IndiaMART InterMESH Limited (NSE:INDIAMART)
India flag India · Delayed Price · Currency is INR
2,011.80
-53.20 (-2.58%)
May 12, 2026, 3:29 PM IST
← View all transcripts

Q3 25/26

Jan 20, 2026

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Avijit Vikram, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of IndiaMART InterMESH Limited, I welcome you all to the company's Q3 FY26 earnings webinar. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Joining us today from the management, 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 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.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Thank you, Avijit. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to IndiaMART Q3 FY26 earnings webinar. We have circulated our earnings presentation, which is available on our website as well as the stock exchange website. We are sure you would have gone through the same, and we would be happy to take any questions afterward. IndiaMART has delivered a consolidated revenue from operations of INR 402 crores in Q3, representing a year-on-year growth of 13%. Collections from customers grew to INR 426 crores, representing year-on-year growth of 17%. Deferred revenue grew to INR 1,775 crores, representing year-on-year growth of 19%. In Q3, unique business inquiries reached 28 million, growing 4% year-on-year, along with continued improvement in the quality of inquiries. Total number of paying suppliers declined by 1,000 to 2,221,000.

This decrease can primarily be attributed to moderation in gross addition due to price increase we implemented in the Silver subscription tier during the last quarter. Additionally, a lesser number of working days due to festival season has also contributed to the decline. Our Platinum and Gold customers, which constitute approximately 50% of our customer base and more than 75% of the revenue, continue to have good upsell and retention rates. Our company has always been an early adopter of the new technologies. Nearly a decade ago, we introduced behavioral data-based matchmaking, which was powered by AI and Machine Learning. Today, we are accelerating that journey further. We are rapidly adopting AI-enabled technologies to enhance the quality of our product and platform, improve user experience and engagement for buyers and suppliers, and reinforcing elements of trust across the marketplace.

We remain committed to elevating quality standards and improving the user experience to maximize the value offered by our platform. Now, I will hand over the call to Brijesh for an update on Busy Infotech. Thank you, and over to you, Brijesh.

Brijesh Agrawal
Co-founder and Director, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Hi, good evening, everyone. At Busy, we've done a billing of INR 33 crores in Q3. The normalized year-on-year growth rate, after removing the impact of the change in the payout structure for partners, is at 28%. The revenue from operations was INR 32 crores, and the deferred revenues were at INR 112 crores at the end of Q3. This represents a growth rate of 50% and 56% on a normalized basis. The cash flow from operations was INR 6 crores for the quarter. During the quarter, Busy also sold about 10,000 new licenses, taking the total number of licenses sold to about 431,000. As we have been sharing in the past calls, we continue to invest behind enhancing the overall product experience and growing the sales channels that we have so that we can build the foundation for sustained high-growth business at Busy and for years to come.

Now, with this, I'll hand it over to Jitin to discuss the financial performance.

Jitin Diwan
CFO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Thank you, sir. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you through the financial performance for the quarter ending December 2025. Consolidated collection from customers was INR 426 crores in the quarter, representing YoY growth of 17%. IndiaMART standalone collection from customers for the quarter was INR 390 crores, registering YoY growth of 14%. Consolidated deferred revenue stood at INR 1,775 crores, an increase of 19% on a YoY basis. Consolidated revenue from operations was INR 402 crores, registering YoY growth of 13%, and consolidated EBITDA was INR 134 crores, representing a margin of 33%. In Q3, consolidated other income for the quarter stood at INR 135 crores. This includes one-time fair valuation gain of about INR 82 crores on account of revaluation of our strategic investment, Baldor Technologies. Consolidated net profit for the quarter was INR 188 crores. Consolidated cash generated from operations was INR 129 crores.

Consolidated cash in treasury balance stood at ₹3,051 crores as of December 31, 2025. Thank you very much. Now, we are ready to take any questions.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

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 question in 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 until the question queue assembles.

Operator

The first question is from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Anmol, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Anmol, please go ahead.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Yeah, I hope I'm audible.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes, please go ahead.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. A couple of things. Firstly, I wanted to understand that it's been now a few quarters since our paid supplier numbers have remained kind of stagnant. So from that perspective, how do you see it going ahead in terms of, do you think that somewhere the market is saturated for us, or do you feel that, and do you feel that we might have to kind of make changes to our business model in terms of introducing transaction-based aspects to our business model, or do we kind of prefer to work on the classified plus model going ahead as well?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

So let me just answer one by one. Do we feel the market is saturated? No. The market has kind of unlimited demand for an enough number of leads and quality leads that can be converted by sellers. So there is enough number of sellers willing to pay if they get leads which can be converted by them. Second, is there a, to attract more buyers, do we want to prefer moving to a fulfillment model? No. We would like to remain a software and tech-oriented company with enablement embedded wherever we can, whether it is trust-related embedding, whether it is any kind of credit-related embedding, any kind of payment facilitation. But we ourselves do not intend to do any sourcing or delivery or return because the categories are enormous, and it is not feasible to go that way.

So we are continuing to tune in product-market fit for buyers so that we can generate as many buyers as possible. As soon as that happens, I think we should be able to now get earlier, about a year and a half back, I think there were problems with the quality of the inquiries also, and there were problems with the competition also. And I had addressed this in earlier quarterly calls that now the competition side, the localized inquiry side, the quality of the inquiry, the intent of the inquiry, all of that is solved. Most of the suppliers are happy with the number of inquiries that, the quality of the inquiries that they are getting. Now, if we can double the inquiries, I am sure we can double the customer count from here. Thank you.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Understood. Secondly, I wanted to understand that there is a slight reduction in our advertisement SG&A spend in the quarter. So when can we, when would we move to ₹10 crore kind of a quarterly spend in terms of the digital marketing spends?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah, we continue to do that. The little bit of spend that you see a reduction from ₹6 crore to ₹5.5 or so, that is because there was Diwali, Dussehra, and we didn't want to run the ads on the holidays. There's no point running ads on the holidays. The 25th was a holiday. So that's about it. And secondly, as we are running the ads, we are getting confident how to optimize for the cost. As far as the scaling goes, I think we are trying to find more and more keywords that can be targeted at the value, at the CPC rates that we are willing to pay. So we are continuing to see that. Hopefully, this quarter, we should be seeing a little bit of uptick, but I can't comment when do we plan to spend 100% of that ₹10 crore budget every quarter.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Understood, and lastly, if I look at on a YoY basis, our total number of buyers have increased almost by 9%-10%, while the unique business inquiries still remain kind of range-bound, so whatever the spends that we are making on the advertisement side of things looks like that it's attracting more buyers, but the suppliers and the unique business inquiries by these suppliers kind of remains range-bound, so do you think that maybe there would be a change in strategy in terms of the advertisement spends, which will cater towards more supplier additions?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

No, these particular advertisements are mostly related to very transactional buyer requirement related. So supplier advertising is mostly on the social media. So YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you will find more supplier-oriented advertising. You will find more buyer-oriented advertising where buyers are actually searching for products such as Google. So both the channels are different for buyer advertising and supplier advertising, and in terms of registered buyers and unique business inquiries, these are seasonal factors. I think plus/minus 2%, 3% keeps on happening. I think I would be happy to keep focusing on the unique business inquiries.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Sure. Understood, and just a bookkeeping one, is there any impact of new labor code on our business?

Jitin Diwan
CFO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah. So we have impact of new labor code. We have taken in P&L impact of about INR 8.5 crores in P&L. And after that, the net profit EBITDA, the number which has come is there.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

So is this a one-time impact, or this is something we can tackle?

Jitin Diwan
CFO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

That is right. This is a one-time impact. As per mandated by ICAI, there was a one-time impact which was supposed to be taken in books. So we have created a liability at an expense of ₹8.5 crores, which is a one-time impact.

Anmol Garg
SVP, DAM Capital

Sure. Thank you. Thank you so much for answering my questions.

Operator

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Prashant Kothari from Pictet Asset Management. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question. Hello. Can you hear me, please?

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes. Yes, Prashant. Please go ahead.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Okay. I just wanted to understand about the unique inquiries. They are growing at a very healthy rate in the last two quarters, like 17%, 12%, and suddenly it has dropped to 4% growth YoY. But is there any kind of one of factors there, or are we losing momentum despite our digital advertising initiatives?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

I would call it mostly seasonal factors.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Can you explain what happened, like what has changed seasonally out there?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

What changed seasonally in terms of quarter three last year versus quarter three this year?

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Yes, please. Yeah.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Generally speaking, holidays here and there, sometimes just having one additional working day or two additional working days also happens. And from Q2 to Q3, it is always lower if you see historically also. But even if you compare Q3 to Q3, you are right that it was growing at 14%, 15%, but now it has come down to 7% because in those holiday days, we didn't even advertise. Earlier in the Q1 and Q2, we advertised all the 90 days. In this particular quarter, we advertised only for 75-80 days. That's why you see the advertising expense also lower by ₹5,000,000 or so.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Okay. Okay, sir. And how are the churn levels now?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

The churn levels continue to be the same. There is not much change that we, so if you remember, we started doing these changes in the product side, especially supplier side product changes that we started doing sometime around November, December, January, February, March. I'm expecting that any annual display of the churn would be available sometime around April, May, June, not before that.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Okay. And sir, just I noticed that you stopped reporting the total traffic data. Was it just an omission, or is there?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah, no, I mentioned it last time also because currently, the bot traffic is coming from everywhere, whether it is ChatGPT bot, and there are hundreds of now LLM bots, search engine bots, new browser bots, agentic bots. So the traffic trying to identify the actual human traffic versus bot traffic, it was years of Google and being monopoly that systems had become stable enough to identify what is the bot traffic and what is not. Nowadays, there are so many new crawlers coming like this Perplexity, Exa, those kind of things. So I guess this traffic is moving very rapidly, and that's why we are. I told you last time also that we should be removing it. So we removed it.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Okay. And one last question, sir. When do you think you will feel confident to accelerate on the addition of new paid suppliers?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

I'm not able to comment on that. I think I will continue to focus on providing better quality and better quantity. As soon as it starts to trend two, three quarters in one single direction, then you will see. However, if you see this particular quarter, we have reversed from a sub 10% collection growth over the last four, five quarters to about 13%, 14%. So I think there is some positive that I can see, but has that resulted dramatically into any kind of churn parameters? And until the churn parameters become better, I'm not in a position to even invest dramatically on the gross addition.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Okay, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next question is from the line of Anirudh Shetty from Solidarity Investments. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Aniruddh Shetty
Partner, Solidarity Investments

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. So just a few questions. Sir, I would like your comments on just the ARPU growth company level and for the top 10% customers just over the last three quarters or so. It seems that the pace of growth has seen a bit of a slowdown. In Q1, FY26, it was 9% growth, 7% last quarter. It's come down to 6%. Similar trend for top 10% of customers. And you mentioned you all have taken a price hike. So if you can just share more color on what's happening over there.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

I don't think I've always guided 6%-8% on the ARPU, and top 10% ARPU are at 9%-11%, and that is how it is going. Yes, there could be certain when the customer count was not growing at all, then the ARPU growth was higher. And so ARPU growth is now coming in line to the long-term trend of 6%-8%. I don't think anything different was told.

Aniruddh Shetty
Partner, Solidarity Investments

Got it. And our collection growth has been quite strong. It's been 14% well ahead of what we are getting in terms of revenue. So is there something, what has been the delta over here in terms of what explains why collection growth has been faster than, say, ARPU's and your revenue growth overall?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

No, it's the same. 9%, yeah, 6% ARPU growth. And how much is the customer growth? 8% is the customer growth.

Aniruddh Shetty
Partner, Solidarity Investments

Okay. So there are no one-offs in that number, right? So this is like a good normalized growth rate to expect.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah. So if you see the revenue side of it, you will be able to multiply the collection customer growth and ARPU growth. But on the collection, collection is a leading indicator where collections grew first, and then they will go to deferred revenue, and then they will go to the revenue. So that's how they will reconcile. We actually internally maintain two metrics. One is average collection per customer and average revenue per customer. So we are able to understand what is the collection growth.

Aniruddh Shetty
Partner, Solidarity Investments

Got it. Yeah. And just one final question. The net adds, so essentially, just to understand it more clearly, you mentioned that the churn levels have not changed vis-à-vis the past. So essentially, the gross adds in this quarter, will you be able to quantify what would that be? Is it?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

No, I said end of last quarter. Last quarter means end of September. In the month of September, we had taken a price increase. So October, November, December was the first quarter, full quarter where the price increase was affected. Even January, February, March, we are probably recovering. So I think gross addition should be coming to natural numbers sometime around April, May, June. So one more quarter of maybe plus/minus 0 customer addition you can expect.

Aniruddh Shetty
Partner, Solidarity Investments

Got it. Got it. Great. Thank you for answering my questions.

Prashant Kothari
Senior Investment Manager, Pictet Asset Management

Next question is from the line of Nikhil Choudhary from Nuvama. Nikhil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Nikhil Chowdhury
VP Equity Research, Nuvama

Hey, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. First question on gross addition side. Sir, you mentioned in your earlier remark on an earlier question that there are enough suppliers to target, right? If we have so much large supplier base which we can target, then why gross addition will get impacted despite of price hike? We should be able to get higher gross addition if we want to, right?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes, we will. We will. We will be able to get. It's just that every time you change some ₹500, ₹1,000 price, the sales team takes a little time to adjust to it. There's no problem theoretically.

Nikhil Chowdhury
VP Equity Research, Nuvama

Got it. Got it, sir. Second thing on this standalone collection growth. So you say standalone collection growth increased to 14% compared to 8%-10% what we have been seeing since last few quarters. How sustainable this mid-teen growth is, and what led to this acceleration from last quarter?

Brijesh Agrawal
Co-founder and Director, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

So as I said, to some extent, I think the better Gold and Platinum monetization led to some better average collection per customer. So maybe 0.5% recovery on the renewal rate and better collection. However, at least let it repeat for one or two quarters, and then we can say that this is a trend. Otherwise, one-off 14%, I think let's not become very happy about it. But I think we are cautious. We are targeting even JFM quarter to be similar, but let's see.

Nikhil Chowdhury
VP Equity Research, Nuvama

Got it, sir. Your comment about this higher renewal rate, does that mean that we saw lower churn in Gold and Platinum this time compared to previous quarter?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Sir, as I said, it is too little to quantify.

Nikhil Chowdhury
VP Equity Research, Nuvama

Got it. Got it. Just last one from my side. You made a comment that we might see lower churn from April, May, June. What gives you confidence? Is there some behavior you are noticing in annual suppliers? Maybe they are more active on the platform. They are consuming more leads. And second, are you seeing some, let's say, change in churn, especially for silver monthly? Is there some activity there?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah. So monthly is still not recovering. Monthly because I think there are two separate behaviors that we found. Why somebody takes monthly and why somebody takes annual? So one, obviously, somebody takes a monthly because of the affordability reason that he himself has a cash flow problem and wants to pay monthly. And the second is he wants to try the platform, and he has not made up his mind that, "Okay, IndiaMART, I want to jump in." However, somebody who comes in with annual subscription of INR 32,000, one, he doesn't have that kind of a cash flow problem. And secondly, he has made up his mind that he wants to try definitely an annual. So in the annual, the churn rates are always a few percentage points lower than the monthly. So we are hoping that the annual retentions would improve a little bit.

But in the monthly, we have not seen any respite. If we would have seen, I would have given you an indicator that, "Okay, monthly is improving, so will annual improve.

Nikhil Chowdhury
VP Equity Research, Nuvama

Got it. Got it. That's it from my side. Thank you. Good luck for coming.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

We have a question from the chat menu. The question is from Mr. Devang Patel. At the margin, some of the buyer traffic is moving from Google Search to AI Search. Given our predominant reliance on Google Search for traffic, how do we see this as a longer-term threat to our business model, and what are the measures we are taking to tackle it?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Two, three things. One, every time a newer technology and more pervasive and more useful technology comes, it overall improves the time. Means if earlier X number of people were only using Google, now the total number of people that will use either Google or Gemini or ChatGPT would be higher than X. So it actually expands the time anyway. Now, within that, is Google going to everybody? Many, many different publisher companies are facing stagnation in growth of traffic coming from places like Google. More so where there is a lot more research required. I have heard stories around where there is more research required, people do go to AI search. However, where there is a transactional unique content discovery, people continue to go to the search. Having said that, if you go to Google Gemini or if you go to Grok, IndiaMART features well even in those searches.

However, currently, those are not giving directly blue links, but they are giving a reference within the answer. They are giving reference that this answer has come from here. So we are getting links, but this is a general problem. I think we need to rely more on our repeat traffic, and that's what we are working towards. Currently, our repeat traffics are running almost all-time high at 58%, 59% repeat inquiries.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

We can go ahead to the next question, Nikhil.

Operator

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Swapnil from JM Financial. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I have two or three questions. The first one is on the, can you just quantify the increase in silver category pricing that you have been mentioning? What was it earlier, and what is the latest pricing that you're offering to the suppliers?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Earlier, it was INR 3,000 plus tax on a monthly basis and INR 28,500 plus tax on an annual basis. Now, it is INR 4,000 plus tax on a monthly basis, and currently, it is INR 35,000, but currently, we are giving some discount of INR 3,000, so it is INR 35,000 minus discount running INR 3,000, so INR 32,000 plus tax on an annual basis.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Got it. My follow-up question to that is, given the quantum of increase is quite steep, do you think it was the right time to take these price hikes, especially at a time when we have not been able to get the proper control over churn rates?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

I mean, we as a company have taken this decision after enough discussion and enough pros and cons. So we obviously think it was the right time after many, many years. And we also discussed that whether we should go from INR 3,000 to INR 3,500 and then INR 4,000. But given the size of the sales team and the amount of time it takes to absorb, whether it is, and we did a lot of survey in the market. Most people said it didn't matter to them whether it was INR 3,000 or INR 4,000. People said it matters either it worked or it didn't work. So I think, yes, you are right. Some fence hitters might actually churn out because of that. But in general, those fence hitters anyway will churn out one month later. So it was a well-discussed and debated step taken by us.

So I mean, I'm not sure whether it is right or wrong. I mean, it's a very subjective decision to say whether it is right or wrong.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Okay. I mean, can you help us understand how the churn rates would have moved from the previous quarter to this quarter? Because this was the first quarter of full price hikes, and especially for the Silver category suppliers. Was there a slight increase?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

It doesn't apply to renewals. Renewals continue to happen at previous prices. Only the next time renewal will come, they will come at the newer prices. So if somebody had taken a INR 2,500 monthly subscription and continues to run, he is still running at INR 2,500 a month. So either somebody breaks the subscription in between, then comes back, that's when the new prices apply. Or if somebody is on the annual subscription, when his next year's subscription will come, that's when his new prices will apply.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Will it be fair to say that the full impact of the price hikes, right or wrong, we will get to know maybe six to nine months later? That is when we will be in the actual position to understand whether it worked or not.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes. Yes, sir.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Okay. Okay. Now, coming to, I mean, you said in the past that one of the challenges in increasing the suppliers was the quality of business inquiries that the suppliers used to get, and some of them were not happy. That led to some incremental churn. But do you think the way our sales teams approach the suppliers, there could be some improvements needed on that side also? I mean, have you done some analysis on that side, I mean, that the way our pitch would be to the suppliers and the?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah. Obviously, there is also some improvement possible. When it comes to sales, yes, better qualification, better presentation, better convincing helps. When it comes to servicing and churn, more enablement, better CRM, better training also helps. And we continue to work on both sides. As I admitted five quarters ago, that until four, five quarters, we were actually thinking that it is purely and purely sales and service execution problem. However, when I myself went to the customer meetings, and now I have met almost 100 customers myself, there were small, small things that customers were worried about or they were getting irritated about. And we found a few errors also. There were a few blind spots in our product because something which was working, working for a long period of time, we tightened. So I think it has helped.

Now, when I go and see, and when we see the leading indicators, I think our engagement levels have improved. The Buy Lead sold ratio has improved. The irrelevancy feedback has improved. Many of those have improved. Nowadays, more complaint is, how do I get more inquiries? I'm unable to catch this Buy Lead. That gives me some confidence that there was some problem. Yes, sales and service can be definitely improved. AI is now helping us put the CRM context. We are trying to find if we can help some Copilot on the servicing side where the AI can suggest the action of a meeting or action of a call. I think those are the things that will help us improve the sales. Apart from training and training, how do I enable a normal salesperson?

Because having said that we will do training, it's still a high attrition role. Field sales and servicing or tele sales and servicing is a high attrition role across the industry.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

But my question actually was slightly on the side. Have you considered any changes on the top management side, people leading the sales vertical from that side? I mean, is that a solution to the problem?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

No, I don't think so. I mean, if you look at our leadership team for the last 15 years, they have done a great job. And even this particular quarter, I think. So I think we have a very good team. And I would encourage any of you to meet our leadership team at different places, regional teams. And there is some performance-level rotation, job rotation, and churn that continues to happen even at that level. So we do take action if certain particular locations or certain particular verticals are not performing well. But if you're suggesting that a lot of churn at the top level in the business, I don't think that is the problem.

Swapnil Potdukhe
VP, JM Financial

Got it, sir. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. And all the best.

Operator

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Amit Chandra from HDFC Securities. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.

Amit Chandra
Assistant Vice President, HDFC Securities

Hello. I'm audible?

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes, Amit.

Amit Chandra
Assistant Vice President, HDFC Securities

Yes. Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity. Sir, most of the questions have been answered, but just to get a clarity, you mentioned about the attrition thing has been stable, but despite that, we have seen the increase in the collections, which was pretty strong, so is it that the existing customers are opting for more multi-year packages and expanding their existing packages to more from regional to more wider packages, so that is also leading to kind of collections growth despite the additions being muted, so this is one, and also in terms of the ARPU, is it now the company is getting tuned to more milking the existing customers or enhancing the value for the existing customers only, or how to see the overall strategy here?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yes, sir. As I said in the earlier answer also, the 13%, 14% collection growth is obviously the number of customers multiplied by the average collection per customer. Now, within that, it's everything small, small that works together. At certain places, it is the higher upsell. At certain places, it is the higher multi-year renewal. At certain places, the renewal itself has improved in the Gold and Platinum. Now, coming to your second question, whether we are tuned to higher ARPU, and these two go hand in hand. If you need a 20% plus growth, if you want to target a 20% plus growth rate, ideally speaking, the company should target 10% coming from customer addition and 10% coming from ARPU addition. I mean, it could go from 5% to 15%.

I'm saying anywhere between, if you want to get all of the growth coming from ARPU, it might get difficult. If you want all of the growth coming from customer addition, it might be difficult. The second part is that each segment plays a different role at IndiaMART. The silver customer brings the buyer-side leadership because it gives you the availability of everything and anything on IndiaMART. So that's how you can say, "Kaam Yahin Banta Hai," or, "Any product is available," or, "Cheapest price is available." While the ARPU growth at the platinum side, which drives the ARPU growth, that brings all the profitability. So if you just leave one lever, either you will lose on the top line or you will lose on the bottom line. So we have to balance in the long run both of them. We can't leave it on one side.

Amit Chandra
Assistant Vice President, HDFC Securities

And in the last some of the calls you mentioned that change in attrition in the silver monthly or annual bucket might lead to an increase in the collection. So is it fair to assume that, say, if the attrition level comes to normalize level maybe in the next one or two quarters, maybe we can see 5%-6% more increase in terms of the collections growth from the current 14% to maybe 17%-18%, which we were seeing two years back when the attrition was normalized? So is the math still similar? And the second question is that obviously you mentioned about the sales thing that we have been trying to do and in terms of training. So apart from the sales, the other very important aspect is the technology. Because from that, we have obviously it is getting upgraded.

But do you think that the platform needs a very severe upgrade in terms of the way the things are handled in terms of business inquiries or in terms of the interaction it is having with the buyers and the sellers that actually needs a serious upgrade? Yeah.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

There's a huge opportunity today in terms of upgrading the platform in many ways, whether it is user interface, whether it is user experience, whether it is multimodal, whether it is multilingual, whether it is instead of search, a chatbot. Also, I think earlier the trust indicators were mostly direct. Now with AI, you can do a lot of indirect ways of creating internal trust score, preventing any kind of suspicious activity. So I guess content moderation, every aspect today, given the technology has taken and technology has enabled very, very nicely in the last year, especially, it has become within reach of everybody. I mean, just take an example of voice AI. Today, almost 80% of our buyer interaction, which used to happen on a normal call, have already gone to an AI bot voice bot.

And they are performing better in terms of quality and better in terms of productivity. So I guess whether it is off platform, whether it is content, whether it is user experience, everywhere, world over, every technology platform, every UI platform will require a significant upgrade. And we are cognizant of that fact. And we have always been a very good user of the technology. We started the internet portal in 1995. So that will give you some glimpse of the future that we can see.

Amit Chandra
Assistant Vice President, HDFC Securities

Yeah. I know, sir. So that has been really a great journey. But why I'm asking is this because for several years, we have seen the user interface typically being the same, right? We have not seen a very major upgrade. So where we are in terms of the upgrade journey, if you can give some idea. And also in terms of the internal technology team, how the internal technology team functions and things.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

So there are two things. One is the look and feel that you see. Maybe look and feel feels a little dated. And I take that feedback. I mean, if you really look at the Microsoft Excel in 1992 and today, they are the same, but the great functionality. So there is nothing much that has changed on Google or Microsoft Excel in the last 20, 30 years. It is the substance that gets changed. Having said that, feedback taken, we will upgrade and uplift the design and feel. However, the technology slide is in front of you. You can see there is a lot of changes currently going on. And we are very proud of our own technology platform. You just see the site speed that we open and the complexity of the things that we do. We are very proud that and we do benchmarking with our technology.

Our technology platform is equivalent or faster, similar to Amazon.com. Our security levels are 96%, which is even one point higher than Amazon. So I think we continuously benchmark ourselves with Google and Amazon of the world.

Amit Chandra
Assistant Vice President, HDFC Securities

Okay, sir. Thank you. And all the best, sir.

Operator

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Shubham Sehgal from Securities Investment Management. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with the question.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Shubham, please go ahead.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Hello. I'm audible?

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah, you are audible.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Yes. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is, could you share the typical progression of the paid suppliers from silver to gold or platinum tiers? And additionally, I just want to understand how has this trend changed in the recent one or two years compared to the past years? So due to the churn, how this trend has changed. And if you could just share a typical progression in annual basis, how many suppliers we expect from the silver category to get upgraded?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Yeah. So typically, historically, 15%-20% customers from silver moved to gold. From gold, another 15% customer typically moved to platinum. No, 10%, I think. So nowadays, ever since the renewals have dropped, most of the upsell has dropped. So 80% of drop will come from the upsell because if the renewal was higher, because most of the upsell happens at the time of renewal. When the people come up for renewal, that's when the upsell happens. Since the renewal itself has dropped by 10%-15%, I think the upsell itself is currently trending at 8%-9%. So from 17%-18% upsell, which used to trend anywhere between 15%-20%, that is now trending at 5%-10% depending upon the different industries and different buckets.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Okay. Got it. My next question was, in the previous calls, you had mentioned that there is still a significant headroom for ARPU expansion among the enterprise customers that we have, given their large marketing budgets. So could you help me quantify this potential and what is the estimated ARPU ceiling for this segment, the enterprise segment, over the next two, three years? And currently, what would be the percentage of IndiaMART's current revenue or paying supplier base, which would be made of these enterprise customers?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

We have about 100-200 odd customers in the enterprise segment. Depending on when I'm saying 100-200 means those who are platinum and enterprise both. Because there might be certain platinum customers who have been using our gold service or using our silver service. Now, from there, if you see the top 1% of their customer, you will see 2,200 customers currently are paying INR 11 lakh rupees per annum. Top 2,200 customers. Within that, if you see the Pareto, this can at the highest level, we have customers who end up paying even upwards of INR 50 lakh rupees. This is the average of top 2,200, INR 11 lakh s. If you see the median and above, you will see that it is ranging from INR 5 lakh rupees to INR 50 lakh rupees also.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Okay. So just a follow-up on this. And actually, regarding the ARPU growth, so you mentioned that the normal growth that we expect is around 6%-8%. But in the past few quarters, when we were getting accelerated ARPU growth, you had mentioned that it is due to the new categorical and differential pricing that we have involved in our system. So I just wanted to know, either that categorical pricing difference, has it just normalized in the system? That's why now the ARPU growth will normalize as well? Or could we again see the accelerated periods of ARPU growth?

Brijesh Agrawal
Co-founder and Director, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

ARPU is driven by revenue. And revenue is coming from different revenue, which typically reflects three quarters ago collection trend. So if you want to see the current quarter ARPU, so if three quarters ago, my collection was 9%, so is ARPU out of that, if 3% was customer growth, 6% is ARPU growth, that ARPU growth we are seeing today. So either you see customer and collection, because average collection per user is not a standard metric in the market. Otherwise, if you see the ARPU, it will always be a 15-month moving average ARPU.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Okay. Got it. Thanks for the clarity. Just last question. So on our platform, we do have different tags for different industries, like a tag known as Industry Leader or Leading Supplier. And that's for the specific categories of the searches. So is there a cap on the number of these tags that we have, the Industry Leader and Leading Supplier? And if there is a cap, does this help in retaining the customers? Because if they might go off with the tag or remove the tag, that tag would be handed over to someone else. So is there a cap? And does it help in retaining any leading customers?

Brijesh Agrawal
Co-founder and Director, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

It comes at both. If I have a limited number of tags, then I limit my time because there is a limit to what a single person can give. But if I have unlimited, so initially, when we launched the Industry Leader program, I think we had three maximum things. But over the time, the demand in the market was that I can't pay you INR 3,000,000 for being an Industry Leader, but there are three people who are willing to pay or five people who are willing to pay. So I think we have only one product, which is the Category Leader or something, which is not visible there at the tag. But other than that, all the products are available with the demand supply kind of thing.

Shubham Sehgal
Equity Research Analyst, Securities Investment Management

Okay. Got it. Thank you.

Avijit Vikram
Head of Investor Relations, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

We have one last question from the chat menu, which we can take probably. This is related to accounting products. This question is from Mr. Vaibhav Jain. In our accounting products, can you throw some light on how the products are different from each other or how they complement each other as part of the stack? And what is the value addition in comparison to competition like Tally's, QuickBooks, etc.?

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Right. So if we look at the three major companies within the accounting portfolio that we have, one is BUSY, second is Vyapar, and third is Livekeeping. Now, each of these companies essentially have a very different target segment. So BUSY, for example, starts to do very well in the small and medium-sized businesses segment. These are businesses typically who will have a requirement of managing inventory apart from doing basic sales, who would want to do GST filing. When we come to Vyapar, Vyapar essentially will focus more on the micro-sized businesses. These are businesses where billing is essentially the most primary requirement. And these are businesses which are smaller in size. They want to go ahead and work upon billing through mobile app more than just rely upon a desktop-based software.

When we look at Livekeeping, Livekeeping exclusively focuses on existing customers of Tally who would want to have a browser-based and an app-based access to the data and work upon that. So Tally does not offer you those opportunities currently. And therefore, Livekeeping becomes extremely useful to about two million subscribers of Tally who essentially would want to access data on browser using a mobile app online. So each of these companies are targeting different sets of customers altogether. And as a whole, therefore, we see that we will be able to have a significant play in the overall accounting industry segment altogether. Right.

Operator

Thank you. This was the last question for the day. I would now like to hand over the call to Dinesh Agarwal for his concluding remarks. Over to you, sir.

Dinesh Agarwal
CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining our Quarter 3 FY26 conference call. We have tried to address your queries in the time available. But if you still have any questions, please feel free to contact our Investor Relations team. Thank you. And good evening. Good night.

Operator

On behalf of IndiaMART, we thank everyone for joining us on this webinar. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.

Thank you.

Powered by