Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Brainbees Solutions Limited Q3 and 9-month FY 2026 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 of 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 we 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 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, everyone. Once again, welcome to our Q3 performance and 9-month performance for FY 2026. We'll be covering both Q3 and 9 months, as well as the segmental performance of all our 4 business segments. Financial summary, business overview, and some of the supplementary information is attached in the pre-presentation uploaded. Just straight diving into the Q3 and 9 months. Happy to share that we've been PAT positive on a consolidated level for the Q3 FY 2026, adjusted for ESOP cost. Also, for the 9 months, adjusted EBITDA has been increased from 25% year-on-year basis, and we continue to remain cash flow positive for 9-month FY 2026. On segmental updates, India Multichannel business witnessed sequential improvement, as we had promised in our earlier calls as well, despite relatively muted consumer sentiment.
If you look at the right-hand side, you will notice that we had, on Q1 , 7.5% year-on-year growth, Q2 , 7.9%, and, Q3 has been, 8.9% growth. We faced certain challenges around supply chain volatility. Otherwise, our growth would have been around 11% for Q3 year-on-year basis. We have undertaken a lot of initiatives that we have spoken about in the past. We will speak more during the course of the presentation. We strongly believe that the... With those initiatives, structurally, our growth rate for both online and offline channels will remain much superior in FY 2027, as those initiatives would have taken certain scale and size. We continue to remain PAT and cash flow, free cash flow positive, in India Multichannel for the 9-month FY 2026.
For the international business, we witnessed elevated promotional activities led by the two horizontal commerce, e-commerce players that we have spoken about, a few quarters back as well. However, we have continued to remain laser focused on sustainable growth and not participating in those events, and maintaining our focus towards reducing our adjusted EBITDA losses, and which has reduced by 25% year-on-year basis for Q3 FY 2026, and 36% for the 9-month FY 2026. GlobalBees delivered another strong quarter of organic and profitable growth. Core categories delivered 30% year-on-year growth in 9 months, FY 2026, and an adjusted EBITDA of close to INR 70 crore post corporate expenses. Moving further, you will see these are snapshots for our consolidated business.
AUTC grew by 10%, and GMV of our online, offline, online, offline, and international business grew by 10%, and revenue from operation grew by 12%. Adjusted EBITDA, consol business stands at 6.3%, and India Multichannel at 10%. Cash profit after tax grew year-over-year for Q3 at 23%. For the nine-month performance, on the consol basis, AUTC again grew by 10%. Revenue from operations grew by 11% over nine months compared to last year nine months. Our consol adjusted EBITDA grew by 25% year-over-year basis, and India Multichannel at 9.3, and cash profit for 72% on a equivalent nine-month basis.
With that, I would like to sort of move to the segmental performance and hand over Vivek for talking about our India Multichannel segmental performance. Vivek?
Hi. Good evening, everyone. I'll share some key updates about the India Multichannel business. So as Supam also mentioned, that, we saw sequential improvement in year-on-year growth rate for the revenue, and this was despite, a bit of muted consumer sentiments in Q3 that we witnessed. We also... Which contributes to 85%.
A nd continues to perform well. We also witnessed, as Supam was mentioning, some supply chain volatilities in a few select categories.
Vivek, we missed last 15, 20 seconds. If you don't mind, can you please speak from the point 2 again?
Sure, sure, sure, sure. Am I audible?
Yeah.
Yeah. So, as I was mentioning, that, we witnessed some heightened competitive intensity in diapering category during the quarter, which led to pressure on growth and margins. Our non-diapering portfolio, which contributes to 85%, about 85% of our GMV, remains robust and continues to perform well. We also witnessed, as Supam had mentioned, some supply chain volatilities in few select categories, which impacted overall growth by 200 bps in Q3 FY 2026. Anish, if we can move to the next slide. So we saw about 9% growth in Q3 , FY 2026. At a 9-month level, we saw about 8% growth. And if I talk about adjusted EBITDA, in 9-month level, we saw a growth of about 6%, to INR 395 crores. Supam, do you want to take this slide?
Yeah. So I've... I, I think I just wanted to give you, you know, the new initiative updates that we had been talking about, a few of them, and a few new ones, one significant new one that we'll speak about. As in last few quarters, we have mentioned that we had some, you know, had some customer experience issues through third-party logistics service providers, and we had taken our own logistics initiative to serve our customers. And last time when we had talked about, we had expanded our logistics service, we branded it RocketBees . That's our own internal in-house logistics initiative. And this is a totally asset-light model we have spoken about in the past. We maintain the entire tech stack here.
These are third-party, you know, dedicated service providers who are working on that tech stack, regional, local ones, to be able to work with us directly, and directly work for FirstCry shipments. This RocketBees initiative has expanded in less than 9-10 months from the time we started from scratch. Last time when we spoke about, we had expanded to 13 cities. Now we have expanded, by December end, to 22 cities. Happy to share that with this increased volume and increased number of cities, we have witnessed 20% improvement in delivery times, resulting in much superior growth and customer experience that we had started this initiative. We continue to expand this.
We believe we should be able to cross close to around 45%-50% of our total volumes by the middle of this year. So this is a initiative on RocketBees , which has given us tremendous boost and, you know, and will continue to give us a superior customer experience in times to come. While we built this architecture of RocketBees and our own delivery initiative, we had also been cognizant of the fact that customers in India overall has been experiencing and a desire to get the products much faster than, you know, has been traditionally been served a few years back. And over the next few years, that desire to get products much faster will continue to only increase and improve.
With that in mind, to cater to those expectations of the customers, we started a new initiative called FirstCry Quick. We are currently underway on a pilot in three cities, in Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad, where we not only serve our diapering category, but service all other full range of products, including baby care, nurseries, fashion, toys, everything, that we normally serve across all categories. And this FC Quick model has been set to. We are leveraging our entire. In these three cities, as a pilot in a few PIN codes , we're leveraging our COCO stores to begin with, and few of our stockist network. And also, we'll be extending it to the dark stores.
With that, we believe over a period of time, we'll be able to leverage our 1,200 stores over a period of time, once we streamline the entire tech product, as well as, the supply chain ops for the entire FC Quick, to be able to deliver, all products. Currently, we are promising, three hours as a promised delivery. We intend to reduce it, a promised delivery over a period of time. The objective here is to ensure that we remain future-proof, foolproof, in terms of being able to meet customer expectation, while RocketBees will continue to serve across, you know, over a period of time, a large number of cities, not just only a few hours, but STD, NDD, and, you know, across states, deliveries as well.
FC Quick is a pure few hours delivery, which is what we are endeavoring to deliver to cater to the future requirements of our young mothers and young fathers. Third initiative that we have spoken in the past is going to take shape in FY 2026, which will help us address more footfalls, more conversions through realigning product portfolio. By getting into a width to a depth strategy, part of our product portfolio will move to a depth strategy, releasing the COGS benefit to MRP reduction, catering to a wider audience, and enabling us to have better conversions. So with all these three initiatives, we remain super, super confident about structurally deliver superior growth in FY 2027 once these all three initiatives are fully rolled out. Yeah, I think...
Yeah, I'll hand over to Abhinav for international business update.
Hi, good-
This meeting is being recorded.
Hi, good evening, everyone. One second. I think I have a tech glitch.
No, you're right.
Can you, can you hear me, guys?
Yes. Yes, yes.
All right. Good evening, everyone. So our story for Q3, looking back at Q3 this year, we witnessed, as Supam had mentioned in his first slide, we witnessed very elevated promotional activities, you know, led by the two horizontals that we've spoken about in the previous quarters as well. However, we on our part stayed relentless with razor-sharp focus on, you know, not participating in that kind of a frenzy or negative spiral, as we call it, and wanted to ensure that we are on a path to sustainable growth with improvement in our gross margins. Anish, next slide, please. So, you know, having said that, we expanded our gross margins in like-for-like quarters by 150 basis points, and over a nine-month comparative period by 180 basis points.
We also saw a reduction in our EBITDA losses from 15%-11% in percentage terms, and in absolute value, about 25% reduction, like-for-like quarters. The same, in the nine-month comparative period, we reduced our losses from 17%-10%, and in absolute value by about 36%. So, you know, the trend, if you look at the trend, the path that we've sort of stayed sustained over the last few quarters, as we've discussed previously, we've seen, you know, reductions or improvements rather in our EBITDA losses. From, right from FY 2023 to FY 2025, we've reduced our losses by 831 basis points. If you compare FY 2025 over the nine-month period of FY 2026, we've reduced it by 705 basis points.
So, very sustained focus on both, a very sustained, healthy top line, sort of a growth. When I say healthy, I mean, looking at, you know, ensuring that EBITDA losses quarter- on- quarter and year on year are, reducing as we speak. Over to you, Anuj.
Thanks, Abhinav. Good evening, everyone. Here's the update on GlobalBees. As you're aware, over the last few quarters, we've been speaking about rationalizing certain brands because they were delivering a relatively lower revenue growth, as well as incurring losses. We believe that we should be able to complete this rationalization in the Q1 of FY 2027. Therefore, we'll first focus on the core categories performance for nine months FY 2026. We did a revenue of INR 1,417.4 crores, which was a 30% year-on-year growth. If I were to compare this to H1 as well as Q1 of this year, we were at very similar levels of growth of 30%.
So, as of now, we're delivering pretty consistent 30% growth. The EBITDA was sixty-nine point. Adjusted EBITDA was 69.8 crore INR, which is 4.9%. If you look at the consolidated view, it's been a good quarter, and it's been a good nine months. In the last quarter, we delivered a 22% growth, from 422.3 crore INR to 515 crore INR. And even on a nine-month basis, the growth has been 22%. So again, the overall story of growth is consistent across the year. All of this growth has been organic. The last acquisition that we made was in September 2022. Moving on to the adjusted EBITDA.
The adjusted EBITDA for the last quarter grew by 147% year-on-year, and moved from 1.4% in the previous year to 2.9% this year. If I look at it on a nine-month basis, we grew by 54%, and from a 1.6% in the previous year to 2% this year. We just look at the-
O verall trend of EBIT, adjusted EBITDA that we've seen over the last few years, in FY 2023, we were at -5%. In FY 2024 and 2025, we moved to a 0% and a 1%. And in this year's nine months, we're at a 2%. However, again, looking at if I were to remove the brands that we are rationalizing, and if I was to focus only on the core categories, the adjusted EBITDA becomes 4.9%. So that sums up the GlobalBees update. Thanks.
So this is the console performance of all the segments put together. While three segments was just explained by Vivek, Abhinav, and Anuj, the fourth segment, which primarily represents our school business, it continues to perform very well. For the 3 months ended 31 December, if I talk about the EBITDA growth, EBITDA growth has seen a jump of 40% year-on-year. And if I talk about the 9 months growth in the EBITDA, it is roughly around 27%. In terms of percentage of EBITDA to the revenue, for the Q3, the EBITDA was roughly around 31%, and for the 9 months, it stands around 27%. So that continues to perform very well.
So if we add all the four segments, what we get is a 12% year-on-year growth in Q3, INR 2,172 crore increasing to INR 2,423 crore. Similarly, if we talk about the nine months performance, the growth of 11%. There is some dip in the gross margins, as presented and talked about in the previous slides, largely because of, you know, some decline in our India Multi-Channel business gross margins, which is largely because of heightened competitive intensity, especially in the diapering category that we have seen in Q3. And the second one is drop in gross margins in GlobalBees business. While it continued to improve the EBITDA, the gross margins has reduced because of two reasons.
One is a drag on gross margin because of the other categories, which is non-core, other than the core categories. And the second one is some change in the revenue recognition policy of of Flipkart that has reduced the margin. However, on our EBITDA level, GlobalBees continue to perform very well. With this gross margins and the revenue growth, what we achieve in terms of EBITDA is a 25% year-on-year growth for the nine months FY 2025 FY 2026 over FY 2025, which is from 5.1%, we have reached to 5%, 5.8% of EBITDA. All the business segments, you know, continue to see a EBITDA growth on the nine months basis.
India Multi-Channel increasing by 6%, GlobalBees increasing by, you know, 47%, school increasing by 27%, and international business, the losses have come down by almost 36% in nine months. So all the four business segments has contributed to the improvement in this EBITDA. Yeah, happy to take questions.
Thank you, team. We will now move on to the Q&A. I request participants to raise their hand for asking questions. We will unmute you one by one, 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 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, hi, Sukumar and Gautam. I had three questions. The first one was on our brand partnerships, right? So while, yes, we are struggling with growth for sure, but I also noticed that in the 9-month FY 2026 period, the number of brand partners we have is actually lower than what we had last year. What is happening there? Is it also driving some of the headwinds that we are facing?
Yeah. So you want to complete the... Okay, we can address this particular point. We're talking about from some 8,000 number to something, some, you know, numbers getting-
7,800. Yeah, 7,800, yeah.
That's, you know, absolutely, that point needs to be ignored because those brands do not even contribute less than 0.5% of our revenue. So you can continue to ignore that. That's we are rationalizing at our end to be able to manage our own, you know, curation in a much smarter way.
Understood. I mean, largely, for most marketplaces, one would be anticipating that the number of brands goes up rather than goes down, but yeah...
No, that's not a metric. No, Sachin, that's not a metric that really impacts us. So nothing to... it's completely to be ignored, because, that's not the brands that are... You know, there are a lot of mompreneur brands, and there are a lot of, you know, new brands that come and go. You know, they, they completely get wiped out, you know, over a period of time in their own journey. A lot of entrepreneurs, young, you know, mompreneurs as well. So we can't continue with them once they can't give us the, you know, sort of, customer experience of the products that we are requiring for, so we take those calls as well in terms of curation of the brands that we are catering to the customer, for our customers.
So, but these are long tail. I would say, you know, the far end of the long tail, so nothing to worry about at all.
Right.
No impact or revenue, Sachin. No impact.
Yeah.
Zero.
So, okay, on the second question on our own supply chain initiative, right? I mean, obviously, I think this question has come up earlier as well. You had Xpressbees, which, as far as media reports suggest, is faltering. And now you are again doing a RocketBees . Do you, I mean, how certain are you that you really need to build this, right? I mean, as far as the broader e-commerce goes, most people are happy with third-party logistics. One large player, which is shipping, like, 2 billion shipments, is probably doing in-house in-sourcing, which makes sense probably at that volume. But for your volume, how certain do you feel it is needed, and especially in the light that we have highlighted supply chain issues now for 2 quarters in a row? So, so we'd love some color there.
Sure. So, Sachin, if you look back, you know, last two quarters that we have talked about, you know, third-party logistics is hugely dominated by... Their demand is dominated by, you know, players like Meesho and others. And, you know, the customer sensitivity of, you know. And I don't wish to mention that there is no distinguished service for a premium player like us versus someone else. So while we are very, very particular, the kind of customers that we are catering to is far more particular in metro tier one, tier two or tier three. Whereas players who are dominating the demand of some of these LSPs are on the tier three plus, so the consistency of service doesn't exist there, and our customers were suffering. So we had to take things...
We waited for quite some time. I think I acknowledged in the last call as well that we were late. But I think we had to take things in our own control in terms of being able to provide that kind of a service, which customers will love. And these are young moms, young parents, who cannot wait beyond the promise that you are promising.
And on top of it, with the, you know, I would say, the feature of quick commerce and general, you know, commerce being, you know, so pervasive in today's world and today's Gen Z audience, and so on and so forth, it is very important from a future perspective as well to build our supply chain, which you can, you know, tailor to your requirements rather than being dependent on the third party. It's not like in U.S., where you have, you know, a, you know, FedEx being same-day delivery or a, you know, one-day delivery versus a three-day delivery. You can decide as a shipper, as a customer for a shipper like FedEx. In India, we don't have that kind of models.
So we had to take things in control and, you know, and, and for any large e-commerce player like us, I would say logistics is a very, very integral part of our journey. Initially, Xpressbees was built like that, but I think they moved in their own direction in terms of managing their own, you know, PNL and their own, sort of a story. And likewise for delivery, likewise Shadowfax and so on and so forth. We believe we are in much better shape. We track metrics of performance of third party. We work with all of them still, and we are scaling our own RocketBees as well. We are far superior in terms of customer experience.
As I told in my presentation a few minutes back, we have a 20% superior delivery TAT compared to the third-party logistics. That itself is, you know, critical for us to be able to provide that experience, and it helps us reducing RTOs and so on and so forth, which I can talk a lot about it. But I will reserve my comment saying that it is important to build that architecture, and it's an asset-light model. It is at the same cost. Initially, there is a little bit of a bump up, but as you scale and you build your own network in cities, you are able to have the similar cost as a third-party logistics, so it doesn't come at an incremental cost in a medium to long run.
And on top of it, if you have your architecture, you can actually build an FC Quick kind of a model, which otherwise you cannot... You can only dream and wait for, you know, I would say, you know, performance to be done by somebody else. Whereas the core-- If you look at any large player, everyone has their own fleet, everyone has their own model to be able to deliver that kind of a service. And it, it had to happen, probably it happened now. We had not anticipated it a couple of years back, but I think it was imminent that it happened, and now we feel more confident, having taken RocketBees to 28 cities, and it will continue to grow week on week, fortnight on fortnight basis.
as I said, 45%-50% of our shipment will be done by middle of the year, which will mean a lot improved customer experience, help us in growth of the same customer who we are serving through RocketBees, and on that same architecture, be able to scale up our FC Quick as well, which otherwise would have not been possible.
Sachin, just, just to clarify, Sachin, you talked about the supply chain issues. So what we talked about as a supply chain issue is not anywhere related to logistics. I'm just clarifying that.
Yeah, those supply chain were related to, you know, sourcing-led supply chain, not the forward-looking supply chain, which is from our warehouse to end consumer.
So, Sachin, and just wanted to add on to what Supam was mentioning, that we continue to work with all third-party logistics, and they are critical for our business. But while RocketBees also continue to give us more flexibility towards making sure that the consumer sentiment improves and solve for micro-nuances of the consumers.
Sure, understood. Just my final question on the margin outlook for India business, if I can. Right, so we have been generally trending, I mean, earlier we were doing 80, 90 basis points expansion, then we dropped to 50, 60. This quarter it looks like year-over-year we have dropped margin. Is there any new outlook on how margin should look like on the India business? That's my last question. Thank you.
So, Sachin, on a medium to long run, nothing changes. I think this correction that has happened is largely because of a certain heightened competition that we saw in one of our categories, which is diapering. and we have seen these kind of events even in earlier years. once, you know, these are irrational, I would say, events that has happened. A lot... obviously we don't control that because it's being done by large players. I think once it improves, that, you know, improvement will come back sharply, but we can't anticipate the time. However, our structural improvement in gross margin across our 85% of the portfolio will continue to happen, you know, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year basis, when we, you know, increase our category mix...
Improve our category mix and improve our home brand mix. So that doesn't change at all. Hope that answers.
Yeah, that does. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Sachin. The next question is from Ajay Agarwal. Ajay, please unmute yourself.
Thanks. Hi, Supam, Gautam, and team. Good set of results. I have three questions. I will take the first one on the India business. So how are you viewing the new players that have emerged in the baby and kids vertical, with one-hour delivery being a proposition? There are a couple of the players, I think, in the market, especially in the metro cities, that have emerged in this segment. So this is my first question. I think, should I repeat all three, and then you will take them? Or you want to take one by one?
No, no, we can go one by one. It helps to remain focused. So Ajay, I think, look, your point is fair. But I can just say that we have heard about two small, sort of, venture-funded companies. Look, you know, these are early days. There is a frenzy of quick commerce, and I think, people are just, riding on that bandwagon. They're operating out of a, I would say, single dark store in a few catchment of a city like an NCR, I mean, like a NCR as a... and, and Bangalore.
Scaling this model to a level where they attain scale, build a, you know, acquisition engine, ecosystem of a certain sort of a, you know, competitive game, or a unit economics, and on top of it, being able to build home brand, it will take them many, many number of years. Currently, their unit economics is at a CM2, sort of, is so terrible, that it will take, you know, in our estimate, $hundreds of millions for anyone to really take certain shape and size. So in our, in our opinion, in our assessment, it's very, very hard to replicate what has been built, for, you know, players like, the new, you know, players that you are mentioning in, especially in the quick commerce baby and kids space.
Good luck to them. Good luck to, you know, being able to generate $hundreds of millions in investment to be able to fund their growth or, you know, and, and fixing their unit economics.
Thanks, Supam. It makes sense. The another question is on international business. So when we will-- you will be able to turn EBITDA breakeven in the international business, and by when can we expect the growth to bounce back to higher level?
Hi, Ajay. So, Ajay, good question. Slightly longer answer. Stay with me here.
Sure. Sure.
So, uh-
Yeah, yeah.
Ajay, early days, and you know, if you've seen the last few quarter results, you know, especially the expansion of gross margins and a certain sort of a top-line growth, as well as reduction in losses, I think you know, the path that we've chosen for ourselves here for the international business is ensuring that we grow, and while we grow, we are you know, you know, very, very focused on reducing our losses first. That's the topmost priority, because we believe fundamentally that you know, while the competition intensity is very high, you know, we saw that last quarter also, we must remain very absolutely focused on you know, ensuring that we are not joining that bandwagon. Because retaining customers, acquiring the quality customers is the topmost priority.
You know, especially in the ecosystem, which are, you know, inducing your CAC to be on the higher side or even the CPCs and CPMs to be very high, you know, just because of the intensity, we have to remain focused. We are ensuring that our home brand mix in the business, what we are selling, the mix of home brands is improving, the mix of brands that are higher gross margin or higher repeat categories for us is improving. While we do that, our profitability path is very clear that we are not gonna achieve a certain step function growth in top line, or we are not gonna commit to a step function growth in top line while having a steep drop in gross margin or steep drop in EBITDA.
So the first priority is obviously improving or reducing our losses. Having said that, I think, 3.5 years into KSA and about just over 5.5 in UAE, still early days. We've seen the same frenzy in India. If you go back, you know, 10 years or 15 years, you know, we've seen the horizontals play a similar sort of a business game plan. While they expand the ecosystem for e-commerce in the baby and kids category for us and for the larger ecosystem, we ride the wave. Once we have our unit economics, you know, in a zone where we're very comfortable to press on the pedal to grow faster and also break even.
So, very early days to commit anything, but definitely India, I think, and, Supam, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but India, I think, took about 10 years, you know, to achieve that sort of a profitability or break-even mark. One thing we know is we'll get there faster. It'll not take us 10 years.
Thanks, Abhinav. And thanks for the detailed response. My last question will be on GlobalBees. Anuj, good set of results in GB. I heard there was a mention of Flipkart impact of some growth in Q3. So can you help us to understand how much did Flipkart impact growth in Q3? And again, on GlobalBees, also, any plans on listing of GlobalBees? Can you share the tentative timelines or any sense on the same?
Yeah, sure, sure. So, I would say that overall, you know, with the readjusted model that Flipkart has, there has been an impact on the revenue level itself, and that has got depressed. Overall, our gross margin profile remains, you know, pretty, pretty consistent. At a fundamental level, there's no material change in the margins of the core business. So, really that the impact of Flipkart we've seen over the last couple of quarters has stabilized, and in the coming year, I think we should be able to simply grow from there.
I think the right way of, you know, looking at the GlobalBees businesses is you look at the EBITDA growth, right? Which is around 150% increase year-on-year in Q3, and roughly 50% increase year-on-year in nine months. I think that's the metric that we should see.
Sure. Thanks for patiently answering all the questions. Wish you all the best of luck. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, Ajay.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ajay. The next question is from Mr. Ranjit. Ranjit, please unmute yourself.
Hi, am I audible?
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, hi. This is Tejas from Avendus Spark. Hi, Supam. Hi, Gautam. Supam, if you can just elaborate a bit, our plan with RocketBees and Quick. What exactly are we trying to solve here, A? And what it will entail in terms of capital commitment and bandwidth commitment in coming period?
So, look, Ranjit, we have spoken about RocketBees initiative for. RocketBees is a nomenclature that we have expressed first time on this call, but I think this initiative is almost a 9-month-old. We started somewhere around February, March. It's almost like 11, 12 months old now. So, we've been speaking about it in couple of quarters in our earnings call. We faced a lot of challenges in you know, late 2024 and in calendar year 2025, where customer experiences, because of our delivery delays and painful experiences because of disruption in the LSP, last-mile service provider sort of ecosystem really you know gave our customers a lot of pain.
We waited, we tried all kind of all players, but we could not really get the kind of output, the kind of experience that we would really desire to give to our customers. With that, sort of a landscape, that this will not get fixed, you know, because, as I said, India logistics do not provide differentiated service as what you will find probably in developed nations like U.S., where you can have a shipper ship your order for a priority delivery versus a regular delivery. India doesn't have as sophisticated nuance, at scale and at a cost that you would like it to be. And therefore, we had no choice left but to take this, you know, last mile service, you know, sort of a game in our hand.
We built a totally an asset-light model. Total tech stack is being built by FirstCry. And on that, we have third-party logistics, regional, local players who are providing dedicated manpower, who are attached to fulfilling those shipments or delivering those shipments to the last mile, dedicatedly only our shipment, not mixing shipment with some other shipper. So with that, we have not only improved, you know, I would say the delivery tag by around 20% compared to the third-party logistics provider for our end customer, but also improved a lot of other metrics in terms of RTOs, in terms of, you know, other, you know, metrics that come around, damages, and so on and so forth. Which essentially means superior sort of a customer retention and superior customer cohort.
As more and more customers come under the area, under the curve of RB, we believe that we will be able to improve our growth with higher retention, and higher LTV from those sort of a customer. So it'll, it will, you know, pan out very beautifully for us. Also, I must say in the same breath that it doesn't cost much extra compared to the third, you know, third-party LSPs cost. Initially, for a few months it is a bump up, but after that, once the city stabilizes onto a higher network, of RB deliveries, the cost really comes down to the same third-party logistics sort of service provider cost. So it is, it is something that I wish, we would have not faced this issue in the first place, but since we faced it, we had to build it.
And having built it, we... there was also a strategic, sort of an understanding with the undercurrent of last couple of years, that couple of quarters, we are seeing how quick commerce has been, you know, rapidly changing the consumer behavior, of getting products much faster. With RocketBees , sort of an architecture, we are able to now control our destiny or control our customer experience for FC Quick as a model as well. Otherwise, it becomes super difficult to just keep waiting for third-party LSP to really, build a model for you and being able to scale up as quickly as you would wish to. That would have not happened. So it's just taking things in our control.
The way we did it in 2013, when we started Xpressbees, we had to take that in because at that time there were no LSPs other than DTDC and Blue Dart, and so on and so forth. Historically, I don't want to go there and tell you the whole sort of a story. You may already know that. So we had to build what we built at that point in time, but, we had to do another innovation again, once again, because of the disruption in the LSP ecosystem, in last couple of years, and therefore ended up building our own, RocketBees dedicatedly only working for FirstCry. So I hope I have answered this question, unless you have any specific questions on this particular point.
Yeah. Thanks, Supam. This was quite comprehensive. Just one follow-up there. So when we, when we look at a player like Nykaa, now, two years back, they also called out that because of logistics issues and other challenges, they are not able to give the... The customer experience was getting compromised, and especially they were getting into Nykaa Luxe also, so they wanted it to be much more premium. Now, they addressed it by investing in fulfillment centers closer to larger markets, and as the result shows now, they seem to have solved the problem and in a very good way.
So just wanted to know, this stencil that we are trying to use or we are using now, now we are committed to, has it been used and hence it gives us confidence, or we are the first to try it? Because, to our naked eyes, Nykaa model also seems to be doing fine, which also had similar challenges as we had.
So I'll, I'll just tell you the broad difference between us and some other players that you are mentioning. Look, we are a mini horizontal in some sense. We are shipping from a 10-gram diaper pin to a 30-kilogram toy car. So our supply chain, our logistics model is far, far different than half a kg of a shipment of a typical sort of a fashion or a, you know, beauty, BPC as a product category. So the supply chain is far, far different, right from storage to a, you know, line haul, mid-mile, first mile, and last mile. So I think it is very, very complex. So it cannot be compared with what you are mentioning in real terms.
So therefore, while things may work out with others in a different way, same, you know, paintbrush cannot be applied onto our kind of a mini horizontal, you know, product mix, where the spectrum of the product, in physical form or a volumetric form is far different, than what the others are providing. So we had to build what we therefore built. And as you will remember, when we have already 85 warehouses, somewhere around 83 or 85 warehouses in the, from a, you know, proximity standpoint already, that network, we built it a fairly long period of, time back. In fact, we were the pioneers of building a sort of a dark store when the dark store model as a name nomenclature did not exist.
We built our first so-called today's dark store in 2013 or 2013, 2013 or 2014, somewhere around that. So we have been fairly innovating in those terms. We enjoyed the fruits of that journey fairly early in our, you know, overall, 15-year journey. But I think, things change, environment change, you know, service models change, consumer expectations change, and we had to re-innovate, reinvent ourselves, and that is where, it, you know, led to building what we have built now. This will be long-lasting. This will be a very strong pillar of our growth going forward. In fact, in the cities that we are already delivering through RB, we see a very significantly higher growth than the cities that we do not have RB today....
I hope that really gives you, you know, and it's significantly different. So therefore, that gives us internal sort of a boost as well, that what we're doing is right, not just vanity metric in terms of customer satisfaction, but also in terms of real growth that we'll be able to demonstrate once, you know, more and more customer experience this RB and the RB network increases to many more cities. And we'll be able to demonstrate our India Multi-Channel growth, our online growth, into a very different curve in FY 2027. We mentioned that in our presentation, and hopefully we'll continue to demonstrate sequentially, not just FY 2027, but sequentially, a superior growth in our India Multi-Channel . We are super confident on that, on back of these initiatives, in fact.
Yes.
In a way, I mean, this is a long-term investment. It is a long-term benefit that we are building for the consumers.
Mm-hmm.
So it is important from that window as well for us.
Perfect. And just for last, if I may squeeze in a follow-up there. What percentage of our revenue or client pool or customer pool will be able to service with this initiative by, let's say, in next two quarters and by the end of FY 2027? And you have said that witnessing 20% improvement in TAT wherever we have done implemented this. So other than TAT, this customer experience shows up in which KPI, and how we should think of it translating into financials going ahead? That's all from my side.
So as I alluded, I think we are witnessing significant superior growth. So if you are talking about 8.9 or maybe 11, if you want to, you know, iron out the supply chain deficiencies that we witnessed in Q3 , you can apply definitely a much superior growth than that. We have... In cities where we have RB, we're talking about mid-teens + of growth. So as we expand our RocketBees network to more and more cities, we should be able to expand, you know, that mid-to-late teens of growth model in those cities, as more and more customers really get area under the curve.
As I said, RocketBees , by middle of the current calendar year, we should be able to touch 45%-50% of our overall shipments.
Thanks, and all the best for coming quarters.
Thank you, Ajit.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tejas. Next question is from Vineet. Vineet, please unmute yourself.
Hi, thanks for the opportunity. So just a follow-up on FC Quick. I get your point around the third-party logistics, but how would Q-commerce players as our competition who are delivering within, say, like, 10-15 minutes? And what will be our value proposition if our delivery promise is 2-3 hours? So is it going to be the assortment depth, or it will be largely pricing led?
So, Vineet, if you think, you know, let's go back into the shoes of a mom. Typically, our AUPT is fairly high compared to, you know, a quick commerce. A mother typically will put multiple number of units in a typical order, number one. Number two, our assortment itself, we are talking about, not just, you know, diapering or consumables, we are talking about entire fashion, footwear, and baby gear, nursery, toys. You know, the entire product categories that we serve in a regular business is also being served in the FC Quick. So it's a very different experience, and we are leveraging twelve...
Today, we are leveraging, you know, on a pilot in these three cities, on few PIN codes across our COCO stores, through our COCO stores and through our current, sort of warehouse. Over a period of time, we will be leveraging close to around 1,200 our COCO stores, as we progress further. So, that will give us a extremely high operating leverage. And as well as, in certain PIN codes , we'll also be able to, you know, increase, coverage of the dark stores as well. So over a period of time, we believe that, while 10 minutes is what we are not solving for, the young mother who is probably looking for a single item, we are not catering to that.
We have talked about there's not so much of an overlap between what quick commerce assortment is and what our assortment is. We are talking about a full assortment in... Just to give you example, non-fashion assortment itself, we have 300,000 SKUs just in non-fashion assortment. So it's a very large assortment that we are talking about. And with that, we believe it's the objective here is not to solve for 10 minutes or half an hour, it is to solve for that customer experience where they have a certainty that it'll come in few hours with the full basket that they have ordered for. That is what we want to give assurance rather than...
To catch on to that customer experience is what we want to solve for, and that will be remain the bulk of the customer experience that, you know, young mothers or young fathers would want to solve for. And look, majority of the products that we sell is our home brands that we have already acknowledged in the past, so that is not available anywhere. And in particular, babies and kids space, there is a challenge on size and scale of brands, third-party brands that are available. That essentially means that customer would come back, would shop with us and will shop more and more with us, provided he gets, you know, a certainty on our quality of delivery experience. Through FC Quick, we'll raise the bar.
That's the objective with which we have already had, you know, I would say a few weeks of FC Quick already live. Of course, you can try it in these three cities and some PIN codes. And the experience or the pilot, our results have been, I would say, very superb for us. We're just ironing out the tech product and the overall supply chain, overall efficiency, and we'll continue to scale this up. Like we are giving you RB update, we hope to give you the FC Quick update over the next few quarters as we go along. So we remain super excited on, you know, on these three initiatives that we have talked about, today.
Perfect. So I have a slightly structural question over our growth. While I appreciate our focus on profitability, but over, say, like last four to six quarters, our India Multi-Channel growth has moderated significantly versus our own historical growth, say, like pre-listing. And we've also alluded to, say, sort of weaker consumer sentiments. But other multi-channel platforms, say, Nykaa, has grown significantly faster while expanding margins. So structurally, beyond FC Quick, what are the other levers that we are working on to re-accelerate growth back to, say, like mid-teens or higher?
I think with this initiative itself. Look, there are always many projects and many initiatives that we undertake in our, you know, regular day-to-day, and which we have not spoken about. But these were three large, worth mentioning initiatives that we spoke about, which will really move the needle. We remain super confident about our mid- to long-term story of being able to deliver mid- to late teens growth on our India Multi-Channel . So we remain committed to that. In last three quarters itself. In my first slide itself, I think we talked about the growth increasing, you know, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year basis, and sequentially for last three quarters. You will continuously see that happening over the next few quarters.
I think, structurally, with these three initiatives, we are destined to be able to see that and deliver that without any compromise. We don't see any challenge. We have to just execute on these initiatives hard, day in, day out, and ensure that we are retaining and delivering those results that you're all anticipating. So I think it should happen sooner than later. FY 2027 will be far superior than FY 2026. And I didn't mean to say back-ended, I mean sequentially, quarter-on-quarter, you should be able to see a continuous increasing growth year-on-year.
Perfect. That's it from my side. We wish the team all the best. Thank you.
Thanks, Vineet.
Thank you, Vineet. In the interest of time, we'll just take one last question. Arvind, please unmute yourself.
Hey. Hello. Hi, thank you for the opportunity. So, like, given the unique lifestyle of baby and kids product, how we are working to extend our customer engagement beyond early childhood and maximize lifetime value?
So, Arvind, we have a couple of initiatives, a couple of things that we have talked about a few times, and maybe—
It's in the supplementary slides.
It's in the supplementary slides as well. We cater to products from minus 9 months, when the mother is pregnant. But even prior to that, we engage with the mother through our parenting platform, which is part of our FirstCry app. From that time, before the mother conceives a child, from that time itself, we have the product range up to 12 years of the age of the child. So, you know, many years back, we had started the journey from minus 9 months to 3 years, then we extended it to 6 years, then later on extended from 6 years to 12 years. And we have compartmentalized our app. If you look at our front end, a 3-year-old mother or a 6-month-old...
I mean, a three-year-old, you know, young one mother or a six-month young one's mother, or a six-year-old, you know, kid's mother, will see a very different homepage as they progress, as their kids progress over age, over time.
Even based on the gender also, it's very personalized.
So it's hyper-personalized from both gender and age, and being able to show the relevancy of the products, and being able to therefore retain the lifetime value of the customer from almost up to a 15-16 year. 'Cause there are almost 1.5 kids a family, and therefore two, you know, couple of years of gap, 2 or 3 years of gap in between first and second child. Between almost 15-16 year of a lifetime value is what we are able to sort of map with, you know, driving engagement from through the product journey that we have been able to build.
Initial years, the engagement is from parenting platform, which is a far superior engagement, but over a period of time, it is more, I would say, through the products and the superiority of products, and our home brand play, and the curated play through our partnership with our thousands of brands, is how we are able to retain those customers and superior customer experience. So that's how we have been able to manage and intend to grow the lifetime value and the cohort and frequency of customers.
In fact, you know, in the supplementary slide, there is a slide on, the revenue cohorts as well. You can refer to that slide, in the presentation we have shared with the stock exchange.
Thank you, Arvind. That was the last question. I'll just hand it over back to the management for any concluding remarks.
Nothing, Anish. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your time. We promise we continue to deliver on what we have mentioned here. So you'll continue to see an improvement in our India Multi-Channel growth and overall growth of the consolidated business. Looking forward to seeing you in the next quarterly update. Thank you once again.