Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Avijit Vikram, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd, I welcome you all to the company's Q2 FY26 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 after the presentation concludes. Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Dinesh Agarwal, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brijesh Agrawal, Full-time Director, Mr. Jitin Diwan, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Prateek Chandra, Chief Strategy Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's conference call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve risk and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number 3 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.
Thank you. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to IndiaMART's second quarter FY26 earnings call. We have circulated our earnings presentation, which is available on our website as well as the stock exchange's website. We are sure you would have gone through the presentation and would be happy to take any questions afterward. IndiaMART has delivered a consolidated revenue from operations at INR 391 crore in Q2, representing year-on-year growth of 12%, and collections from the customers have grown to INR 406 crore, representing year-on-year growth of 14%. Deferred revenue grew to INR 1,750 crore, representing year-on-year growth of 18%. In the second quarter, our unique business inquiries were 31 million, representing year-on-year growth of 12%. The total number of paying suppliers stood at 2,022,000. Net additions for the quarter were around 2,800.
This is excluding a one-time benefit of around 1,200 net additions during the quarter due to simplification of the onboarding process for new silver paying subscribers. The net paying supplier addition in Q2 was actually 3,951, but the normalized would be considered at 2,800. Our platinum and gold customers, which constitute approximately 50% of our customer base and more than 75% of the revenue, continue to have very good upsell and retention rates. We continue to focus on improving the platform by creating a better user experience for both buyers and suppliers, improving how users engage and converse, delivering better customer servicing, and building a trusted platform. We are implementing a growing range of AI use cases, which is strengthening our platform and product offering. Our focus remains on raising the bar on quality and servicing our customers better, which will create long-term value for our stockholders.
Now, I will hand over the call to Brijesh to update about Busy Infotech. Thank you and over to you, Brijesh.
Hi, good evening. Busy has done a billing of about INR 38 crore in Q2. The normalized year-on-year growth rate, which excludes the impact of change in the payout structure for partners, is at 57%. The revenue from operations for Q2 is around INR 29 crore, and the deferred revenue stands at about INR 111 crore. This represents a year-on-year growth of 46% and 63% respectively on a normalized basis. The cash flow from operations for Q2 was INR 11 crore. During this quarter, we sold 12,000 new licenses, taking the total count of licenses sold to 4,021,000. Moving forward, we are committed to enhancing the overall product experience and continue to build the growth momentum in the business. With this, I would hand over the call to Jitin to take it further from there.
Thank you, Brijesh, sir. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you through the financial performance for the quarter ending September 2025. Consolidated collection from customers was INR 406 crore in the quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 14%. IndiaMART's standard on collection from customers for the quarter was INR 365 crore, registering year-on-year growth of 8%. Consolidated deferred revenue stood at INR 1,750 crore, increase of 18% by and by ratio. Consolidated revenue from operations was INR 391 crore, registering a year-on-year growth of 12%, and consolidated EBITDA was INR 130 crore, representing a margin of 33%. In Q2, we recorded a decline in other income from INR 92 crore in the previous quarter to INR 10 crore in this quarter, primarily due to the mark-to-market losses on our treasury portfolio, owing to a significant increase in bond yields during the quarter.
Consolidated net profit for the quarter was INR 83 crore, and consolidated cash generated from operations was INR 114 crore. Cash and treasury balance stood at INR 2,874 crore as on September 30, 2025. Thank you very much, and now we are ready to take questions.
We will now begin the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question to the panelists, kindly raise your hand and allow camera and microphone access. Alternatively, you may type your questions on the chat menu, and we will revert on it. Please restrict to two questions so that we may be able to address questions from all the participants. We will wait for a few seconds while the question queue assembles.
First question is from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Anmol, please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.
Anmol, we are not able to hear you.
Yeah, hi, am I audible now?
Yeah, you are audible. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Firstly, just wanted to understand, when you say that 1.2 thousand additions is because of a simplification of onboarding process, what does this mean exactly?
See, what used to happen earlier is that our sales team will go and acquire the customer, means collect the advance payment or the NADJ registration done. Then we would ask them to wait for two reasons. One, wait for their payment clearance. The second, wait for their GST verification that they are a legitimate GST-verified supplier or not. We also took that opportunity to build, to improve their catalog or the mini website, microsite on the internet, which we call MDC, Mini Dynamic Catalog. Now, given the technology, we are able to verify the GST of any supplier on the go. In fact, many of the suppliers are pre-verified on GST. We said that most of our payments are also online. 80% of the payments are now online.
I think we initially did a pilot in Delhi NCR for a couple of months, and after no problems, we now immediately activate the customer to be live. Earlier, what was taking three to five, seven days process has now become zero. With that change, earlier, we used to have a work in progress or the orders in progress, order book of 1,200-odd customers, which will get rolled over. Now, with this immediate activation, that order book was immediately filled so that there is no rolled over order book that is going to the next quarter. That is the additional gain that we have gained. Yeah, that is the additional one-time gain that we have found. That is what is looking like a 4,000 customer addition. However, as you know, many of those orders actually bounced in the payment and failed in the GST or failed to complete there.
I think that will result into an immediate first month or second month churn. Earlier, those customers were not counted as a, and they were refunded automatically, or their money was not received. Now, they will be counted as a customer, but they will be also counted in the churn. That's why there's a one-time benefit of about 1,200 customers, but the overall gross addition and net churn, net churn will remain the same. Hope that answers.
Yeah, very clear, sir. Also, sir, wanted to understand going ahead, how should we think about the paid supplier addition from an overall perspective? Are we seeing any reduction in the churn process in the last three months? Any steps that we have taken with respect to the same?
Yes, the steps I have already told, and I will tell you again. The one we have done is reduce the competition or reduce the number of sellers being introduced per buyer so that it is good for buyer and supplier both. As I told, over the last five, seven years, the supplier responsiveness has become far more better. Earlier, when we were introducing six, seven suppliers to one buyer, they were likely to get three responses. Now, the supplier responsiveness has gone as high as 70%, 80%. It may be enough to introduce only four or five suppliers. It increases the competition for the suppliers because the suppliers were complaining largely that earlier, I used to get maturity. Now, I'm getting difficulty in getting maturity. The second thing that we did was the quality of inquiry.
Earlier, when we were asking buyers, we were not asking buyers to fulfill a lot of details. With category-based management, our ability to know what to ask and our confidence has gone up that we can ask two, three questions to the buyer. That helps in two things. One, the intent of buyer is very, very clear because he has filled at least two, three things apart from his phone number and OTP. He has also filled quantity, and he's also filled some specification. Secondly, it also helps the supplier very much that when they see the RFQ, they see the RFQ earlier. If they were seeing 50%, 60% of the RFQs having quantity or having specification, now they are seeing 80%, 90% of the RFQs having quantity and having specification. That helps the suppliers choose the correct kind of RFQs and correct kind of inquiry.
The third one was localization. Earlier, we were giving mostly all India-based searches. Now, we are giving more city-preferred localized searches. As you would have seen on Google and every place else, the results are localized for you. The same process we have started to do for IndiaMART also. All this has resulted in a better NPS from the supplier side on the leading indicators. Leading indicators mean now they are happier with the quality of inquiries. They are happier with the locational irrelevancy. We have seen an improved query relevancy feedback. However, it has not yet resulted into any significant movement in the churn. Silver customers continue to have an elevated churn. Monthly customers are having about 7%. Annual customers, silver customers are about 4%. Gold and platinum continues to be healthy at about 1%.
I am not able to give you any guidance on the paid customer addition even going forward.
Understood. Understood. One last thing, just wanted to understand how has our performance marketing spends moved during the quarter?
That's good. Done well. If you really see the unique business inquiry count, the unique business inquiries have grown from immediate past quarter 29- 31. If I see the year-on-year, that has grown by 12-13%. Half of that is actually coming from the organic, and half of this is coming from the performance marketing. Performance marketing is currently being done in the top 10,000-odd categories. We are still trying to optimize because in certain categories, we are not able to get any share. In certain categories, we are getting too much. We are trying to optimize, but I think the initial results are very good. I think the framework has been settled. We will continue to, as I said, our initial budget is about INR 8-10 crore per quarter, and we'll continue to work to spend on that side.
Should we assume that INR 8 to 10 crore is something which is continuing in this quarter as well?
Yeah. The current quarter was about INR 6 crore, and last quarter was also about INR 6 crore. This quarter, slightly, the results are better because our optimizations have gone better.
Okay. Okay. Sure, sir. Thank you. I'll join back in the queue. That's it from my end.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Kunal from Benjamin T Advisors. Kunal, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hello?
Yeah. Yes, Kunal. We are.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I had two questions. One was on the collection numbers, collection growth, and the deferred revenue growth. If you look at the collection growth, it is closer to 7-8%, and deferred revenue growth is closer to 15-18%. How does one read into these numbers? How do we interpret the difference between collection growth and the deferred revenue growth?
There is a table in the standalone financials to go in detail, not here in the detailed financials. This is a proper reconciliation table in the standalone financials. There's a proper reconciliation table in the standalone financials, not in the investor presentation. You can see there what was the opening deferred revenue, what is the collection, how much the revenue recognized, how much is the closing deferred revenue, and what is the current and non-current of that. That is there in the standalone financials. I don't remember the note number.
One other question was when we look at the traffic growth on the platform, right? It was 3% this quarter. Last quarter, it was closer to 7%. How does one read into this number, and what are the steps that we have taken to improve this traffic growth? Because ultimately, if you were to think about it, traffic growth would be the lead indicator in terms of our growth coming back, right?
Yeah, yeah. I was about to touch this next quarter. I'm going to drop this KPI altogether because this KPI has become very unreliable in the days of web crawling and scraping and agentic and all of this. The traffic has become really hard even for Google Analytics to differentiate between the user traffic and differentiate between bot traffic or scraping traffic or crawling traffic. Earlier, it was quite, you know, almost a near monopoly of Google. It was very easy to identify which are the Google crawlers and which are the Yahoo crawlers or which are the Bing crawlers. We would typically ban the Russian and Chinese crawlers, Yandex, and others. Now, everybody, including Meta, including ChatGPT, including Grok, including many Alibaba Queen and DeepSeek, they're all crawling the entire internet very, very heavily.
The second part is now every little time, every time you say think harder on the or the think mode on the ChatGPT, it goes and brings 100 pages and gives you some 20 lines answer. Those 100 pages are again very hard to differentiate because there is no established system of identifying which particular place that query is coming from, whether it is coming from Perplexity through ChatGPT or, I mean, which model, which front end. Now, with the agentic, browser agentic, the Jira browser and the comment browser and all of this, actually, the crawling will happen directly from the customer's end. Customer's IP will come. It is very hard to now say that this traffic is user traffic and this traffic is machine traffic. We will probably have to drop this KPI from the top and look at only the business inquiries received or converted or calls.
We'll find some alternate, better KPI where I can differentiate between the human traffic and machine traffic.
Thank you. One last question if I can ask is, we have improved a lot of things in the last four, five quarters. When we look at the conversion numbers in terms of unique inquiries versus delivered, there's reasonable improvement there. When you look at the supplier churn on the server level, it continues to be elevated. How do you as a management team think about this? Is it also linked to the overall economy going through a tough period? What are the attributes apart from IndiaMART, if you like? What are the things that we should think when you've been trying so hard on these, improving the user experience, making it more relevant to them? Still, the problematic silver paying subscribers continue to be under stress.
I would say we are too small to be even affected by economic downturn. We may get some positive tailwinds when the economy is doing very, very well. We are too small to be even affected by economy unless something very bad happens, like COVID or a demonetization or something like that. Otherwise, these kinds of typical economic slowdowns or, I mean, 1%, 2% GDP slowdown or up, that should not be a matter of importance for a 2% penetration or 3% penetration. Now, coming to the working hard, I think we keep working hard, and one fine day, we find something smart. You never know when that is. That is what we are trying to find, all of us together, and we have to wait for that moment to come.
There was a definite tailwind, which was the mobile internet, which started around 2013, 2014, got a very good shot in the arm at around 2016 end when you came in, and also in 2020 when the lockdown happened. Effectively, there was a big tailwind. Now, there are almost 900 million internet users in India, and there is not much left on that side. Whatever was the natural trade tailwind of that every internet company, that is kind of tapering. Whatever new tailwind will come will be because of the agentic or because of the AI-based things, because now we have got a distribution which is far more wide. Earlier, WhatsApp was a communication channel, but now WhatsApp could be a discovery channel. Earlier, ChatGPT was a chat channel or a Wikipedia kind of information channel. Now, it could be a discovery channel.
There may be more new channels that will come in. I think the natural growth on the buyer side will come in either from there or there is something that we need to fix within our ecosystem, and we continue to work hard to find that one particular lever.
Okay, sure. Thank you. All the best.
We have a question from the chat menu. The question is from Mr. Manjit Buhariya. You have consistently explained why you believe this is a large addressable market from a paying supplier standpoint, and growth here will come back to healthy levels when the current issues are fixed. What factors or data points will make you change your mind on this hypothesis and say that the TAM is not large enough to grow net paying suppliers, at least in high single digits? Any implications of that changed view on our marketing cost?
I mean, you are saying that if these 15 million GST suppliers come down to 7.5 million, I will reduce my final supplier that I should be targeting. As long as there are 15, 20 million good SMEs, and as long as they are growing at 8-10% nominal growth, I don't think that a 5%, 10% kind of penetration should be an unrealistic number. I don't know what will change my mind that this will not increase.
We can take the next question with us.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Nikhil Chaudhary from Nawama. Nikhil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. First question on subscriber addition. The 2.8K addition, while being close to our range, was still highest in the last two years. I just want to understand, was it normal change we see quarterly, or did we see some change in, let's say, gross addition or some decline in churn?
Not much. I think it is that 2,500 plus minus a couple of hundred here and there, certain working days, certain working non-days in the quarter. That's about it. Nothing else.
Got it, sir. Second one, on the churn side, especially on monthly churn, sir, any reason we are not seeing any reduction in churn? Second, along with this question, I think we have noticed you have increased the price of silver subscriber plan. Any logic behind why to increase silver pricing at a time when the churn is so high?
The same question was asked to us in 2022 or 2023 also. In 2019, the silver pricing was INR 3,000 per month and INR 30,000 per year. Today, we are in 2025. That's like six years ago. In six years, even at whatever price rise that you factor in, this has to be factored in because, as I said, while these are the building blocks for our, or while these are the bottom of the pyramid customers, which end up becoming gold and platinum tomorrow, trying to acquire them at a more cheaper rate and a more cheaper rate could be a race to the bottom because a lot of these customers also have which kind of customer you want to acquire, what size of customer you want to acquire. It's not value at this price or value at that price.
It's either there is value or there is no value. Our thought is that a simple 10% kind of a price rise every second year should be applicable, whether or not, I mean, that's a part of the inflation, I guess.
Got it, sir. Got it, sir. Just one clarity on the investment part. Last quarter, we highlighted we want to increase the investment from INR 6 crore to INR 10 crore, but we maintained it to INR 6 crore. Any logic here? Also, was there some ESOP announcement, and can you quantify it?
Yeah, what was the first question? What was that?
Market.
Marketing was, I always told that it is about INR 10 crore per quarter. I don't know. It was actually done at INR 6 crore last quarter, but I said that my budget is about up to INR 6-10 crore per quarter. On the ESOP front, Jitin can give you the details. Our last ESOP was expiring sometime this January, I guess.
December, yeah.
We came up with a new ESOP policy, a new ESOP.
Grant.
Grant.
Correct.
In the beginning of the year, as Jitin mentioned, because the last policy was expiring, we have renewed our ESOP policy, and we have given the grants for about INR 90 crore. The expense for that has started coming in Q1 and Q2.
Got it. That's it from my side. Thank you. Good luck.
Thank you. We request participants to kindly raise their hand if they want to ask questions to the panelists. Next question is from the line of Shon Javar. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah, hi. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible. Yes, please go ahead. You're audible.
Yeah, there was some issue here. It asked me to rejoin. I'm audible, right?
Yeah, yeah, you're audible.
Thank you for taking my question. My first question was, our ARPU of top 1% has now increased from INR 600,000 in FY2021 to nearly INR 1,100,000 now, right? I wanted to understand, this growth is fairly very nice over the years. How much of it is due to volume increase of RFQs and what % would be due to the price hikes that we have taken over the years?
The top 1% is mostly price hike because there is nothing to do with volume. In FY2021, we had 147,000 customers. The top 1% would account for about 1,500 customers. Now that we have 220,000 customers, the top 1% is about 2,200 customers. One is the 50% growth has come in from that. The ARPU growth, as you said, is mostly from the price hike or from the differential pricing that we give to the and from the product that is, you know, you can target multiple cities and you can target multiple keywords. People have taken multiple keywords and multiple cities. Some of it came from the medium enterprises and large enterprises also.
Got it, sir. What is your sense on our ability to further increase this? Over the years, it has increased quite decently.
Yeah, I guess on the enterprise side, it can increase quite a bit because their ability to target and their ability to serve larger markets, especially in the high-value segments. If you go to our enterprise section, you will find different. If you go to different quarterly presentation, you will find different, different industries being focused here. These kind of customers have the marketing budgets running into crores as well as the ability to serve a larger customer base because of their dealer distribution network or because of their distribution ability. I guess there is a lot more possible. Probably we are yet to learn how to do that better from the product-market fit side also and from the sales and servicing point of view also. You can see different.
If you go to this section on IndiaMART and About Us, you will find multiple such industries where there are large customers exist. Then comes the medium size of the customers because now MSME definition, as per MSME definition, the medium size of the customer is INR 100 crore to INR 500 crore.
Got it, sir. My second question was, our marketing and selling cost is at INR 60 crore this quarter. How do we see that going forward? What % are we expecting it to increase?
It should remain the same as a percentage of revenue. It should not, like, as we said, that we have done the performance marketing of INR 6 crore and there's a budget of INR 10 crore. We'll see how we optimize it. That may increase, so that may have a change of another 1%. Otherwise, it should remain the same.
Basically, around 16% to 18% of revenues is what our selling and marketing cost would be?
Yeah, correct.
Let me start.
If you see, before COVID, it was 19%. During COVID, let's forget about it. When we started building up again, it went as high as 20%. That was FY2023 because we suddenly hired so many people. It has typically hovered at 19% pre-COVID, and I think 18%, 17% this. Last year, we did not because we were trying to see how to work on the churn numbers before adding the gross. As per the salaries and as per the normal increase, I think 17%, 18% is fair to assume.
Sure, sir. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much and all the best. Happy Diwali to the team.
Thank you. Thank you. Same to you.
We have a question from the chat menu. The question is from Mr. Aman Thadani. Net adds have remained in the 1,000- 2,000 range for several quarters as we intentionally slowed gross additions to fix churn. Understood and aligned here. The question is, given that the silver funnel is weak and there is 1% natural churn per month in platinum and gold, at what point will the customer count in platinum and gold start shrinking?
At 1% churn, because typically there is a natural flow coming from silver and gold to the platinum side, I don't see that shrinking. If the silver customer growth remains muted, platinum would be the last to start shrinking.
Okay, we can continue with us.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Rahul Jain from Dholat Capital. Rahul, please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.
Rahul, please go ahead. Your voice is breaking, Rahul.
Hello?
Yeah, please go ahead.
It seems there is an audio.
Yeah, sorry for that.
Basically, we needed to hello.
Yeah, Rahul, please just restart the question so you're audible now.
Looks like he's on the road.
Yeah, my question was related to hello.
Yes, please, yeah.
Sorry for the trouble. What I was trying to understand is that with all this long-enduring process that we have gone through in terms of optimizing various aspects of the business to ensure the subscriber addition aspect of it, and meanwhile, scaling up on the ARPU on the existing base. With this learning, your thought process in terms of what is the right scalability in terms of the subscriber and your thought process is what is the ideal ARPU in this business? Has that changed in the last three years, the thought process that this is a far less volume game but more an ARPU game? Do you think the opportunity remains the same?
No, to both sides, I know that is why if you go to the customer pyramid slide, you will see there are both the aspects to the business. While the silver and base, whether it is monthly or annual, they bring bulk of the customer and they bring the pipeline to the gold and platinum. If you see the gold platinum customer base, which is just the top 10%, 15%, that accounts for 50%, 60%. I am giving you gold plus platinum data that gold plus platinum put together is 50% of the customer base accounting for 75% of the revenue. Effectively, the rest 75% of the customer base is actually accounting for the low ARPU base. It is not either or game. You have to work on both sides, one for the leadership, the other for the monetization and profitability.
Right. With this thing, what looks like a best case, a three-year scenario for us from a going forward perspective? I know you don't go for a guidance at this point, but maybe a longer period goal which you could set by because you would assume a lot of this thing would get rectified over the next few quarters.
Yeah, I mean, we'll continue to work. As soon as we have a better grip on the situation, we'll start giving guidance. Currently, we best effort basis, we continue to deliver what is delivered.
What should be the sustainable ARPU potential on the current base? Of course, if there's a faster.
I can talk about the historical ARPU. Historically, ARPU has grown from INR 32,000 in FY2017 to pre-COVID about INR 42,000. Immediately post-COVID, as early as FY2024, it was INR 53,000 and now running at INR 60,000, 65,000. I guess ARPU has grown at 7%, 8% CAGR over the last many, many years. We think that that kind of an ARPU growth should be typically possible. You know, 6%- 8% of the ARPU growth should be typically possible.
Right. Right. So 6% to 8%, when you talk about the long average, it is a period when you have good net addition also, which is actually diluted to your ARPU.
In this period, there have been periods. For example, FY2021 and FY2022, the entire two years, we didn't have any net addition. Similarly, FY2024 and FY2025, we didn't have much of net addition. This is a very, very long term, which includes all kinds of cycles.
Right. Right. Thank you. That's it from my side.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Saurav Saula. Saurav, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah, am I audible?
Yes, you're audible.
Yeah. I had a bookkeeping question with respect to our general and admin expense in a functional P&L that has sequentially increased by around INR 20 crore from INR 25 crore to INR 44 crore. Is there any one-off in that, and what kind of sustainable number would be for this expense?
Yeah.
Thank you for your question. You're right. There is a one-off of fair valuation loss, which we have taken on one of our investments this time for about INR 16 crore. That is why that is looking swell. Other than that, there is no reason to believe that should increase from the normal number, which we have been reporting.
In the reported financials, it would be part of your other income, right?
Not other income, it will be under expenses only, above EBITDA.
Also, our other income has declined sequentially QOQ in the reported results. What is the reason for that?
Just before that, while that G&A number includes one-off in the standalone, in the consolidated numbers, if you see, there will not be any impact of that because on a monthly and quarterly basis, we take the share in loss for all of our share in loss and profits for all of our investments. Coming to your point of other income, as I explained in the beginning, in this quarter, there is a mark-to-market losses on our treasury portfolio because the bond yields had increased. That is why you're seeing dip in the other income. The way to look at this is usually on a little longer basis. If you see on a yearly basis or on a half-yearly basis, that should stay in the range of the yield of like 6% to 6.5% to 7.5% of what actually treasury income what we do.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, thank you.
We have a question from the chat menu. The question is from Mr. Amrish Kakkar. Busy has added 12,000 licenses in each of the last two quarters versus 8,000 per quarter previously. How should we think about the longer-term growth in licenses as our investments begin to pay off?
In terms of the licenses being sold, as I have mentioned earlier, the improvement on the new activations has been consistently happening. We expect that this momentum should continue. However, we should factor in that in the accounting software business, Q4 and Q1 generally would see a higher demand for accounting software because at that time, people find it convenient to change their accounting software, whereas Q2 and Q3 generally tend to be a little subdued. Therefore, even going forward, we think that we would be in line with the kind of growth we've been seeing over the last couple of years in terms of new activations. That is how I would try to put it here.
Sure, we may continue with this.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Nikhil Chaudhari. Nikhil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to ask a follow-up question. Just one clarity, a couple of questions. First, on the price increase of INR 3,000, especially for silver monthly, did we see some slowdown in silver subscriber addition after the price increase, or was it at a normalized level?
Yeah, of course, because once we announced the price, we announced ahead of the time. We got some of the sales where the proposals were already sent. We got some of the sales pre the price, and probably this particular price would have some impact on the gross additions in the next one or two quarters. I don't see that to be a major change beyond one or two quarters. There would be a slight dip, but I would say that it's worth the increase in the price.
Got it, sir. Second, just want some clarity on your comment that we saw some improvement on ROI of the marketing spend compared to last quarter. Can you quantify what were the improvements we saw in this quarter versus last quarter?
If you see the unique business inquiries, on the similar spend in the last quarter, we got 29 million inquiries. On the similar spend, we got 31 million unique business inquiries.
Okay, it could be organic as well, right?
That's why I'm saying you can assume 50% organic and 50% driven by the advertising effort.
Got it, sir. Yeah, that's it from my side. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Shion Gupta. Shion, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question. Shion, please go ahead.
Yeah, am I audible?
Yes, you are. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good evening. I just had a couple of questions. The first one was that, see, when we are attacking our churn problem, and in a way, if I zone out, it's more like we are trying different interventions and experiments to see what works. From your perspective, isn't AI a big, and with the way AI is coming through, isn't that a big lever for you to actually accelerate the number of experiments and the velocity of them to actually shrink the time from henceforth to solve this problem? Just your view on this.
Very good. I think two, three things come immediately. As early as last month, we had a complete AI-related full day with the board. There are three things that we have found apart from what I have been talking and what you can see in my annual reports, that other AI initiatives that I have been talking. One, clearly emerging is the call automation or AI-based voice bots. They have become as good as humans in terms of sounding natural and understanding the other party's voice. With the AI, with the tooling, with the context engineering, I think they can surpass humans in less than one year in terms of their ability to handle complex queries and their ability to answer complex queries and also fix the problems. I think we are working very quickly.
We have already, as we speak, our AI bots could be handling as high as 100,000 calls per day by the beginning of January 1. They are already doing almost 10,000 to 20,000 calls per day. The second part is this whole voice part has two things. One is the voice bot, where they can talk. The second is the call analytics. There is a huge amount of calling between the customer and between us that happens, and between the buyer and supplier that happens, and between the buyer and us that happens. That entire triangle, almost 3 million calls per month happens. That's a black box because you can always say that we can do audit, you can listen to the calls, but it's almost impossible to listen to millions of the calls and make sense out of it.
I think we are working in that direction to improve that. That's on the call side. Now, coming to the cataloging improvement, categorization improvement, and categorization expertise, a lot of these call analytics will come handy, and the PDF analysis will come handy to improve these items where it can dramatically improve the cataloging and discovery and those kinds of things, the things that we have built harder over many, many years. I think that has become easier. That also lowers the entry barrier for others. At the same time, it gives a lot more advantage to a player like us. You are right. These three things should help, and many more will emerge in times to come. I hope that answers your question.
Yes, that was helpful. The second question was that you did mention about the pollution from the bots in the incoming traffic. Related to that, does that also pose a worry from a perspective of data being scraped and poached and, in a way, kind of dilute that as a mode that the platform has?
Yeah. There are two, three, four kinds of data. Half the data is just the name, address. Some of the data is phone number and email, and some of the data is the catalog. That's one part of this, which is the data radar. Phone and email, we don't provide anywhere on the web, so hard to scrape. Yes, from other sources, one can always get something. The second part of the network effect or the barriers to entry is the insight that we have on which supplier likes what, despite the fact that he has displayed a lot more products. What he likes to deal in, which categories he deals most, and which categories with cities he deals most, what kind of quantities and what kind of price points he deals most, that information is nowhere scrapable or available to any bot or any AI agent.
The third part is the paying customer service that we have built, which has brought the buyer and supplier both, creating a network effect where there are 30 million unique business inquiries every quarter. That's about 10 million business inquiries every month. Similarly, there are about 200,000 paying customers. These are the three modes. Out of that, the only first one, I mean, that was always scrapable anyway. The scraping has become easier, but it was always scrapable.
Got it. Got it. My last question, sir, would be that, from my understanding, there is a lot of value in the platform when it comes to somebody searching for a long tail of goods or products that they use in their own supply chains. Over the years, have you seen the platform becoming a larger part of the user supply chains? Maybe if this answer you can give from a gold guy into a platinum guy, if you have any cues that IndiaMART-sourced leads are becoming a larger part of their build purchase or their supply chain operations.
I didn't understand, Shivam. I didn't understand.
What I was trying to say is that, let's say there is a supplier, let's say a Platinum customer, who is consuming certain RFQs, and he's, let's say, sourcing 10% of his incoming supply from IndiaMART. Over the years, as his ARPU continues to pay you more, there will be a natural growth in his business, which is allowing him to pay this. Also, is there a natural increase of wallet share in the fact that he's sourcing more of his supply chains from IndiaMART's platform? Maybe I know you don't have exact data on this, but any heuristics, if you have or any color, you could share. It's a relevance question that effectively I'm trying to ask for the Gold and Platinum customers.
Yeah. Typically, we found that the people who are responsible for doing the sourcing versus the people who are responsible for doing the marketing or lead generation for the customers, even in very, very small businesses, are a very, very different set of people. The people who work like a telesales girl or a telesales boy or even a field salesperson, or there's a Sales Manager, and then there's a Factory Manager or there's a Procurement Manager. They are almost like two very different personalities and two very different. However, the owner does deal with both of the guys, but it is the two different ones. It is hard for me to even decipher that the same company purchase person is also.
It is far easier for me to identify a Purchase Manager from an Indian Oil or from a Reliance Industries or from a Tata Motors because their email ID clearly reveals that he's from Tata Motors. From a small company, it is difficult. I've taken your suggestion and will work on it.
Thank you, sir. All the best and wish you all a very happy Diwali. Thank you.
Very, very happy Diwali to you. Let me.
Yes.
Please continue.
Thank you, everyone. This was the last question for today. I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Dinesh Agarwal for his concluding remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for your quarter two FY26 conference call. We have tried to address your queries in the time available. If you still have any questions, please feel free to contact our Investor Relations team, and they'll be happy to arrange for any answers. Thank you very much. Good evening and have a very, very happy Diwali and safe Diwali.
On behalf of IndiaMART, we thank everyone for joining us on this webinar. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.