Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I am Anand Bansal, and will run this conference along with my colleague, Vivek. We will wait for a moment as people join and settle in the virtual conference room. We will start the conference in a minute. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We will wait and start the conference in a minute.
No, let's start the conference.
We have 80+ people with us, Vivek. You may start the conference now.
Let's start the conference. Hi, everyone. Good evening. I welcome you to Info Edge (India) Limited Q4 2022 and financial year 2022 financial business conference call. As a reminder, all participant line will be in listen-only mode, and there'll be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need any assistance with your call, please raise your hand on the screen. Please note that this call is being recorded. Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Chairman, Mr. Hitesh Oberoi, Co-Promoter and Managing Director, and Mr. Chintan Thakkar, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin today, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's conference call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve risks and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number 2 of investor presentation for detailed disclaimer.
Now, I would like to hand over the conference to Mr. Hitesh Oberoi for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, Hitesh.
Thank you, Vivek. Good evening, everyone. Hope you're all doing well. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. We take the privilege of announcing our Q4 2022 and FY 2021-2022 financial performance of the company. We will start with overall financials and then cover each business vertical in more detail. Of course, we have time for Q&A. The audited financial statements and other schedules on segmental billing, revenues, et cetera, along with the data sheet have been uploaded on our website, infoedge.in. I'll first take you through our standalone financials. Billings in Q4 were up 52.5% year-on-year at INR 649.3 crore. FY 2022 billings stood at INR 1,866 crore, a year-on-year growth of 58.7%.
Revenues in Q4 were INR 455.5 crore, a year-on-year growth of 51.6%. FY 2022 revenues stood at INR 1,562.5 crore, an increase of 38.5% year-on-year. Operating expenses excluding depreciation for the quarter grew 35.5% year-on-year and stood at INR 327.5 crore. For FY 2022, operating expenses were INR 1,098.7 crore, a growth of 13.8%. EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 128 crore versus INR 58.8 crore in Q4 of last year, a growth of 117.6% year-on-year. FY 2022 EBITDA grew 61% to INR 463.7 crore from INR 288.1 crore reported last year.
EBITDA margins for the quarter stood at 28.1% compared to 19.6% in Q4 of last year. For FY 2022, EBITDA margins stood at 29.7% versus 25.5% last year. Cash EBITDA for the quarter grew 84.8% year-on-year and stood at INR 341.7 crore. Cash EBITDA for the full year stood at INR 811.6 crores, a year-on-year growth of 140.2%. Deferred sales revenue stood at INR 819.6 crores as of March 31, 2022 versus INR 521.6 crores as of March 31, 2021, an increase of 57% year-on-year.
The cash balance at the IEIL level, overall level, stands at INR 3,759 crore as of March 31, 2022. The balance stood at INR 358 crores as of March 31, 2021. During this quarter NCLT also approved the merger of IIMJobs with Info Edge. Accordingly, the numbers of the standalone business and the recruitment business that we will discuss in the later part of the call will be inclusive of IIMJobs financials for current as well as previous periods. We will now talk you through what we are seeing in the market in our different verticals, and then we will discuss financials for each vertical. Starting with recruitment, the hiring market continues to be strong.
Our IT customers continue to see increased hiring pressure on account of high attrition and the increasing gap between demand and supply of IT talent, thanks to the digital transformation story that is playing out globally. We also saw an increase in demand for freshers on our platform last year and also in the last quarter of last year. In the last two quarters, we have started seeing demand for non-IT talent also come back as the economy continues to open post-pandemic. Q4 saw an average increase of 30% in the Naukri JobSpeak Index. Non-IT sectors like BFSI, retail, hospitality, pharma, and telecom also demonstrated healthy growth as concerns related to COVID reduced drastically during the quarter. The JobSpeak index for the month of April grew 38% year-on-year, with sectors like travel and hospitality growing by over 100%.
We are watchful of recessionary trends in the U.S. which could impact IT hiring in the coming months. Fingers crossed on this one. Moving on to the real estate vertical. Well-known builders are seeing a strong revival of demand for nearly ready-to-move-in homes. There is an escalation in cost of construction of new homes, which could result in higher prices for new homes going forward. Real estate prices have started moving up in some pockets. Well it seems like after a long time, affordable real estate prices combined with rising incomes, low home loan rates, and a demand for bigger homes post-COVID are likely to lead to the real estate market picking up in the months to come. The matrimony market continues to grow at 5%-10% per annum.
We are beginning to see the emergence of small serious dating category in addition to casual dating now. The EdTech segment continues remains vibrant, and education search and research traffic on Shiksha continues to grow well. Moving on to financials. We will discuss the recruitment business first. In Q4 2021-2022, recruitment segment billings grew 66.6% year-on-year and stood at INR 513.3 crore. While revenues were INR 344.4 crore. Revenue grew at about 64.7% year-on-year. For FY 2022, recruitment billings are up 72.6% year-on-year to INR 1,436.4 crore, while revenue grew year-on-year by 44.2% to INR 1,154.2 crore.
EBITDA for Q4 stood at INR 206.9 crore, compared to INR 104.9 crore in Q4 2021, a growth of 97.2%. EBITDA for the full year for the recruitment vertical stood at INR 679.8 crore, a year-on-year growth of 55.4%. Margins in the business grew 10% from 50.2% in Q4 2021 to 60.1% in Q4 2022. EBITDA for the full year stood at, EBITDA margin for the full year stood at 58.9% compared to 54.7% in FY 2021. Cash EBITDA for Q4 in the recruitment vertical grew 89% year-on-year to INR 386.2 crore.
Cash EBITDA for FY 2022 for the full year, for the recruitment vertical stood at INR 987 crore, a year-on-year growth of 110.1%. New CV registrations in Q4 stood at 21,000 per day, while CV modifications per day stood at 417,000. Traffic share remains stable and daily active users are at an all-time high on the platform. During the year, we took several steps in our recruitment business to beef up our offerings to cater to changing consumer and customer requirements. We saw an increase in hiring of freshers through our FirstNaukri platform. Accordingly, the product was revamped to attract and handle more traffic. We continue to invest behind our AmbitionBox offering to help job seekers find the right place to work and to research salaries, etc.
We also augmented our assessment services for job seekers on a wider scale through our platform, DoSelect. In these times of high attrition and growth, Naukri has emerged as a high-value recruitment tool for most recruitment firms and companies. This helped us in driving value selling proposition in most of our sales discussions and helped us rationalize discounts. There's also an increasing focus on adding new customers on the platform. Most of our new customers are now being acquired through the online mode. A little bit on DoSelect and Zwayam, our two recent acquisitions. DoSelect, our recent acquisition in the assessment space, generated a revenue of INR 16.2 crore for FY 2021/2022. The business has reported revenue of INR 4.2 crore in FY 2021.
We saw similar growth in Zwayam this financial year, with revenues growing from INR 6.5 crore in FY 2021 to INR 11.6 crore last year. Moving on to the real estate vertical, 99acres. Billings in Q4 in the 99acres business stood at INR 79.3 crore, a year-on-year growth of 10.6%, while revenue stood at INR 61.3 crore, a year-on-year growth of 22.3% from INR 50.1 crore Q4 of last year. For FY 2022, billing grew 25.1% year-on-year to INR 231 crore, while revenue grew 25.1% and stood at INR 217.3 crore. EBITDA for the quarter stood at a loss of INR 33.8 crore.
EBITDA for full year stood at a loss of INR 78 crore against a loss of INR 22 crore booked in the last financial year. Cash loss during the quarter stood at INR 11.2 crore against a cash profit of INR 5.7 crore in Q4 of last year. Cash loss for FY 2022 stood at INR 54 crore against a cash loss of INR 12 crore in FY 2021. Seeing growth in the real estate sector and an aggressive stance by our competitors, we increased our marketing spends by almost 44% quarter-over-quarter in 99acres last quarter. We launched premium listings. This product has received encouraging response from the advertisers during the quarter.
With market recovery now back on track, we are slowly seeing old broker and builder clients return to the platform. With reduced inventory levels, we expect increase in new project line launches in the sector, going forward. Growth of unique users and traffic on the platform shall be priority for the next few quarters. We will continue to invest in both operations and marketing. During the quarter, we also announced an investment of INR 137 crore in 4B Networks. This venture aims at providing a tech platform to connect agents, brokers and builders on the one hand, and track and aggregate new home site visits and home loans on the other to make it easier for all participants in the market. Moving on to the matrimony vertical, Jeevansathi.
Billings grew 5% year-on-year to INR 28.1 crore and revenue for the quarter stood at INR 25.4 crore, down 1.9% compared to Q4 of last year. FY 2022 billing grew by 1.5% year-on-year to INR 101.9 crore, and revenue grew to INR 100.2 crore from INR 96.9 crore in FY 2021, a year-on-year growth of 3.4%. EBITDA losses stood at INR 38.8 crore in Q4. FY 2022 EBITDA loss stood at a loss of INR 120 crore against a loss of INR 95.6 crore in FY 2021.
Cash loss for the Jeevansathi during the quarter stood at INR 34.8 crore, up from a cash loss of INR 20.9 crore in the same quarter of last year. Growth in Jeevansathi stabilized in Q4. Like we mentioned in our last earnings call, we have reworked our strategy. We have introduced several free offerings this quarter. This will result in revenue taking a hit for the next two or three quarters. We are still evaluating impact of these changes. We hope that they will help us gain serious traffic share in this category going forward. During the quarter, we also announced an acquisition of 76% of Aisle Network Private Limited. Aisle is engaged in the business of running multiple serious dating platforms on the web via its mobile apps.
For FY 2021, Aisle reported a revenue of INR 7.56 crore. We are quite optimistic of this space and expect the business to grow well going forward. Moving on to our education vertical, Shiksha. In Q4, Shiksha billings grew by 48.2% year-over-year to INR 28.7 crore, while revenue grew 58.8% year-over-year to INR 24.4 crore. FY 2022 billing and revenue grew 64.5% and 59.2% respectively, and stood at INR 96.5 crore and INR 90.7 crore respectively. EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 4.8 crore compared to an EBITDA of INR 28 lakh in Q4 of last year. FY 2022 operating profit stood at INR 19.5 crore against a profit of INR 4.1 crore in FY 2021.
Cash profit for the quarter stood at INR 10.6 crore, up from INR 4.3 crore in Q4 of last year. Cash profit for FY 2022 stood at INR 28.7 crore, up from INR 5.8 crore reported in Q4 2021. We continue to invest more in the Shiksha Study Abroad business and in aggregating more useful content for our users on our platform. Moving on to our financial investments. In January 2020, we launched the Info Edge Venture Fund with a fund size of $100 million in partnership with MacRitchie Investments Pte Ltd., an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings Private Limited. By March 31, 2022 the fund has been able to successfully invest 80% of its corpus.
Of the 28 investments made through the fund, 10 have been able to raise a follow-on round from market investors at a higher valuation. The company now proposes to set up three AIF schemes already approved by SEBI with a target corpus of $325 million. Info Edge and MacRitchie Investments Pte Ltd have committed to approximately 50% each of the total corpus of the schemes. The relevant approval from the shareholders as per SEBI listing regulations and MCA circulars have been secured through a postal ballot on May 21, 2022. These funds will have a life of 12 years and further extendable by 2 years as per SEBI regulations. At the consolidated level, the net sales for the group stood at INR 472.9 crore versus INR 300.5 crore the same quarter of last year.
For the consolidated entity at the total comprehensive income level, there is a loss of INR 6,420.8 crore versus a gain of INR 311.9 crore from our corresponding quarter of March 2021. Adjusted for the exceptional items, PAT stood at a gain of INR 245 crore in the quarter ended March 2022 versus a loss of INR 39.6 crore in the corresponding quarter of last year. Thank you. This is all from us. We are now ready to take any questions that you may have.
Thanks, Hitesh. We'll now begin the Q&A session. Anyone who wishes to ask question, may raise your hand on the screen. We'll take your name and announce your turn in the question queue.
Thanks, Vivek. We have couple of questions. The first question is from Vivekanand Subbaraman from Ambit Capital. Vivek, go ahead and ask your question.
The opportunity. My couple of questions are on Naukri. So, Hitesh, I thought that you mentioned about the you know your watchful stance on the U.S. recession. Can you elaborate a bit further on this and how it has been in the past for you? Because I mean, it has been a very long time since the U.S. went into recession. So, that's question one. Secondly, what is your best guess of the proportion of IT hiring that happens through Naukri.com? And how has this trend moved in the last two years?
Look, U.S., you know, we are not forecasting a U.S. recession. Okay. I was just sort of reacting to, you know, the various news items in various sort of media, which you and I have been reading for the last few weeks. As far as we are concerned, we are not seeing any slowdown as yet in the market. Q4 was our best quarter ever in the last 15 years. IT hiring is still very, very hard. Salaries are going up. Retention rates are high. Companies are looking to hire more fresh talent to control costs. Because lateral hiring is just so hard. You know, at the moment, we are not seeing any slowdown in IT hiring, but I don't know what is likely to happen going forward, given inflation, given the geopolitical situation and so on and so forth.
You know, in our history, we've seen two, three sort of serious slowdowns. There was a serious slowdown in 2008, and then there was, of course, COVID. What we've seen so far is if there's a serious recession, you know, even serious recessions don't last for more than two, three quarters, and then life goes back to normal. If it's not a recession, just a temporary slowdown, like if Indian, you know, if it's a slight slowdown in economic growth, then, you know, that one can take in one stride. That may not impact anybody too much. Only a serious recession is something we need to worry about. So I don't know if that answers your question. You had another question, right?
Yes. My second question was on the proportion of IT hiring.
IT hiring, yes.
That usually happens through Naukri and, how has it trended over the last few years?
Well, you know, it's different for different companies. The services companies, I suspect end up doing at least 30%-40% of their lateral hiring through Naukri, if not more. For product companies, it may be 25%-30%. In certain cases, it could be as high as 50%-60% as well for customers. If I were to put or take a number and sort of give an average for the industry as a whole, I would take a number of more like 35%-40%. That is what is probably the share of Naukri in all hiring at some of these companies. How has it changed in the last two-three years? Maybe it's gone up by a couple of percentage points.
It tends to sort of be very high in a slow market because in a slow market, companies can take their time to hire, and they're not in a hurry. In a fast-moving market, or in a hot market, companies are under tremendous pressure to hire. It's very expensive to hire, so they activate almost every channel to hire people. Probably goes down a little bit in sort of hot markets or goes up in slow markets.
Thanks. That was useful. Just one follow-up.
Yeah.
You have been looking to build, you know, adjacencies on recruitment through acquisitions and also through your own products. What are the niches, or say segments of recruitment where you think Naukri is lacking and where will the investments be focused?
Yeah. You know, we've already signaled that through our acquisitions and the various sort of new initiatives that we are pursuing in-house. Premium hiring or hiring of premium talent was a weak area for us, which is why we acquired IIMJobs a few years ago, and we are now trying to sort of, you know, build that take that business to the product to more customers in our sort of portfolio. AmbitionBox is a startup we acquired many years ago. AmbitionBox is now as big as Glassdoor in India. You know, if you wanna research companies, you wanna research salaries, if you wanna research interview questions, AmbitionBox is the box where you go today. That business has really grown.
That site has really grown in terms of usage and traffic over the last three years for us. It's fairly sort of big now. FirstNaukri is something we've been investing behind for the last few years. That business grew at more than 100% last year because campus hiring really boomed, picked up last year, and is likely to stay strong this year as well. We acquired DoSelect. You know, we think skill-based hiring will sort of increase going forward, and companies will need a platform to sort of assess skills and that's where DoSelect sort of fits in. That business grew to INR 16 crore last year. Again, it's a very good product, very good team.
All we are doing is using our sales system to take the product to more customers. Of course, Zwayam, which is our applicant tracking and management system, or a recruitment management software, which, you know, last year became a part of our portfolio. Our long-term plan is to add more machine learning to their offerings. Again, like, use our sort of sales force to take that product to more customers. Internally, we are also investing behind Job Hai, which is a blue-collar platform. Early days, but that is scaling up nicely in terms of traffic, in terms of listing, in terms of usage. We are also experimenting with BigShyft, again, a premium platform for end-to-end hiring.
You know, that they focus on closing transactions for tech companies. Early days. It's a startup inside the company. That is something we have been sort of, you know, playing around with for the last couple of years as well. These are all the adjacent sort of areas where, you know, to start with, the verticals may be small, the business may be small, but they hold tremendous potential for the next five, seven years.
Thanks. Actually, just one last question on recruitment, which is on the billing. So the number that we see in the current quarter, does it have any lumpy year-end renewals that came through, or is it fair to assume that this is the run rate that will percolate into revenues in fiscal 2023?
No, I would not call it the run rate because Q4 is our biggest quarter, and there are lots of renewals which are due in Q4. You know, there is seasonality in our business because of the subscription business. Q4 is always our biggest quarter. You know, the growth rate in Q4 is, of course, you know. You know, if the market stays the same, then you can extrapolate that for future quarters, but that is, of course, a big if. The base for every quarter will change because Q1 last year, for example, was much smaller than Q4 the year before last. No, you can't say that this is the annual run rate.
That's it.
All right, thanks. I'll come back if necessary.
Thanks, Vivek. Next question is from Pranav. Pranav, go ahead and ask your question from Edelweiss.
Hi, thanks for the opportunity. I have a couple of questions. My first question is regarding, you know, the slowdown in hiring, especially in the startup world. I mean, this has implication on two sides. One is, you know, somewhat your employee cost is also linked with. How should we see this? Secondly, on the recruitment business side, that, you know, you will have some revenue which can potentially, you know, slow down. How do you see this impacting in the current scenario?
Well, if the slowdown is only startup hiring, that is actually a positive for us because we don't make a lot of revenue from startups. They are a very tiny part of our revenue. On the other hand, you know, we lose a lot of people to startups and big tech companies. So if startups and big tech hiring, as in the internet kind of hiring, slows down, then that may actually be a, you know, benefit us because it'll help us control our costs and wages. On the other hand, may not affect our revenue so much.
On the other hand, if there is a slowdown in IT services hiring, in product companies hiring, back offices hiring, traditional data centers hiring, that is likely to hurt us because a large part of our revenue comes from some 8,000-10,000 companies in the IT space we sort of work with. That, I guess, is going to be more indexed to what happens to the U.S. market than anything else.
Sure. My second question is, you know, can you please elaborate, you know, how do you see the philosophy on the investment in the listed space? For example, you have a large investment in Zomato and Policybazaar. How should we see this in the longer term? That's what I would like to know.
Sanjeev, you wanna take that?
Uh.
Chintan?
You're talking about Zomato and Policybazaar, right? See.
Right.
Sorry?
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Look, we are still figuring it out. We are locked in till July in Zomato, and we are locked in till, I think, a few months later, I think November, in Policybazaar. We still have some time. We'll figure it out, but we haven't taken a view on it yet. Look, as long as there's enough growth left in the companies and there is, we don't have a competing use for the cash, we, you know, there may be substantial value to be built by staying on. On the other hand, if we believe there isn't growth left or we have competing use for the cash, maybe we'll look an exit, but we've not taken a call yet.
Sure. If I can just ask one follow-up on this. I mean, you know, the valuation in the, you know, the startup world seems to be correcting. In that sense, are you looking to accelerate your deployment, you know, of the cash in the AIF, in the current period? Or how are you seeing this space?
The first one.
From your end?
The first fund has invested in 28 companies. It won't do any new companies. Whatever money is left there will be used for follow-ons in the current companies. There's a follow-on fund which will be used further for the follow-ons in the current companies. There are two new AIFs which will be for new companies. Now, we are being a little careful discerning, figuring it out. You see, a few things have changed in the last two-four months. You've got to go for companies where, you know, if you believe it's gonna be heavily cash consumptive over the next few years, there's a real risk of it not getting external investment. Therefore we'll be a little careful. I think we won't invest in a hurry. We will be very, very discerning.
Sure. Thank you so much. I said wish you all the best.
Sure. Thanks, Pranav. Next question is from Vijit Jain from Citi. Vijit, go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you, Anand. Part of my question was answered in the previous, but just a follow-up on that investment strategy, Sanjeev. Is there any change in views regarding which stage of companies you would invest in, given that now maybe in the private space, a lot of companies will come in at more reasonable valuations? That's part one.
You want me to answer?
My question was, is there any change in views regarding-
There is no change.
Oh, okay.
There is no change. We'll still go early stage. We'll still be likely the first institutional check-in. You know, the thing about growth and late-stage investments is that, you know, if the valuation is lower, there's a reason. If the company is still burning cash, it's going to consume a lot of cash, and we are not in the big money game. Our fund sizes are modest.
Right.
Right? INR 100 million.
Mm-hmm.
You know, INR 150 million, INR 75 million. They're not large funds.
Right.
You know, if somebody is raising INR 50 million, INR 60 million, INR 70 million, there is no way we can support that kind of round, and for a small ownership.
Mm-hmm. Right.
When the market has corrected, even at a lower valuation, you know, if the operating risk is high, it's still a very risky investment.
Right. Thanks, Sanjeev. My second question is to you, Hitesh. If you can, you know, talk about the A&P spend outlook into FY 2023, and also any views on your own hiring for your own team in FY 2023. Is that going to continue to go up because of product investments, or how should we think about that?
Let's start with the A&P. We look at advertising and marketing expenses quarter by quarter. We don't have a budget for the year. We spend money, evaluate the impact of that spend, and then course correct and fine-tune and refine as we go along. What I can tell you for sure is that, you know, Jeevansathi high ad spend will continue, because that's the nature of the beast. Our competition also spending aggressively. We also need to spend aggressively to stay in the game. 99acres also will be likely to spend more money than last year, because again, that market has also become very competitive. There's a lot of competitive intensity in that market.
We may spend a little more in Naukri because that business is doing well and, you know, I mean, we may just sort of just to sort of build some brand recall. We've been out of media for a while. We may spend a little more in Naukri as well. But like I said, you know, it'll be quarter on quarter. We'll see how the market shapes up and, you know, plan accordingly. As far as hiring goes, we will continue to hire in our newer verticals, so verticals which are small but likely to grow in the long run.
You know, these are investment modes, so whether it's the study abroad vertical in Shiksha or whether it's Job Hai, the blue collar vertical that we are building, which generates no revenue or whether it's you know, BigShyft or whether it's you know, AmbitionBox or Zwayam or DoSelect. In these verticals we will continue to sort of invest more and more with you know. Again, like I said, you know, we are watchful. We may invest. We'll invest for six months, see the impact, and then again review and so on. In our regular verticals, we may hire a few people more in functions like sales, operations, customer service as business grows.
We are unlikely to, you know, seriously or sort of, you know, invest a lot more in technology and product and in terms of number of people, in our traditional core operation, because I think that is adequately staffed for the moment.
Got it. Thanks, Hitesh. Those were my questions.
Thanks, Vijit. Next question is from Geeth Vaz from Lagori. Geet, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, Hitesh. Congratulations on a great set of numbers.
Thank you.
This is specifically from the Shiksha point of view. Just wanted to understand the breakdown of revenue. What is the percentage of penetration that you have gotten already from free and paid listings over there? That was the first question that I had.
Actually, you know, penetration levels are very low, but I would not read too much into them because, see, we have all kinds of listings on our platform. A lot of government colleges are also listed on our site, and they are unlikely to pay ever.
Right.
You know, while, you know, most of our revenue comes from maybe 700-800 sort of colleges and universities, and we may have 40,000 or some very large number on our platform, it is unlikely that many will pay ever. Right.
Like, just trying to estimate the growth potential over there and how much do you think there is? I mean, it's been growing at like, above 50% for a long time. How long can that sustain?
You know, very difficult to say. See, in the Shiksha business, our revenue is a function of the number of leads we are able to generate for our customers.
Right.
The price we are able to charge per lead, right?
Right.
Now if we have to keep growing at this rate, we have to keep growing our traffic. We have to improve conversion rate on our platforms. We have to be able to monetize leads at a higher price. It's not possible to sort of do this year-on-year every year, for a long time. Let's see. I mean, hard to say whether we will be able to scale up traffic at this rate going forward also, right?
Right.
Can we add more new customers? Yes. Can we look at different revenue models? Maybe yes. For example, we're already experimenting. We are already sort of doing a lot on the study abroad side. Now study abroad, we are following a very different model. We've gone full stack, as in we are doing end-to-end transaction. And the study abroad business did a reasonable job last year. We generated about INR 20 crore of revenue from the study abroad business and started from almost from zero, you know, three or four years ago. So it's a startup inside Shiksha. We plan to invest behind that business and grow it faster going forward. Let's see what happens. The domestic business, can it continue to grow at 50% year-on-year for a long time? It's gonna be very difficult.
Right. Got it.
Unless we are able to crack some new sort of model of growth.
Got it. Also, one last question is, what is the breakdown between agency hiring and direct hiring on the platform right now from Naukri?
So-
Companies hiring directly versus.
Agencies-
-versus-
I think, I mean, I don't have the latest number, but usually around 25% of our revenue. Maybe Vivek can figure out the numbers and get it to you separately.
Sure. Thank you so much, and congrats again on the numbers.
Thank you.
Thanks, Geeth. Next question is from Mohit Motwani from Edelweiss. Mohit, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. I have two questions. One is on the paid listings in 99acres. If you see that the paid listings have come down in the last two quarters, but the billings have significantly increased. Can you give some insight on what has led to the increase in billings? That's my first question.
No, see, you know, billings have gone up because we upped our prices. We've sort of cut discounts. That's the reason you are seeing more monetization per listing. Our response has also gone up over the last few months. We're delivering a lot more to our customers. Now, why have paid listings gone down? See, there are two, three reasons. One, you know what happens in a. See, paid listings are often put by brokers and often brokers used to put up multiple listings for the same property, right?
When prices go up, they've probably sort of become a little more careful about how many listings they post because they don't want to pay much more for posting the same listing, you know, again and again. That's one. Secondly, I suspect, but this is just, you know, my suspicion right now that, you know, the market has become a lot better than it was, and properties are moving a lot faster. Earlier it used to take maybe, four months, five months, six months to sell a property. Now, because the market has become a little better than it used to be, maybe you can, you know. You put up a property, you start getting a response, you can maybe get out in two-three months, you know, on the average.
It's a faster moving market, as well.
Sure. That's helpful. Thanks. My second question is on the matrimony business. I know that you know you have been very bullish on the matrimony space in the last five years.
Anyway, carry on.
Yeah, sure. In the last, like, you know, five years, I think it has been making losses at the EBITDA level. I believe what you're betting on is the number of paid profiles will come up in the matrimony space, right? There are no repeat use cases. If you look at the matrimony segment, there won't be any repeat use cases. You know, how are you seeing the future of this matrimony space? Are you expecting more paid profiles? Because the pricing power may not be there considering the competition.
You know, see, we've done badly in the matrimony space for the last few years for the simple reason that we are a number two player nationally, and that we have only 15% share of the market. It's hard for a number two player in any market to make money. It's not a market where one player dominates like Naukri does in jobs. You know. What we have tried to do over the last four to five years is gain at least in terms of profile share, traffic share, matchmaking share, with the hope that revenue will follow once we gain share. Three, four years ago, we implemented a heavy sort of discounting, very heavy discounting strategy. For a while that got us a lot of traffic. It got us a lot of paid users.
It resulted in more matches happening on the platform. You know, it increased our share of matches, if not necessarily revenue, in this space. Competition caught on. We also sort of, you know, sort of supplemented and complemented it with more advertising to get more profiles to register to start with. The strategy really had good gains for about five to seven quarters, but then competition caught on. They also upped their advertising spend. They also started discounting very aggressively. Then of course we ran into COVID. Lately the strategy has start-stopped working for us because, you know, everybody's doing the same thing. We can, again, we're a number two player. Lately what we've done is we've changed our strategy once again.
We have in fact become what you can call even more aggressive. Instead of giving heavy discounts, we've actually gone free for a lot of our paid services, right? With again, the intention is to, like I said, gain traffic share, you know, gain profile share, you know, enable more matchmaking on our platform, and hopefully as a result there'll be more word of mouth and we'll be able to sort of garner a larger share of the matrimony market. Once that happens, over one year or two years, you can sort of, you know, play around with the monetization as well . That's the idea. It's early days. You know, we are happy with what we are seeing. Now, what is the
As a result of this strategy, our revenues will take a beating for at least two to four quarters. We are also hoping and that, you know, our marketing costs will also come down. Early days on that one, because you know, if Jeevansathi is free, it, you know, helps us differentiate ourselves from our competition. Let's see how this plays out over the next two, three, four quarters. We are hopeful and bullish that, you know, it will help us gain share. You know, again, it's also going to be a function of what happens in the market or how our competition reacts and so on and so forth. Fingers crossed. Let's see how this plays out.
Sure. Just if I can follow up with my last question. The new AI schemes which you are setting up, so those will also have investments similar to how you had with the first AI fund, like in similar areas like AI, machine learning and those kind of areas?
Yeah. There's a follow-on fund which will invest only in the emerging winners from fund one. That's under building. There is fund two, which will basically invest in new companies which we've not invested in earlier on the same strategy as fund one, and that wasn't around AI, ML, right? That was more consumer internet, mobile app and so on. Right? Which of course, you know, nowadays you can't avoid AI, ML, it's there everything. But you know, pure tech companies, very few. Then there's the fund two B, capital two B, which is going to be a more product tech-ish, deep tech-ish kind of investment. It'll be more AI, ML like. But there will be some overlap, but we'll figure it out.
Sure. Thank you for all the answers. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Mohit. Next question is from Aditya from Macquarie. Aditya, go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you. Good afternoon. A few questions. First was more on kind of real estate and matrimony and all that stuff. I guess it's a long game here. You mentioned past consolidation is the game. Last year we had a INR 30 million loss. The year before the loss was a bit lower than that. I guess in terms of fiscal 2023, maybe any thoughts in terms of how much losses you're willing to fund here at the upper bound? And then I had a few more questions.
There's no upper bound, but you know, in matrimony, like I said, we lost about INR 120 crore last year. Now we are hoping that, you know, it'll sort of, you know, we'll sort of be able to make serious gains in terms of traffic share and, you know, if we do that, then the rest of the stuff follows from there. Now whether we'll end up with an INR 100 crore loss or an INR 150 crore loss is difficult for me to say at this point in time, because like I said, we've changed our model. It's very, very early days. We know revenue will take a hit for the next three to four quarters. We did INR 100 crore last year. You know, we will see a drop, at least for two to three quarters.
You know, only if we gain market share and traffic share, and if we are able to figure out new ways of monetizing, we'll definitely pull back. We are also looking to cut our marketing spend slightly. Again, like I said, it'll be one quarter at a time. Play around, experiment, see what happens, and refine and fine-tune as we go along. In real estate also, again, it's become very competitive. There are many more players in the market than was the case two to three years ago. Some of them are very heavily funded. Market is also showing signs of making a comeback. Again, it'll be like, one quarter at a time.
Needless to say, we will sort of, if we have to stay competitive, if we have to stay, in the game, we will have to respond to competition. We cannot sort of let competition sort of take the game away from us, if we want to stay in the game. If that means taking extra losses for a couple of years, we have to, we should be prepared for it.
Excellent answer, Hitesh. I guess the second question was more on your Naukri business right now. Here, clearly in a kind of very strong demand environment, your margins have expanded as well. So the prior years, your EBITDA margin was about 55%. I understand that there are levers which you can pull, but I guess into fiscal 2023, do you see a downside to where your current margins are in Naukri?
Well, it'll depend on what happens to demand and revenue. See if revenues continue to or billings continue to grow at 25%-30% or more, I don't think margins will in fact improve from there on, right? On the other hand, if there is a slowdown in the second half of the year, if IT hiring takes a hit, if there's a recession and so on and so forth, then it's hard for me. Yeah. You know, but like I said, we manage quarter by quarter. In the past, I've always said less than at 15%-20% growth also we can maintain our margins.
This year we are being aggressive in terms of the staffing features that we are building out, in terms of investments in adjacent verticals, right? I mentioned that most of them inside the company, they are not gonna generate a lot of revenue in the short term, but we think it's important to keep investing in them to invest in them for the medium term. We won't wanna cut down on those investments. Recessions in the past we've seen normally don't last for more than two or three quarters.
Yeah. Can I ask one more question, Hitesh?
Yeah.
Just on your investing companies, maybe just a quick update there on some of your larger carrying value investments, whether it be ShopKirana, Bizom, etc . Also, I guess related to the AIF, I mean, are you increasingly facing a more challenging environment in terms of capital and having to kind of go down the risk curve, as you're kind of competing with some of the larger kind of PE/ VC firms?
Well, I'll take that. See, actually, what's happened last two to three months is that, people are being very careful, even, other investors. It's not as if it's a very competitive situation where we are having to fight to get into investments. That's not the case. I think everybody is being careful. Therefore, the risk is on the other side, that what if your current companies can't get the next rounds, and you're dealing with that, and you're figuring out how much cash they have, how much runway they have and, you know, and so on. If somebody's got two years of cash, you know, it's, he's okay. But, you know, if he's got six months of cash, he better start raising now, immediately and, you know, pretty quickly, right?
It's not as if it's really competitive, you know, in getting into deals right now. You should actually be very careful what deals you wanna get into, right? Now, as far as ShopKirana and Bizom are concerned, I mean, they're both reasonably well capitalized right now. But yes, they will need more capital. They'll need at least one round more. The business is scaling up nicely, but you know, they're not making money. Obviously, you know, next few months or so, they will be, we will have to look at capitalization options there.
Thanks, Hitesh.
Thank you so much, Aditya. Next question is from Bhavik Mehta from JP Morgan. Bhavik, go ahead and ask your question. Bhavik, you're there? We'll take next question while he joins back. The next question is from Vivekanand from Ambit Capital. Vivek, go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you for the follow-up opportunity. First one is for Sanjeev. We saw that in the past, Zomato and PB Fintech, you invested almost close to INR 1,000 crore in these two companies. In fact, in PB, you invested around INR 400 crore in one round itself. Now, given the new AIF structure, does this imply that you are no longer able to cut such large checks in follow-on rounds for your investments?
That is potentially correct. You know, the truth is that, see, we you know, in our earlier sort of capital allocation in our, you know, in our portfolio, we cut some large checks which would never have passed muster actually in the AIF structure, because even SEBI does not allow more than X amount of your fund going into one company, right? You know, you've got third-party capital now, and therefore you've gotta follow norms of commercial prudence. Now, it worked out for us in Zomato and Policybazaar. The fact that we cut these large checks has given us this kind of outsized return. It is also carrying risk. Therefore, yes, we will be more commercially prudent than we were earlier.
Yes, we won't take back the fund kind of investments, where you invest a very large percentage of your fund into any one company. You can't invest INR 400 crore, you're absolutely right, in one check in one company.
That was very useful. Just one follow-up, Sanjeev. Does this mean that for deploying the same amount of capital or perhaps now , 3x the capital that we deployed in the first AIF, we will potentially have to invest in around 100 companies?
No, it doesn't mean that. You see, INR 100 million of this INR 325 million is going into a follow-on fund, which will only invest in the emerging winners of fund one. That doesn't go into new companies at all. Right? What you will have, INR 75 million and INR 150 million, INR 245 million. Yes, you will have maybe 2x the companies. Maybe. We're still figuring it out.
Okay. Some of these startups that are listed here, the Unbox Robotics, the IoT company, are these also earmarked for the deep tech AIF or is it part of the previous?
Listen, we had a small sort of pool of capital we had put aside from the company balance sheet to invest in very early-stage deep tech companies. This was done through a subsidiary called Redstart, right? This is brought along those companies, eight to 10 of them. We'll have to figure out where to put them. That's still being worked out.
Okay. Last one is for Hitesh. Now that Shiksha's billing is higher than that of Jeevansathi, does this mean that your business priorities also change in tandem with the higher billing of Shiksha over Jeevansathi?
Well, you see, we internally have a, you know, business unit structure, so every business has a business head. They sort of make a case for their business, they build business plans, and then they execute. They are, they're empowered to sort of hire people, invest in marketing, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, of course, Shiksha has done well for the last two years, and we are going to be sort of increasing our investment in Shiksha going forward. Like I said, we are looking to invest in the study abroad sort of section in vertical in Shiksha, and so on. In Jeevansathi, you know, it's been one bad year. You know, we expected to grow at 15%-20%. We've grown it only maybe 2%-4%. Now we have, again, sort of reworked our strategy.
Now, if this strategy starts to yield results, we'll continue to invest both in 1872.
All right. Understood. Thanks, and all the best.
Mm-hmm.
Thanks, Vivek. Next question is from Mukul Garg from Motilal Oswal . Mukul, go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah, thanks. Hi Hitesh. Good evening. Hitesh, a couple of questions from my side. The first one was, you know, just a bit of a clarification on the recruitment side. There is a difference of about INR 75 crore between recruitment and Naukri billing. Is this purely due to IIMJobs? And, you know, can you just help, you know, break out how much growth IIMJobs has done?
I just want to clarify, see, recruitment for us includes Quadrangle. It also includes NaukriGulf. It also includes, you know, portals working gets almost zero revenue from Job Hai and Makesense, but it also includes those verticals. It includes AmbitionBox, it includes the candidate services business in HR. Now I don't know whether our... You know, Chintan, can you just clarify whether what we have reported includes IIMJobs and Zwayam and DoSelect as well or?
Yeah. The recruitment solutions numbers include, you know, IIMJobs number because that merger is complete. It won't include, you know, Zwayam and DoSelect. I think those numbers we have given it out separately. But, you know, broadly that then explains that, you know, Naukri is just one subset of recruitment solution. Of course, that's the big part of it. But there are other small brands also. That's everything kind of, you know, accumulates into the overall recruitment solution numbers.
Right. Chintan, is it fair to assume that there is no major change in last few quarters because of these smaller businesses, their overall share in the recruitment billing, or has, you know, something grown quite rapidly?
Actually, I mean, I don't think we gave out the numbers, but our core Naukri business, original business grew the fastest.
Fair.
More than anything else.
Right. The second part was, you know, a follow-up to earlier question on 99acres, Hitesh. You know, if you look at the paid listing drop, you know, is it fair to assume that this was partially due to market share loss as you increased prices and, you know, if you look at the number of paid listing, it is probably lowest in recent history, excluding obviously the Q1 disruption. I had to go back all the way to FY 2015 to get a lower number. If you can just kind of break it up, was the impact more on the rental side versus the developer side? How's the mix shaping up?
The fall in paid listings, like I said, can be attributed to two to three things. One is of course higher prices and therefore brokers putting up, you know, fewer of the same listings. Two is the market being a little better than it used to be. Three, maybe there is more, like I mentioned earlier, there's more competitive intensity as well. Yes, we have lost some customers at the bottom because that was by design in the beginning at least because, you know, there a lot of the customers were paying us very little money, so we didn't feel it sort of was important to sort of service them. Also there was a slowdown, so many sort of of our clients went out of business, especially in the first half of last year.
They're all slowly and steadily, they're all coming back. Let's see what happens going forward.
Understood. The third was on the, you know, while obviously there are concerns on the IT side going forward in FY 2023, but how should we think about the non-IT portion, the remaining 50% of the Naukri business, that went through a deep compression in the last two years? How should we see the growth, especially compared to, you know, what it was in FY 2020 pre-pandemic? Is it something which can really see a fast catch-up next year?
You know, again, the non-IT sort of piece I would break up into two parts. You know, one is the sectors like travel, tourism, hospitality, retail, which were massively impacted by the pandemic. Then there are the other non-IT sectors, like , education, pharmaceuticals, FMCG, et cetera. We've seen the second sort of segment that we started seeing hiring in these sectors pick up in the second half of last year itself, you know. Some of these companies started hiring very aggressively towards the second half of last year. Lately what we are seeing is the other segment also come back.
You know, the hospitality, travel, tourism, you know, retail, these kind of sort of sectors, because they've started opening up, you know, post the pandemic. Now, I suspect and what we're also seeing on the ground, in fact, even in our company is, you know, till last year we were worried about tech attrition, and therefore we had to give massive increases to people in our product development sort of organization. This year we are having to sort of pay a lot more to people in functions like customer service and operations and sales and finance and accounts and as well, you know. Because demand for these professionals is also slowly and steadily coming back. Now, will this continue for another two to four quarters, one quarter? It's hard for me to say. Things are opening up.
Many of these companies had laid off people. They had downsized over the last two to three years. They are beginning to see hiring once again for now. That is resulting in higher attrition in other sectors as well, not just in these sectors. For how long will this continue is hard for me to say.
That's fair. The last one.
One more point I wanna make is, see, many of these workers also went back home, right? A lot of them are working from home. As companies encourage them and to get back to work, that could also lead to some attrition in some places.
Sure. If I may ask one question to Sanjeev, if he's there. You know, if you look at the last fundraise, you know, there was a discussion about, you know, scaling or acquisition in the non-Naukri vertical in the standalone entity. With funding drying up, you know, and obviously peers kind of struggling, can that be an opportunity for direct acquisition? Because, you know, that will not be possible through Aisle.
No. Acquisition will not happen through Aisle, but there's enough money on the balance sheet. I'll let Hitesh answer that question because that really comes at him.
No, no. See, like when we raised money also we have said that we are looking to, one, of course invest in, you know, our operating businesses in adjacent areas. Two, you know, we said we would sort of do more investing in companies outside, also do some tuck-in acquisitions. The third thing we have said is that we are sort of, you know, also hoping to sort of do a big acquisition at some point in time in the next two to three years. Big acquisitions, as we have learned, are one, of course, they're opportunistic.
You know, there are just a handful of companies you can acquire. What also happened over the last two to three years is that valuations sort of went out of whack. Now, therefore everything looked very, very pricey. Could things on this front change going forward? Maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell. You know, big acquisitions will. You know, you'll probably see, we'll probably do one or maybe one in the next couple of years at, if we get opportunity. Hard to predict what's gonna happen on that one. We'll continue to do the smaller ones and continue to sort of invest in our internal businesses. Those are easier.
Sure. No, no, that's clear. Thanks for taking my questions, and best of luck for 2022. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Mukul Garg. Next question is from Swapnil from JM Financial. Swapnil, go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Couple of them. First one Naukri. Given that we have a high billings base this year, I would presume your revenue would grow significantly well next year. You mentioned that you would be doing some investments within Naukri itself. How should we think about margins for Naukri in the near term, at least? If you could give some sense on that.
The investments are not going to be very, very substantial. Like I said, we look at things quarter-on-quarter. We make some investments, see results. If it's working, we sort of scale up. We will continue to invest in our newer verticals. If billing growth continues to be solid, and I'm by solid, I don't mean 60%- 70%, which is what we got last year. By solid, I mean, even if we are able to grow at 25%- 30% this year, I think our margins should continue to be very, very healthy.
Okay. Second question is on Jeevansathi. You mentioned that you're not charging the customers as a change in strategy. Now, should we assume that theoretically speaking, can the billings go to zero? Or is it like is it that partially you're charging some customers and not the other party? Just a follow-up on that, like what would be your fixed expenses in Jeevansathi? And what will be the variable part of it? That would help us model.
No, no, you're right. Theoretically, billings can go to zero because, you know, a substantial part of what we were sort of charging for is now free. Having said so, there are some value-added services that are still paid and we expect, you know, revenues to fall substantially, but not go to zero. Maybe a 30%-40% correction is very likely could happen. Drop in revenue could happen easily. We are hoping, like I said, in the long run, to make it up through more registrations, more matchmaking, more activity and more engagement on the platform, but that's a big if. You know, our revenue in Jeevansathi was INR 100 crore last year. We spent about INR 220 crore. We lost INR 120 crore at the EBITDA level.
I think at least half of this, if not more, was advertising and marketing costs. The other costs would have been maybe closer to INR 80 crore-INR 90 crore, but we can get back to you with the exact number.
Right. Okay, cool. Thanks a lot for taking the questions.
Yeah.
Thanks, Swapnil. Next question is from Vijit Jain from Citi. Vijit, go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you for the follow-up opportunity. I have just two questions. One, with Study Abroad, Hitesh, is there a change in approach with that, given that you've talked about it as a new initiative versus other classified business? Is there going to be more marketplace type of offerings, more value-added services, if you will, that you can monetize effectively? That's one. My second question is on the IT in the recruitment business. Is there an overlap between the kind of resumes you think are you know sought by the New Age internet companies, so to say, the ones where you know a lot of funding has been raised in the last few years and the conventional IT services companies that is the core of your business? Those are the two questions.
Listen, the Shiksha Study Abroad thing started off an experiment. You know, in the past, we've flirted with these assistant services. In Naukri, we have an AI service, which is, you know, we get INR 30 crore-70 crore revenue. We have an assistant service in 99acres. We have an assistant service in Jeevansathi, but we've never gone the full hog, whole hog on, you know, and said, "Okay, we'll do the transaction." Shiksha Study Abroad is actually the first, as far as we are concerned, where we are actually saying we actually get paid on closure. You know, we will send these kids overseas to these universities. We will handle them, counsel them, get them a visa and so on and so forth.
Now, we've been surprised by the fact that we've been able to execute reasonably well, given that this is not a skill we had in the company so far. Now, if it scales up nicely, you know, and we are able to develop this new competency, then over time, you know, we could experiment in other verticals as well. I've already mentioned BigShyft. There's an experiment going on inside the company where we're looking at an end-to-end sort of play in premium tech hiring. It's early days of BigShyft. BigShyft is just about the platform. They haven't even sort of started monetizing as well as yet.
Let's see how this plays out, but it could open up new sort of avenues for the company in the medium term for these one or two experiments if these one to two experiments were to succeed. As far as your second question goes, you know, is there a big overlap between the kind of people IT services companies hire and you know these startups which are heavily funded hire? I don't think so, because IT services companies have traditionally hired from tier two, tier three campuses. Their starting salaries on campus are more like INR 3- 6 lakhs per annum.
Right.
They hire in thousands and in hundreds of thousands, in fact.
Right.
On the other hand, these innovative tech startups, which are heavily funded, don't hire as many people as IT services companies, but they like to hire sort of from tier one campuses. Their starting salaries are often double or triple of what IT services companies offer on campus. They hire very few numbers. I think all the startups put together, you know, if you were to look at the total tech workforce, it would be smaller than perhaps a Wipro or Infosys, right? They're not big in terms of size, but they hire higher quality. They hire from more premium premier institutions, and they pay a lot more.
Right. Great. Thank you, Hitesh.
Thanks, Vijit. Next question is from Abhishek Bhandari from Nomura. Abhishek, go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah, hi. Thank you. Hi, Hitesh. I hope you're doing well. Hitesh, I just had one basic question. You know, if I look at your billing, you know, which is an indicator of your market size, your recruitment is almost around INR 1,450 odd crore kind of business. What do you think, you know, could be the market size for your remaining, you know, three key verticals, whether you look at real estate or education or matrimony in next five years' time?
Actually, you know, recruitment has become a very large market. We do INR 1,450 crore, and there's LinkedIn. They do INR a few hundred crores. Then there are recruitment firms, and there is referral hiring. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if companies are spending at least INR 1 billion or close to that much on recruitment in India, if not more. This is not including the cost of their internal HR or recruitment team and so on. Right. That's one. Now, as far as the other verticals go, 99acres now, if you look at, it depends on how you define the market. If you just look at the advertising market for real estate, right? Ten years ago or twelve, fourteen years ago, it used to be INR 2,500 crores, right?
All of it used to go to newspapers and hoardings and so on. The real estate advertising market shrunk because real estate went through a rough time, you know, starting with RERA, then demonetization, GST, NBFC crisis, COVID, etc . The market actually shrunk to maybe, you know, two-thirds of the size, even though after 10, you know, so 10 years later, the market was maybe two-thirds the size. Now, the nature of the advertising spend has of course changed. Most of it now goes to online, right? It doesn't go to newspapers and hoardings anymore. Within online also, a large part of it now goes to Google and Facebook, right? There's Google and Facebook, and then there are the real estate portals, and then there's newspaper advertising.
If you were to look at the spend on real estate portals and Facebook and Google today, it's probably close to INR 1,000 crore, if not more already, right? Real estate is now entering a growth phase, and then there is newspaper advertising, et cetera, which will slowly again keep migrating to online. It's very likely that, you know, 10 years from now, the real estate advertising market in India, right, could be INR 5,000-7,000 crore. Who knows, right? This does not include, you know, transactions. It does not include brokerage. Over time, you know, some of these sort of markets will also be up for grabs, you know, depending on what models people develop and so on, right? It's not a tiny market by any standards.
It's just that it was, like, screwed for the last, you know, seven, eight, 10 years, right? If you look at matrimony, now again, depends on how you define the market. If you look at traditional matrimony, which is basically caste and community-based matrimony, like, say, what's Jeevansathi, Shaadi and BharatMatrimony do today itself, that market is close to $100 million, right? But growing at maybe 7%-10% per annum. The reason, one reason why it's $100 million and why even real estate is INR 1,000 crore and not INR 2,000 crore or not INR 1,500 crore- INR 2,000 crore is because a lot of competition. What happens when you have a lot of competition is that prices are driven down. Unlike what you're seeing in recruitment.
In recruitment, because there isn't a lot of competition, you know, we are able to command the price we deserve to get in that vertical. Here, because there's a lot of competition in both matrimony and real estate, there's aggressive discounting from all players, which results in lower realizations. Now, if you were to add to this matrimony market the dating market, right? Because the dating market did not exist a few years ago. The dating market also evolving. There's casual dating, which is Tinder, and then there is serious dating, which is Aisle, which is something we invest in. That market is also now, I don't have the numbers, exact numbers, but maybe it's an INR 250 crore-INR 300 crore market already, right? Growing much faster.
These are not small markets by any standard. Over the next five-10 years, they could become fairly large, especially if you know there is consolidation.
Got it. My second question, Hitesh, is that, you know, now that, you know, you know, our jobs classified business core Naukri is a cash cow, I know, and we are a clear dominant market share. Has it occurred to you that we should actually-
Sorry. May I take that?
Yes.
Cash cow is not the correct characterization of Naukri. It is growing very fast. It's highly profitable, growing very fast. I do not know what you'd call it, but it doesn't fit into a VC.
Star. It's called a star.
A star is a mature business at this point in time. It doesn't fit into your traditional 2×2 VC , but yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, yeah.
No problem, Sanjeev. I didn't mean, it's growing slow by any standard. What I meant that, you know, it's a fast-growing engine throwing cash. Has it ever occurred to you that you should go up the value chain and probably start targeting, you know, more premium? Now, I know the investments in IIMJobs and all are there, but you know, more like probably like a LinkedIn kind of approach. You know, where you start building communities and, you know, it becomes probably, you know, one of its own kind, given the wide network you have. I think the, you know, the effects of network can actually be realized very quickly over there. Any thoughts there will be helpful.
See, you know, what we've seen over time is that, you know, it's very hard for me to play or to succeed in any market, right? You have to have a differentiated strategy. You have to have a differentiated offering. If you try and do what somebody else is doing, and if that somebody else is already very strong, very powerful, anzd has a lot of resources, it's unlikely that you will succeed. Which is why, you know, we are doing what we are doing in Jeevansathi also. You know, we have to differentiate ourselves. Now, should we do another professional networking site? I doubt it, whether that approach will work. What are we doing? We're doing IIMJobs. We're doing vertical sites. We are also experimenting with a portal called Hirist.
You know, in the IIMJobs stable, which is premium tech hiring. We are trying to do BigShyft, which is, you know, where, like I said, we are flirting with the idea of doing end-to-end sort of, transactions, you know, end-to-end on a platform, using technology, maybe in a small area. Maybe the right approach to, premium hiring or to sort of enter that market is, you know, this niche sort of, vertical approach, as opposed to, you know, trying to build another sort of network to compete head on with Microsoft, you know. That's our thinking at this point in time. Like I said, some of these things change and they.
You know, tomorrow if you see an aggressive startup which is sort of likely to succeed in this startup space and, you know, is making great progress, then none of this will matter.
Thank you, Hitesh and Sanjeev. Really helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Abhishek. Next question is from Aatman Ajmera, from Nordea Asset Management. Aatman, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, good evening. This is Aatman from Nordea. Firstly, congratulations on Naukri's performance. I mean, business has done really well over the last two years. Business is a lot bigger and, you know, virtually a flat employee base. Clear testament to the sort of scalability of these of the platform. My question, Hitesh, is more on 99acres and Jeevansathi. Most questions have been answered, but just one question I was curious about is, so what are you really optimizing for when you incentivize your business heads? You know, are they going after traffic share?
Is it, you know, is someone in the organization penalized for a high marketing spend? You know, what, how do you measure a successful outcome in these two businesses when, you know, the market is what it is, but there's some things you can do internally as well. What are you really incentivizing your business heads for? What's a good outcome?
The number one thing we focus on in almost every vertical we operate in is our traffic, right? How many users sort of end up on our platform? What is the amount of time they spend on our platform? How engaged are they with our platform? That's the number one thing. Whether it's Naukri or 99acres or Shiksha, we have daily analysis to track, you know, what's happening, right? The number two thing we focus on, because we are a matchmaking platform, is matchmaking, right? You can get a lot of traffic, but it may bounce and it may not spend too much time. It may not end up sort of in Naukri, they may not end up applying to the right jobs. They may not get shortlisted. They may not get hired.
In Jeevansathi, they may not find the right sort of matches, and they may sort of just, you know, disengage after a while. The number two thing we sort of focus on in all our sort of verticals, almost all our verticals, is matchmaking. How many matches are we able to enable through our platform? We again, like I said, we have dashboards, we have analytics, et cetera, to report stuff like this on a daily basis. The number three thing which we focus on is traffic share, right? Which is, you know, how are we doing versus our competition. Our UVs may be growing, our visitors may be growing at 20% per annum. Our matchmaking may be growing at 30% per annum. If our competition is growing at 50%, we have a problem, right?
Because as you know, in the internet space, it's often win or take all, especially in the kind of markets we operate. If you're not a strong contender or if you're not a strong number two or a strong or a number one player, it's very hard after a while. Which is why I mentioned recently on just now on the call. I mean, that this new approach in Jeevansathi, because what we did three years ago started working for us, worked for us for some time. We gained share. We gained, you know, in terms of the number of matches we were enabling and so on. But then competition followed, and then we are now sort of forced to do things again very differently if we have to gain share. These are the top three.
Of course there's revenue, because the proof of the pudding ultimately is in the eating. Often monetization is not easy. You know, we have to think of smart ways to monetize because you can do all this but if your monetization model is not in sync with what you're doing, then you may not be able to reap the benefits of all these changes that you make to your platform, right? We have to constantly sort of reinvent or reimagine monetization also on all our platforms. These are the four sort of big things we focus on.
Like I said, in the long run, traffic share is the most important, but also our UVs because you may have very high traffic share, but if you're in a tiny market, if you don't have too many visitors, it doesn't matter, right? In the end, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so you have to be able to monetize and you have to be able to command the right price, especially if you're a leader, because that is what ultimately leads to good margins.
Right. Thanks for that. Just a follow-up there, Hitesh. A lot of the things you mentioned can be achieved through marketing spends, right? I mean, you can invest higher to get traffic. Are the business heads given X budget, this is what you spend and do your best with the kind in terms of traffic? Or is this sort of, you know, is there a pool that the business heads are fighting for and, you know, or is there a constant combat saying we need more to sort of grow traffic?
Yes and no. See, marketing is not a panacea for all this. You know, in the sense that, you know, if you spend more money on marketing and your competition also starts spending more money on marketing, you're back to square one, right? Marketing works up to a point. It works, especially when competition does not respond. It often does not work. It works to grow the market, expand the market, you know, but it does not work beyond a point to get your share, right? If your competition is also as aggressive as you are. Now, therefore, a lot of the focus is also on doing smart things, you know, on the platform. In some of our verticals, we need to invest more in operations.
We need, like I said, we need to invest in smart algorithms to enable good matchmaking. We have a data science team which sort of is constantly sort of focused on that. We sometimes need to launch new features and get into newer areas to sort of just, you know, get a higher share of the funnel at the top. It's a combination of things. Marketing is not the, I mean, marketing is required from time to time, and it's important, you know, especially if competition is advertising and you are not, to be able to respond. It's not as if you can get all the results you want only from marketing. Now, is there a budget? Is there, like I said, you know, every business prepares. It has a business head.
They prepare business plans. They survey the environment. They understand what competition is doing. We have a lot of past data on how effective marketing has been for us, right? Because the good thing about internet marketing is that you can track everything. You know what happened when you spent last time. They look at all that, and then they sort of arrive at a plan, and they prepare a budget, which is then sort of approved. Now that budget is not cast in stone because in our space, unlike in mature setups where things don't change too much, things change every month, right? Earlier it used to be only because of competition and because of startups, but now it is also the environment which changes every quarter.
Once we agree on a budget, they implement it quarter by quarter and review and, you know, evaluate and then. That's how it works.
Understood. Just to wrap this up, would let's say if this quarterly loss was instead of INR 35 crore, let's say, INR 100 crore this quarter, hypothetically, would someone be penalized in the organization for that?
In which vertical? Sorry. You know, they won't. I mean, it's unlikely that that has happened because, see, we track, like I said, things on a daily basis. You know, we have data coming in on revenue, on costs, on all this on a daily basis. At the end of the month also there's a review. At the end of the second month also there'll be a review. At the end of the quarter also there'll be a review. You know, it's not. When I say quarter by quarter, it is, you know, I mean, at my level it's quarter by quarter, but at the, you know, the business heads and the sales heads and the product heads review stuff every week.
Understood.
They will course correct if required.
Right. Very clear. Thanks, Hitesh, for that.
Thanks, Aatman. That was the last question for the day. We may wait for some time. If there are any more questions, please raise your hand. Vivek, no more questions, so we may conclude the call.
Thanks, everyone. On behalf of Info Edge, we conclude this conference. Thank you, and you may now disconnect your lines.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.
Thanks. Bye.