Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Avijit Vikram, Head of Investor Relations. On behalf of IndiaMART InterMESH Limited, I welcome you all to the company's quarter our and FY 2026 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, Whole 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 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.
Thank you, Avijit. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to IndiaMART's quarter four and FY 2026 earnings webinar. We have circulated our earning presentation, which is available on our website as well as stock exchange websites. We are sure you would have gone through the presentation, and we would be happy to take any questions afterward. IndiaMART has delivered consolidated revenue from operations of INR 404 crores in the quarter four, and INR 1,569 crores in the full year, representing a year-over-year growth of about 14% and 13% respectively. Consolidated collections from customer grew to INR 595 crores in quarter four, and INR 1,857 crores in the FY 2026, representing a year-over-year growth of 10% and 14% respectively.
Consolidated deferred revenue grew to INR 1,965 crores, representing year-over-year growth of 17%. In quarter four, unique business inquiries were about 27 million. In FY 2026, total number of paying suppliers increased by 3,200 to 220,000, while the quarter four saw a little decline of 1,200. This decrease can primarily be attributed to moderation in gross addition due to price increase we implemented in the silver subscription tier at the end of the second quarter. Our platinum and gold customer, which constitute approximately 50% of our customer base and more than 75% of revenue, continue to have good upsell and retention rate. On the platform side, we continue to take initiatives to improve the quality of inquiries by capturing relevant and most more product specification.
We are now delivering inquiries which are having higher intent and relevance to sellers. In addition to the seller side verification, we are now starting to do more buyer side verification as well, so as to increase the overall trust in the platform. We also continue moving forward our AI journey by embedding AI capability across our platforms. By combining three decades of our proprietary data with next generation intelligence, we are making the discovery process much more precise and seamless for both buyers and sellers. Currently, AI is driving multiple parts of our ecosystem, and it is helping us improve the product quality and reinforcing a deeply trusted marketplace. We remain committed to ensuring that platform remains a reliable growth partners for businesses in a digital-first world. Now I will hand over the call to Brijesh to update about Busy Infotech.
Thank you. Over to you, Brijesh.
Hi. Good evening, everyone. In Q4, BUSY has done a billing of INR 45 crores, whereas in FY 2026, in total, we did INR 170 crores of billing. The normalized rate of growth that we've had year-on-year, which excludes the impact of the change in the payout structure that we had introduced, is 24% and 43% respectively. The revenue from operations in Q4 were INR 34 crores, whereas for full year, this was at INR 119 crores. The normalized growth rates of 53% and 44% respectively. The deferred revenue was at INR 124 crores, and this represents a normalized growth of 44% year-on-year.
The cash flow from operations in Q4 was INR 10 crores, whereas for the entire year, this was at about INR 49 crores for us. During the quarter, we also sold 11,000 new licenses, and this takes the total count of licenses sold to over 142,000. The new licenses sold during the entire year are close to about 45,000. We continue to invest in improving the overall experience of the product. We are also now working upon adding AI-led features in the BUSY product itself. All of this should help us grow our sales further. This should lay the foundation for a sustained high growth at BUSY for years to come. Now, with this, I'll request Jitin Diwan to take over and discuss the financial performance of the business.
Yeah. Thank you both very much. Good evening, everyone. I'll take you through the financial performance for the quarter and year ending March 2026.
Consolidated collection from customers was INR 595 crore in the quarter, and INR 1,857 crore on full-year basis. This re-represents year-over-year growth of 10% and 14% respectively. IndiaMART standalone collection from customer for the quarter was INR 546 crore and INR 1,674 crore on full-year basis, registering year-over-year growth of 8% and 10% respectively. Consolidated deferred revenue stood at INR 1,965 crore, an increase of 717% on year-over-year basis. Consolidated revenue from operations was INR 404 crore for the quarter and INR 1,569 crore for the full-year basis, registering year-over-year growth of 14% and 13%. Consolidated EBITDA was INR 133 crore for the quarter and INR 530 crore for the full year, representing margin of 33% and 34% respectively. In Q4, consolidated other income for the quarter stood at - NR 34 crore.
This was primarily driven by mark-to-market losses on our treasury portfolio, resulting from a significant increase in bond yields during the quarter. We view this as notional losses, which would reverse on a long-term basis. Other income stood at INR 204 crore for the full year basis. Consequently, consolidated net profit for the quarter was INR 50 crore and INR 475 crore for FY 2026. Consolidated cash generation from operations was INR 290 crore for the quarter and INR 694 crore for FY 2026. Consolidated cash and treasury balance stood at INR 3,280 crore as on March 31, 2026. Finally, Board of Directors have recommended a total dividend of INR 60, which includes final dividend of INR 30 and a special dividend of another INR 30. This is subject to approval of Shareholders.
Thank you very much. Now we are ready to take any 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 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 participants. We will wait for a few seconds while the question queue assembles.
First question is from the line of Vivekanand Subbaraman from Ambit Capital. Vivekanand Subbaraman, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Vivekanand, you are not audible.
Hello, am I audible?
Yeah. Yes, you are audible. Please go ahead. Yeah.
Thank you very much for the opportunity. Two questions. The first one is on the gross adds. Thanks for the opening comments where you mentioned about the moderation in gross adds. Dinesh, if you can just update us on the process changes that you were initiating in improving the quality of gross adds, where do you stand in the journey and by when can we expect the business to go back to, say, a net add trajectory of maybe 5%-6%, at least on an annual basis? That is question one. Secondly, if you can give us an update on the churn metrics across the various tiers in the platform and where they stand now versus last year on an annual basis, that would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. Let me handle the churn rate first. As I've been repeating quarter-on-quarter, Gold and Platinum continue to do healthy business with the monthly churn rates in the Platinum segment being much lesser than 1% and in the Gold segment anywhere, 1%-1.5%. On overall basis, about approximately 1% per month. While on the Silver annual, they are about 4%, and the Silver monthly, they are about 7%. There is not much of a change that is there in each one of them. Coming to the gross add, quality and quantity.
We continue to put levers where we can apply better quality of suppliers by way of GST verification, by way of turnover qualification, by way of any kind of a third party signals that we can get. In terms of the quantity, as I said, there are certain decrease in the gross adds because of the pricing pressure. It took longer than we expected, especially in the March when the war also broke out. Otherwise, generally February and March typically do a better job, which could not have happened. Hopefully, this is going to continue a little longer with the pain in the market.
In terms of net adds, I think until and unless the churn improves, no amount of gross add can actually do that. We'll continue to have no guidance on the net adds until we have multiple quarters of continual success. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks for the explanation. Just one follow-up. How much of the current quarter's muted gross addition would you attribute to the war that broke out maybe end of February? How much would you attribute to, let's say, the price increase that you took in the middle of the year?
Yeah. In terms of the, about 1,200 odd customers decreased, I think, if there was no war, we could have been probably 2,000 customers positive. That gives you the entire quarter, maybe 3,000 more. Out of that, I would say, 1,000, 1,500 could be because of the war. 1,000, 1,500 could have been because of the price.
Okay. Got it. Thank you so much, and all the best.
Thank you, Vivekanand. Participants are requested to raise hand if they wanted to ask question to management. Next question is from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Anmol, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of things that I wanted to understand. Firstly, have you thought about any value-added services that we want to provide through our platform to which we can charge higher prices and in turn could increase our pool through that aspect?
Yeah. While we don't necessarily report value-added services as part of the financials or that. When we say platinum customers, platinum customers is all of it is value-added only. Platinum customers, typically, the top 10% customers that you see doing 50% of the revenue, they are all value-added services. Whether search targeting, whether location targeting. These are not typical subscription businesses. However, they are sold in the similar manner as yearly subscription and multi-year subscription. Sometimes even a quarterly and six-monthly subscription. Coming to the other kind of value-added services which are not related to the access to market.
For example, a lead manager professional version or, where you have a WhatsApp kind of an integration, that contributes to some value-added revenue. There are few other planned items on the lead management side. They are not significant yet that can be reported as separate line items. Export, again, as we started some time around 2020, become a separate business altogether with almost, you know, INR 50 crore-INR 60 crore of collections. It was always there even when we were purely domestic at maybe INR 20 crore-INR 25 crore, but now it has become INR 60 crore-INR 70 crore of business. You can look at our export-oriented website at export.indiamart.com. That's there.
We continue to maintain certain value-added experiments which are towards logistics and credit facilitation. Those are still remain very, very pilot and experimental and not yet have resulted into anything substantial. Hopefully, that answers your question.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that, sir. Secondly, just from a holistic point of view, I wanted to understand the market sizing right now. According to you, how many in India would be currently GST-registered MSMEs and currently?
Yeah.
Both non-paid and paid, included, how many total MSMEs would be there on our platform as an overall basis?
Yeah. In total, INR 1.6 crore GST-registered businesses. Typically, about 5% churn in GST-registered businesses at the GST registration, cancellation, suspension that you would see. You can verify this data from the seven years of GST and six years of GST kind of a publication that happens on the official GST website. They also publish data by way of turnover and by way of thing. Approximately 50% of them are at a lower turnover, less than INR 40 lakh turnover, and rest of them are higher. About 85% of them are proprietorship, rest of them are company and partnership and in equal numbers.
Out of them, at our IndiaMART level, when we look at the seller side of it, almost INR 50 lakh businesses, with the GST identified, are registered with their own OTP of the phone and email on IndiaMART. Out of that, about half of them or little over half of them have now been verified with the GST, where they are the true owners of that GST number, not only with the matchmaking. Out of that, we now have 220,000 customers, which are live online. In our lifetime, I think we would have brushed shoulders with more than INR 5 lakh customers, in the past four or five years or so.
Sir, in accordance to that, we have almost 40%, if I consider 16 million total GST registered MSMEs. We have almost, you said INR 5 lakh, sorry, INR 50 lakh MSMEs which are there on the platform, either paid or non-paid. Almost 30%-35%, 40% of the total MSMEs is what we have covered. Do you think that, right now with this number, we have largely penetrated the market on overall basis?
On the free basis, I would say, out of the out of the serviceable obtainable SOM. Instead of TAM, SOM. SAM and SOM. I guess, we would have gotten to 50% kind of a number. Any incremental benefit coming from there is not really adding up. On the variety of products that are available, on the variety of suppliers that are available on IndiaMART, I think from the buyer's perspective, they fulfill almost 80% of the needs which are required by the buyer. Whether any particular unique product or unique location. Almost 80% of the products and location, you will be able to find in IndiaMART.
From that perspective, yes, there is a limited headroom on the increasing more supply in order to get a better experience. However, now there are multiple levers that open up in terms of increasing the trust, in terms of increasing the discoverability, in terms of increasing the better digitization, and accurate digitization of those products. There are many levers where supply itself can be improved multiple times. However, just by doing multiple numbers of the sellers, I don't think it is going to add incrementally very high value to the customers.
Sir, if the volume growth from a SAM perspective is now limited, the other part to grow is through realization and through value-added services. From that perspective as well, we haven't seen much happening over there. From going ahead perspective, should we expect that the platform growth would largely come from increase in the pricing, prices that we see? Given that as silver monthly customers or silver annual customers churn persist, in that case, eventually, the upgradation towards gold and platinum will also somewhere slow down. How do you think that the growth going ahead in the business would be from that perspective?
You can see, you know, out of our total growth number, when we were at upwards of 20%, half of that came from ARPU growth and half of that came from customer growth over a longer period of time. Currently since the customer growth is hardly 1%, 2%, most of the growth of ARPU growth is coming at 9%. I think until we fix the supplier growth, either directly acquiring customers through silver and retaining them and upgrading them to gold and platinum, or directly acquiring gold and platinum, I would say that there is enough headroom. For example, 1688.com in China typically has about 1 million paying suppliers.
However, they started growing total supply. They continue to grow their revenue at 25% year-on-year with the ARPU side of it. We haven't, we have only recently started, last two, three years started monetizing the differential category and differential category on a differential basis and location on a differential basis. There's a lot of optimization that can be done over the period by way of better demand supply curation and making sure that between us and supplier and a buyer, there is a better distribution of margins for each one of them. I guess ARPU will continue.
We continue to think that it is too early to completely focus on the ARPU side. However, given the organization size, I think, now that we have matured enough organization with matured enough brand and cash balance, I think, why should we not be looking at multiple ways of monetizing, whether it is through credit or whether it is through value-added services? You are right. Currently, let us what you are thinking in terms of ARPU and paying supplier as the main growth operator, remains the similar range as you can see.
We'll continue to aim for a double-digit growth in the near term, as we continue to do multiple, multiple experiments on the value-added services as well as on the, you know, credit facilitation. Until something becomes meaningful enough, the reality is that 10% ARPU and 10% dependent on paid supplier growth is there.
Sir, lastly, just wanted to understand that have you seen any impact in traffic on the platform, coming from Google or direct, on the platform because of a new chat-based AI platforms which might be used for, you know, discovery related aspects?
Sorry, I missed on your questions. Can you please repeat that again?
Yeah, sure. Basically what I am asking is that, have you seen any impact on the traffic on the platform which is coming directly from Google or direct on the platform because of, you know, new chat-based AI platforms which might be used for a discovery related kind of aspects?
I don't know if there are significant impact started to happen on our kind of website today. In terms of our traffic, there is so much of bot traffic and there's so much of real traffic, and there's so much of agentic traffic. We stopped reporting on the traffic side of it. When we look at the unique business inquiries and all these, they are typically not yet declining anytime soon. I can't say that there's a impact on B2B kind of inquiry have reached to the ChatGPTs. I think ChatGPTs are still limited to more consumer-facing entertainment, infotainment. I don't think they are yet very, very good at the B2B kind of queries.
Sure, sir. Thank you so much for answering my question.
Thank you, Anmol. Next question is from the line of Nikhil Choudhary from Nuvama. Nikhil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on unique business inquiries. This quarter it declined 1%. Last quarter also there was a decline, and I think management gave commentary that due to low working days and more holidays, there was less spent, and that led to decline last quarter. More important point is that last two quarter it's been 27 million, 28 million, and even last year for most of the quarter in FY 2025, three out of four quarter, it was 27 million, 28 million. Despite of us investing so much on performance marketing, why this number is not inching up?
Yeah. Thank you very much. This is a very good question. If you really see the quarter two is typically a softer quarter on unique business inquiry. Now, given the quarter four, why it is slower? Few, few experiments that we are doing in the last three, four months is all this while we have been trying to improve the trust of the platform by putting more verification on the seller side. We are, we started with the mobile verification, email verification, GST matchmaking, and now GST verification, bank account verification and things like that. However, the platform is still totally free for buyers to come and visit, and also you can put in any phone number and start interacting with the platform.
As part of our overall trusted ecosystem process, first thing was that we started to put about two, three years, two years ago, we started to put multiple questions when you are asking for the inquiry. If you did not submit those question, you still had to skip, skip so that we know that at least you have put in three times skip or three times those questions. That increased the intent of the buyer that whether he wanted to actually put in the inquiry for that particular product or he was just looking around. We are going ahead and also saying that you can maybe make one inquiry or two inquiry without verifying yourself.
If you are trying to make multiple inquiries, please verify your phone number through our OTP, please verify your email ID, please verify yourself. We are starting to do a more buyer verification also, and that is leading to probably 1% of drop in the conversion from traffic to the this. This is going to be a little bit of a challenge in the medium term.
Got it, sir. Again, like you highlighted, just 1% drop in conversion. Even then it means the overall increase is very limited. That was the point. Second, if possible, you can quantify the mix, how many of these queries you have acquired through performance marketing, if possible, and rest which are organic?
I don't think I would be able to give you that number because performance marketing is very new and we continue to do a lot of experiment because which categories we want to put more budget, which categories we want to put less budget. We continue to do a lot of experimentation on that side. Until we reach a INR 10 crore per quarter continuous number, I won't be able to give you how much traffic is coming through organic search, how much traffic is coming through direct, how much traffic is coming through affiliate, and how much traffic is coming through AdWords or Facebook. There are now multiple channels through which the traffic comes, and I can't provide you know, a split on each one of them.
Got it, sir. just last one on gross
Yeah, sure.
Yeah. Sure, sure.
Yeah, please just make it the last query, yeah.
Last, last one. The last one on gross addition side. I think two quarters back, you mentioned that when we increased our prices, August, September, that generally it takes two quarters for gross addition to normalize. Are we seeing that to happen, especially in the month of April? If not, when can we expect that?
Yeah. As I said, I have already answered that question in the, in response to Anmol Garg, or in response to Vivekanand. I think it is taking much longer, given the geopolitical as well as the pricing, because SMEs are really going through a lot of pain right now. This price increase and our sales process and the silver churn, elevated silver churn is not helping. We are not going back on pricing.
Got it, sir. Thanks a lot. Good luck for coming period. Thank you.
Yeah. The participants are requested to stick to one or two questions so that everyone can get a chance to ask questions. It's preferable if both the questions can be asked at one go, please. Yeah. Vikram, please continue.
Sure. Next question is from the line of Ritvik Agrawal from 3P Investment. Ritvik, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hey. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. Am I audible?
Yes, you're audible.
Hey. Hi. I just had one question. You implemented some price hike in Q2, Q3. Just wanted to understand why are we not seeing an uptick in ARPU, not just on a whole level, but also on the silver, you know, membership subscribers. The ARPU has been pretty much flat. Any reason, any stress there?
We are seeing a uptick in ARPU because here you are seeing a mixed ARPU of everybody together. You will see ARPU uptick in times to come because it is only applied to new subscribers signing up, not the entire base. An entire base over a period of time. Every price hike takes one, two, three years. Any price hike that we would have taken one year ago in the TrustSEAL or two year ago in the Star Supplier or two year ago in the silver is still in the rolling out phase. Both the ARPUs are growing consistently, whether it is the top 10% ARPU or whether it is the.
If you see the ARPU, you know, average collection per user, that will give you some better understanding. ARPU is the revenue per user, and revenue itself is 18-month moving average. That is why you are not seeing immediate uptick.
Understood. Understood. One more question. Assuming that we have all the pressures gone, where do you see the number of suppliers, the paid suppliers number can rise up to? Any directional sense? Any way we can grow? How are you seeing it internally?
I think I've answered that question. 1688.com does about 1 million sellers. Justdial does about 0.5 million sellers. We do about 0.25 million sellers. We still feel that there is at least 2x more opportunity from here on. We need to find a better, further improved product market fit for higher frequency of repeat buyers so that we are able to retain the sellers at the silver level.
Got it. Thank you, sir.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Abhisek Banerjee from ICICI Securities. Abhisek, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi, sir. Thanks for the mute. A couple questions from my end. First is, this is the first time that I can kind of recall that there is a divergence registered buyers.
Voice is not clear. Either you are moving, so I can't make out what.
Yes. Can you hear me now?
No, I can hear you, but I mean, once you speak the entire sentence, I can't make out what you are saying.
Oh, sure.
It is coming out little. Maybe you can come a little closer to the mic.
Yeah, yeah. Trying to. This is the first time that we are seeing that registers registered buyers and your active buyers, there is a divergence. Registered buyers is up 9% year-over-year. Active buyers is actually downstream from well buying. Is there any analysis that you have done kind of gives you an answer why this is happening? Is the relevance? Is there a question of relevance coming down? The second one is, you would remember, sir, we have often spoken about the virtuous loop, right? When you do net add improvement and your buyers also kind of keep improving. Given we are seeing negative trend in both, is that something that worries you of falling into a vicious kind of cycle?
I could only make out the registered buyer versus active buyer. Registered buyer, there are lot of agentic traffic nowadays coming, and we continue to deploy armors and other ways. That is why we started doing more OTP verification so that people writing simple agents to do multiple phone numbers, to simply scrape the website, or simply send one inquiry or read the data. That is why registered users is also becoming difficult. I could not make out what you said in the second question.
I was talking about the virtuous loop that we used to talk about when our net additions were going up steadily, yeah, and active buyers were also going up. Now that both are in a decline, is there a worry of falling into a vicious loop?
Yes, there is a definitely a worry of falling into the vicious loop because that virtuous cycle where the suppliers were increasing and buyers were increasing. Suppliers, we were increasing and buyers were increasing because the total internet size was increasing. Now, it has to increase. The buyers have to come more frequently and supply side has to become more trustable and more, you know, better. I think that's where we have hit a, you know, a little bit of a saturation point. We are trying our best to find out what will keep bringing the buyers with a better frequency and what will keep the sellers with a better retention.
I think, this is, and this is a typical S-curve that you find. It's the growth consolidation, growth consolidation, growth consolidation. In every, you know, growth side of it, you will find that this virtuous cycle keeps on increasing and improving, better and better and better. Every time you hit the plateau side of the S-curve, you need to further scratch the surface to find even better product market fit. Sometimes it is.
If I can go back in time, earlier we were purely supplier name and phone number and email ID listing, then we became a product listing, then we became a product with price listing, then we became product with price and specification listing, then we became product with price and specification and photos and videos and reviews listing. I think every time we improve the supply side better and similarly, the verified supplier base and then the GST supplier base. I think we need to find one such more lever for us to go to the second, I mean, nth layer of the S-curve, that is where we are.
Understood, sir. Sir, just one last question. This is on cash distribution. We are obviously a cash-rich company, and we generate quite a decent amount of cash. Are you actually thinking about, you know, changing the payout ratio or doing some sort of larger dividend or something on those lines?
Jitin.
Okay. Abhisek, thanks for the question. We have been pretty consistent in distributing the capital back. If you see in the last three, four years, we have distributed about 40%-60% of the cash which we have generated. As per the approval from the board this time also we have gone in the similar trend and had a dividend of about INR 60 per share. We have taken your suggestion. We'll probably discuss with the board again and come back.
Next year.
For next year. This year it is INR 60 dividend.
Thanks.
Thanks, Abhisek. Now we'll take a question from the chat box. From strategic point of view, what all measures have been taken to improve stickiness of suppliers? Secondly, we understand you are facing issues in Silver segment. However, just wanted to know if this segment churn has always been this high. Has bundle selling of accounting softwares helped enhance the stickiness? The question is from Mr. Suraj Uttamchandani.
Hello, Suraj. Very good questioning on the supplier churn. Supplier churn on the Silver side has not been this high. On a monthly basis it was in the best ever terms, it went as low as Silver annual churns went as low as 2.5% side. I think we are on an annual basis around 10%-15% down on the retention numbers. Same is on that monthly side. Monthly side used to be 5%-6%, now we are running at 7%. About 2% per month we have deteriorated. If you take the month on month decreasing value, I think 15% lesser retention on the and this is pre-COVID versus post-COVID.
On the platinum and gold side, I think, we have been very similar, churn ratio of about 1% per month, that hasn't changed. Second question was bundling of the accounting software. We are not yet bundling of the accounting software. Accounting as a segment now has about 225,000 net paying customers currently. However, we have sold 400,000 licenses. Out of that, there are multiple people who were sold before the before the 2021 time, where we didn't have the direct connect with the customer and also the software was being sold as a one-time perpetual license software. That segment, now that we are 225,000, Busy is also 225,000.
In times to come, we will start to see what kind of synergetic bundling can we do, between BUSY and this. This has not yet been done. Thank you. Avijit please continue.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Swapnil from JM Financial. Swapnil, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hi. I have just one question. This is pertaining to your employee expenses. Typically 4Q is the quarter where employee expenses go up meaningfully on a quarter-to-quarter basis. This time around here there has been a decent decline. Any particular reason for that? A related question to that is with the number of employees. I think there has been some rationalization on the employee employees also. Can you kind of confirm that? Because the numbers are-
Swapnil, your voice is breaking.
Should I repeat my question? Hello?
Yeah, we got the first question. On the expenses part, you may repeat the second part.
The second question was like, the number of employees that you reported, 6,200 something. It was 6,300 in the previous quarter. Is this some kind of a rationalization exercise or and is it linked to the employee expenses going down also in a way? Any particular reason for that, and what are the thought process on the number of employees going up or going ahead? Yeah, thanks.
Okay, thanks. Let me answer the first question first. If you remember last quarter, there was a labor code impact which we had taken. It was about INR 8.5 crores, if I remember, which we had taken last quarter, and that's how it is looking like the expense has reduced. That is not the case. On the employee count, it has reached to 6,200 as we speak. There is no rationalization as such. There are, like, campus hiring, et cetera, which we do on a periodic basis just to scale up our servicing and sales team. No rationalization by design as such which we are trying to do. I hope that answer your question.
Just, the continuation of that. Like, do you plan to add more number of people as or do you want to wait and watch for the collections growth to come pick up first and then?
On the basis of servicing and sales team, what is required, we usually hire that. We are already at a level what we require. We don't see any, like, gap which needs to be bridged at this point of time.
Will it be fair to say that you should get some kind of operating leverage, if you're not adding people?
No.
On the margin side at least?
No, it is variable. As per the business grows, expenses also grows, especially for the employee side.
Okay, cool.
Cool. Thank you.
Now we'll take a question from the chat box. What are the updates we can provide on the trends with some of our key investee companies in terms of growth, competition, funding scenarios, et cetera? The question is from Mr. Krushi Parekh.
Can you put the investing slide? Yes. No, the other one.
Yeah.
Thanks, Krushi, for the question. You know, as you know that we started investing sometime around in 2020 onwards. In the last five to six years, we've invested almost INR 750 odd crores across 13 different investments, primarily in the area of business software, logistics, SaaS, and the fintech opportunities that we kind of came across. Out of 13 investments that we made, you know, so far, almost six companies have crossed more than INR 100 crores in the turnover. They've been kind of, you know, doing very well and been kind of, you know, growing at a very reasonable rate, you know, that we foresee. That's like, let's say, 15% of the investments we have done.
The other investments are also kind of, you know, doing good or there. These six companies particularly, we hope that probably in the next two, three years may go down the more IPO path also. That investment what we have done is kind of, you know, playing out well in line with our own thinking that what we had at the time of making these investments. In the terms of, you know, specific metrics for all those 12, 13 companies, we would be coming out with the annual report, which may have, you know, some kind of end revenues and the disclosures that you would find. Probably I would suggest maybe once you go through that you may find some metrics, you know, around those companies.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Pranaya Jain from Banyan Tree. Pranaya, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Pranaya, are you there?
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yeah, you're on, yeah.
Sorry for that. I have three questions. Number one is, you mentioned about 1688.com. Can we also assume that, you know, we'll see ARPU-led growth in the medium term on a consistent basis? That's question number one. Question number two is, can you talk a little more about some of the value-added services that you are providing? What are our methods of monetizing them? Do we have any plans of getting into fulfillment as well? The last question is on buybacks. What are your thoughts on buybacks, given the change in taxation policies?
Yeah. First on the 1688.com. As I said, 1688.com has 1 million customers and ARPU of about $2,000 now. That makes it about $2 billion in revenue. It has started to become a mostly ARPU-led growth. Even today they have ARPU and customer both. I think they started doing that when they crossed more than 750,000 paying sellers. I believe that, given that India versus China, manufacturing versus not manufacturing, services versus product, we also aim to become a at least a half a million customer in times to come. I believe that it is too early to be purely and purely dependent on ARPU-led growth.
We will continue to look for customer-led growth as well as ARPU-led growth in the medium term. Over the time, when we are closer to 500,000 customers, maybe 400,000, that's when we will start to look at mostly ARPU-led solution. But currently we are in stuck in a position in the last two, three years that it looks like that we are mostly doing ARPU-led growth. That coming to the second part of the VAS. If you compare the 1688.com or alibaba.com, what portion of the subscription and VAS revenue they report. I mean, what they report as subscription and what they report as VAS versus what we report as subscription and VAS is slightly different.
If you look at it, all the platinum customers revenue that they report, barring the basic subscription they have, they report it as a VAS. All the search and premium listing and the keyword listing and the location targeting, they report it as VAS. When we look at them, because there's not much of a detailed version of available, it's only the 2011 version, when they, when they were listed as a B2B company that was available. I guess you should see our top 10% customers revenue as typically the VAS revenue, which could be compared with the alibaba.com. Having said that, over the last 15 years or so, Alibaba has matured into a multiple revenue items.
Whether it is fulfillment, whether it is lending, whether it is software enablement, whether it is, you know, payments. They have built an entire stack over a period of time. Fulfillment is just one of them. We believe that fulfillment through Cainiao or fulfillment through partnering with people like maybe Porter, Shiprocket and alike, while trying to build other items. Like payment we don't need much here in India because Indian payment infrastructure is very, very good, and we have done multiple attempts in the past when it was not good. On the other value-added side, I think we are continuously working towards the software value-added, which is accounting, lead management, you know, AI-based seller initiative for lead qualification and things like that.
We'll continue to work on that. On the buyback versus, dividend, I don't think there's much different now.
Yeah. No. We had evaluated in this in detail, and that's how we came to the conclusion versus the amount of dividend to be declared, amount of money to be reallocated to Shareholders. We decided dividend is the right way. Next year we'll reevaluate it and we'll come back.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question is from the line of Shreya Chatterjee from Ageless Capital. Shreya, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question. Shreya, are you there?
Thank you for taking my question. I'd like to understand more, like, what metrics are you exactly tracking so to get a clear view of how, like, your buyers, whatever RFP they put out, is actually, like, closed from the sellers that you have on your platform, apart from the metrics that you provide?
Sorry, come again, Shreya. I didn't understand the question fully, fulfillment part.
What other metrics than you provide in your presentation do you actually track to actually understand that the RFPs that are provided out by the buyer is actually closed by the sellers? Are there any close metrics that you track that, okay, it will be closed with 80% or 90% fulfillment rate? Anything on that front?
Yeah. There is no definite metric that we have because we are mostly advertising and referral platform. We are not a transaction and fulfillment platform. We are a intermediary rather than being a marketplace. Now, coming to the anecdotal and survey-based thing. We send out a survey to all the buyers whose email ID is available with us, and almost 60%, 70% of the buyers we have email ID also available. In those cases, we send out a email after three days and after seven days asking them whether their RFQ was fulfilled or if it was fulfilled, whether it was fulfilled through IndiaMART seller, it was fulfilled from outside or if they postponed their requirement.
That almost 2% of the buyers actually respond to those thing. Given that our 9 million unique monthly buyers, out of that, 6 million obviously typically have email ID. When we send out to them, about INR 1.2 lakh we end up getting feedback. That INR 1.2 lakh feedback every month that we get, we get to see anywhere between 40%-45% fulfillment confirmed by the buyer. However, these are survey figures. Treat them more like yesterday's exit poll.
Got it. Secondly, on your product listing side, the number of active products has gone up. Are you trying to, like, focus on certain particular categories with this increased product listings? On my first question, you said that you track it on a lag basis. Like, after you send out the mails, then you get to know what was the fulfillment rate. Do you want to incorporate some measures so that this can also help you to close more leads and that would actually get the buyers more interested?
Yes, we continue to, you know. Earlier we were looking at the payment as one, more towards that. Now, if you go, we try to do it. We, we will, in a manner, we will try to find whether where we can fulfill across the categories. Because if we apply anything which is category-specific fulfillment, that would be too restricted. I think we continue to love to be a horizontal platform where items from apparel to agro, to machinery, to raw material. I mean, if you, if you go to one of those slides which says end-to-end fulfillment. We continue to find levers so that we can actually do transaction-by-transaction tracking, but we haven't found much success on that side.
Maybe some kind of a financial way or maybe some kind of a incentivization, buyer incentivization, and that has been difficult in any classified business or any intermediary business. We continue to read multiple business models across the world where there could be some innovation where you would be able to find, you would be able to track if the transaction loop closed or not. On the category side, there are category focus. If you see our paying customer distribution on a in the presentation. Our paying customer distribution in the presentation, you will find that industrial plant and machinery, construction, electrical equipment, these are some of the top industries that we focus on. Mostly in the plant and machinery and industrial equipment and electrical equipment.
These are the, you know, if you typically take these four, these four account for almost 30% of the total paying suppliers. Then there is a long tail of it. We are now trying to work on a 3-Tier architecture of the differential pricing, where there is a standard pricing which is applicable to almost 95% of the categories, 5% of the categories are the premium ones, and top 1,000 categories are the super premium ones. That's where we get even better insight on category, ARPU, buyer demand, seller demand, location-wise demand, and that's where we try to increase category focus even better. Given that we are a horizontal across thousands and thousands of categories, it is difficult to scale and manage.
Even if we are able to manage a few category experts, as soon as you expand it to couple of dozen category managers, it becomes difficult to manage. Hopefully, with the AI coming in, I think a lot of horizontal part can be taken care of it, and maybe then we can invest only on the vertical part of the business, where we would be able to focus mainly on few categories to be able to disproportionately generate better business from them. You can see, for example, metal, especially, steel is one of the very large categories on IndiaMART. You will see simple plant and machineries like chapati making machine or chappal making machine or dhona making machine.
Those are a very tier three kind of a buyer, is a very good use case for IndiaMART, lathe machines like that. Similarly, you will find, you know, industrial shed or industrial flooring, you know, color-coated roofing sheets, puff panels. There is a lot of variety of products that you can go into details, and some of them you can see on the screen on the end-to-end supply chain also.
Thank you. Due to paucity of time, this will be the last question for the day. I will now hand over the call to Dinesh Agarwal for his concluding remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your joining our quarter four and FY 2026 conference call. We have tried to address your queries in the time available. If you still have questions, please feel free to contact our investor relation teams. Thank you, and good evening and good night.
On behalf of IndiaMART, we thank everyone for joining us on this webinar. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.