of Global Bees for Q2, which is 55%, is a complete organic growth.
Got it. Good to know. Thank you. Gautam, my second question is actually to you.
So there's this slide in the presentation which is reconciliation of loss profit after tax to cash profit after tax, right? There are two line items here. One is Ind AS 116 cost and then a cash outflow for these rentals. If I was to look at this number for 1H FY25, should I just assume that your real rent is INR 100 crores? You are booking INR 119 crores in the P&L, and hence your P&L is understated by, let's say, INR 19 odd crores.
That's the right interpretation, Garima.
All right. Okay. Perfect. That answers my question. If I have anything else, I'll come back. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Garima. Next, we have a question from Sheila.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. And hi, Supam. Hi, Gautam. So my question again was on Global Bees.
I understand there was seasonality this quarter, but if you could just tell us how should we think about the growth rate and which are the strong quarters in general for Global Bees going into future also, how should we think about it? And again, I think Garima also asked that question. Is there any particular category which stood out for us in this particular season or which has scaled up to a certain level where we would want to talk about it?
So Garima, I mean, so as I just alluded a couple of minutes back, the overall industry report states that the D2C sector and the categories that we are operating will continue to demonstrate a 30% plus CAGR for a few years. So we are in pretty much line with that on an annual basis.
However, some quarters, because of the festive season, as GlobalBees operates and sells its products on a couple of third-party marketplaces and therefore does have an impact on seasonality or some of those sale periods. And there are few of them, few of such sale period during the year. So it does have an impact, but on an annual basis, we should be able to be around what we just talked about as what industry report says.
And with respect to the profitability, Supam, is this going to, I mean, we have delivered 2% EBITDA margin. So should we think of this to improve going ahead? Or again, this had some seasonality to it?
No, no, there is no. Okay. So as some of our businesses are fairly, I would say, not very mature, this is a three-and-a-half-year, three-year-plus just business, three-year-old.
We are in our fourth year of our operation. We started in May 2021. So this has a very sort of a long life where we can continue to, and we will continue to strive hard to demonstrate both top-line growth as well as bottom-line expansion. It is just the beginning. I mean, it just we have started.
Okay. Understood. Thank you.
Thank you, Sheila. The next question is from Sanithya. Sanithya, you can go ahead.
I think she is probably logged out or something. Maybe you can start with someone else.
Next question from Tejpal. Tejpal, please unmute yourself and ask the question.
Yes, sir. Hello?
Yes, yes.
So, sir, my question is that from five years now, where we are seeing ourselves in the Indian markets or as a company, what is the five-year plan? Where we are seeing in the revenue terms, in the profitability terms?
And the second question is that in the product line, what we are selling, in terms of the what we are getting to the which age most?
Sorry, I got your first question, but I did not get your second question.
Okay, sir. So in the age category where we are getting to the 12-year till the 12-year of age, but I just want to ask which age category we are getting to the most.
Oh, okay. Sure. So the first question's answer, Tejpal, is actually we are operating in next four to five years, our overall time will be close to $120 billion. So we have a significant headroom. Even in our India multi-channel core business, which is the largest and 14 years in sort of play, we are very small.
Although we are the largest multi-channel player in the mother's baby and kids domain, but we are very, very small. So therefore, in this India childcare market itself, it will become $64 billion in over the next four years or five years. So therefore, I mean, I would say it will take us, we will continue to compound all our top line across all four business segments. Our other two businesses are fairly new, both international, especially in that Saudi Arabia. That's a new business. And Global Bees, I just spoke about, is a three, three-and-a-half-year-old business. So they'll continue to grow. So from a growth perspective, I think we should be able to see sustained growth because our TAM is fairly large, as I just spoke about, and we are very small.
To answer your second question, the largest segment, obviously, our 6 to 12 business was launched just a few quarters back. So it will take us some time to actually build on that. So our large part of our business is 0 to 6 because that's how we started our business 14 years back. And so it will take us a bit of a time to be able to get to balance this as our cohorts gets built up over a period of time. So the focus, right, I mean, our large part of our business comes from 0 to 6, both online and offline, while 6 to 12 will continue to build as those customers who are at five or six-year-old kids, they'll continue to transact with us over a longer period of their life cycle. I hope I've answered.
So okay, sir, thank you.
And my next question is that, sir, in the education segment, where we are, what is our strategy like we are seeing as ourself as a DPS has established itself, or we have another strategy, or I just want to know your thought process.
We largely run a franchised model, which is an asset-light building preschool, which is catering to kids from two and a half-year-olds to somewhere around six-year-old. So it's before they go to a K-12 proper school. This is where we operate in. We have business partners who we work with, and we provide all kinds of curriculum, technology, help facilitate the admissions and so on and so forth to be able to, and the brand. All of that is being leveraged with our business partners to be able to provide. This is a very big market. Again, it's very unorganized. Within that, it's very unbranded.
Millions of parents want to actually give a lot more organized and a lot more branded and quality education to their young ones. And that's where we are coming into the place. We have a huge headroom to build our sort of model within the preschool sort of a market. That's what we will continue to do in an asset-light. (crosstalk)
Okay, sir. So any guidance for the in the two, three years, how many schools we are going to operate or in the franchise-based model?
As I said, we are very small, Tejpal. The market is 50,000-plus sort of preschools in the country, and 80% of them, a large part of them actually is unbranded. So you can imagine, I mean, we are less than sort of we are very small.
I mean, and although we are growing quite meaningfully, as you can see in our numbers, a 44% growth. So we will continue to demonstrate that growth as we go along. We are insignificant as far as the overall preschool market is concerned. So the overall branded segment is small. So the branded segment is growing, and within that, we are probably growing in a very fast way. I think the revenue growth is an indication of the number of schools that we are opening and plus, it's a very high-profit business as well.
Sir, just wanted to quantify the number. Is there any plan to operate 200, 300 schools like this? Want to know.
End of September, we are already sitting on the number of schools are already 300-plus.
Okay, sir. Thank you. Thank you from my side and best of luck for the future. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tejpal. Next question is from Annamithra.
Congrats on the great set of numbers. Two pointers. For H1, we have a mix of 23% offline with 77% online. So what would be our steady-state mix, any target that we have in mind, offline versus online?
If you see the historical trends as well, if you see the disclosure we have made in the prospectus also, last three, four years, the mix between online and offline, it remains in the same trajectory, probably 1% here and there. 76% could become 75% or 76% could become 77%. So we don't expect this number to change significantly. And we have a lot of headroom to grow even in offline because we are the largest organized sort of in terms of the FirstCry as the largest organized player in the country. We have 1,100 stores today.
And in some of the other brands that you think of in the other categories, whether it is categories like Bata or Raymond or other brands, they have significantly higher number of stores, 1,600-2,000 and even more. We continue to believe, and we are already there in only 500-plus cities as of today. So not only will we continue to add FirstCry stores, we will continue to add BabyHug stores, which can coexist in the same vicinity. So therefore, we believe this our offline platform or offline stores will continue to improve our overall multi-channel story as we go along, and it will continue to demonstrate growth as a multi-channel while this percentage may not, as Gautam said, significantly change because both online and offline will continue to grow.
That's the beauty of our convenience and all the benefits of online and offline that we want to proliferate and give it to our audience, young parents. And that's what we believe is something that nobody can give, and probably what we have delivered and what we continue to deliver will be very, very good for our audience to give their largest wallet share to us.
Sure, of course. One related point is in terms of so on an overall basis for the India multi-channel segment, we are at 8.5% EBITDA margin, right? So at a store level, what would be the EBITDA margin? Any indications on that?
So Annamithra, I would sincerely request that you should not look at our business further segment-wise in terms of offline or online. During our Q1 call as well, I talked about it.
Our customers transact both online as well as offline. There's a huge amount of overlap of our customers that they transact on both the channels. And now we have also started a distribution channel as well, which is growing as well, where the and within that, we only sell largely BabyHug and our home brands only. So essentially, the customer can get penetrated through our distribution platform through LAC plus retailers that are selling our BabyHug products. And then they can also, if they want to buy extended categories or product types, subcategories, they can come to our offline channel, which is our COCO or FOFO stores, our FirstCry or BabyHug stores, and then they can also come to our online.
So as the trust builds different set of customers, which are, I would say, e-commerce savvy, or they want to have a convenience of buying in offline with a touch and feel, with an instant gratification, and having sort of an experience of buying offline, taking their family out. So all of those that we provide. So please look at our business in a multi-channel way. And that is what we believe that with more stores and with this current approach of a multi-channel, we'll continue to improve post-marketing CM2 and thereby, over a period of time, continue to improve our EBITDA as well. And that's what has happened in the past as well.
Yeah, yeah. Got it, sir. My last question would be on the international business. So I think the Landmark Group is also planning to launch in India, which is also there in KSA. Right?
Do you see the competition intensifying in both of these geographies where we are operating in?
Both of these geographies, you mean? Both India and international? See, Landmark is already there in sort of Middle East, right? Yeah. They're already there. Yeah. In India, yes, they have opened a few stores. And there is no depth of competition in India, (crosstalk)I don't think. So I don't think that's a little see, if you look at our tenet, which is building a multi-channel experience to the customer. So if a customer can buy offline and can remember and build that trust with the product as well as with the platform, then they come online and also buy the same brand, same product, which is not available. So BabyHug today, today is not available.
And some of our brand partners have also products which are with us alone and some of our home brands. So all of these make us, I would say, a very differentiated platform with our curation, with our personalization, with our convenience of faster deliveries and so on and so forth. With our 80 warehouse supply chain network of 40 cities, same-day delivery, 1,000-plus cities, next-day delivery. All of this to provide to a new player, to a new young parent, only in offline will not cut the ice. That's our view.
All right. Thanks a lot. And all the best. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Next is from Sachin Salgaonkar. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.
My first question is just wanted to understand more on ad and promo expenses, which have increased to 9.1% of revenues, slightly higher than what we have seen in the past. The question out here is, what is spending more on India multi-channel or international or any other business, and how should we look at this spend going ahead?
Sure, Sachin. So Sachin, I would like to draw your attention to our AUTC. If you look at our AUTC in just India multi-channel, we were at sort of one million addition for FY24. And then for Q1, for annualized basis, it was 1.1 million. Now it is 1.3 million. So we have been continuously increasing our AUTC sort of rate. So that's number one.
Number two, if you look at our mix of the business, India multi-channel is a, I would say, still a fairly decent maturity stage compared to our international and global-based business, which are fairly new. And within that, KSA is even more newer. So as the mix will change, so you will probably be able to see percentage-wise increase while we will continue to optimize and our overall spend in a way that we ensure that the CM2, which is contribution margin post-marketing, we continue to improve. So that's what we have been able to deliver even in this quarter. And we will endeavor that even if we improve, the percentage might look higher. But at a CM2 level, which is post-marketing contribution margin, we are still accretive.
We are still better off than the quarter two last year or H1 of last year versus H1 of this year, so we have demonstrated that already in our numbers, and so with that, I think we feel very comfortable going forward that with that thesis in mind, with that discipline in mind, we'll be able to continue to steer both top-line growth as well as bottom-line growth.
Thank you, Supam. Very clear. Second question, we are hearing multiple comments from multiple consumer companies about an impact on some kind of a consumption slowdown now in urban areas also, wanted to understand if you guys are seeing any impact, especially on your same store growth on the back of that.
So Sachin, as this particular question came in the last time around, I think we don't look at our business from a same store basis.
We look at our business in a multi-channel way because the same customer we would like that customer. And that has happened in the past for many years and will continue to happen for many years to come. I don't think the behavior will change significantly. And that's why we feel we are fairly unique that our customers who join our platform first time, either offline, they continue to go to online for multiple transactions, or they continue to first come online, they also go back to stores in the vicinity of their homes to do transaction offline. So with that basis, looking at an SSG is not the right metric to look at our business.
The best metric to look for our sort of a multi-channel is CM1, CM2 kind of sort of a data point, which is there in our supplementary sheet sort of a data point, although it's at a consolidated level. But large part of our business is multi-channel, so you can assume it is reflecting and coming from the Indian multi-channel. So we'll continue to demonstrate that. We would like to add more stores over a longer period of time because that's what we have stated in our RHP as well. And we have added close to around 40 stores in quarter two over last quarter period.
And we will continue to add that because we believe we will be able to add a large number of stores in the next four to five years because we are the, as I just said, some of the other categories have a large number of stores. And our stores give a lot of benefit to us even in online, and online gives benefit to offline. So together, it becomes a strength. So we look at our business in a more totality to arrive at a unit economics. And that's why we invest our energies like that. So that's how we believe we have been successful in the past, and we'll continue to demonstrate even more success going forward.
Excellent. So to clarify, not much of an impact on consumption slowdown on your business, right?
Well, consumption slowdown is something that at least Q2 numbers is what it's visible to you. So I don't have to say much on that. Rest, I think we are in a category. It's a we are 16%, I would say, only organized. A lot of industry is getting from unorganized to organized. And we are the largest player, so we'll continue to gain and benefit from that. So that's how I will put it. I don't think we should look at it one or two or three months, one or two quarter. Maybe these are things that we haven't experienced in past because we were small. Now we have become of a certain size. But I think we're still small compared to where we want to reach. So over a longer period of time, some of these things probably will not matter. Got it.
And then last question, and I know that you got this question regularly in the past as well, but every month, the quick commerce platforms are getting bigger and bigger. So as we speak today, any impact from quick commerce platforms because there are certain standardized products, for example, diapers, which could be eventually bought and sold on those platforms?
Sure, Sachin. So Sachin, first of all, I think you must understand FirstCry as a platform, which is we are at an e-commerce level available across thousands of PIN codes. On our stores, we have 500-plus cities covering tier two, tier three, tier four cities as well. 500 cities is where we are present. So whereas quick commerce is present probably in metros or probably top 8, 10 cities or over a period of time, they may get to a sort of a state capital.
I think they're largely and broadly present in top 10 cities or 12 cities. Having said this, if you look at the categories, we deliver, as you know already, and you would have seen in our RHP as well, we deliver 40-plus cities, same-day delivery, and 1,000-plus cities next-day delivery. And this, we have not been doing it in the last six months or nine months. We have been doing it for many, many years. Probably we were the first original company or long back. We built this model to we never called it dark stores and stuff like that, but we have built this model a long, long time back. So we've been delivering this kind of customer experience for a fairly long period of time. Although we'll continue to improve as we'll build more proximity to our customers to be able to give better experience.
But with our pan-India, with our offline 500 cities approach, with our already large network of sort of SDD entity, and on top, the category overlap is very minimal. It's just probably diapers where and it's not as significant sort of. So therefore, we are solving for mothers who are looking for trust, looking for products. So we believe that these are very planned sort of purchases. There will be some sort of young parents or mothers who may want to buy. But what they probably feel comfortable buying with us along with other products in the kind of assortment that they can get from us is probably usually a mother's purchase is very planned. But that's how we believe that it's not been a very material sort of impact even today or going forward. That's what we assume.
Believe, but we'll continue to improve as we go along in our getting more proximity to the customer. So that's what we'll continue to do. So that's where we are placed for the quick companies. Because majority of our business, if you remember, is as I think as we have discussed in past is a fashion, so.
Yeah. Got it. Thank you. And all the best. Thank you.
Thank you, Sachin. We'll now take the last question. Ankit, please go ahead. Ankit, please unmute yourself and ask the question.
Can't unmute. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Hi. Just on Global Bees, just to close more, which company actually in Global Bees is leading to this turnaround? Is it Fruit ill, Kobe Mart? Because these are profitable before also. And on the sales side, Mekazi Foods has grown exponentially in the last couple of years.
So if you can give us more granular data, it will help us analyze because it becomes difficult for us to look at the consolidated company level.
Sure. So Ankit, just look at it from a window of there is no brand concentration in the business. Don't look at it at a company because that's not how you should look at it. Because from an investor perspective, from an operator perspective, from our perspective, our Global Bees perspective, it is how we look at it is at a brand level. No brand is one single brand is dominant or even more than 20% or more than, I would say, 15% of the overall sales. So I think from that window, we are quite diversified at a brand level. So it's quite fairly, I would say, distributed.
And that is what is the beauty of the model that we have built as a D2C platform, which enables us to continue to get more insights, continue to from the third-party platforms, from the social networks, and being able to deliver and internally all the tech platforms that we have built to be able to come up with more product innovation based on those insights and being able to quickly use our internal capabilities from sourcing to a supply chain, being able to deliver on the ground to deliver growth. So that's how we have been able to demonstrate growth.
Sure. And from the investments, from the fund raised from the standalone entity to Global Bees, when does that happen? And how will our stake change in Global Bees once that investment happens?
So we have already invested.
We have agreed to utilize around INR 170 crore in Global Bees, either in the form of investment or by way of loan to help Global Bees acquire additional stake. And those are committed stake in three of its subsidiaries. Out of that INR 170 crore, we have already invested around INR 85 crore in Global Bees for them to increase their stake as per what we have agreed in prospectus. In terms of our shareholding in Global Bees, today, we hold around 50.73% shareholding in Global Bees.
So the investment is form of debt and not equity?
No, it is in the equity now. So what we have agreed in the prospectus will be in the form of convertible equity.
Okay. My second question is (crosstalk) sure. My second question is, what's leading to this gross margin expansion?
Are we seeing any mix change in product, whether apparel share is increasing significantly, or is this gross margin sustainable?
Yeah, Ankit, I think over a period of time, as there are multiple levers across our businesses, business segments. In our India multi-channel, which is the largest core business segment if I talk about it, we have multiple levers to continue to improve our gross margins. One is simply our sort of a category mix changes. Second is home brand sort of a mix. Third is scale and size of our home brand itself leads to a COGS reduction. And fourth is our third-party brands where we will continue to, as we scale, be able to get better margins. So I think with those four levers, over a longer period of time, we should be able to continue to improve our gross margin.
As you have demonstrated in the past for many years in a row, we should be able to continue to demonstrate that over a longer period of time. In fact, from FY23, we have improved our gross margin by almost 400 basis points. It used to be 33% in FY23, and it is hovering around 37% as we speak, and some of our other new businesses like international have yet to sort of improve and so on and so forth, so this quarter, if I have to just point out from a quarterly basis of the three levers which you called out for gross margin expansion, how many dips came from each of those levers? All the levers have contributed to the improvement in gross margins, Ankit. This will be a continuous process across all levers. There is no single lever.
As a management team or as a team, we will never leave anything unturned to continue to expand our gross margin because as an execution machine, as a team, we are continuously after both top-line expansion as well as bottom-line expansion led through a gross margin expansion and some operating levels.
My last question is on the EBO expansion for the international market. When do we start seeing that happen?
Sure. So as an update, we have hired the head of the business for our offline foray. And the team is getting hired. I think you should see a couple of stores in the next year. And will the unit economics remain the same? These are COCO stores? Unit economics, you will have to look at it at a multi-channel basis. That's how we would look at the unit economics.
Because the same customer as I was talking about for the India business, similarly, we would like it to I mean, we will experiment with the first few stores and then before we scale it up. But yet to open, but we believe that it will follow somewhere what India trajectory is.
Thank you, everyone. Supam, I'll hand it over to you again for any closing remarks.
No, I think, look, thank you very much, all of you, for giving your time on an evening. With that, I think we will continue to strive hard for delivering performance as what we have delivered this quarter over a longer period of time. So thank you for joining us and listening to us and our story. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.