Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Ravi Gothwal from Churchgate Partners. On behalf of IndiaMART InterMESH Limited, I would like to welcome you all to the company Q3 FY 2022 earnings webinar. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions once the presentation concludes. Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Dinesh Agarwal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brijesh Agrawal, Whole-time Director, Mr. Prateek Chandra, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Kushal Maheshwari, who has recently joined as Head of Treasury and Investor Relations. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's webinar may be forward-looking in nature and may involve risk and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number three of the earnings presentation for the detailed disclaimer.
Now I would like to hand over the call to Mr. Dinesh Agarwal for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to IndiaMART's Q3 FY 2022 earnings webinar. I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy. We have already circulated our earnings presentation, which is available on our website as well as on stock exchange's website. I'm sure you would have gone through the presentation, and I would be happy to take any questions afterwards. I'm pleased to report that our consolidated revenue from operations has been INR 188 crore in the third quarter, and deferred revenue of INR 790 crore, representing a growth in the deferred revenue of 25% year-on-year. Collections from the customer for the period have grown by 25%, 24% to INR 222 crore in Q 3 FY 2020.
During the quarter, we also added 5,833 paying subscribers, closing the total count at approximately 156,000 during the quarter. Unique business inquiries stood at 23 million, with our 90-day repeat buyers standing at about approximately 55%. As communicated last time, we are improving our algorithms for better matchmaking and higher efficiency in the systems for easing the efforts of buyers and sellers. Our average matchmaking per unique business inquiry reduced to 5.3 times as against 6.3 times of the year. Further, we are very excited to share that we have strengthened our value proposition in the accounting software space by acquiring 100% stake in Busy Infotech Private Limited for INR 500 crores in cash.
Busy was founded in 1997 and currently is one of the largest accounting software company in the Indian market with over 2 lakh users. The business is cash positive with a revenue of INR 42.4 crore and PAT of INR 11 crore in FY 2021. Vyapar, one of our invested company offering mobile accounting software, has announced a Series B investment round led by WestBridge Capital, wherein we have invested an additional INR 63.5 crore and have raised our stake from 26% to 27%. Let me also brief you about some of the strategic investments that we made in the previous quarter. We have acquired 7.7% stake in Mynd Solutions for INR 32 crore, which runs M1xchange and invoice discounting exchange, one of the TReDS platforms as approved by RBI.
We have also acquired 26% stake for INR 13 crore in EasyEcom, which offers AI-driven omnichannel inventory and warehouse management solution to D2C e-commerce merchants. Looking ahead, we continue to see increasing adoption of internet by businesses which will fuel the long-term growth at IndiaMART. We remain committed to enhance our value proposition and leverage these opportunities. Now I would like to hand over the call to Prateek to discuss the financial performance in little more detail. Thank you, and over to you, Prateek.
Thank you, Dinesh, and good afternoon, everyone. I will take you through the financial performance for the quarter ended December 2021. Consolidated revenue from operations was INR 188 crores in the quarter, a growth of 8% year-over-year, driven by both increase in ARPU and paying subscribers year-over-year. Consolidated EBITDA was INR 79 crores, representing a margin of 42%. Expenses have increased primarily in the manpower costs due to increase in headcounts and re-rating of salaries across the markets and our investments behind growth. Net profit for the quarter was INR 70 crores with a margin of 33%, and cash generated from operations during the quarter was INR 84 crores. As of December 31st, 2021, total cash and investment balance we have was at INR 2,523 crores. Thank you very much.
We are now ready to take any questions.
Thank you, Prateek. We will now begin the Q and A session. Please allow camera and microphone access if you wish to ask a question and use the raise hand option on your screen. You may type your question in the discussion panel as well, and we will pick up few questions from the panel at the end. Please restrict to two questions per participant so that we may be able to address questions from all the participants. We will now wait for a couple of seconds while the question queue assembles.
Yes. The first question is from the line of Mihir Damania. Mihir, please go ahead with the question.
Yeah. Hi. My first question is relating to a sharp drop in website hits that we see on a quarter-over-quarter basis. What has actually resulted in the same and what are we doing to mitigate a drop in traffic? Sorry, traffic.
Thank you, Mihir. The sharp drop in the traffic generally you see in quarter three. We have historically 10% lower than the quarter two traffic. However, this time, I think because of the pent-up demand from the wave two, there was a much higher traffic in quarter two, and that's why we are seeing this. I am seeing a good 90 million kind of a traffic on month-on-month basis. I think we will stabilize back to, you know, 272-odd million visits per month per quarter.
Okay. My second question is relating to the acquired business. Once it is acquired, is the business? Hello? Am I on?
No, no, Mihir. Sorry, you broke up. Can you repeat your question?
Yeah.
Yeah.
My second question is relating to the acquired business. The acquired business is in accounting software. Does it compete with Vyapar in any way? And if not, how are they different? And what is the expected revenue and PAT for FY 2022 for the Busy Infotech, which we acquired?
When we look at Busy Infotech, Busy Infotech actually is an accounting cum ERP software, which is available on-premise for companies to do their accounting. The product features that you typically go ahead and see on the screen right now would, you know, give you an idea on the expanse of what all can be done within Busy. When we look at Vyapar essentially is a cloud-based SaaS product which is being made available to businesses which are trying to do accounting on their own. It's a DIY kind of a model. People generally would use this for the purposes of doing basic accounting on their own, and therefore is a product that appeals to the micro and small businesses as a segment more.
Whereas Busy typically would be competing with Tally and Marg of the world, where you would look at small and mid-sized businesses being their principal set of customers.
Second question was regarding the expected FY 2022.
When we look at the current Busy business over the past you know three four years period, their typical revenue growth rate has been at within the range of 10%-15% on a CAGR basis. Their PAT margins have been around 25%. While we are of course going ahead and going to focus on you know taking over the business over the next one or two quarters and trying to stabilize the overall management team there, we think that we would want to go ahead and look at least you know doubling the revenue growth rate from the current levels.
As we get a better understanding of the overall business and the operations and how things are working on the ground, we will be in a superior position to comment upon the future growth rates after this understanding has been built. Current FY 2022, I guess, we would be looking at INR 44 crore-INR 45 crore of revenue.
Okay. My last question is, can you just talk briefly about a few strategic investments and how they are scaling post our investment? Last time you talked about Vyapar. Can you get a few other examples of what they are currently up to?
Yeah. If you look at Mobisy Bizom, which operates Bizom. Bizom is one of the well scaled business, which is running at around INR 40 crore-INR 50 crore run rate. They have on quarterly basis been growing at 10%-15% per quarter. They are near breakeven. Some quarters they make some losses, some quarters they don't. The other ones are, all of them were invested in the last nine months only. All of them, whether it is Shipway, Legistify, SuperProcure, Aerchain, all of them are very small. The only one which is a slightly bigger one is M1xchange. It is a RBI-licensed entity which offers invoice discounting and bill discounting in an automated manner.
It's an exchange, and you can only take up to 10% participation in an exchange. We have bought secondary shares from SIDBI. SIDBI was the earlier, you know, early-stage investor in that. One of their funds was getting over. We bought 10.7% there, and this is again a very recent investment in November 2021. All others are very new investments. I don't have much updates on them. I believe, once FY 2022 completes and their numbers are there, I think in July quarter, I will be able to give you some update from the investment made in the past nine months.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Chandra.
Thank you, Mihir. Next question is from the line of Kushagra Bhattar, Old Bridge Capital. Kushagra, please go ahead.
Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of questions, management. First is if you can give more sense on you know the rationale behind both the deals of Vyapar and Busy. Also, if you can cover you know how you guys have valued both businesses, what all parameters you looked at, and you know between both these businesses how did you compare both of them? Also, you mentioned in your opening remarks that it's an on-premise model. When all your offerings and you know your future strategy of going into SaaS, which we have been hearing from past couple of quarters, why going for an on-premise model and you know paying almost big acquisitions?
The related question is, Dinesh, you have highlighted in the past that you generally go for smaller minority stakes and then see how the business is panning out, right? This time you have upfront invested 100%, not even testing for some period of time. Why a different set of an approach this time? If the accounting is really that big opportunity, why not invest more in Vyapar instead of running two different software? Yeah. This is more a broader question. I would have couple of follows. Yeah.
Let me answer about Vyapar, and then Brijesh will add more rationale behind Busy. Vyapar, as you know, has been growing well, and Vyapar, as Brijesh also mentioned, it is primarily a mobile first and primarily a micro-sized businesses platform, which is self-use platform. It is not meant for accountant or multi-location or, you know, complex manufacturing or sourcing kind of product. Vyapar itself has grown to almost 1 lakh+ customers, who when we invested in them, they had around 15,000 customers and around INR 20 lakh monthly run rate. Now they are over INR 2 crore monthly run rate in terms of collection. That is why we have doubled down on Vyapar, where Vyapar has raised about INR 200+ crore from WestBridge.
WestBridge Capital is taking about 20-odd% there. IndiaMART has maintained our position at 26%. Not only maintained, but we have bought additional 1% from secondary share, where we are investing about INR 63.5 crores. Learning with Vyapar is that it's a very sticky and very large opportunity in the accounting space. We have been studying this space for a while, whether it was Busy or Marg. Marg has been recently acquired by PharmEasy as part of their DRHP. It is disclosed. We have valued Vyapar at the similar multiples as Marg deal. We have acquired Busy at a similar multiple as the Marg deal.
Now, valuation for an early-stage business versus valuation for a late-stage business is very different. Also, the revenue in Vyapar is customer revenue. You know, most of the customers directly pay to Vyapar. While in case of Busy, it is a transfer pricing revenue, dealer revenue. Vyapar sells it to dealer, and then dealers further mark it up and sell it to the customer. The retail price, MRP, is different than the revenue realized in case of Busy. I think, taking into account multiple things, one focusing on self-use, mobile side, you know, SaaS and other focusing on slightly complex, more desktop, kind of thing. I think these two are very complementary set of products, and they will continue to have a good growth in the times to come.
On the Brijesh Vyapar side. No, Busy side, more items.
Let me also just add on you know the rationale that we believe is driving this decision of going ahead and looking at multiple companies within the accounting space. You know when we look at accounting traditionally it's a business which is very very sticky. Customers typically would not switch from one platform to the other very easily. We've seen that you know players like Tally, Busy, Marg have had a very loyal and sticky customer base available with them. These are customers who have also been focused upon keeping their data in a fairly protective mode not you know really going ahead and doing everything on cloud basis.
A lot of this is also driven by how the chartered accountants, you know, really, you know, want them to go back and manage their accounting and auditing practices. Overall, today when we look at the top three players in the accounting space, which do on-premise, they have more than 2.5 million paying subscribers between Tally, Busy and Marg. When we look at the mobile first cloud-based market, the number of subscribers, the paying subscribers there, for each of these players put together is just a fraction of this number today. When we look at the overall GST registered businesses only here in India, which is at about 12 million, all of these numbers again suggest that we have only...
For these software have only been able to reach a certain small percentage of the overall population. The way we are seeing usage of mobile, acceptability of cloud and increased regulations and need for compliance, which is being pushed by the government in the form of e-invoices, e-way bills, regular returns being filed. It is going to become almost mandatory for such businesses to go and adopt software to manage their entire accounting and compliance and reporting. The overall market in itself, according to us, is poised for growth. There is going to be growth coming in for all kinds of these offerings put together.
For us, by having multiple, let's say, presence across different kinds of products catering to different kinds of segments will mean that we would be able to address a larger chunk of this market. Given the fact that accounting is the, or accounting software is the only product which is used at scale by small and mid-sized businesses, and this is a global phenomenon, by the way, if you really go ahead and look at it. In India it is far more prominent. We think that this opportunity in itself allows us to go and reach to the widest possible SMB audience and therefore we are doubling down on this space. We have stated in the past also as to, you know, how strongly we feel about it.
In fact, given our experience of investing in Vyapar and what we've seen there, that actually also gave us a lot of confidence to go ahead and look at doing a full-fledged acquisition at this point in time rather than just simply taking the route of doing a minority investment and then look at taking a majority or doing an acquisition there. In fact, we feel absolutely confident about this entire space. We would want to go back and continue to build a world-class product and make sure that this expansion that we are going to see in terms of market in terms of the penetration of accounting software within the SMB space, we should be leading that change here in the next decade to come here.
That is something why we believe that we need to invest behind on-premise accounting, why we believe we need to have multiple investments in the accounting space, and also why we should go ahead and do an acquisition at this point in time, rather than only taking a minority investment route.
Sure. Okay. This explains. Second, you know, a related question is now you are almost done with, you know, 70% of the fundraise which you did. And pretty clear of, you know, going a little aggressive at this point of time. Any thoughts on how you guys are planning to monetize all these acquisitions? Because few quarters back, you sort of highlighted that, we'll see how these businesses evolve and then we'll see some sort of a monetization SaaS or monetization plans on the or on all these SaaS offerings. So any color on how you will price these? How will you club them in your current packages?
Go-to-market or how you are going to offer or sell to your clients all these new businesses, new offerings which you have acquired.
As I said, we take about a year to understand the businesses after we invest. Then we start to experiment with any kind of a cross-selling, any kind of a data sharing opportunity there. I think we have been doing some experiments with Vyapar. To some extent, those are showing some results. Nothing very significant numbers that I can share with you. In terms of Mobisy, Bizom we keep discussing what are the ways to further help each other. We haven't yet found anything very substantial that can be immediately plugged in or. All other investments are literally very small. I think we help them generate leads, but beyond that, they are still very small.
Okay, sure. Last one from my side. On the Legistify, so you have increased the stake. Again, a similar question, what I asked on the Busy and Vyapar. If you can provide, you know, what changed basically in this business and how do you see this very specific domain-specific business to evolve going forward? Yeah. That's it from my side. Thanks.
In this round, we've invested almost INR 7.5 crore into Legistify. Legistify is a litigation, tracking and the management software. Currently it's in a fairly early stage. In the terms of revenues, they would be approximately INR 15 lakh a month. They have more than 100 customers who are the enterprise customers. Looks like a kind of promising startup. They were looking at doing the fundraise for funding their expansion and growth. Since we believe in the story there, we decided to kind of, you know, support them. It's more of a convertible. The valuation and everything would be linked.
Otherwise, Pranav, please go ahead.
Thanks for the positive. I have two questions. Firstly, can you throw some color on, you know, the latest collection for this quarter? Considering, I think, you know, this quarter possibly, you know, the paying customer addition was decent compared to the last quarter. In that sense, I also want to know that, you know, how the churn has been for the silver monthly customer, which has been a key issue in terms of the paying customer addition. That's my first question. Secondly, I would also want to know on the cost side, how should we look at the cost going forward? Specifically, I mean, you know, that you had talked about steady-state cost coming to INR 100 crore per quarter.
We are at INR 110 crore. For FY 2023, should INR 110 crore-INR 120 crore be the base, or it could be even higher considering the manpower costs are going up. These are my two questions. Thank you.
Yeah. Pranav, to answer your questions, you asked about the collection, the customer growth, which was the churn, and about the cost. Starting with the question on collections. This quarter, we saw roughly around 24% growth in collection from customers. While you're right that the last quarter again, we did the similar number, which had a slightly higher percentage. However, collections, you know, we would recommend to look at more on a year-on-year basis as it would have little bit of a quarterly seasonal trends therein. In terms of—
Churn of the-
Customer, the growth and the churn overall on a net basis, we've been able to add 5,800 customers in this particular quarter, which had been higher than the previous quarters. It is a result of two things. Certainly, improvement in the acquisitions of the customers as well as reductions in the customer churn that we were seeing. So, this quarter churn was slightly better than, like, let's say, the previous quarter churn. We saw the churn stabilizing there. However, towards the end, because of again the COVID wave, there is a bit of an uncertainty about collection and customers. Overall, we saw things are pretty much improving and moving in the right direction.
Specifically about churn, I think, as the monthly customer addition has been muted over the last two years, there has been a relief on the churn side, and that's why the net customer addition is now showing up because we have been working to expand our new client acquisition in multiple directions with the channel sales. That has started to pick up a little bit. I think going forward also, we continue to believe that we will do better than 5,800 net addition at least for the next couple of quarters that I have visibility, direct visibility on.
In terms of collection, you know, last 15 days of December as well as the first 15 days of January, there has been some impact of the Omicron. Many of our employees are also not feeling well, and their family members. In general, I think this should be over by the month end, and February and March should be great months.
Okay.
On the cost side, coming back to your third question on the cost side. You know, as I said earlier, like if you see, the increase in the cost has primarily been in the manpower side. Manpower side, again, there are two factors which are playing out. One is, you know, as we look at investing behind the growth, you know, we are increasing the headcounts. This quarter we've added, roughly around 225 more employees than the previous quarter. We look forward to continue building up this manpower by, roughly around, 100 employees every quarter.
The second factor which is leading to the manpower increase is also the rerating of the salaries which have, you know, happened, all across as what we see in the entire sector. There has been a talent crunch and challenges on the talent retention. If the market correction is taking place, you know, we'll have to come up to that market correction because it's always advisable to retain the people rather than, you know, letting them go. We would, you know, see some impact there. On the cost base of INR 110 and for the next quarter as to what will it become, you know, we announced our increments in quarter four, so certainly there would be a further cost increase you would see in the coming quarter.
The exact number would be, like, let's say, difficult to guide, but certainly the cost would increase in the Q4 as compared to Q3 .
On the FY 2023 guidance, I would say that let this JFM quarter complete and the JFM quarter numbers will be able to give you the FY 2023 guidance on the cost. Yeah. However, if you look at from a margin standpoint, as we've guided that, you know, structurally the margin had been more around, you know, 38% barring one quarter here or there. We think we should be able to maintain those margins, you know, on a-
On a yearly basis.
On a yearly basis.
Okay, thank you. I mean, if I can just ask, you know, one follow-up question.
Sure.
I understand that, you know, typically Q4 has the bonus payouts and so on, and that's why, you know, we should see the cost increase. You know, other than that, I mean, you know, should we expect what we have seen the cost base, you know, how it has increased. I mean, for example, before COVID, annual cost increase was roughly 15-odd% considered as a baseline increase in the cost. I mean, is that a fair assessment?
That's where there is a difference, Pranav. You know, pre-COVID, yes, you are right that we were typically having an overall cost increase at 15%-18%, barring a few years where it would have gone to 20%, but it has been, you know, 17%-18% on an average. Now, this, since last two years, we haven't had, you know, we have, you know, had a depressed cost. Offices were closed, and we haven't given much of increment. We haven't hired many people.
People were not hired, yeah.
People were not hired. I think there is a replacement hiring that is happening of the people who left in the last 18 months. Now I think we are almost at the same level as pre-COVID. Now if you see, we have to hire for growth also. That is why. If you will compare that, this cost with FY 2021 cost, that won't be correct. Yes, if you look at the FY 2020 kind of cost, assuming 15%-18% growth over that.
Year-on-year.
For FY 2023 should be fine. FY 2023 versus 2022, I think the 15-20% growth in cost should be assumed.
Sure. Thank you very much. Very, very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Pranav. A reminder to participants, you know, once you raise hand, option, you know, please accept the invite for you to come on stage and ask question. So please make sure to accept the invitation as well. You know, thank you. Next question is from the line of, Ajay Modi. Ajay, please go ahead with the question.
Thank you, Ravi. My question, Dinesh, is twofold. First, on the growth. While you've been guiding of a quarterly new subscription addition of about 6,000-7,000 thousand, and you've met that kind of a mark for this quarter, the growth still seems to be low in terms of both new subscriber, new paying subscriber addition and the ARPU. Now, should I link it with the business inquiries because the business inquiries delivered also seem to be subdued for this quarter. Is it that we are kind of losing market share, or is it that our competitor is more competitive, which is why we are not able to kind of increase ARPUs or get more paying subscribers?
Is it because that we are not being able to add enough value to the free subscribers to convert them into paid? That is one question. The second question is on the acquisitions or the investments that we are making. Are we looking at these as a, as more of financial investments, passive investors? Or are we looking at kind of using a lot of these products for our existing subscribers, kind of adding value to our existing paid subscribers? In summary, what I'm trying to understand from these questions is that if I were to look at IndiaMART, say, three years, five years out, do I still look at IndiaMART as a company who's continuing to add subscribers and deliver inquiries, that's it?
Are we trying to move to a more value addition model like the Chinese counterparts?
Okay, let me first answer your second question. I think I remember that part better now. In terms of investment, you asked whether they are pure financial investments or strategic in nature, where we would be adding more value to either our customers or to their customers or to the entire ecosystem, or will it help in increasing our ARPU or their ARPU or reduce our churn or their churn. I think these are definitely not the pure financial investments. These are minority investments in the strategic spaces, and we will continue to find ways and means to upsell, cross-sell, partner, and create the partnership into more meaningful partnerships. These are not for a three to five years investment and sale purpose.
Now, as I have been guiding that, you know, we will probably take one or two minority investments every quarter and possibly one acquisition every year or so. That is what, if you really see, in mid-February last year, we raised funds and, you know, we have been able to deploy since then almost seven or eight investments so far in less than four completed quarters. As well as, we have been able to do one acquisition. I think, for a first timer, that's a pretty encouraging thing. Now, coming to the overall growth. I believe internet has a very long runway.
B2B has a very long runway. India has a very long runway, and SMEs have a very long runway. You know, we have seen this journey from 1996 till date. Every two, three years, we find some or the other dampener as well as some or the other rocket ship. It has been happening every now and then. Last two, three times there has been a GST, there has been demonetization, there has been you know, COVID. Some of them have a positive impact on digitization. Some of them have a negative impact on unorganized SMEs. I continue to believe that it is still a very, very large opportunity.
IndiaMART is very relevant, and with all these investments being made, we will become even more thread to fabric kind of a relationship with the Indian businesses. In terms of growth, as I said, that in the past, because of every nine months there has been one lockdown or one wave, we have not had a continuous addition into the customers. If we had 5,000 typical continuous, 5,000 to 6,000 typical continuous, we would have seen that growth. You know, you can see, two quarters we add, and then one quarter we have to sacrifice the growth. We cannot comment on that external world.
I think we are confident that our acquisition channel is working fine, our product is working fine, and we should be able to add that 6,000, 7,000, 5,000 customers every quarter. In terms of ARPU, whenever we have a customer growth, unique customer growth, more about 20%, the ARPU is about 5%. Whenever we have 10% customer growth, then the ARPU increases by 10%. Because the ARPU is nothing but the total revenue divided by the number of customers. If the customer base increases, because most of the customer base increases at the bottom of the pyramid at the lowest ARPU, and then over the period of time, they upgrade to the higher services. I don't see an ARPU increase suddenly from here.
If the entire next year is free of COVID, I'm pretty sure we would be able to get to 15%-20% customer growth and maybe very less ARPU growth from here on. Whenever we have the lesser customer growth, then we get the ARPU growth.
Can I just-
Uh-
Just to emphasize on this one. You know, when you look at the entire model, for us, the leading indicators for us would essentially be in terms of our collections and the deferred revenues. It is from the deferred revenue buckets that you will see that you know revenue actually getting recognized. Over the last few quarters now, we have seen almost like a mid 25% kind of growth both in our collections as well as in deferred revenues. As obviously we move quarters ahead, this increase in deferred revenue or collections will reflect into our revenues. The current growth in revenues obviously is dependent upon what we did, you know, four, five, six quarters ago, and therefore you may see that as subdued.
We definitely see that with the number of net customer adds getting back on track, with the economy opening up, obviously this Omicron thing is a blip that has happened for about a month or so. We think we are probably in a very, very good shape to take advantage of all the improved internet adoption that has happened because of COVID in this while. We should be looking at decent growth for us even going forward.
Brijesh, thank you for that. Dinesh Ji, thank you. Dinesh Ji, I'm with you. I understand that the space is very large. We are becoming more and more digitized. The only problem is that having seen so many internet companies, the problem is that, look, a lot of these internet businesses are in an exponential growth trajectory. Whereas IndiaMART as a company, we've been in a subdued growth environment right now. I can understand, look, the target market we which we cater to, which is SMEs, they have kind of been in a little bad shape for a while now. My question again is, look, are you satisfied?
I mean, is it that 6,000-7,000 thousand new customer addition and a little bit of ARPU hike is all that we should expect going forward? Or I understand, look, so many acquisitions that you're doing is definitely for some outcome. But having said that, whatever last fourth quarter acquisitions you've done kind of still does not reflect so far. So what I'm trying to just simply dig through is it because the base of 156,000 paying customers, is that base very large now from where growth of, say, north of 20% is going to be a little difficult?
If you look at our collections from customers, it is still. Last quarter it grew by 36%. This quarter it grew by 24%. I don't think. You know, if you look at the revenue from operations, that's a 20-month moving average. When collections were -10% and -50%, then also revenue was -2% and +10%. We are still growing at 30%, ±, you know, and we will—
No. Sir, you are, but your guidance always remains about 6,000-7,000 quarterly new subscriber numbers.
Now I'm guiding that, I think, we have been guiding at INR 5,000-INR 5,500. Now I'm guiding INR 6,000-INR 7,000.
Okay. When do we get to 9,000, 10,000 kind of a number?
That we will let you know next quarter or about quarter or two.
Okay, cool. Thank you. I will come back in the question queue if I have more.
Thank you. Reminder to all the participants, please raise hand option and please accept the invite to come on stage and ask question. Next question is line from the, you know, Antique Stock Broking. Pratik, please go ahead with the question.
Yeah. Good evening, sir. Can you hear me?
Yes, Pratik, we can hear you.
Yeah. I had a question. You know, one of your competitors mentioned about significant shift to monthly subscription plan from this quarter, while we are sort of, I think, what do we think about, like, change in like subscription mix or a period mix for us?
We keep doing that. I know sometimes it is 60/40, sometimes it is 40/60 depending upon when we see where we want to keep it and where we want to acquire it. I think for example when the COVID hit we didn't want to do a monthly and we could not have done monthly. A lot of people signing up remotely on a phone was much more difficult. Entire FY 2021 we hardly did monthly subscription at least for the first nine months. Then we opened up monthly big time.
I again remember that when 25th year of anniversary happened, then we ran an anniversary offer for 2-3 quarters at annual subscription being at 10% discount. I think that keeps on changing between 40/60 or 60/40. In terms of current client mix, currently we have only one-fourth customer of the total 160,000 customer. About 40,000 customers are in silver monthly. Rest all are in the annual or multiyear mode. As I've been saying that almost more than 50% of our customers are in more than one year subscribed.
Now, trend-wise, particularly related to industry shifting to monthly or your customers wanting to shift monthly because they are sort of feeling the crunch and that's why they want to pay less initially and then test.
If you remember, we had done some easing out on that side. Earlier, the monthly subscription used to come with INR 5,000 setup fee and then INR 3,000 a month inclusive of taxes. First, after the first wave or the first lockdown, we first tried to improve on that because the e-NACH had become far more easier by then. We removed the INR 5,000 initial setup fee and converted it into an advance EMI kind of a thing. INR 3,000 as an advance EMI. We also experimented with INR 3,000 plus tax, but we found that that becomes too expensive at INR 3,500 at the entry level.
Currently, the INR 5,000 rupee setup fee is gone and it's INR 3,000 rupees inclusive of tax. We get about 50/50 annual and monthly, plus or minus, depending upon any particular month when we run any promotion or something. I guess the new customer acquisition will continue to happen, you know, at almost 50/50 between monthly and annual subscription.
Question is on, like we have added like sales employees you mentioned. We continue to like sort of add them in coming quarters. You remember that earlier, like pre-COVID, we had a significant dependence on on-field employees to ramp up our business and we moved to online mode and channel partners, et cetera. This increased hiring now will also go towards this on-field sales and which will also impact your costs?
One is the, if you see at 147,000 customers, we had about 3,200 odd employees. We need employees for two things. One, for acquiring new customers and other for servicing the existing customer. Servicing the existing customer, only silver monthly and tier three customers are served over the telephone. All Tier 1 , Tier 2 , gold and platinum customers are served on, and annual customers are served by field sales force. There itself we needed more people to serve these additional 15,000-20,000 thousand customers and more customers being added every quarter. Also the outsourced sales have increased to, you know, this is in terms of crore, INR 62 crore or what?
Outsource 16.
We don't have numbers. I think in terms of new client acquisition, you are right that we are slowly changing the mix. In terms of earlier, we had almost 1,000+, our own people, on the field. Then about 300 people on the, in the telecall centers. Now we are planning in a manner that 40% would be our own, field sales force, 40% would be probably, you know, channel field sales force, and maybe 20% on the, telephone. That's the split that we are working towards. On an overall basis, the increase, customer acquisition would happen based upon the increase in the number of people in all the three channels.
Now, one last question on, do you still feel any need, based on industry trends of increasing your ad spend or you're not still looking at, incurring major ad spend to accelerate your growth in line with like a question mentioned earlier?
I think on the ad spend side, if you see our traffic from the pre-COVID levels have grown from you know 60 million per month to almost 90 million per month. That's you know digital adoption itself has done a 50% increase in terms of our traffic on an annual basis, if you see. I don't think there is a need for that. It's more of a trying to get the seller side. On the seller side ATL advertising is very expensive. I think you'd be investing more on the sales and distribution rather than working on the ad spend. Some brand ad spend might happen. As I have always been guiding we can keep that INR 20-25 crore budget for annual.
Whenever that will happen, we will let you know.
Sir, these are my questions.
Thank you, Pratik. Next question is from the line of Manish Gupta, Solidarity Advisors. Please go ahead with the question.
Yeah, hi, Dinesh. Just wanted to understand when should we start seeing more operating leverage in the model? Because, you know, in one of the slides you have shown your contribution at about 80%. Over time, you know, your technology headcount is not increasing much. The current margin profile, if we look at the business a couple of years out, why should the EBITDA margin not expand from here, from operating leverage?
Yeah. Last two years, you know, if you take pre-COVID level, EBITDA margin were 26%-28%. From 26%-28%, they are expanding to 38% in two years. Whether they will continue to expand, as you know, given that there has been a salary re-rating and we haven't had growth, so I think I'm guiding that for the next one year. Let us stabilize at 38%. After that, again, the same guidance will continue. If we grow our 20%, if our costs grow at 15%, we'll continue to see 1% per quarter margin expansion.
1% per quarter, you mean? Or you-
1% per quarter is what, you know, if you grow at 15%, if your expenses grow at 16% and if your revenue grows at 20%, you will see a 4% margin expansion every year.
Okay. Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you. Please, a reminder to the participants, please use raise hand option if you wish to ask question. Kindly accept the invitation as well. Thank you. Next question is from the line of Amit Chandra. Please go ahead.
Yes, sir. Can you hear me?
Yes, Amit.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Sir, thanks for the opportunity. My question is on the investments. I know you have explained a lot about the rationale behind the investment, but you know, just to have some you know, further clarity on this. You know, most of the investments are in the ERP space. You know, how are we actually looking to leverage these investments in our existing client base or our platinum clients? For example, how many of our platinum clients are actually using these softwares? Specifically, if you you know, want to talk about Busy. Is there a huge cross-sell opportunity in our existing client base where we can go and sell this software?
If you can also highlight, you know, what is the pricing model there in terms of, because it's an on-premise model. So whether we will charging it as a license or a SaaS, or a SaaS kind of a model, or it will be more of an, you know, an offering which will be more, like a bundled offering, right? In which you will, like bundle it along with the, yearly, subscription charges. So if you can throw some light on that.
Thank you for all these.
Amit, when we look at, you know, Busy as an accounting software, currently, the on-premise model that they have, they offer licensing model, whereby you can take it for a single user, for two users or for multiple users. The price typically would range anything between INR 8,000-INR 9,000 to about INR 35,000-INR 36,000. There are some of these users who would also, you know, go back and pay anything between INR 3,000-INR 5,000 every year to get the upgrades that are launched by them. Currently, about 25% of their customers essentially go for these services right now, and that adoption has happened over the last two years specifically.
Now, their current market share in the accounting software market and specifically for businesses that are GST registered, they have about 10% market share. That is also fundamentally more on the manufacturing and the wholesale trading side of it. A sample dipstick between our customer base and the Busy customer base suggests that there is a current overlap of anything between 15%-20% of the customers, of IndiaMART customers using Busy accounting software. We definitely see that in terms of the target segment, that is the existing overlap.
However, you know, as we go back and understand the operations of Busy, you know, far more deeply, over the next year or so, and we get a good hang on, you know, how they have been doing the overall sales distribution all these years, there is definitely an opportunity possible for us to look at bundling of these products. However, one important element that we must know is that at IndiaMART, these subscriptions are for, you know, recurring payments, typically. These are not one-time licensing fees. Therefore, when you look at closer bundling, we need to look at a subscription model rather than a one-time payment model.
Better clarity on it, of course, will emerge as we go and build a better understanding of the business and also look at how do we enable Busy in itself to look at a subscription model from the licensing fee by building up a cloud SaaS-based application. That is something which is, you know, a year or two away from where we are. Once we get into the business, I think that's the time when we would be able to give you better clarity on when would this be sort of possible for us to go back and do. The current, you know, spread of customers that is already there with Busy suggests that they are fundamentally very, very strong in north.
Almost about two-thirds of their business comes in from the northern states itself. About you know 25 odd % comes in from Maharashtra. There is a lot of open space available in south in east in the central part of the country where in fact their presence is very very minimal currently. I think that will of course be one of our priorities to go and use these white spaces to increase the overall customer base there.
If you see there, you know, their revenues until pre-GST were about, you know, INR 10-20 crores. It is only post-GST that they reached to the INR 30-40 crores. Their ability to spend massively on a sales force or a distribution network was also limited. I think they have done a very good job making a product which is very stable and getting up to INR 2 lakh customer base. I believe now we are a INR 1,000 crore company.
I think we have a lot more ability and lot more cash behind us to be able to expand the sales force, whether it is the dealer distribution sales force or whether it is a new sales force or whether it is our existing sales force. We all know that sales has a lagging effect. Somebody with limited capital has that limited ability to press the pedal on the sales. We have seen multiple times how investing in sales can have a lagging effect on subscription businesses. I think next nine months, I would say that we would not go and disturb the business. We would just try and digest the business, understand the management, understand the product, make it a stable smooth transitioning.
We would like to experiment with sales first and then going to mobile and going to cloud and doing other things. I think it will be year one, year two, year three kind of a thing. Let's look at a five-year, 10-year horizon on this rather than looking at three quarters, five quarters.
Okay, sir. Fair enough. Sir, also, you know, the objective behind acquiring companies earlier was to increase our value-added services, maybe in terms of increasing more focus on the logistics, warehousing. You know, other ancillary services which actually increases the ROI or the transactional capability for a seller. What is the progress on that side? Why we are not acquiring or investing in, you know, like in that area? You know, which can actually give a boost to our existing MSME penetration, basically.
We are investing. In the current financial year alone, you know, April 2021 we invested in Shipway, March 2021 we acquired-
These are very small investments. I'm talking about the kind of, you know, steps you are taking in Busy, like a big company and, you know, investing with full, you know, like, confidence, you know. That kind of investment in those particular areas, basically.
After investing for two years, we have been able to make this courage to do a bigger investment. Let's digest this one and then we will do one acquisition a year over the you know, as I've been guiding, if we can do one acquisition a year, let's first for the next three years, that should be our you know, target. Then we look at you know, there are companies in the world who do one acquisition every month.
Yeah, true. No, so thanks, and, you know, all the best for the future. Thanks. Bye.
Thank you.
Thank you, Amit. Next question is from Kotak Securities. Sumit, are you there?
Yep. I just wanted to know how is the competitive intensity and are we losing market share?
I haven't seen anything like that. You know, I haven't found any customer saying that I'm going to XYZ. You know, even recent many a times I think some of the research reports that you guys publish have done customer diligences or customer voices, and there has been no overlaps. You know, and I've highlighted this earlier also. If the average order value on a B2C marketplace like Amazon or a Flipkart is $10-$15 versus the average order value on a B2B like grocery marketplaces are like $50-$60. The average order value on Pay with IndiaMART that we see is around $400-$500.
Pay with IndiaMART only can use for lower transaction, lower value transaction, not for high value transaction. I mean, if you see, say one of our categories, say diesel generators. Now, who's who of the customer brands that you see, and non-brands also are our customers. And their average order values will run into, you know, upwards of INR 50,000, anywhere up to INR 5 lakh, INR 10 lakh. I guess we haven't yet found any competitive pressure.
How we should see the growth trajectory going forward from here for next two or three years?
As I said, you know, if this kind of, you know, every nine months some kind of a lockdown or a wave does not happen, I think we should be good at anywhere between 20%-30% growth rate.
Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Sumit. Due to time constraint, that was, you know, the last question. With this we come to the end of our Q and A session. Now I hand over the call to the management for their closing remarks.
Thank you very much, everybody, for joining our Q3 FY 2022 conference call. We have tried to address all your queries. In case you have any more questions or follow-up questions, you can please contact our investor relations department. Now Kushal is full-time available to handle all your queries in much more detail. Thank you very much. Have a nice day, and look forward to a great quarter again.
Great. Thank you, everyone. On behalf of IndiaMART, that concludes this webinar. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you.
Thank you.