Conference is now being recorded.
In demand in the segment. So moving on from sector to sector in terms of specific- end markets which we operate in, and I'll begin with the automotive industry. The automotive industry remained positive in passenger vehicles, despite end market output being mixed. We especially saw strong performance by M&M with new product launches, which provided a boost to volumes. The two-wheeler segment remained muted but demonstrated some green shoots at specific categories. In both PVs and two-wheelers, we continue to see an accelerated shift towards electric vehicles, with a stronger demand growth for EVs, launch of new models, and a very strong short-term outlook for that space. The commercial vehicle and auto components showed a more muted or flat growth environment. During the year quarter, we witnessed a higher level of NPDs or planned shutdowns across several OEMs in the industry.
From a farm sector perspective, what you see is a seasonally weaker quarter of the farm sector, with typically upcoming year changes and a kind of a post-season slowdown. This quarter remained consistent with that pattern of prior years, and we saw softer demand in the quarter compared to the preceding quarter of the year. M&M farm sector's new products continue to gain traction in the market, reflecting positively for us. From a consumer perspective, demand in urban markets continued to be muted, with rural markets showing some recovery. Despite the festive season, which is traditionally a period of heightened consumption, demand saw no real significant uplift. A delayed and milder winter has also had an adverse impact on sales of seasonal products, while continued weakness in urban general trade channels has further negatively impacted demand. However, there has been a modest sequential improvement, with some stabilization.
At the same time, premiumization in consumer goods also remains a strong driver for value growth. Moving on to consumer durables, the fan industry has stabilized post-implementation of the BEE norms and is experiencing increasing premiumization in both urban and tier-one towns, driven by the growing adoption of BLDC fans. The room air conditioning industry posted robust growth during the first half of FY25, continuing the momentum from the previous year. Uninterrupted seasonal demand and soaring temperatures led to record demand for cooling products. With the summer season approaching, inventory build-up is expected to commence soon to meet anticipated demand. In other categories of the segment, in FMCG, we generally see moderate growth, especially in the lower and middle category products, while premiumization remains a strong driver for value growth in higher product categories.
Rounding off with telecom, the tariff increases in the telecom segment continue to benefit the industry, driving healthy growth in ARPUs and contributing to an overall improvement in industry performance. Consequently, capital spend has remained stable compared to the previous quarter, supported by ongoing investments in 5G infrastructure and initiatives to expand and densify rural networks. We continue to see increased network expansion forecasts from the major telecom players we are working with, both in terms of network expansion and specifically 5G expansion. From a Mahindra Logistics perspective, some things have gone well in the quarter. Despite the challenging environment and fluctuations in the market, our order intake remains positive. Our pending order board for execution, CPL contract logistics business, is over INR 250 crore in terms of annual contract value, and therefore we are looking forward to some momentum there in the coming quarters.
During the quarter, we won nearly INR 100 crore of new orders worth INR 100 crore in annual contract value in the CPL business. The mobility business won a key contract for the new Noida International Airport, where we should start services as that airport opens up in the coming quarter. The express business did see an uptick in new contracts, with total contracts signed of nearly 3,500 metric tons on a monthly basis, and we do expect the rollout or the flow-through of that in the coming four months. Warehousing volume, warehousing and solutions volumes grew by 14% year-on-year, with stable and improving yields. Our white space at 7%, or close to 1.5 million sq ft, remains obviously above our long-term targets, and we are working on driving utilization up by Q1 of next year based on some of the orders which have been won.
New expansions to east and west are going well, and similarly to those new expansions, more than 75% of the capacity there is already sold out. Our new offerings for the linehaul transportation business to trucking have gained strong momentum with customer orders, and the auto outbound business, where we actually added fleet earlier this year, is now in full utilization and is kind of doing really well for us. During the quarter, we also launched a new analytics platform for emissions measurement called EAR, which is an industry-leading platform and provides all our customers data on emissions and optimization opportunities. We also, as part of an overall corporate action during the quarter, released a new brand identity which integrates all of Mahindra Logistics and subsidiaries into one unified approach to our customers and an integrated value proposition to all our stakeholders.
From a technology perspective, we continue to upgrade our LogiOne suite of technology products with new additions, leveraging GenAI, and we expect a full re-release of the suite by the end of this financial year. What's not gone well in the quarter and kind of areas of focus for us? Firstly, overall, we saw a mixed impact of the festive season and the peak. The first part of the festive period was really positive, but post-mid-November, we did start seeing a softening in volumes, and that did affect multiple parts of our business: the CPL business, the express business, and the last-mile delivery business. The express business was flat in volumes sequentially on quarter-on-quarter basis, despite the new order intake. We obviously had some churn or short-term attrition in volume. These were largely driven by two things. We had some operational challenges during the festive peak.
As you all know, during the festive period, we do see a surge in demand for delivery associates, operators, and so on, and we had challenges around that, which kind of had some impact in service levels across multiple parts of our network. This did impact in customers dropping some volume in the short term. Volume from our retail partners was also impacted post the festive peak, and across the board, some of our existing volume customers saw lower volumes, which was kind of not as per what we had expected going in. Our estimate these have not been issues of a loss of market share, but really mean that our customers have fundamentally seen lower volume. Cumulatively, those three factors have impacted the improvement plan which we had estimated.
Though we did see a recovery in December, for the quarter, we did end up pretty flat on volume, and Q3 overall looked a lot like Q2 on most segments. The CPL and the contract logistics business, many of our mature existing warehouse-based operations during the quarter have seen slightly lower volume versus last year. This has been the second quarter where we've seen this trend now, with same-site volumes being lower, largely reflecting the broad consumption slowdown which we are seeing. This has reduced our operating leverage, as we have seen sales growth now coming from new sites, which obviously are earlier in their maturity cycle.
On a positive note, while volume on the sites has been lesser than what we thought it would be, because of the way we structure our contracts in terms of minimum guaranteed volumes in all our operations, we have not seen a significant downside impact of it. The freight forwarding business was impacted sequentially by lower pricing in Q3 versus Q2, and there's been a price correction across the board, both in air and sea. While we were able to show tonnage air in growth, the volatility in pricing has affected our order closure in sea especially and obviously impacted revenue for TEU as well. So mixed bag in terms of some things which went well, obviously some things did not go as well. Let me now move on to financial performance. As we discussed consolidated financial performance, revenue for Q3 increased by 14.1% year-on-year to INR 1,594.2 crore.
Revenue from the warehousing segment stood at around approximately INR 300 crore, exactly INR 210.6 crore in Q3 F25, as compared to INR 261.9 crore for the same period last year, a jump of nearly 15% year-on-year. The supply chain management businesses, including our 3PL and network services businesses, contributed 95% of our overall revenue, and the mobility businesses contributed 5% of our overall revenue for Q3 F25. Gross margin on a fully consolidated basis in the third quarter was at 9.2%, 10 basis points up compared to the same quarter of last year. Gross margin without the impact of the investments in the express business stood at 10.1%. EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 73.7 crore, up from INR 52.3 crore in Q3 FY24, largely driven by improvements in cost performance in multiple areas, especially in the express business.
Overall losses for the quarter, Q3 F25 stood at nine crore at a consolidated MLL level. Moving on to component performance for individual companies, and I'll start with MLL standalone. To remind everyone, the standalone MLL business largely hosts the CPL contract logistics business and part of our last-mile delivery business. Revenue for Q3 F25 in this entity was INR 1,326.9 crore as compared to INR 1,160 crore for the same quarter last year. PAT for Q3 F25 was INR 11.6 crore, marginally down from INR 12.5 crore for the same quarter last year. Moving on to logs, our freight forwarding business revenue for Q3 F25 was INR 71.5 crore, up from INR 55.2 crore in the same quarter last year. PAT for the quarter for Q3 F25 was INR 1.5 crore as compared to INR 240 lakhs for the same period last year.
Express business revenue for the quarter was INR 89.1 crore compared to INR 95.6 crore in the same period last year. PAT losses shrunk to INR 24.8 crore in Q3 of F25. The mobility business had revenues of around INR 78.1 crore compared to INR 83.9 crore in the same quarter last year. PAT for Q3 F25 stood at marginally short of INR 1 crore, around INR 0.76 crore. The Rivigo entity, revenue for the Rivigo on a reported basis for the quarter was INR 42.2 crore as compared to reported revenue of INR 3.2 crore in the last year. Important to note to all of you that in the last year, we had the actual majority transactions took us to majority consolidation happened in the last end of the quarter, and therefore the INR 3.2 crore of revenue in Q3 represents a very small part of the full quarter's number.
Adjusting for that, revenue grew by around 7% on a nominal basis in Q3 FY25. PAT for Q3 F25 was INR 0.1 crore as opposed to a loss of INR 80 lakhs for the same period last year. The 2x2 Logistics business, which is our outbound logistics business, had a good quarter. Revenue jumped from INR 14 crore last year for the same period last year to INR 25.3 crore in Q3 F
25, and PAT jumped from INR 0.40 crore last year for the same quarter to approximately INR 2.1 crore in this quarter. Overall, across the company, the automotive and manufacturing business is around 58% of our revenue, and the non-automotive and auto and manufacturing of farm business is around 42%, split roughly equally between e-commerce and non-e-commerce, consumer manufacturing durables and so on, and e-commerce are roughly split halfway through there. At an overall level, we continue to make progress in most business segments.
As you can see, the component level performance, as you would see, that we've had improvements year-on-year across most of our business segments. The CPL business is well positioned for growth given the positive order boards we have and a slate of new upcoming projects for the next two quarters. The cross-border and mobility business continue to make structural improvements while managing some short-term volatility in end markets. Our big focus continues to be the express business, notwithstanding a weaker-than-expected performance in the quarter which we just went by. We are confident the actions we have put in will generate positive momentum. Over the last four quarters in the express business, we have been able to reduce our gross margin from minus 13% to around minus 5% on marginal volume growth. So obviously, for us, the key thing for us now is to drive volume in the business.
We have several initiatives which are ongoing, not fully reflected in the bottom line in the quarter we just went by, but things which we are confident will have. Those are a bit long tail, will flow into in the coming quarters. With this, I'll open the floor for questions and answers.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question comes from the line of Krupas hankar with Avendus Spark. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, Krupa.
Hi. Hi. Good afternoon. I think on the CPL business, I just had a couple of questions. Given that the update of the quarter had mentioned INR 250 crore which is pending and INR 100 crore worth which is won, these are annual worth of these contracts, is it, or is it lifetime of these?
These are annual contract volumes. So obviously, they get executed, and that's a 12-month run rate of those numbers.
Great. And that was one clarification. And on the white space of 1.5 million sq ft, what is the thought process over there? How do you see the reduction coming in, or what would be the average level of white spaces which would continue to remain given the churn or, if at all, enduring churn customer base? What is your thought over there?
It's a good point. I think the way I really see this, and obviously, we model the network across the board, is we are continuing to invest in the network because we think that there is a long-term play, and we obviously have long development cycles. As I said earlier, even construction cycles have gone up as some of the commodity prices have increased. So we are building into a 24-30-month window during the construction cycle. We designed the network, Krupa, for roughly a 3.5% white space. So we always assume some amount of white space will be there. It's good for us. It allows us. There's always customer sites which are basically demobilized or being newly mobilized, and there's kind of interplay time during that for startup and so on. So we do design the network around 3.5%.
Within 3.5%, as a general planning metric, is actually very good, basically what we have assessed. Right now, we are running at around twice that. So technically, we are kind of running at around a million sq ft extra, Krupa. It will take a little bit, and as you all know, this big inflection point for us on this happened around Q3 end last year, from a contracting perspective and from a financial perspective in Q4, where post-peak, one of our larger e-com customers actually foreclosed contracts. Almost all the space which became excess was largely on account of that. Now, where we stand, as we stand right now, we are pretty confident that I would say around 700-800 thousand sq ft should get sold out basis of contracts we have, should hit utilization somewhere in Q1 next year. Okay? So that's roughly when this will get done.
There are specific periods along the way, but we expect that in Q1 onwards, we should be able to get around 800,000 of that done. Bear in mind, we're obviously adding new space as well. So this is on the slide which is there. And that's why this quarter, I reported out how we are on the new space we're adding as well. So we are adding between Kolkata and Guwahati, and Pune and Chakan. We are adding another probably 1 million sq ft roughly or so. And around 75% of it is already sold. It's under construction, actually client construction and commissioning. We have probably another 250,000 of that to be sold, but those infrastructures also come up over the next three, four months, four, five months. So we obviously have some amount of addition coming there as well.
So broad and large, I expect that the white space, as we go to next financial year, we expect to be between 700 and 700 thousand to a million. I mentioned last year, I think I remember in Q4 last year, you may remember, I said that we have now put a pause. We have kind of slowed down some of the new site construction given the volatility we see in the market. Obviously, a lot of the sites which we have seen now, the sites where construction has begun much earlier. So we have slowed down a little bit in terms of CapEx on warehousing just given the volatility we see in the market. But the focus right now, obviously, is to be able to sell this out, and I expect that by Q1, we should be at a white space around 700 to 800 thousand.
The rest should get sold out.
Got it. Thanks for the detailed explanation. Second question was on the express business. While you have highlighted something about taking new measures to improve the adjusted volumes which were required to break even, I just wanted to get a sense, given the underlying slowdown in the industry, what is the timeframe you are expecting that these measures would start resulting in a positive contribution to your run-rate EBITDA in addition to your overall operations, and how do you see the profitability shaping up over the next four to six quarters?
I think let me begin with what has not changed and tell you about what has changed, with both eyes open. But let me first begin, and I think this might be a question that several of you have in your mind. I think this was not obviously. We kind of delivered less than what we thought we would in this quarter on express. And therefore, I'm not going to gloss over that issue because I think we came short, and we didn't kind of expect to do what we had hoped to do in the quarter. Now, let me break that down into two parts. So from a cost perspective, we are around 26% contribution margin in the business, 26.8%. And our challenge is the utilization of the network. And what we could do in terms of optimizing costs. Well, that we've already done a fair amount of practice.
As you can see, Gross Margin has improved by 800 basis points year- on- year in the business. So I don't think that while there is a range of optimization which will now happen, the optimization is going to be linked to volume growth. Okay? So that's the first thing. Now, what's happening in volume growth, I think as we enter the quarter, what we still hold on to is that we need around 6 to 7,000 tons more per month to basically be able to get to that point where we need to be at an EBITDA break-even perspective and somewhere between EBITDA break-even and past break-even. Given the way we are right now, that 7,000 tons, which is still the big ask for us. What happened in the quarter is that that 7,000 comes to two ways.
We have to ensure that we are winning new orders, and we are monetizing that, and we have to ensure that we are not losing money, simplistically. The last two quarters, we had very stable operations. We actually didn't have a problem in holding our existing clients. I think there's a bit of a problem in the pace at which we acquired new clients, and I talked to all of you about all the new things, additional things we were doing. On the positive side, that all actually did add tonnage and orders, so we did, as I mentioned earlier on, fresh order intake was around 3,500-3,600 tons monthly during the quarter. That's the new contracts we signed.
However, the challenge for us was that partially because of operation issues and partially because of the fact that many of our customers just downgraded, we did see almost an equal impact through the quarter on volume. The good news is, December, customers have come back, so we are expecting that in January, February, March, we should start getting back to seeing the flow through of these new orders we have signed, but it is a bit of an iterative situation because, as you all know, the current market is actually pretty tough, okay, so what are we doing? I think what we are doing is three things. I think, first of all, we are obviously sharpening our offerings and trying to offer some, start doing some newer offerings which are focused on some spaces which we are not operating in today.
So that's the first thing which we are trying to do. So we can strengthen that, strengthen our air offerings, strengthen some work on our regional offerings. So those are things we are doing so we can actually capture those niches. The second one, obviously, is we are expanding the sales organization, driving more synergy. Last quarter, obviously, we got 3,500 tons of order intake. We need to kind of expand that further. And the third thing, obviously, is we have made some corrections on the operation side because that was, after seven or eight months of very stable operations, we did have a blip around the festive this time, and the blip had some flow-through impact. So overall, obviously, not the quarter we wanted to have. We did a lot of work. Our team did a lot of work on getting new volume in.
I know they worked pretty hard during the festive peak to ensure that our facilities ran well and we held customer deliveries and helped customer performance levels. Unfortunately, I think we had these parts of the network which got impacted by this. We have upgraded our tech. We've upgraded some of the organization levers around there to ensure that this does not, that we are building more guardrails against this going forward. But that's the two things which we have to do, Krupa. I think as we stand right now, I think if we are able to hold our attrition rate of the churn, even this quarter, if we had held our churn, our volume would have been halfway, about 35%-40% to that 7,000-ton number. So I think that's what we really have to focus on doing, Krupa, and ensure that we do that.
I think one other thing which we've been asked often is, "What are we going to do on pricing?" And I think on pricing, our approach has still been the same, Krupa, which is we price strategically. Our intrinsic approach is to retain value and not to go into price war or get into a pricing game. But we do obviously price strategically to the size of the account. But those are three broad areas we're working on: pricing, demand expansion, obviously expanding our offerings and our coverage in the market, and we're going to kind of improve that good momentum we have seen on new order intake. We could expand that further.
Obviously, we had to make a lot of these corrections in operations which we didn't expect to happen this year, but we did, in a couple of pockets, see a significant impact because of festive in terms of availability of manpower. And that did disrupt a week of operations, but obviously, in an express business or a network, it has a flow-through which is slightly longer. And I just had to answer a lot of express stuff because it probably muddied people's minds as well. So I just want to take the opportunity with your question to answer that.
Sure. Thanks. One follow-up on that. What would be the extent of equity infusion in the express business over the next couple of quarters or three quarters until we find ground to improve on overall profitability? Any projections you have in mind?
At this stage, I don't think we've got a specific number in mind there. I think if you want to ask, from a forward-looking view, we don't have a specific target there. What I would say, I think, is the business is actually we put a lot of focus on cash, and unfortunately, we don't share component balance sheets with you in the end of the third quarter, but you would actually see we did a lot of progress in terms of the cash-to-cash cycle in that business. That's been a significant focus. And therefore, the business, from an OCF perspective, I think, is in very good shape. There's obviously the burn which we have to reduce and cut down significantly.
So, I don't have a specific number, Krupa, but obviously, if you're asking why I'm going to put a couple of hundred crore more, I can raise this for you because that's the kind of stuff we're not going to do. We are topping up if it's required, but at this stage, I don't have a specific number.
Got it. Thanks for answering my questions. I'm all set.
Thank you. The next questions are from the line of Alok Deora with Motilal Oswal. Please go ahead.
Hi Sagar. Good evening. So thanks for the great discussion on the express business. My question is just related to that only. So what we also understand is that even January has been pretty soft, and players have been queuing up for gathering volumes, and even the price hikes which were proposed by some players like Gati, etc., have not really gone through. So how do we see this now? Because even in Q3, which was a festive quarter, QOQ performance has been weaker than Q2. So just some color on that, that when are we seeing the break-even happening for this? I understand it might not be possible to give a specific quarter, but any timeline? Because last time you mentioned that 5% month-on-month growth would be required for a break-even. But in the current market scenario, that seems pretty far-fetched.
If you could just spend a couple of more minutes on this discussion.
Sure. I think it's a great question, and I'm glad you asked it because I think, as I said last time, and I'm really appreciative that you actually remember that as well. You had said last time that we had a 30-35% volume growth. Over six months, that would be roughly 5%. And I think through the quarter, that's why we had hoped to get around 15% order intake growth. And we had hoped to actually be able to monetize parts of those as well in the quarter. I think what on the positive side happened is that order intake story kind of stayed. I think our challenge has been on the churn we have seen. Obviously, there is some pricing competitiveness which affects that churn as well.
But as I said, part of that was actually just our seasonal operational challenges which we had in the quarter, which did impact some of the volume going up. So from my perspective, at least, I think the order intake opportunity still exists. Is it a tough market? It's a tough market. It's a very tough market right now. You articulated that well using a bunch of other industry cons. It is a tough market, but our customers who we have a very strong position with in other parts of our business. And obviously, as I said earlier on, we are expanding the focus and expanding our retail partnership through retail volume. We are attacking some of the industries a little bit more strategically. And we obviously are looking at launching some new offerings along and some niches to kind of get that volume in.
I'm fairly confident that we will be able to get to that just given what we saw as order intake this quarter as well because there's a new contract we signed. These are not just contracts that are upgraded in volume because of festive season. So there's new contracts we have signed. We just have to kind of keep expanding that further. And it's a blocking and tackling game on the ground in terms of sales efficiency. We also have to ensure that our operations are really good so we're not losing anyone. Because this quarter as well, we would have actually probably been 10%-12% higher on revenue, at least, on volume, at least, if we had not had some of these operation issues on the back end.
Yeah. So just whatever the orders which you have lost, I understand there is a new ordering flow also, but you have lost some orders. That's why it's kind of a flattish QOQ. So whatever you have lost is not really a one-time thing. I mean, it's like the industry is competitive, so we kind of lost the volume side. So that could continue in 4Q as well. I mean, when are we going to get a break-even here? Because looking at the way things are progressing, it could well be by FY26, and also we might be in single-digit losses or at break-even in an optimistic scenario because the industry itself is very slow at this point of time.
I hear you a little bit. And all the things which you have said are all possible scenarios. There's no question on that. What I can share with you at this stage is I think approximately 70%-75% of our customers who downgraded in the early part of last quarter came back in December. Now, can I be absolutely sure they will stay forever? I don't think we can ever say that. Never say never. But we are still working on the same plan, as you said earlier. We have because we need to get 3%-5%. We have to get 5% month-on-month volume growth. And we have to obviously hold our existing volume and ensure that we are not allowing attrition to happen.
Obviously, we'll have to probably price some part of that strategically to ensure that, especially on the retention side, that we are doing it. Given the markets right now, can I perfectly predict that this is the month it's going to happen or that's the month it's going to happen? No, I can't. I mean, it would not be fair, and I would just not be being honest about it. What I can tell you is what's moved in our business. The new order intake has been good. It's kind of starting to get in line with what we need it to be. The attrition, unfortunately, has and the ops issues have been a challenge for us. We have to get the ops issues under control, which we have done. To that extent of the ops issues, we have seen the recovery of volume.
Some of the downgrading, we are working on getting that back, and I can't say clearly to ask me will 10% come, 15%, 90% come, but I can tell you that a large majority have started upgrading with us again. I still therefore think that we still hold that this is probably, I'm not sure if Q2 is a low, but I can't, but it would be reasonable to say that we are not going to be able to get this under control. I think we are still two quarters away from EBITDA break-even at least. That I think is a fair conclusion. Just given our update right now, in terms of order intake, the market environment right now, we are probably a couple of quarters away from break-even, and of course, things could move a little bit here and there. Not a little bit.
They could move here and there, and that could further impact it. But the way we are modeled right now, we think we're a couple of quarters away.
Sure. Just last question. How has January volumes been as against Q3?
January has been decent. January has not been a blockbuster. I think you made that. Yeah, I concur with your point. But I think January has been sequentially a positive move for us till now. It is obviously, as you know, it is a 28th-5th last sector of the numbers before the Republic Day. But as of 24th, 25th, we were in a better place, a good place. We were not seeing some of the headwinds which other people in the industry are talking about. But it is also true that volume is a crawl. Volume is not a sprint right now. And look, that's a fair thing. And obviously, I don't think we've not seen a lot of the pricing actions that some industry reports have talked about really showing up on the floor, on the ground. So I think pricing remains tight as well.
Sure. That's all from my side. Thank you, Sir. All the best.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Jainam Shah with Equirus Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Sir, just wanted to check that we are having around INR 90 cr of revenue from the express segment. Let's assume that we reach to or we grow this revenue by INR 30-40 cr. What kind of additional margin, be it gross margin or EBITDA margin, that we can make from the additional INR 30-40 cr of revenue?
Sir, in general, I think if you look at it right now, I think we are around 26-27% contribution margin in the non-business as it is right now, so I think roughly on that, the first step therefore is roughly that contribution margin should largely fall through. There will be some marginal cost increase, but overall, even if that doesn't get better, at that 26% rate, around INR 40 crore would be around INR 10- 11 crore of additional margin. In addition to that, obviously, as right now our linehauls are running at around 75-76% utilization, obviously, as that volume goes up, we expect the linehauls in close to the mid-80s. I don't think we can mid-80s or late-80s. I don't think we can probably push it beyond that, but that uplift should give us we did one down to that correction earlier in late last year.
We should be able to get that utilization further up. And that should probably add. We expect another INR 2-3 cr at least of goodness to the numbers. So at that level, we should be expecting around INR 11-12 cr of goodness overall coming in. And that, I think, is, and mathematically, look at it, that gets us close, almost, to the past break-even level as well.
Go ahead, Sir. Go ahead.
Right now, we are losing around INR 21-22 cr at past levels. We are losing around INR 14 cr, INR 13-14 cr in the EBITDA level. So that goodness of around INR 14-15 cr actually adds to around we expect that the linehaul optimization, linehaul is around 65% of the cost. So we get around a 3-5% benefit there. That'll be another INR 4-5 cr to get up. And that gets us to EBITDA break-even. So that's kind of the EBITDA break-even bridge we're seeing.
Got it. Got it. Sir, just wanted to check. We were doing, I guess, INR 30 crore or INR 40 crore kind of a run rate on our express segment before the acquisition of Rivigo. This number is right?
No, it's not. I think we were doing around. I think it depends on quarter to quarter. But at that time, I think we probably peaked at around INR 27 - 27 crore on a quarterly basis.
Yeah. So even if we just rounded off to INR 100 crore on a yearly basis and on the back of less than INR 25 crore on a quarterly basis, and Rivigo was doing around INR 350 crore of revenue on their express segment. And in total, we were targeting INR 450 crore-INR 500 crore of revenue. Whereas we are currently at around INR 90 crore on it. We had made a hike of around INR 97 crore during the last year. My point is that, of course, we are acquiring the customers. It's a journey that the market is competitive. Few other players have acquired the company, which is like 4X of the size of the Rivigo. Despite that, they were able to gain the market share. Of course, they are not also making money. We are also losing it out.
In what kind of scenario, we can even reach to the 450 cr of revenue firstly? And of course, we have been talking about the synergy benefit after the express is coming into the play. But is that kind of.
Let me answer your question. I get the question, if you can hear me, but let me first clarify numbers. I think we at around, I think our, I don't remember exactly, but I think our peak revenues in the network business was around INR 92 cr for the full year of express. We acquired the company from Rivigo, and so I think there was around INR 340 cr of revenue, so the baseline number was around INR 430 cr. We are actually running below the baseline, so that's clearly a fact. We are running approximately INR 75 cr below the baseline, so let me just, but I'll confirm your point, and also, I'll just clarify the numbers, so we are still on the same page, so what has happened there, I think, as you mentioned, when we started, I think, as we have been talking through the period, two or three things happened.
We obviously lost some business, which was one part of it. The second part is that we downtraded a lot of the volume because we had issues on commercial payments and so on and so forth, and I think we kind of called out earlier that we've actually dropped some and I don't know the exact number, but we dropped probably a couple of thousand tons because of just the orders, the business we got, we had kind of orders which we didn't like or customer profiles we didn't like. We also, the erstwhile Rivigo business was actually also doing a lot of retail business where we had to deliver a lot of deliveries outside our network in extreme areas, which was actually not helpful from a profitability perspective, so we rationalized customers. We rationalized network.
And that has been a significant part of what we saw in terms of revenue drop. It's also I mean, if I may say so, it is also part of what helped us improve the gross margin. The gross margin was minus 13%. Part of the way we think we'll get to the minus 3-4% now. In some part, it's also because we weeded out some of this stuff. So I think usually, I take this into context that I think all revenue is not good revenue. When we are running a network, some revenue can be bad revenue as well. And I just want to say that because you can take the INR 430 crore as a starting point.
But if you look at what I said in our first call, and I think we just go back, we said that we expect the business to be around INR 420 cr on a consult basis. That's kind of what we are combining both of these to be. And we think we'll grow at 10%-15% on INR 650 cr. We had obviously taken some of this network rationalization, which we expected in that period, which is INR 650-700 cr or so. So I think therefore, I want to just say that the starting point of revenue is just not a complete starting point because obviously, all of that revenue was good, and it was a problem for us. But as we go forward, I think obviously, we need around 6,000-7,000 tons per month more.
That's around 70,000 tons a year, which is roughly around 1.2-1.3% of market share. That's kind of what we need to get to EBITDA break-even. Roughly around 1% of the market is what we need in terms of volumes. We probably need another 2-3% of the market in terms of volumes to get to where we want to be financially. We are not looking because the base is small. But what we have is a position where we have a network which is fairly capable in terms of width. But the volume base being small, and that's why there's a volume. But the volume growth itself, which we need, is not. We are expecting 10% growth in market share. We need 200 basis points of growth in market share over four quarters to get where we need to be, Jainam.
Obviously, while we look at the last couple of quarters, we could say, "Hey, listen, that 200 basis points of market share is a stretch because the way the numbers are planned in the last couple of quarters." It's 3,200 basis points of market share in a market which we feel we understand very well. I don't know if I answered your question. I just want to first calibrate where the volume the revenue is down compared to the past of what we acquired. The revenue cumulatively is down in large part because of design issues. We had operational issues, and volume went down. We did recover almost all the volume we lost. Almost all the volume we lost because of integration issues. We have actually recovered that.
I think you made a great point about how much you want to invest in a business like this. And that's one of the reasons why we liked the Rivigo business we acquired because while we knew we had to put in a lot more capital into it, we also felt that the transaction value allowed us. Because we bought it around INR 220 crore, we had the headroom in the business to make that investment because the transaction value itself was low. And we still remain with that high volume. So the last couple of quarters of execution. And I'm cognizant of the fact that we've not delivered what you said on the earnings calls and. And we can obviously explain it after the fact. But the thing is largely an institutional issue which we need to tighten up. It's a fundamental structural problem of the business.
Got it. Sir, just some clarification. I guess during the festive, we were told that we were not even able to take on the volumes because there has been an operational challenge. So I just wanted to check. If we want to grow in the revenue by, let's say, INR 30-40 crore, and if our existing network is not able to even do the festive season peak, then there will be again a network expansion cost which we will be doing. Of course, our utilization is at around 75%. If it grows to 80%. Yeah.
So, Jainam, I think the network has got three parts. It's called infrastructure. It's called vehicle utilization. And it's called people. Right?
Yeah.
Network. I think what we saw this quarter was during the festive sales peak, we saw a sudden surge or shortage of manpower requirement in sites that are approximately 13%-14% of our network. So in those locations, we saw a significant sudden surge in manpower cost and a sudden drop in availability of manpower. And that impacted our network operations for roughly a week or so. Obviously, there are cascading effects because when you are shipping, let's say, from Ludhiana or Ahmedabad or Surat, the pickup there is delayed by five days. Then obviously, the delivery is also delayed by five days. And that obviously creates customer dissatisfaction. But it is not a fundamental business. I think both our warehousing space and our vehicles allow us to have all the headroom.
So if we want to grow by INR 40 crore, and that's why I said that if you remember what I said earlier, that we will get the contribution margin which we see today per ton, and we'll get some part of the operating leverage in terms of facilities and people and not more than that. And that's why I capped that number at around INR 5 crore. If you mathematically look at it, you could actually make much more. If you assume that the network was, I'd be spending a single rupee more on transportation or facilities, then obviously, a huge lot more money would come into profitability. But that's not the way we are modeling. There'll be some cost increase, but it'll mostly be on the people side, Jainam. The vehicles and the transportation and the facilities should be fairly stable.
Got it. Sir, just one thing. Of course, you were told about INR 11-12 cr of contribution margin from, let's say, INR 30-40 cr of revenue, additional INR 5 cr from the, let's say, utilization increasing and all. But let's assume that given this kind of market scenario exists for next few quarters and we have been able to reach the revenue of less than INR 90-100 cr only, which is the current range, then what could be the alternative that we can do to have a better EBITDA or PAT margin? Or will these numbers continue in that case?
No, I think you can always put this viability. Obviously, I think a couple of things there. Obviously, we do look at. There are other costs or leverage opportunities which exist. And then obviously, we have to look at the network itself, Jainam, and say that, "Listen, our network which we designed to deliver 19,000 PIN codes." Almost 40% of them, 35%-40% of them in network, and the rest of them through connections. There's a fairly large cost we are running to obviously keep that network capability alive. If we don't see the volume flow through our network, obviously, we start having to look at which point saying, "Do I rationalize the network capability itself?" And so that's the other areas of cost reduction which are there. So there are rings of defense, Jainam. Obviously, you can look at these bookends.
Worst case scenario, obviously, is just to take off from where we have been performing in the last couple of quarters, and I get that point. The other bookend is obviously what we think we will definitely do, but the reality in between probably will be that some part of the volume, depending on what probabilities you want to put, volume will move up. It may not move up as much as we think it might. It will not move up as fast as we think it would. In which case, we will look at some other rings of defense. Should we rationalize the network spread? Should we change the way that our fleets are working and kind of change vehicle patterns a little bit more, change the way we're scheduling the vehicles right now, so there are multiple other levers which we can do.
They won't solve the problem fully, for sure. So they're going to solve the INR 14-15 crore problem. We'll have to obviously get volume to solve parts of it. But at this stage, we have multiple of those things mapped out, Jainam. It's just not something which we want at this stage, we're not necessarily in a position to talk about that publicly. But we have several of those mapped out. Obviously, we are also cognizant of the scenario you are calling out, saying the next four quarters, there could be no impact in volume, improvement in volume. And then what will we do? But some of those actions are also underway as we talk.
Got it, sir. Thank you so much for the elaborative answer. That is all my side, and all the very best.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask questions, you may please press star and one. If there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Over to you.
Thank you, everyone. I hope we have been able to answer all your questions satisfactorily. However, if you need any further clarifications or want to know more about the company, please contact our team at SGA or Strategic Growth Advisors. Thank you once again for taking time to join us in this call.
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Thank you. On behalf of Mahindra Logistics Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you all for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.