Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Meesho Q3 FY 2026 earnings conference call, hosted by Kotak Securities. 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. Should you need assistance during this conference, please signal an operator by pressing star and then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Ms. Garima Mishra from Kotak Securities. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Thank you, Darwin. Good evening, everyone. It is indeed a great pleasure to host Meesho's first-ever earnings call after its listing. Joining us today to discuss earnings for the third quarter and nine months ended 31 December, 2025 are Vidit Aatrey, Chairman, Managing Director, and Chief Executive Officer, Sanjeev Kumar, Whole-Time Director and Chief Technology Officer, Dhiresh Bansal, Chief Financial Officer, and Karthik Chandrashekar, Head Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Investors and analysts are encouraged to review the shareholders' letter available on Meesho's investor relations website. Management will use this call to focus on questions beyond the uploaded content already covered in the shareholders' letter. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that certain statements made on this call may be forward-looking in nature and should be viewed in conjunction with the risk factors disclosed in the company's filings.
With that, I'll now hand the call over to Vidit for his opening comments.
Hey, everyone. I'll get started with the important takeaways. I think, first of all, you will see that we had a very good quarter in terms of growth. Our annual transacting user base crossed 250 million for the first time. It was 251 million, and on YoY growth, about 34%, which is quite strong. So we continue to be India's largest platform by annual transacting users as well as orders, and still the most downloaded shopping app in India. So I think our growth numbers continue to be strong, and this is mostly because of our investments around, like, technology, marketing, wherever we are seeing the right ROI.
If you look at our annual transacting seller base, that has also grown, like, really well, 81% year-on-year growth to 846,000 sellers, because we continue to improve our product and invest better technology, especially for sellers. Now, if you look at NMV growth, I think the nuance here this quarter as compared to the last year, festive had moved, a lot of festive demand had moved to Q2. So I think an important way to look at it is combining nine months. If you look at nine months, first nine months of the year, our NMV grew by 37%, and for this quarter, it grew by 26% year-on-year to INR 10,995 crore. So again, we continue to kind of grow at a very good pace basis some of the investments I talked about.
If I look at contribution margin, our contribution margin was at 2.3%. And again, here we have talked about earlier, some of these investments have come because of Valmo's scale up in a very short period. After one of our partners ceased to be in business, and there was some bit of third-party logistics consolidation, we had to scale up some capacity in Valmo at a very fast pace, which came at some cost. This should basically go away in the next two quarters. We have also, like, mentioned the timeline that some of our margin numbers will converge back to where we were in first quarter of FY 2026 in the next two quarters.
Our LTM free cash flow for the last 12 months was at INR 56 crore, and free cash flow to equity was at INR 437 crore, taking our overall cash balance to INR 7,277 crore. So yeah, these are the important takeaways. We can get started with the questions.
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 their touchtone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to please use handsets while asking a question. We also request that you please limit yourselves to three questions only. You may rejoin the queue if you have any further questions. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question comes from the line of Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vidit and team. Congrats on continued good set of numbers. I have three questions. First question is on logistics and what you mentioned in shareholder letter about optimization of logistics costs. So question out here is: How should that change your outsourcing mix? I think the last reported number was around 62% - 65%. And because of the change in mix, should we see an increase in cost or decrease in cost? Should I go one by one with the question? Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, we can do one by one. So I think on this outsourcing point, I think we've talked about this earlier, like, we will continue to basically decide the right mix between Valmo and third party logistics partners. This is the lowest cost structure. As we said, like, right now, for example, because we built some of the capacity in Valmo at a very fast pace, some of that was not, like, optimized for cost. So I think we will fix it and then start to scale up Valmo again. That will bring a lot more goodness in pricing, so that will continue. In the meantime, we are also, like, building up capacity with our third party logistics partners at the right price. So in the long run, I think we will continue to kind of build a very competitive logistics ecosystem so that prices reduce everywhere.
So it's not that only in Valmo we continue to improve pricing, we continue to improve pricing even with third party logistics partner as their business keeps growing on our platform, and they also have more operating leverage.
Got it. Very clear. Just a small clarification, Vidit, out here. You guys created a new subsidiary on logistics. The thought process behind that, is it for opening up for third party guys, or this is more like a captive logistics entity only?
Hi, Sachin, this is Dhiresh here. I think we are setting up that subsidiary primarily to explore how we should kind of structure the Valmo financials so that they are more clearly visible for people to understand. There is no plan of opening this up to other third parties.
Got it. My second question is on your margin uptake, where you guys said that for the next couple of quarters, the margin will improve. So just wanted to double-click on the drivers for the margin improvement. Is it mainly because of the logistics, investments pulling down? Or the investments, what you guys are making in terms of onboarding new, set of users, even that will slow down?
I think it will be both. It will be both, and not just these two. I think we'll get a lot of operating leverage on all our investments. So last two years, you saw that we invested, like, aggressively to increase our growth rates. So those investments came in, more marketing came in, people, technology investments going up. So again, you will start to see operating leverage on that. That should contribute to margin improvement, as well as, as we like, for example, continue to kind of scale our logistics business, going forward and make it more optimized. I think that will also lead to improvement in margins. So it will basically be across the board.
Is it fair to say that your absolute adjusted EBITDA losses have peaked in this quarter, and going ahead, these numbers should decline?
Yes. Yes. So I think going forward, this, all these numbers on bottom line peaked in this quarter. And as I said, in the next two quarters, you should start to see them come back to where they were at the beginning of this year.
Got it. My last question is on ad revenues. Would be great to get some color in terms of how it has improved in the quarter. From a two-to-three year point of view, how should this scale up? A related question is: How is your ad engine different from that of other e-commerce peers in India?
So right now, we are not sharing specific ad numbers, but in terms of inputs, we continue to see a lot of progress happening on that product. Every quarter, larger base of sellers, larger base of products are coming on ads, and they're also seeing much better ROI on their money. So I think at the right time, we will come out with more details there. I think when we talk about steady state, we have in general shared that, like, 5.5%-6% is something that a lot of value commerce platforms globally kind of at least get to, and we also believe we should get there. So I think that's what we are going after.
Now, if you look at the differentiation of our product as compared to other platforms, most of the platforms, because they have branded sellers, tend to focus a lot more on keywords and stuff like that. Whereas most of our sellers, these are some of the smallest to medium-sized sellers, may not have known brands, so they're very, very sensitive to return on ad spends, right? Because they wanna make money on every single order in the right way, and hence our product has been built out at smallest to the largest sellers with very small budgets, not knowing what keyword to target, should be able to use a simple product and get to the kind of return on ad spends that they want.
Because, again, you want to abstract out all the complexity away from the seller, we have built quite sophisticated systems that now use AI to do the right targeting and get the right ROI for these sellers. I think that's the big difference.
Perfect. Thanks so much and all the best for future.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gaurav Rateria from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my question. My first question is on logistics cost optimization initiative. Is it only gonna come from the Valmo-related stuff, or will there be any efficiency that will be shared by the 3PL guys on pricing front or other front, which would comprise this, you know, margin improvement journey for you?
I think it will come from both, but if you look at overall, and I would take maybe a mid-year, mid, midterm view, next one or two years, it'll come from everywhere. Because everyone, as their business scales, they have operating leverage, they'll pass it on to us. Some bit of that will happen, but the largest share, we believe, will come from them. Because, because again, it's a newer network, lots of optimization opportunities. We have talked about there are a lot of opportunities there of automation, of doing much better route optimization. So there, the opportunity of improving margin is much, much more. But everyone, as they continue to scale their business, they will basically realize certain costs and, or like, we will also like, then they pass it back to us in some form, we'll also reward them with more volume.
Everyone will continue to get better in the ecosystem.
Got it. My second question is on ad monetization. What is the return on ad spend currently we are operating at, from sellers' point of view? And at what level of return on ad spend you would get to your 5.5%-6% steady range that you talked about?
Hi, this is Dhiresh here. I think we don't specifically talk about the ROI, but to give you a directional sense, over the last one year or so, the return on ad spend that we're providing to our sellers has increased by almost 50% or more, and we continue to be in on an upward trajectory there, which is leading to better adoption of the ad product as we described earlier. And I think for the 5.5%-6%, obviously, as we keep on becoming a more and more competitive ad marketplace as well, some of this return on ad spend would compete it away. And that's been the course of the journey for some of the e-commerce peers outside of India as well. So I think that's the way it will directionally progress from here.
Got it. And last question is on your cost of customer acquisition. My understanding is that every new 50 million or 100 million that you add on the platform is gonna come probably at a higher cost of customer acquisition. So what has been your experience since you kind of accelerated your growth in the annual transacting users? Have you seen your CAC moving up compared to the last year? And then if that happens, then how do you manage your payback period? Thank you.
So actually, by that we see the opposite. And over the last many years, most of our growth, again, you have to go deeper into the country to get the next 50, 100 million people. And you realize that there are not a lot of people who are reaching out to those customers, apart from us. Not many products out there, not many platforms, target mass India consumer. So it's not that there are a lot of competition there and hence the cost of ads are high. It's more around, do you have the product that basically can convert these people and get the right LTV out of them? And that's what we focus on, how do you make a product which is very intuitive for them, language that they connect with, see... They see the product that they connect with.
So it's a lot of our improvement and growth comes by making a product relevant to someone, even in the rural areas, and them connecting with that product much easily. The cost of ads generally has not been... Actually, it has gone down over the last few years. So the most important thing we obviously work on before we go out and scale that user base and make sure that our product is good enough, that we can get good enough LTV and hence good ROI for the investment that we do in acquisition.
Thank you. All the best.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Garima Mishra from Kotak Securities. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Vidit, as you keep growing, you will rely on both ATU growth as well as frequency growth, right? Which between the two will be a bigger driver over the next two to three years, considering you already have 250 million users on the platform?
Hi, Garima, this is Dhiresh here. So I think, if you look at the trend in the last, sort of quarter, our, our sort of ATU base grew by about 24% year-on-year, which is obviously quite high, and that has been the result of all of these efforts that Vidit just kind of highlighted on going deeper into the country, and figuring out those use cases for our users, which resonate with them. In this initial period, let's say if I look at our 3-4-year kind of horizon, the growth would be faster on the annual transacting users versus frequency. Also, because typically the first year of transaction frequency is lower versus as people mature and become habit-formed users of our platform.
Then it will shift towards kind of higher frequency growth over a longer horizon. But I think for the next one to two years, the growth will come more from kind of addition to annual transacting user base than frequency.
Got it. To understand the frequency pattern a little better, could you give us some sense of how many times a year are your, let's say, top 5% or top 10% consumers transacting?
Sure. So I think, roughly, if you look at it, the top quartile of our users, transact at a frequency of more than 20 times a year. That's kind of the frequency that we see. And the typical correlation of who these customers are, are people who have spent long enough time on the platform. So as the cohorts keep maturing, people keep on adding to their frequency of transactions.
Understood. And last question from me really is on the product profile on the platform, right? You have slowly diversified away from apparel footwear as a category, added new categories. In that context, what other categories do you think can potentially be big, growth drivers for the company? And a related question, what are you doing in Meesho Mall? How large is it, and what value proposition do you think it fulfills?
Yes. So I think, again, you rightly picked. What we are doing is to keep expanding categories. We continue to kind of make our platform conducive to different kinds of products. So, for example, a big focus area for the last few years was to grow categories like beauty, personal care, kids, baby care, that have a lot more branded products than what people buy. And we started Meesho Mall, and we have seen some of those categories grow really fast on the back of Meesho Mall. We have also started to see certain categories in the grocery section also grow within Meesho Mall, that are part of that. Again, we have made our platform more conducive to low AOV products, over the last few years.
Now we have seen categories like home and kitchen grow really, really fast, because a lot of products in that category fall in lower prices. So I think it's, it's a continuous thing. I don't think that we, we take a big focus area. At the end of the day, for us, it's building the platform and building the right supply chain for all products to flow through. I would say our focus is to eventually have every category out there. And the categories that I just talked about, which were focus areas for the last two years, our job is not done there. There are a lot of expansion opportunity available there. In all these categories, we continue to add more sellers, more brands that are fulfilling more use cases, offering across price points, across different use cases.
So I think that continues to be a focus area. As our customer evolves, also, I think our focus area on categories will change as more people come from, maybe rural areas. A lot of product categories that are more relevant to them will come onto the platform. So I think it's, it's a continuous thing. There's no, like, one or two categories we focus on. Our goal is eventually to have each and every category that a customer wants to be available on Meesho.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Gaurav Malhotra from Axis . Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity. I just had a couple of questions. So, you know, obviously, the number of sellers on the platform has moved up very sharply, right? In your opening remarks, you also mentioned about it, almost 80%. So then, how do we think of this sort of higher seller numbers, you know, densification, if that is the way we should think about it, and then sort of tie it up with the logistics cost?
Sure. So I think over the last few quarters, we have been seeing this acceleration in terms of the seller numbers going faster. And a lot of it comes on the back of the introduction that we made for non-GST sellers to be also able to sell on the platform. There have also been changes on the onboarding flow, which have kind of helped grow the seller number much faster. So I think what used to happen initially, or a few years, till a few years ago in India, that only GST-registered sellers were allowed to sell online. And as that law changed, we were the first and only ones to kind of launch a product which supports even getting non-GST sellers to be able to sell online. That has led to significant growth in the number of sellers.
And these sellers are also then graduating into becoming GST sellers. So overall, it has been good for the flywheel and the ecosystem on the seller side.
Got it. In terms of the NMV to GMV ratio, that has moved up, right, from around 57% to 60%. So what has helped here? It's, like, better RTO, cancellations, returns, or any variance of one versus the other?
So it has been across. I think primarily the improvements have come from RTOs as well as cancellations. But I think we'll continue to see those in the future as well. As the prepaid share of the platform improves, that also leads to a certain percentage improvement in our RTO numbers, because the prepaid RTOs tend to be lower than cash-on-delivery RTOs, and that has been the case in the last quarter as well, where our prepaid ratio continued to improve. And so, we're seeing consequent impacts in terms of NMV to GMV ratio.
Just last question in terms of Meesho Mall, does it come under new initiatives, or this would be coming under your marketplace itself?
Meesho Mall is part of the core marketplace. All of the numbers are captured within the marketplace, financials.
If I may ask, any sense on... I'm sure it's still early, but, any sense on, you know, numbers or size or proportion, et cetera?
... So I think, like you said, it's early, but, we've been seeing good, healthy growth on the Meesho Mall front as well. I think last quarter it grew by roughly about 70% year-on-year, so faster than the platform in terms of NMV growth. And, we continue to see good traction from, various, brands like P&G, Nitya, et cetera, which have continued to scale up on the Meesho Mall platform.
Got it. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Sachin Dixit from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, Vidit and team. Congratulations on a successful listing. I had three questions. The first one was on Valmo, basically, right? You highlighted that there was some rapid expansion of Valmo, which is why we saw some cost spikes. How do we think of, like, what exactly happened? And if you can put some color around, how will we take the cost down, right? Because the broader understanding is largely a variable sort of supply for you.
Yeah. So basically, in this case, what happened was, you would see that our, I think around May, June, one of our partners stopped being in business, and which is why a lot of our capacity in logistics was not available. And that also tend to be like a time when you just have festive three, four months, three, four months away. And at that point in time, basically, we had two options: not to build capacity and basically not service many users, or basically build capacity but at much inferior costs in a very short period of time. Because a lot of logistics capacity takes, has certain lead times of getting the right mode, your partner may do certain investments to get started, and so on.
We basically said that, "Hey, we don't want to. Like, we've invested in our business over the last 10 years. We want to make sure that we retain the trust of our users." So we built some of this capacity in a very short period of time to service the demand, and because we had to basically do certain short-term contracts, they were more, more expensive. Now, that basically flowed into the two festive quarters, which is Q2 and Q3. As I mentioned, a lot of that short-term capacity is behind us. We've been unwinding that for the last few months, and by the end of this quarter, most of that should go away, and we should get to similar bottom-line economics as we were at the beginning of this, this year. So I think that's basically what happened.
We have never had a situation where one of our partners basically goes away. But now I think going forward, we are much better prepared for something like this to ever happen in terms of if we have to basically do this again, we can do it without ever, like, paying extra for that capacity. But in this case, though, we know that it basically came at a certain cost, but we believe that was the right thing to do for the platform in the long run.
Understood. Is it fair to assume that your insourcing would have actually declined because of this, quite sharply in this quarter?
Yes, that's right. I think it's declined marginally. But that's the right sort of mix at which, the nodes that we operate are operating at, like, the optimal cost, and sort of increasing, you know, efficiencies in those existing nodes.
Fair enough. Thanks for that. My second question is in terms of expenses, right? So, in the filing, we see a large other expenses line item. Is it possible for you to break down that between at least the larger ones, things like logistics and fulfillment expenses, advertisement maybe?
Just a second. Let me just check what it is. Yeah. So I think if you go to the shareholder letter on page 15, that has some of the details of, of these other expenses, which are kind of broken down into individual components, including ad and sales promotion and employee benefit, server and software tools. The other expenses not directly attributable to place orders, which is the indirect expenses, which come below the contribution margin line, are also mentioned there. Rest everything, which is, direct cost, goes above the contribution margin line in terms of the cost structure, and that is primarily composed of logistics-related costs. Although it will have some other direct variable costs, like communication costs, et cetera, built in, which are directly attributable to the order. But overall, 90%+ will be logistics-related costs.
Possible to have that logistics number?
Yeah. Overall, in terms of percentage, if you look at the contribution margin bridge that we have described on page nine, out of the 29.7% cost directly attributable, about 27.5% is related to fulfillment expenses.
Got it. Got it. Thanks so much for that. My last question is on basically user acquisition, right? So we, we are on a very good trajectory this year. Already, having acquired 52-odd million. How do we think of this number going ahead, right? Do we expect a similar, let's say, a 50 million-plus sort of a number in 2027 and 2028 as well? We should expect... I mean, I, I do understand that you will want to continue spending rapidly, but do you - do we expect relative-
... sampling of this number?
So I think it's hard to predict, like, very accurately, but if I kind of think about the trends that we are seeing, return on investment in terms of ad dollars that we kind of spend, leading to new user acquisition continues to be fairly healthy. Plus, more importantly, in organic traction of people who kind of discover us, friends and family who kind of share and get others to kind of install the app also continues to be on an upward trend. So I think where we are sitting right now, we see pretty healthy trends in terms of new user acquisition.
I think it will be premature to forecast specifically the number over the next year or so, but like I'd mentioned earlier, initial part of, let's say, a four-five-year journey, growth would come more from ATU addition, and then towards the latter part, we expect to come from more frequency addition of existing user base.
Fair enough. Thank you so much, and all the best.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Vijit Jain from Citi. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thank you for the opportunity and, congratulations on those, to all of you and for the IPO. My first question is, you know, if I look at, you know, platforms outside India, like Temu, et cetera, they have user bases, significant user bases across income curves, right? For you guys, is, do you think there is a, there is a path towards that where, you know, say, the top 5, 10% households in the country also use you more extensively than they, than they do now? That's my first question.
So, I think even now we have a good share of our business come from, like, tier one cities. So if you look at the top six cities, would be close to, like, 25 million. So about 25 million plus people buy from us every year from the big cities, and these people are split across income segments. They may be buying different categories, and you see the same thing globally. So they may not buy apparel on our platform because they tend to buy apparel from certain brands which are high-end. But a lot of them, we see even high-income households in India buy a lot of home and kitchen products because of our large selection and certain unique selection. So we are seeing that, and we believe it will continue to get better. I think we will keep expanding across all segments.
Our focus is not just in one city or the other, but basically to expand across all cities, all segments, and eventually have everyone on our platform.
Thanks, Vijit. My second question is, you know, with Valmo, you know, with this, with the 6, with the, the things you described just now to the question from Sachin, you also said in the past and in this letter that you will remain asset-light there. So I'm just wondering, as you build out Valmo further, in terms of the workflow of, logistics, I know you do network design, network orchestration, node design, and all of those kinds of things, which are more, you know, technology investments. Just trying to understand, as you build it out further, are there other aspects of, that design that you could undertake? And, would there be any kind of capital involved within that?
And relatedly, you know, over time, you know, in the mid-mile or even in the mid-mile especially, things like automation or tractor-trailers, there could be some benefit if, you know, someone can procure it at scale on behalf of, you know, your partners in the logistics network. Would you be involved... would you get involved in something like that, if and when it makes sense for Valmo? That's my second question.
Yeah. So I think our philosophy is very simple. We tend to invest in mostly technology. Now, that technology could be software. As you said, some of that technology could be around automation in certain nodes, and technology tends to have very good ROI, so that we will do. But now going out and doing CapEx, across the board, building out logistics capacity, like warehousing, et cetera, that tends to have lower ROI. We may not do it ourselves as we have done so far, so there staying asset-light makes sense. So even today in Valmo, the entire software stack, end-to-end, is our own. So the entire technology is our own because that's where we believe, the majority of experience, value, better pricing lies. And we continue to... By the way, we have a team which is focused on automation. Can we bring more robotics eventually?
Can we bring... I don't know, maybe five, 10 years down the line, autonomy is possible. Many other things will be possible. So we will bring all kinds of technology, not just software. And there, if we have to invest, we will do investments. But again, some of this is hypothetical at this stage. As we have something, we will come forward and tell you that, "Hey, we are doing this." But broadly, as I said, directionally, we will invest in technology. Other assets may not be something that we want to invest in. We believe there are enough players out there who are ready to partner with us and offer a very good service.
Got it. Thanks. My next question is on the seller side growth rate. So you had, I mean, a pretty stellar growth here, 81% YoY. My first question is, when you see expansion in seller community of this space, are there any, you know, new seller side incentives also that you're doing, you know, in terms of maybe lower fulfillment charges for a short period of time or whatever the case might be, as you try to, you know, kind of amp up the seller community?
...So today we don't do this. Like, there's no, like, incentive in the beginning for anyone to come on board. But in general, I think if you look at our overall penetration on the seller side, India is actually lower than the user side. On the user side, we have 250 million people out of, I don't know, potentially 1 billion people or maybe more. But on the seller side, there in India, about 60-70 million sellers altogether, and we have less than 1 million annual transacting. So there, because the penetration potential is quite large, and as they said, now even non-GST sellers are allowed to sell online, which is a large mix of overall seller base in India.
We believe just by the need of people's reaching every consumer, this base, we expect, will continue to grow at a faster base, faster pace for the because people want to get access to this distribution channel. We continue to invest more in product rather than incentives. Just make sure that people who come from any part of the country, know any kind of language, should find our product very easy to use and come online and start selling very quickly. So that's what we are focusing on, less on incentives.
Great. Thanks, Vidit. And just my last question, if I can squeeze one in. You know, so just thinking about the assortment available on the platform, and if I break that into, you know, branded and unbranded, you know, do you think that, you know, branded and unbranded can both coexist and both do fairly well? And in that context, could you partner more effectively with branded manufacturers as well going forward? I'm just trying to understand if that category of assortment, you think can do equally as well on the platform, or if there's anything that kind of makes these two things not coexist that well.
Yeah, and the Meesho Mall that we're just talking about is a very good example of that. It coexists on our platform. All the big brands now are available across most categories, and they are continuing to grow at a very good pace. So I think it's less about branded, unbranded; it's more about, like, serving use cases.
Right.
So consumers who come onto our platform for different use cases prefer brands or unbranded. As I said, for personal care, like, people even very deep into the country, prefer brands all the time because they don't want to put something on their face that they don't know. But in many other categories, like apparel, women apparel, even big city, you see a lot of people, because they care about more variety, they tend to buy from all kinds of sellers. So I think its coexistence is not a question. Meesho Mall continues to grow at a very, very good pace. More brands come on board. They tell us that they're able to reach an audience for the first time that they could not before. So we will keep investing on both.
We look at this as a problem of, like, serving every single use case that our customers have across all price points and categories.
Great. Thank you so much. Those were my questions, and best of luck to you guys.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Aditya Suresh from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you, and congratulations on the listing. Three questions all around logistics. The first one is just on a absolute rupee product basis, can you talk through the movements in your logistics cost this quarter versus last? And are there any kind of accounting impacts there for us to work through or kind of adjust for?
Sure. So I think directionally, Aditya, there was... and I think we've mentioned it in the DRHP and RHP subsequently as well. There was a treatment change for some of our last mile costs related to Valmo, which were between the periods, April 2025 till September 2025, were not part of either the revenue or the cost. And then subsequently, we had kind of brought them into the revenue as well as the cost, basis the GST law change that had kind of happened. So on a QoQ basis for the October, November, December quarter, you would see that, increments sort of come in both revenue as well as cost. On a YoY basis, this was the same treatment that we had last year as well.
So, no change in terms of YoY trends, but on QoQ trends, you will see this difference kind of be there.
Thank you. The second piece was around your delivery times, right? So like, going back to the DRHP again, I understand that I think the average delivery times was anywhere between, say, 5-7 days. Is there any kind of desire or thrust towards moving this down more towards, say, 1-2 days, or are you happy with the current kind of pace of delivery? I guess what I'm trying to get at is, are we servicing a just a completely unique, different use case compared to what some of the other logistics players or e-commerce players are catering to?
Yes. So I think I'll take that question. So I think what's happening is, as our platform is getting diversified both on user and seller side, now we have sellers across the country and users across the country. So on average, basically that means is our network continues to get more and more complex. A lot of consumers in, like, one city could be buying from a very remote part of the country, and the seller will ship from there and reach here, and vice versa. So I think in general, if nothing else changes, our speed should slow down because we are serving more hinterland and more products are being picked from smaller places. What we have done is we have ensured that the speed stays in the same area. I think 1-2 days-...
unless people do, for example, their housing close to the customer, which many platforms do, you cannot do. I don't think it's possible in a marketplace format, so that's not a goal that we take. Our goal is obviously to be better than the last year, and we do that as our network gets stronger, better, more density, as our business keeps growing. But our aspiration is not to be the fastest, because we want to give access to the best products, best quality products, best priced products to people. And to have that large selection, people end up buying from sellers anywhere in the country.
Thanks. The final question I had was on... It's a bit of a philosophical question, but how are you thinking about logistics, right? In terms of, let's say, kind of we invest in Valmo and kind of it settles, we clear this out, let's say, over the next, say, 12 months. Any savings in logistics costs, efficiency gains, should we think about this as... How do you think about pricing logistics, right? Is it? Should we think about this as a 2%-3% spread on your actual cost, or are you thinking about kind of keeping the gains and we see margin expansion? Just if you can, like, talk through kind of philosophically how you all think about logistics versus what you report as contribution margin.
Yeah. So I think philosophically, this is the ratio. We tend to keep the logistics margin in a certain range. Now, obviously, last couple of quarters were different, but if you look at the historical trajectory as well as what we intend to do going forward, we keep the logistics margin in a certain trajectory, which is about 2-2.5% of NMV, from a contribution perspective. And anything, anything we gain in terms of efficiencies, we have historically and expect to pass on in the future as well. So most of the contribution margin growth that we expect in the future would come from monetization through other forms like ads and other services, value-added services that we provide to our sellers.
Great, thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Abhisek Banerjee from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, first off, on the growth bit, right? You have explained that, well, you know, there was a festive season shift in this year. But from what I understand, the overall e-commerce market would have actually grown at a faster pace in Q3 than Q2. So is there any reason why... You know, so is it slightly different for you guys in terms of lead times, et cetera, why the growth has panned out the way it has done?
So I think there's no different trend. Obviously, given we have sort of slightly longer delivery timelines, and our festive season sale starts sort of earlier, or let's say in line with other kind of horizontal e-commerce platforms. That's why you see some of this shift. Like last year, for instance, our festive season sale started on 27th September, which was pretty much the end of that quarter, versus it started in 19th September. So both in the baseline as well as kind of in current year numbers, this shift is kind of reflected. And that's why you had Q2 NMV growth of about 51%, which wasn't kind of the normalized sort of case. And in this quarter, you'd see about 26% growth.
But on an aggregated basis, let's say this is about 37% growth, and that's the trend that we kind of continue to see.
Understood. That's very clear. On in terms of the ad monetization bit, right? So, I completely agree with what you spoke about, you know, in terms of getting smaller sellers to really pay for things is very difficult. But do you think, you know, there is some room for some manual intervention, some on the ground sales people who can go and, you know, push for ad monetization? And will that, you know, come into your manpower costs going ahead?
Yeah. Vidit here. The way we think of our ad product, because we have such a large seller base, I think we have taken a very clear approach of building out a product that is very easy to use, self-serve, so that we do not have to go out and sell any product to them. And so far, actually, like, it's been a while since we built that ad product, all of our distribution of ad product is via our platform, which is basically via our app and web product, and there's no sales people, and we see very good adoption. As long as you are giving great outcomes in terms of return on ad spends to our sellers, they easily figure this product out and keep ramping up their ad spends. So we see no need of having any sales team.
We don't have a sales team, we don't plan to add sales team. Even in our any of our experiments and scale up so far, we haven't felt the need. We believe, like, if you want to build a product that millions of businesses in India will use for ads, you have to build a great product. I think sales is unscalable. Like, you can't get to a billi- like, million people and sell them ads. You have to do it via product only, and that's the approach that we take.
Understood. And just one last question, if I can, which is, you have spoken about how reduction in the cost of delivery is one of the key goals for you, you know, going ahead. But with the new, you know, laws around gig workers, et cetera, do you think that the last mile part of that cost is becoming more sticky? And does that impact your, you know, your thoughts on how the cost of delivery can basically go down over the next three to four years?
Sure. I think we're still studying the impact of the gig worker code that has kind of come in. I think there's still some degree of confusion that exists on different state versus central kind of laws. Having said that, I think a large expectation that we have in terms of reduction in the cost going forward does not come from any specific reductions on the last mile delivery partner kind of payouts. I think in general, as the density of orders in a given time period increase and the earnings potential of those partners increase, there will be opportunities to kind of reduce that cost.
But that's, I think, the overall expectation that we have going forward is coming more from overall network optimization, having a better designed kind of network, more automation coming in, some more innovative models around how we can do last mile deliveries, et cetera, as well. And so we don't expect any sort of change in the expectations that we have on reduction of overall logistics cost, even with the new code coming into play.
Understood. Thanks. Those are all my questions.
Thank you. We will take that as our last question, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for joining us on the Meesho Earnings Conference Call. On behalf of Kotak Securities, that concludes this conference. You may now disconnect your lines.