Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Info Edge India Q3 Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants' lines 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 during the conference call, please raise your hand on your screen.
Please note that this conference is being recorded. Joining us today from the management side, we have Mr. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Vice Chairman. Mr. Hitesh Oberoi, co-promoter and Managing Director, and Chintan Thakkar, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin today, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made in today's call may be forward-looking in nature and may involve risks and uncertainties. Kindly refer to slide number two of investor presentation for detailed disclaimer. I would like to hand over the conference to Mr. Hitesh Oberoi for his opening remarks. Thanks, and over to you, Hitesh.
Thank you, Vivek. Good evening, and welcome everyone to our third quarter FY 2021 results conference call. As always, we will start with the overall financials and then cover each business in more detail. Of course, we'll have time for Q&A. The audited financial statements, file, and other schedules on segmental billing, revenues, et cetera, along with data sheet, have been uploaded on our website at www.infoedge.in. Let's discuss the standalone financials first. Billings in Q3 were INR 297 crores, down 1% year-on-year. Revenue in Q3 was INR 272.3 crores, down 15% year-on-year. Operating expenses, excluding depreciation for the quarter, were INR 204.1 crore, down 4.9% year-on-year. Operating EBITDA stood at INR 68.2 crores versus INR 105.9 crores last year, a drop of 35.6% year-on-year.
Operating EBITDA margins for the quarter stood at 25% compared to 33% in Q3 of 2019/2020. On the other hand, cash EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 92.6 crores. It was up 8.9% year-on-year. Deferred sales revenue stood at INR 393.5 crores as of 31st of December 2020 versus INR 457 crores as of 31st of December 2019, a decline of 13.9% year-on-year. The cash balance in IEIL and all of its subsidiaries stood at INR 3,500 crores as of 31st December 2020. This was INR 1,519 crores as of 31st December 2019. We are expecting a revival of activities on all our platforms. Traffic in the recruitment vertical has been actually at an all-time high. We've been seeing registrations were up 25%, applications are up 20%.
Usage, sessions, et cetera, everything is up 15%, 20% at least over last year. IT and ITES have been the verticals driving the recovery. Now, of course, many other verticals are coming back as well. In 99acres also, traffic has started growing. There seems to be an improvement in demand for at least ready-to-move-in houses. In Q3, we experienced an all-time high customer queries on the platform as well. In Jeevansathi, we continue to invest in brand and user experience. Over time, this investment has given us an edge over our competitors, and this is reflecting in our growing user base. Shiksha's traffic share with the competition is also rising once again. We are committed to investing more in the Shiksha business and in all the other content initiatives we have in education.
Besides internal investments, we continue to explore investment and acquisition opportunities in areas of strategic interest to Info Edge. Moving on to the consolidated financial highlights. At the consolidated level, the net sales for the group stood at INR 277.64 crores versus INR 335 crores last year. For the consolidated entity at the PAT level, there is a gain of INR 678.15 crores versus a loss of INR 61.36 crores in the same quarter last year. Adjusted for exceptional items, PAT stood at a loss of INR 25.81 crores in the quarter ended December 20 versus a loss of INR 61.36 crores in the corresponding quarter of last year. Let's move on to our business-wise discussion. We'll first cover the recruitment business.
In Q3 of 2021, recruitment segment billings were INR 201.4 crores, down by 4.1% year-on-year. While revenues were INR 189.5 crores, a degrowth of 17.7% year-on-year. The operating EBITDA stood at INR 106.5 crores, down 20.6% from December 2019. Margins were at 56.2% versus 58.3% in Q3 of FY 2020. Cash EBITDA for the recruitment vertical during the quarter stood at INR 118.29 crores which is an increase of 4% year-on-year. In Naukri in Q3 of 2021, we experienced a good recovery in collections and billings. The month of December specifically, saw a growth in collections over December of last year. Increasingly, the recovery is across multiple industry segments. Of course, IT and telecom continue to do well. We also saw an increase in online transactions during the quarter.
Online transactions are basically, we have a lot of small businesses who buy online, so that's a healthy sign as well. On the job seeker side, New CV registrations stood at around 15,000 per day in Q3 2021, a growth of 25% compared to Q3 of 2020. Average CV modifications per day stood at 440,000, a growth of 6% in Q3, and 11% in the month of December in 2020. The recruiter engagement on the platform has also further improved in Q3, with December seeing a peak of activities post-COVID. IT and ITES segments saw maximum growth in terms of job searches and job postings, followed by the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and real estate segments. We also saw a slight recovery in travel and hospitality for the first time this year. We did curtail our marketing spend, and this is despite actually curtailing our marketing spend for the quarter.
At the same time, we continue to maintain a very high market share and traffic share in the recruitment search segment. iimjobs, a company we acquired last year, reported a billing of INR 6.61 crores for Q3 of 2021. This is a growth of 35% from Q3 of last year. Moving on to the real estate vertical. In 99acres, billings in Q3 were INR 52.4 crores, a degrowth of 3.5% year-on-year, while revenue stood at INR 44.9 crores, a degrowth of 22.9% from INR 58.2 crores in Q3 of 2019/2020. Operating loss for the quarter stood at INR 3.5 crores. Cash profit for 99acres during the quarter stood at INR 3.6 crores against a cash loss of INR 2.8 crores last year. In 99acres, in Q3, billings further recovered, reaching 96% of last year's levels.
All business verticals within 99acres, new homes, resale, rental, and commercial, showed sequential recovery in business compared to Q2. Of course, we saw resale and new homes recover much faster than rentals. We drove efficiency in our spends, which were down 15% year-on-year in Q3, with lesser spends on both marketing and facilities. There was strong growth in demand on the platform, as seen in the number of inquiries or responses on the platform, which actually reached an all-time high in both new home and resale, and towards the end, in commercial as well. Of course, our top-of-mind share versus our nearest competitor, Magicbricks, continues to be high. We continue to see a good sequential momentum on listings and traffic and inquiries in 99acres and are hopeful of this trend continuing in the near future.
More clients are likely to come back to advertise on the platform as normalcy returns to the market. We see the share of online medium in the overall spends of advertisers going up during and post this pandemic due to its inherent cost advantage versus print and outdoor media. We will continue to invest aggressively on improving our core platform experience in all our business verticals to further strengthen our competitive position. Towards the end, over the last few months, we've also seen more competitive activity in this vertical, and it is very likely that our marketing spends in 99acres will increase going forward. Moving on to the Jeevansathi business. In Jeevansathi, billings in Q3 grew 17% year-on-year to INR 26.2 crore, and revenue grew 15.5% year-on-year to INR 24.7 crore.
Operating EBITDA losses stood at INR 27.6 crores in Q3, up from a loss of INR 19.1 crore last year. Cash loss for Jeevansathi for the quarter stood at INR 26.4 crores, up from a cash loss of INR 18.4 crores last year. In Q3, Jeevansathi also saw growth momentum sustained in a seasonally weak quarter. Post-Diwali sales picked up to reach pre-COVID levels of 20% +. Business doubled down on some of the key differentiating features, like online verification, video calling, and video-based online meetups to drive user engagement and improve platform safety. Jeevansathi continues to consolidate its position as it gets into a position of strength in the Hindi-speaking markets in north and central India. Moving on to the Shiksha business. In Shiksha, in Q3, billings grew 27.9% year-on-year to INR 16.9 crores, while revenue grew 23.5% year-on-year to INR 13.2 crores.
EBITDA for the quarter stood at INR 0.8 crores versus a loss of INR 1.7 crores in Q3 of last year. Cash profit for the quarter stood at INR 4.5 crores, up from a profit of INR 33 lakhs in Q3 of last year. We continue to invest aggressively in our content efforts to get more and more users onto our platform. Moving on to the strategic investments. Zomato, like you probably know, received an investment of $448 million during the quarter in two tranches, $253 million in December 2020 and $195 million in November 2020. Key market investors like Baillie Gifford, Mirae, Fidelity, Tiger Global participated in these rounds. With these two rounds of funding, our fully diluted shareholding now stands at 19% in Zomato.
Info Edge Ventures announced the signing of its contribution agreement with MacRitchie Investments Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings Private Limited, for a contribution commitment of INR 375 crore. That's all from us today, right now. Thank you, now we're ready to take any questions that you may have.
Thanks, Hitesh. We'll now begin the Q&A session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may raise your hand on the screen. We'll state your name and announce your turn in the question queue.
Yeah. The first question is from Sachin Hemnani from Perfect Research. Sachin, go ahead and ask your question.
Good evening, sir. I have a few questions. Listing them together. Number one, how big is the size of opportunity for Naukri.com in India? How much can the overall market grow from here in the long run? In the previous phone calls, you hinted towards working on a platform for the blue-collar hiring. Can you please throw some light on any development in this regard? The last one, what steps are we taking to diversify our dependence of majority of our revenues in Naukri from subscription to our recruitment database system? Thank you.
Okay. Now, the size of the opportunity, it's huge. Millions of people are hired in India. We are probably still maybe 25, 30% of the overall sort of recruitment market, and I'm referring just to the white collar market. There are some companies who maybe do half their hiring through Naukri. There are some companies who do maybe 20% of their hiring through Naukri. We are still in that ballpark. The market can be very large in the long run because I guess it'll, to some extent, of course, depend on how fast India grows. If you believe that India will be an INR 5 trillion economy, I don't know, five years from now or seven years from now, or whenever, or an INR 10 trillion economy, 10 years from now or 20 years from now.
The truth is that if that has to happen, then the number of companies in India will grow, the number of people they employ will grow, and all these people will have to be hired. The overall sort of market could grow 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, I don't know how much, over the next 10 or 20 years. But it, of course, will depend on how fast the Indian economy grows, right? We can only sort of help people find jobs. We can't create jobs. But just to give you a sense, we work with close to 75,000 companies in India. The leading job sites in China work with over 500,000 enterprises, right?
The smaller sort of companies, the general classified portals in China, the ones who deal with the blue collar type of companies they work with sometimes over 1 million, 2 million enterprises, right. That's how big the Chinese economy is. There's no limit to how big this market can be in the long run. It'll depend on whether India fulfills its potential or not. In the short run, like I said, we are still maybe 1/3 of all hires or a fourth of all hires happen through Naukri. If we can improve the user experience on our platform, if we can grow our database, if we can do a better job of matching job seekers to recruiters, we can still up our growth of the number of hires through Naukri.
The blue collar job board, we are just sort of test marketing right now. We've launched a product, jobhai.com. It's fully functional. You can test it out, you can try it out. Right now we are focusing only on NCR. It's live only in Delhi, Noida, and Gurgaon. We've been working on perfecting some of the features, perfecting the roll-outs, figuring out our digital marketing strategy, figuring out our job acquisition strategy, figuring out our resume acquisition strategy. We made very good progress. I think we are reaching a stage where very soon we will try and we'll roll it out to more cities. I'm confident that in the next six months, we would have sort of at least entered two or three other cities as well through JobHai. It's very early days.
Right now we are just focused on getting the product market fit right, getting jobs, getting users. We are not even looking to monetize right now. This is a five to 10 year game. It's not likely to move the needle in our business over the next 12 to 18 months, but it's a good space to be in for the long run. We're getting in early. I think we already have maybe the highest number of jobs in Delhi as far as the blue collar job board is concerned on JobHai. Your third question regarding I don't think I fully understood that. You said subscription, reducing dependence on subscription and moving more to databases, right?
No. Reducing dependence on subscription database. See, 60% of our revenue comes from database subscription. Is that too concentrated?
Well, we want to grow our database subscription revenue also, and we've been working very hard to grow that piece. In addition to the database subscription product, that's our bread and butter product. That's almost all companies who sort of, our annual customers on Naukri use that product because it's just very effective when it comes to hiring. Of course, we could do better with our job listings product. For the longest time, it's been less than 15% of our revenue. There is a team working on improving that product. We just rolled out, in fact, just two weeks back, we rolled out a branding product on mobile phones, right? We are rolling out mobile branding features slowly as we speak. We had desktop branding offerings but we didn't have anything on the mobile phone. We are now working on that front as well.
A couple of products are going to go live on that front. We've also sort of been working on a data product. We've got something called Talent Pulse, which is sort of a data offering to help companies figure out what's happening in the job market, where the talent is, what salaries are like, et cetera. This is the first of its kind which we are launching and early days on that one. In addition to this, we have a small services business, WeHire. We also have a small software business, RMS, where we sell recruitment automation products to companies. We also have a campus hiring business called FirstNaukri. We have iimjobs. There's a job posting offering. Yes, the database piece continues to be a large part of our story. Maybe at some point in time, it was 70%.
I don't see it going below 60, 65 ever because this is our bread-and-butter offering and a lot of the hiring takes place through this. Of course, we are working very hard to grow the other products I mentioned in our portfolio.
Anand, you're on mute.
Thank you. The next question is from Deep Shah from Ambit Capital. Deep, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi. Sorry. This is Vivekanand from Ambit Capital. I have two questions. One is traffic trends in 3Q and perhaps January in the real estate vertical. You mentioned that the competition is now advertising aggressively and we see ads by Housing as well.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on the traffic move there, and how much would you probably need to raise your advertising investments here to mark-to-market? Second question is on collaboration with strategic investees in the ed tech and real estate space. You have spoken about this in the past. It would be great if you can give an update here.
Right. Like I mentioned, we are seeing a return of advertising activity from our competitors. Housing has been very aggressive for the last few months on all media. We were quiet for a while because the market was not in very good shape. Now that the market is sort of bouncing back, we are likely to get aggressive once again. How much will we have to spend on advertising, frankly, will be a function of how much our competition ends up spending on advertising. We are very rational players. We are conservative. If competition is aggressive, we will be forced to respond and you will see our ad spend go up this quarter in 99acres. By how much? It's hard to say. It'll depend on, like I said, on what the others do.
Every time you have somebody advertising and others are not, you see some share movements. Those are often temporary in nature because once the other player starts responding, you sort of go back to ground zero. In some sense, it's a bit irrational if everybody's advertising because the market can only grow at a certain rate. It's impossible to make the market grow much faster. That's how it is. The other question regarding strategic investments, see, we've been investing in the four spaces we operate in inside Info Edge of real estate, matrimony, education. We've for a while had this strategy to invest in adjacent sort of areas outside the company. Right? We made a few investments in education. We have invested in a company called NoPaperForms. We invested in a company called Univariety. We've invested in Coding Ninjas.
We've invested in a HR services company. We've invested in Teal, which is a real estate sort of software company. We've just announced another investment in real estate in a startup. They're doing a B2B sort of play in the broker tools sort of category. We acquired iimjobs last year, as well. This is an important part of our strategy. There's a lot of opportunity in every vertical. We know that we can't do everything in-house. We've been upping our investment in innovation. We've been upping our investment in product development. Across our whole verticals, we have close to 700 people working in product development roles. There are opportunities everywhere.
Every time we see a company which looks interesting, but we don't want to do it in-house at that point in time, but at the same time, we want to sort of be in that market. We don't want to sort of lose that market. If we find a good startup, we invest. That's how we are playing this right now. Hopefully, over time, we'll find some synergies between our sort of properties and the companies we invested in. For example, we are trying out something with Teal, a real estate sort of analytics company we invested in to see if we can get offered an additional service on 99acres to our users using their sort of data and their algorithms in their search. We've tried something with one or two education companies as well in the past.
The long-term sort of ambition here is to sort of be in multiple adjacent sort of spaces as well. Now, if you look at Naukri, there's a bunch of stuff we are doing in-house. Like we're doing the blue collar job portal in-house. We are doing Artemis in-house. We've sort of done FirstNaukri in-house. There could be other opportunities outside, and if we don't think we can do them in-house or we don't have the resources or we want to focus on something else, we would rather invest in them and then maybe three or four years later, we'll see what to do with them. That's the strategic investment strategy. If there's something we can sort of take in and scale up, we would rather acquire. Right?
If there's something which we believe we can add a lot of value to immediately, and if we take them in, then we would rather acquire. Like for example, iimjobs. Despite the slowdown in the hiring market, because we acquired iimjobs and we sort of threw the might of our sales team behind it, we were able to grow our revenue from iimjobs or billings from iimjobs 35% last quarter, right? If we see something which is a direct fit, which is more in the area in which we already operate and which we can scale up tremendously, then we would rather acquire. If adjacent areas, we would rather invest, watch how these companies do over a three, four, five-year period, and then see what next after that.
Sure. Thanks, Hitesh, for the explanation. Just one small follow-up, since you mentioned about iimjobs, is the growth in billing there a reflection of the verticalization of recruitment, or is it that you were able to extract synergies because of your sales processes being far superior? Can you give some more color on how this came through? Did iimjobs reach more number of customers who currently use Naukri?
Yeah. It's primarily that. See, of course, the product is very solid. It's rock solid. It's a good brand. Not only do they have iimjobs, they have another product which is sort of getting good traction called hirist, which is a tech hiring platform, which they've been working on for a while. What we were able to do, see, was to basically take them to many more customers over the last nine months. We merged the two sales teams. We merged the iimjobs sales team with the Naukri sales team. iimjobs was working with maybe a few hundred customers because they had limited reach, because they had only a handful of people in sales. We had, like I said, we work with 75,000 companies. Maybe a few thousand of them can use iimjobs. That's something we do really well.
We have a solid sales engine. Through this engine, we took iimjobs and hirist. Hirist is still sort of a tiny brand, but it's getting there, to a lot of our customers. Because the product is rock solid, when they started using it, they liked it. We hope to continue to do more of this in the coming quarters as well.
Okay. Thank you, Hitesh.
The next question is from Anmol Garg, Motilal Oswal. Anmol, go ahead and ask your question.
Hey, hi. Good evening. Just had few questions. First of all, can you give any update on the cash that we have raised through QIP?
Chintan, you want to take that?
Sorry, say again?
Cash raised through QIP, an update on that.
What's happened to it?
There's nothing much has happened in terms of the utilization of that one. We already had cash of roughly around INR 1,500 crore when we raised this money, right? We're continuing. If you see that even in Q1 in the midst of the peak of COVID, we were cash generating. Q2 also generated cash. In Q3, in fact, we generated on YoY basis cash, which is more than what it was in previous years. We are cash generating, and that is despite of the incremental investment that we are doing in branding and marketing in the matrimonial business. We have cash surplus, and we have not done anything very specifically from the QIP fund so far.
Anything in the pipeline that we can acquire from the cash that we have raised?
Well, that's part of our strategy that we'll continue to invest through our P&L. P&L, as I said, that we are generating cash as well as it can happen through our balance sheet. Some of the small strategic investment that Hitesh just kind of talked about in a previous question. I think some of those investment will continue to happen from this. If something large acquisition has to happen, we can use this cash, but there's nothing so far that we have anything to announce here.
Secondly, my second question is towards 99acres and towards the strategy that we are adopting from the same. In general, where do we expect our marketing dollars to be? Will it be towards having more brokers on the website or towards the house owners? Still the listings are down by sort of 20%. When do you think that we can be at the previous year levels?
Yeah. We sort of target both dealers and owners. It's actually free for owners. Owners can list for free. Dealers, of course, have to pay to list, and they buy a subscription product. Our goal is to get all sort of genuine supply onto the platform, irrespective of which source it comes from. It could come from a dealer, it could come from an owner, it doesn't matter to us. We want all the listings in one place. That's what gets us our traffic. Now our marketing campaigns will target everybody again. Anybody who wants to list a property, we'll encourage them to list to that on 99acres and make it easy for them. Listings are not back as yet because, see, the broking business. The brokers are taking some time.
One, of course, we've been toying around with the business model as such. What was happening earlier was that we were getting a lot of repeat listings because brokers to get more inquiries, used to post the same listing a few times. Now in some of our markets, we have moved to a different model. We are encouraging our clients to move to a different model where we are saying, "Listen, why don't you boost your listing instead of posting it again?" Hopefully, it will result in less spam. There's a shift in model there. We are trying out some new things in a few markets. As a result of which brokers are boosting their listings, so they're consuming the same number of credits, but they are posting fewer listings.
The other is, of course, brokers have been slow to get back onto the platform after COVID. What we've seen is actually a surge in supply from owners. We've seen more owner listings on the platform. Owner listings are in fact up 20%, 30% over last year. Broker listings are down 20%, 30%. Slowly brokers are also getting back. Now the market is actually a lot more open than it was six months ago or three months ago. We are confident that all these brokers will also come back. Yes, because of the change in model, you may still see fewer broker listings than earlier.
Sure. Hitesh, thanks. This was very useful.
Next question is from Sanjay Bhargava. He is from Bharosa Club, Co-founder. Sanjay, go ahead and ask your question. Sanjay, you are there?
Sanjay is on mute.
No, he's not. He unmuted.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, Sanjay. Go ahead.
Okay. I am a very small investor in Naukri. I just invested and I hold 750 shares. One of the things I was intrigued about was, I used to be on the founding team of PayPal, and PayPal looked at both sides, the consumers and the merchants. I don't understand Naukri's business that well, but there seems to be a lot of focus on the merchants or the businesses. Is there also a focus or a planned focus on individuals and then being able to give them a whole suite of products which they can use? That may be a pretty good growth strategy for Naukri. I just wondered your comments on that. Is there anything keen on that side?
Sanjay, when you say individuals, you mean job seekers?
I mean everybody because I think Naukri serves individuals for many things, matrimonial, real estate, job seekers. It serves a bunch of people and touches them in different ways. Right? And also in the budget you have now people saying that we are going to go into the gig economy and the gig economy people are going to get pensions and so on so forth. There may be PF, maybe at some stage there will be a universal pension. Even I'm an employer in some ways because I employ domestic staff, I may have to pay them a pension. Maybe a long way off.
Yeah. The way we sort of are organized and the way we run the various bits, we have different portals. We don't have one common platform for jobs and real estate and matrimony. We don't have all of them on one sort of platform. We have different URLs, different platforms for these four verticals. The Naukri business is focused on recruitment, white collar recruitment. The 99acres business is for real estate listings. For matrimony listings we have Jeevansathi. For education sort of content and classifieds we have Shiksha.com. They sort of don't talk to each other. These businesses work independently. They have separate teams, separate targets, separate goals. Everything is different. That's how we operate right now.
To answer your question. In all our verticals we have, actually the way we are organized, like in Naukri also we have one team working on the recruiter side, right? Which is because we are a marketplace, like you said, two-sided marketplace. We have a bunch of people working on building products for recruiters and at the same time we have a bunch of people working on building and improving products and improving the user experience for job seekers. Ditto in 99acres, ditto in matrimony and Shiksha as well. Of course, what we offer on the platform, the kind of products we offer, the kind of services we offer are guided by our sense of what we think makes sense and what we think is relevant at this stage.
Like I mentioned earlier, while we are trying to do more and more stuff inside the company, we just launched a job board for blue collar workers. We launched an AI-based tech platform for tech hiring. We acquired iimjobs for premium job seekers. We are working on a recruitment software product. At the same time, we're also investing in adjacent areas outside the company. Right? That at some point in time in the near future, over a four or five-year period, we can maybe look at offering even more services to our audience. That's the strategy we are following right now. Maybe it's a little different from eBay because I guess eBay was one platform and you had all kinds of buyers and all kinds of sellers on one platform. Our approach is a little different. It's more vertical rather than horizontal.
Yeah. May I add something there? Sanjay, if I heard your question correctly, look, we have got some candidate services but 98% of our job seekers who come to Naukri, they don't pay anything. You're allowed to put your resume up for free, you're allowed to apply for a job free. Everything is free. Do we see a big thrust in candidate services where it becomes a big part of our business? We have no products in the pipeline which will suddenly lift candidate services to where anywhere near the revenue that we get from employers is, to answer that question.
Yeah. That's fine. I wasn't suggesting that you charge candidates but I'm saying that if you have many more consumers or individuals and whoever pays. You just like telecom firms measure an ARPU, an average revenue per user. It doesn't matter who pays, whether it's a consumer or a business. It may be something interesting to look at, but I'm not sure.
No. Yeah, Sanjay, you're right. We have products like Sanjeev said for job seekers and it's only maybe one or 2% of job seekers who pay for those products but in absolute numbers they're actually higher than the number of recruiters who pay. It's just that the ARPU is much lower. Ticket size is much lower.
Yeah. Please carry on. I'm just.
You are through, Sanjay?
Yeah. I'm through.
Thanks. The next question is from Rishit Parikh, Nomura. Rishit go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, thanks for giving me the opportunity. Just two questions from my side. First, on the blue-collar market, Hitesh, could you provide just a little more color on what could be the opportunity size? What is the initial due diligence that you would have done that you know? How big can the potential market be, let's say, over the next five to 10 year perspective, right? Can it be bigger than where we are from, let's say, the enterprise jobs perspective? That's the first. Second, just from the investee companies or Jeevansathi including, right? What is the next, let's say, three to five year potential value add that you see? Is it going to be EdTech? Is it going to be Jeevansathi, which could potentially drive more value from where we are today? Thank you.
See, the blue-collar market, it's very hard to say how big that market will be five or 10 years from now. Clearly, in terms of volume, it's a much bigger segment than the white-collar market. If there are 50 million or 100 million white-collar workers, the number of blue-collar workers are maybe four or 5x or 10x of that number, right? In terms of volume, it's a very large market, but it's unclear how monetizable it is. It's unclear what ARPUs will be like. It's unclear what the unit economics for that space will be. Which is why we're taking baby steps, which is why we are test marketing in Delhi to see what kind of response we get.
Once we figure out the lay of the land, in the short term, we are not even looking at monetizing aggressively, because we just want to ensure that we build the right product and we get traction and we get users, and we are able to get people hirist through our system. Once we cross that hurdle, then we'll think about monetizing. Yes, of course, if you look at China, if you look at other countries, these markets are very large, right? For example, 58.com, which is the general classifieds portal in China, they do a lot more revenue than the number one job site in China, right? Most of the revenue is from real estate and jobs. That's 80%, 90% of their revenue. In India, unfortunately, that's not how it has played out till now, right?
Up till now, nobody's been able to monetize the blue-collar workers or recruiters who hire blue-collar workers. These things are the categories they develop when the economy reaches a certain size. In my view, it's going to be very hard to monetize over the next year or two. Once this space becomes a little more organized, once you see many of these people entering into formal employment, once you see millions of small enterprises, if they find it difficult to hire workers and they start using portals, then who knows? Hard to say. Volume-wise, it's much, much bigger. ARPU's very, very low, and in fact unit economics is a question mark right now.
Okay, fair enough. Then just on the next value driver, potentially, what are your thoughts on that one?
Sorry, could you repeat that question?
Just from a three to five-year perspective, right? What could be the potential value driver? Is it likely to be Jeevansathi, EdTech or where do you think your bets will be?
See, one, we continue to see a lot of opportunity to grow in Naukri, right? Of course, it's going to be a function of how fast the economy grows also. We are trying to add more and more verticals. Like I mentioned, we have a campus hiring play. We're trying to do something in recruitment automation. We are trying to see how we can use more machine learning to improve the Naukri platform experience. We are trying to see what we can do on the data products side. We believe that the recruitment opportunity itself is very large and we still have a long way to go on that front, number one. We see a huge opportunity in real estate in the medium term. See, real estate was in terrible shape for a long time because of various reasons, starting with demonetization, RERA, the NBFC crisis.
A bunch of things happened. Real estate was anyway very highly priced and so on. I think we are now again getting to a point where real estate is becoming an attractive proposition. Prices have corrected, interest rates are low, rental yields are going up. Every time I say this, something or the other happens in real estate, I don't want to make any forecasts here. If the real estate market picks up over the next five, 10 years, real estate is deeply cyclical, we've been through a very long cycle. If the market picks up, it could be a big opportunity for us. Of course, we'll have to execute really well because like I mentioned on the call earlier, the market is competitive. We are a leader, we are not a dominant player like we are in Naukri.
If we play our cards right, we may be able to unlock some value in that category. Matrimony is harder because again, it's a three-player market, it's hotly contested, but here we are not a leader. We are number three. We are, of course, cash-rich, and we continue to invest aggressively, and we continue to gain share. Here, unless and until there is some sort of action in consolidation, something of that sort, it will be hard for any player in this space to break away and create a lot of value. Education, we've been surprised by what we saw in education this year. Our education business has done well despite colleges being shut, despite schools being shut. We're going to start looking at it. We're also trying out a bunch of new things in education.
We focused more on study abroad, for example, over the last few months. We think it was good results. It's always been the fourth business inside Info Edge. It's showing Some signs of attraction. We're going to dive deeper and see what else we can do out there.
Fair enough. Thank you. Next question is from Manik Jagtiani. Manik, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, this is Lata Jagtiani. I'm his wife. Can you see me at all or what?
We can hear you.
We can hear you. Yeah.
Okay. You just need to hear me. Right. Okay. I'm a small shareholder of your company, and I also happen to know Sanjeev earlier when I wrote a book, and he did ask for a copy of mine, which I mailed to him. That's apart. I'm very happy.
Thank you. Yeah, I received that. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you so much. That's years back. I'm very gratifying to see the kind of work you're doing as far as employment is concerned. It's one of the major concerns in this country. I was really concerned about the kind of multiplier you had on Zomato in the month of December, and then subsequently, there's been a lot of talk about your IPO coming up. I just wanted to find out how far ahead this is, and is it something that we can expect sometime in September? If you could answer that. Thanks a lot.
Yeah. Chintan, you want to take that question?
Yeah. Zomato IPO, as you know that Zomato is an independent company with an independent board, and we have already kind of it's public that they do intend to do IPO and they are preparing for it. Right now there's nothing more than that. They are under preparation. When the Zomato board will take a final call, I think then only the IPO will proceed. So far that has not happened.
Okay, it's not even in the pipeline as of now?
No, they are definitely preparing for it.
Okay.
I can't really give you any indication as to the timing or any other details of that because the board has not yet taken a call.
Okay, because there was some kind of buzz about September, so I was just asking. Thanks a lot.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is from Utkarsh Solapurwala from Damos Capital. Utkarsh, go ahead and ask your question. Utkarsh, you are there? Maybe I'll take the next question while he comes to the call. The next question is from Vishal from Enam AMC. Vishal, go ahead and ask your question. Vishal, are you there?
Vishal, you're on mute.
Maybe I need to take next question. Okay. The next question is from Krishna Appala from Capitalmind. Krishna, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, sir. Am I audible?
Yeah, go ahead.
Hi. Thanks, everyone, for the opportunity. I just have three questions. First one is on 99acres. Sir, we have recently became profitable at the operating level. How long before we see profitable at the PAT level for 99acres? That is one thing. The second one is on Shiksha. Post-COVID, we have seen increase in online classes in the entire EdTech revolution. Are we looking to expand Shiksha universe or product offerings in this EdTech space? On the third one, we have an exceptional item of INR 703 crore on consolidated level. Can you please elaborate on that, what was it about? These are three questions from my side, sir.
Yeah, I'll take the first two. Maybe Chintan, you can take the third. The 99acres, when will it become profitable at the PAT level, et cetera? Very hard for me to say, will depend on two things. One, how fast are we able to grow top line once the market recovers, right? If the real estate market starts to do well and we are able to grow at 25%, 30%, 40% per annum, then of course it's only a matter of time before it becomes profitable. The other, of course, thing it will depend on is what the competitive intensity is like. If competition starts spending a lot of money, if they start discounting aggressively, if they start advertising like crazy, then we'll be forced to respond. Very hard for me to say how this will play out in the short term. Right.
Our endeavor, of course, we would like to be rational, as rational as possible, but the number one thing we have to defend is our traffic share and our market share. No matter what, we can't afford to let go of that. In Shiksha, you said EdTech is becoming a big part of the story. You're absolutely right. There are now lots of players in EdTech, lots of courses on offer. Shiksha was primarily targeted at sort of university and college as in physical sort of colleges and courses. We've been working on developing an offering to sort of help people figure out what options in EdTech are out there. Actually, that offering was built under the Naukri Learning sort of brand, and we've made some progress in that area.
Why it was built under the Naukri Learning sort of brand at that time was because, in the beginning, some of these courses were mostly for working professionals, while Shiksha targets students. Shiksha is more targeted at students in class 11 and 12 and students in college who want to do an MS. While the Naukri Learning offering more targets working professionals who may want to upskill themselves. That's something we started working on. Actually, you can go to Naukri and check it out. You can search for Naukri Learning on Google, and it'll take you there. Still, it's early days for that offering. We're just getting started.
Because we are cash-rich on the company level and on Shiksha, I think we can expand the universe, of course, keeping our financials and the profitability in mind. Anything you're looking in the inorganic space, sir, from the edtech offering?
We made a few investments in some education companies. We've invested in a company called NoPaperForms. They're basically an education software provider to universities and colleges. We've invested in a company called Univariety. They sell software to education. They have education offerings which target school students and schools. We've also invested in a company called Coding Ninjas, which is basically an edtech player. They teach people, think of them as an IIT online. These are three investments we made in the last couple of years. Let's see how these play out over time. You're absolutely right, there's a lot of opportunity in edtech. In fact, edtech is the one category which has benefited because of the pandemic, right? It's also very competitive, and there are large funded players in edtech, so we have to be careful about how we play it.
Right. Just last question on your content piece.
Yeah. There's this one large entry as an exceptional item on Consolidate. If you follow India at the time when you are consolidating financials with your associate companies, and if the associated companies have raised money and your stake is diluted, what you really do is that, on the one hand, there is a loss of stake that you have. On the other hand, if the dilution happens at a premium, then you are gaining in that process, right? That's the kind of a game which we are required to be account and required to be taken into our P&L account, and that's what the exceptional item in the consolidation. That's roughly around INR 700 crores. It's a large entry because Zomato raised about roughly around $400 million during the quarter.
Got it, sir. Got it. Thank you so much, sir. That answers my question. Thank you.
Thank you.
Next question is from Pooja Ahuja from Qontis Wealth. Pooja, go ahead and ask your question.
Hello, am I audible?
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
Hi. Pooja, you're on mute.
Am I audible now?
Yes.
Yeah, you are.
My question was regarding the matrimonial business. The leading player is sort of getting aggressive in the northern markets. They've launched new portals. How are we planning to tackle that? What's your thought process there?
The number one player in the country is actually the number three player in the north. You're absolutely right, they have become a little more aggressive in recent times, and they've launched a few new portals, but they already have some 250 portals. They've had these portals for a very long time. In this business, it's hard for a number three player in any market to sort of make serious inroads in a short span of time. They will have to invest considerable money if they want to make inroads in the North Indian market is our sense.
Got it.
We continue to be aggressive in the market and so is Shaadi.com. Both us and Shaadi.com continue to be aggressive in this market. Often what happens in matrimony is that it boils down to what is your share of voice when you're advertising. If the number one and number two players are very aggressive, even if you become slightly more aggressive, it doesn't really make a difference. You'll have to become very aggressive for you to gain share.
Got it. Thank you.
Next question is from Srinath V from Bellwether. Srinath, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi, Hitesh. Just want to find out some qualitative feedback on traffic growth in our key sites like Naukri and 99acres, say, year-over-year or versus January. Any sort of qualitative feedback you could share that would be great.
Yeah. In the Naukri business, we're seeing massive growth in traffic. Registrations are up 25%, were up 25% last quarter. Applications are up 20%, 25%. Number of unique applicants are up 20%. MAUs are up. On the job seeker side, all metrics are growing at a very healthy rate. App downloads are up maybe 30% over last year. We've seen this surge in traffic. On the job seeker side also actually got affected by COVID in the first quarter, when there was a lockdown. We saw for the job seekers also leaving the platform, but they've come back with a bang in the last two, three months. That's on the Naukri side. Similarly, on the 99acres side, we've seen a massive jump in inquiries, right? The number of responses on the platform, especially for resale, are going through the roof.
In some months we've seen even 50% growth. In some markets, in some of the smaller cities, we've seen 80%, 90% jump in inquiries in real estate. On the user side, we are comfortable. In Shiksha also, we've seen massive growth in traffic. We've gained a lot of share, in fact, over our competition in terms of traffic over the last few months. On the matrimony side also, we've been investing aggressively in marketing. Our user base, our number of active user base has been growing at over 20% year-on-year.
Thanks, Hitesh. That's nice to hear. Sanjeev, just wanted to understand, as in the quarter post the QIP, you had spoken about capital allocation in concentric circles within our core portfolios. That's where you would look at M&A activities and at best, in classified something like auto would be a complete outside opportunity. Just want to understand.
I think I had said auto would be a second concentric circle. It's not a closer concentric circle.
Yeah. Just want to find out how do we stand now? Is deal pipeline an issue, valuation's an issue or are we just going to wait it out and take a year or so and then?
Look, conversations take time to fructify and mature, especially when you're talking about larger acquisitions. I think it's a bit of a conversation and waiting game. We've not dropped the ball on that one, just want to assure you.
Sure. That basic strategy is in place.
That's right. We're committed to our strategy. Let's see where it goes.
Thank you. Thanks a lot.
The next question is from Hari from Hillfort Capital. Hari, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi. Thank you for taking time to answer my question. My understanding is that the package, the pricing, look at the pricing package of matrimony players in India, right? They seem to be around INR 4,000-INR 5,000 for three months. While the global players have, the ARPUs are far lower, I think around $10-$15 if I'm not mistaken. I was just wondering that, does this mean that the matrimony services in India, are they sort of pricing out the average user and is there a pricing intervention possible to drive conversions from free users to paid users?
INR 4,000-INR 5,000 is often the list price. I'll tell you, at least in the north and west where we operate, we are not a very big player in the south. What the consumer ends up paying is a lot less because most of these sort of services are heavily discounted. If Jeevansathi were to start generating INR 4,000, INR 5,000 per transaction, we would be double the size we are today. In the south, you're right. In the south, because Matrimony.com is a leading player, they have maybe 70%, 80% of that market. They are able to command a price premium. They're able to charge INR 4,000, INR 5,000 per user per ticket. Having said that, let me tell you, we just said the matrimony market is very different from the dating market. It's a very high involvement category. The entire family gets involved.
It's a very big decision. People don't mind paying a lot of money if they get the right service, right? The people who are active in this market are also older, so they can afford to pay. Most of our users are 27, 28, 30 years old. In the dating market, on the other hand, I don't know how it is overseas, but in India at least, the audience is much, much younger. There, people are not willing to pay that much money on a monthly basis. Also, you have to understand that dating users often stay in the market. They come back, they go, they come back again, and so on and so forth. ARPU's for some reason are lower. Because matrimony is a very high involvement category, entire family gets involved, it's a very big decision.
You end up spending INR 20 lakhs, INR 30 lakhs in a wedding. What is INR 20,000 to pay to get the right partner, right? It's not a big deal if you provide the right service. Wide Matrimony size, in fact, can charge much more than what they charge today. It's just that there's too much competition in the market, therefore they end up discounting.
That's super helpful. Thank you.
The next question is from Deep Shah from Ambit Capital. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Thank you for the follow-up opportunity. Vivek again. First question is on the billing for shiksha.com. We see that this has increased sharply in the last two quarters and has recovered, I think it's at lifetime high, right? What is going right for us in this business now and what are the interventions that we took reacting to COVID possibly? Second question is on the gross margins following the trend of several small customers of ours now doing online payments for recruitment real estate, I'm sure, where the sales effort needed to renew low-value transactions might have come down. Does that materially change your gross margin? Lastly, Sanjeev, if you could discuss about the performance of your older investees excluding Policybazaar and Zomato like Shop Kirana, Ustraa, Kuki and so on. Thank you.
Right. Shiksha. Listen, it's not as if we did anything because of COVID, it's just that we continue to invest aggressively in creating the right kind of content for our users. It's mostly a content business. We've upped our investment in content. We're getting more reviews on the platform. The platform has become more stable. We are sort of trying to see what we can use from Naukri also in terms of content to help people solve problems of students. We've launched some new tools on the platform to help students understand what they can do with their careers and so on. It's just that we are more focused on providing the right kind of content on our platform than we were earlier. We had taken our eye off the ball a little bit in Shiksha. We are back to sort of doing the basic stuff right.
We've also started making small inroads in study abroad counseling. Of course, it was actually hit by COVID this year because many of the countries were shut for a while. We expect that business to also do better going forward. It's basically just more focus on the customer, more focus on content, more focus on sort of solving the problems that Shiksha is supposed to solve. That seems to be yielding good returns for the time being. It could also be that because of the pandemic, because everything has become more digital, education institutions are more open to this idea of spending more money online. A lot of our customers have upgraded in a big way this year, because maybe they're more comfortable spending money online than they were earlier. That's on the Shiksha side. Sorry, what was the second question?
The second question was on gross margins.
Okay.
Hitesh, you made a comment earlier, so I wanted you to elaborate.
Yeah. It's material in terms of number of customers, but it's not very material in terms of revenue. Because some of the low-paying customers are the ones who buy products online and buy our services online. It helps us get new customers into our fold. It's good from a long-term perspective because it brings down our sort of business development costs. It's not material revenue, so it's unlikely to change our margins in the short term.
Right. Sanjeev, on the investees?
Yeah. Look, [inaudible] continues to do well. It is servicing its customers. It bounced back to much higher than pre-COVID levels. It continues to track well. It'll take time for it to sort of really scale up and be valuable. Right? Ustraa got a round from IIFL Ventures, and it's back up to 70%-80% of pre-COVID levels, but still some distance to go before it gets back to pre-COVID levels. Business which used to be called 4B Networks is doing rather well, and that is showing real promise. As is Gramophone. These companies are shaping up quite well, actually. None of our investments have really been hit by COVID to a point where they had an existential crisis. Now they all bounced back. All are bouncing back.
Okay. Thank you.
Next question is from Srinath V from Bellwether. Srinath, go ahead and ask your question.
Hi. Just want to understand the real estate sector landscape more from a long-term perspective. It has been a market where you have builders, brokers, and platforms like us. We have been enabling the customer to the builder or the customer to the broker, and it's been a structure that has kind of survived now the test of time, and it's done well. Of late, we are seeing these end-to-end players like Square Yards coming in, also building a technology platform, also having heavy call centers and acting as a broker and a kind of building up a tech platform. I just want to understand again, three, five years out, how do you see this landscape playing out, and do you feel we also at some point of time? We did have Allcheckdeals and so on.
Would we also need to morph into a person completely carrying the transaction and not just enabling a handshake? Just want a kind of long-term view on the same. Thank you.
See, the real estate market is large and complex, and we operate in a lot of verticals within real estate. We have a resale vertical, we have a new home vertical, we have a commercial vertical, we have a rental vertical. Square Yards is basically a big player and is a big brokerage in new homes, right? Now they're trying to sort of build a tech platform, et cetera. I don't know if they are still clients, but they were a client at one point in time. See, the truth, it'll depend on what shape or form the market takes. If the market starts getting concentrated around a few brokers, our model will get challenged. If there are five players like Square Yards, and between them, they have 70% of the market, it's an issue.
Today, for example, we work with a few thousand developers. We work with a few hundred channel partners. We work with 25,000 resale brokers. We work with owners also directly. If the real estate market goes in a direction where there are more and more sort of dealers in the market, there are more and more developers trying to do their own thing online, there are more and more channel partners, it's good for us because we are a marketplace. On the other hand, if the market starts to consolidate around a few dealers, right, or around a few channel partners or around a few developers, that's not good news for us. That's broadly the way we see it. Most parts of the world, consolidation in real estate is very, very hard.
I mean, in resale, it is almost impossible because the mom-and-pop shop business, there is I mean, today there is not even one real estate sort of chain, a brokerage chain for resale in this country, right? Not even in the city, forget about a national chain. New homes is easier. It's easier, but even that, beyond a point, it's very hard for somebody to get more than a 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% share of the market. You see different channel partners active in different parts of the country. You see there are nuances. It's hard to figure out, if you're not close to that market, which projects are going to sell, which projects are not going to sell. Can real estate tech brokerages exist online? Of course, they can. There's Redfin in the U.S. There's Zillow, but there's also Redfin, right? Marketplaces exist everywhere.
That's a tried and tested model. How big marketplaces will become in India will ultimately be a function of how big the real estate market actually becomes. If there is a lot of home ownership, then what you see is a lot of activity in terms of buying and selling of old homes as well. For a real estate platform of the type we are, to do really well, we want a resale market to develop in this country. New homes is not enough. New homes is where we'll get our revenue for the next five, seven years. In the long run, what builds a network effect is a resale platform. Where we already have an advantage, we are the largest, we have a big lead. We want that piece to become larger and larger over time.
There is no reason why different models cannot coexist in the market over time. Will we become a broker at any point in time? Unlikely in the near future, but if the market, like I said, moves in that direction, then we'll be forced to revisit our strategy.
Yeah. Look, may I add there? See, Knight Frank is morphing into a share of transaction models, and therefore facilitating and enabling and handling each transaction is a bit like asking that should Naukri morph into a headhunting firm, right? You can't be a marketplace and then one headhunting firm. There are about 8,000 recruitment firms that are clients of Naukri. There are, I don't know how many tens of thousands of brokers who are clients of Knight Frank. It's going to be hard. You can do a separate venture if you want, a separate vertical if you want, which does that. Knight Frank morphing into that is going to be hard.
Thanks. That was very useful. Thanks a lot.
Next question is from Utkarsh Solapurwala from Damos Capital. Utkarsh, you are there?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, go ahead and ask your question.
Sir, can you explain our thought process on the Naukri Learning, the vertical you have launched recently? Are there any plans to monetize it?
No, sir, we are already monetizing, but early days. What we are trying to do is see if we can build a marketplace of online courses, right? Now, for any marketplace to succeed, to start with, you have to have a lot of online courses available for people to be able to compare and choose and research them. Naukri Learning has been around for a while. It is just that the ed tech space was not so hot, and therefore we were not focusing on it. Given that we are seeing a lot more activity in ed tech, there are a lot of course providers now, right? There are many more online courses available than was the case earlier. We have started investing a little more in this platform. We've got a guy running the show. He's doing a very good job.
We made a lot of progress over the last few months. Still, we have a long way to go. It's nowhere close to where we would want it to be. Our business model is lead generation for the ed tech providers. We have a few large customers. We are doing a lot of business with them. We are monetizing, but it's still very tiny.
We'll be able to use the job seekers data that we have to suggest them the necessary updates that they should do to their resume?
Yes. That's the idea. That's why we actually built it under the Naukri umbrella, because we believe that most of these ed tech courses which are there on Naukri Learning will be used to up-skill job seekers. We can use our Naukri data to recommend to them or to help them understand which skills are in demand, what courses are in demand, and guide them to take the right decisions over time.
Thank you, sir.
Next question is from Manoj Bahety from Barclays PMS. Manoj, go ahead and ask your question. Manoj, you are there? I'll take next question in the meanwhile. Next question is from Dheeresh Pathak from GSAM. Dheeresh, go ahead and ask your question.
Yeah. First, can you give the cash balance?
Sorry, you want to know the cash balance, Dheeresh?
Yes, cash balance, please.
Chintan, what? INR 3,700 crores.
INR 3,500 crores.
Including the cash balance with our subsidiaries.
Yeah.
Okay. What I understood from some of the other questions that you answered, that when you raised the money during QIP, it was as if we had the impression, at least some of us had the impression that the transactions would close quite soon. Given the confidence that you were showing at that time.
No, actually, I thought I had clarified specifically that these things are lumpy, they are opportunistic. We have some ideas.
Yeah.
They will take time. Could be 12, 18 months, anything, is what I remember clearly saying. I don't know. I want to clarify that right now, look, these things take time.
Yeah, I know. That also, it came with those conditions like you're saying now, that these things take time. We came out with some sort of an impression that you will close in the coming quarters, maybe not immediately. Now as I understand correctly, you're still in that process, right? How would you characterize the timelines from the time at the QIP fundraise versus now? Has it moved forward? Is it still there? Is it backward? How would you characterize it versus that time period?
We've had some more conversations. We must have met at least another 10, 15 companies over the last few months, in different spaces, right? We've had a few conversations. There are some small deals which could happen at any point in time. The large ones, like Sanjeev said, are lumpy and opportunistic. It takes time to cook a deal. Often it's a case of two steps forward, one step backward. These things are not easy to execute. We are still hopeful, but I can't give you a clear timeline right now on this.
Sure. On 99acres, so without being a broker, what are the other things that you can do which can sort of, like you said, you've cleaned up the listings, so spamming is less. What are the other things that we can do to build more trust and provide consumers with some sort of standardized processes? Like developers can be more organized, but the broking community is quite fragmented and everybody has their own set of things they do, and there is less trust among the buyers. How can you, as a platform, create more standardization and more trust around that, without being a broker yourselves?
What you have to understand is that the real estate market in India is very opaque. Unlike the stock market where prices are available every day, you know what sort of stock is worth how much. I mean, in real estate, it's very hard to figure out what the prices are like, what the last transaction was like, what is the going rate, and so on and so forth, right? Now, 99acres is sitting on a ton of data. We have asking data, asking prices for the last more than 10 or 12 years now we've been in the market. We are increasingly getting better and we've invested in a company called Teal, for example. Now, Teal is doing a lot of real estate analytics. They're in the business of title checks and litigation checks and some of those things, right?
I think one sort of big area of work for us is how do we make the real estate market more transparent to both buyers and sellers. Sometimes owners are not able to sell because they ask for the moon. Even owners don't know what going prices are like. Just because they bought a property at a certain time for a certain price, they think they should get that price, or they should get 50% more, 100% more. What happens as a result, there's a big gap between what buyers and sellers are willing to sort of accept, and therefore transactions take a very long time. If we can make the market more transparent, if we can provide more information to people, if that information is credible, reliable, trustworthy, the velocity of transactions in real estate can improve, right?
If that starts to happen, then that will be a very big win for everybody. That's an area which we would want to work on for the next couple of years and see what we can do on that front. We've already got a team working on a few things. Let's see if we can make progress on that front. In addition to this, we can sort of work with our clients to help our prospective buyers identify which are the good dealers on our platform, which dealers are sort of good in a particular area or in a particular geography. Some of those things we can do to highlight the top dealers in a particular locality and a particular geography, because so many of them, right? There is a bunch of things we can do. We have a few ideas.
I can't discuss everything here, and we are working on some of them. We have, for example, we just launched reviews on 99acres. Now, there's a lot of information available on, again, opaqueness, right? Now we'll be getting reviews on societies, on localities. Sitting at your home, you can sort of figure out what people are saying about different societies. What is life like in, let's say, in Sector 150, Noida? What is life like in this particular block, in this particular area? A lot of these kind of things we'll do, and we are working on already, to sort of just make it a more engaging and a more attractive proposition for buyers, so that anybody who's looking for property, buying or selling property should say, "Listen, let me start at 99acres.
Okay. All right. Thank you, Hitesh. Thank you.
The next question is from Manoj from Barclays PMS. Manoj, go ahead and ask the question.
Yeah. Hi, thanks for the opportunity. Hitesh, my question was largely on a very broad level, at the segment level of probably the sectors because medtech and edtech, these are the two very sought-after segments a lot of people are working upon, including you. Beyond this, what is your sense that a couple of more sectors or areas you guys are looking at very closely, which may become very big over the next three to five years timeframe? Secondly, the second part of question was, do you have any sight of gap to the number of investments you are going to make in the next six to nine months? The reason I'm asking is about to check on the available management bandwidth to focus on the investment, which you guys keep on doing. I think currently you are at 2023 or 2024, I'm not sure.
Is there any cap which you are looking at for year by year, or you don't have that kind of numbers in mind?
You see, internally we are focused on just four categories: Recruitment, Real Estate, Jobs, and Matrimony for the time being. Right. Education for the time being. In the operating scheme, this is where we spend all our time. We are not looking at new categories to enter as an operating business. From an investment standpoint, yes, we continue to look at all kinds of opportunities, and we are more bottoms up in our approach. We look at what comes our way and then invest accordingly. As an operating business, we are going to just focus on these four categories for the next at least 18-24 months. Right. Maybe Sanjeev can talk about what he's seeing on the investment scene. To answer your other question, how many companies are we going to invest in going forward?
We already have a lot on our plate. What we've done over time is we've separated out financial investing from strategic investments. We have a separate team looking at our strategic investment portfolio, where we have five or six companies only. We have a separate team looking at our financial investment portfolio, a large part of which is now under the AIF. Right? We have separated the two. For acquisitions and strategic investments, it's the operating team which works with the strategic investment folks. For the financial investment piece, it's Sanjeev and the AIF team which work together. There, of course, we have 13, 17 companies. Maybe I'll let Sanjeev comment on that as well.
Yeah. Look, I think Hitesh summarized better how we organize this. The financial investment team is six, seven people. It probably will not go beyond 10. The fund is INR 100 million, so you're talking about maybe 15, 20, 25 companies over the next three years.
Sanjeev, you want to talk about what new opportunities.
Look, we don't do it top down. We do it bottom up. We don't sort of go in and say, "Hey, we've got to look at this sector now. We've got to do one company in this and one company in that." We don't give quotas and targets of that fashion. We simply say, "What's bubbling through?" Just meet everybody. We meet dozens of startups every week, maybe 100 or so every month, maybe more than that even. Beyond that, we study others without meeting them. Maybe do phone calls, right now it's all Zoom calls anyway. You go a few hundred to invest in one or two. Right? There's spaces we've liked, but if the company's not right, the founder's not right, or the valuation's not right, we don't do it. As simple as that.
There'll be spaces we'll miss, and we live with that. That's okay. We do it bottom up, like I said.
Thanks. I think that was quite helpful, Sanjeev and Hitesh, and all the best.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
That was the last question we had. Any other questions, please?
There are some online questions, Hitesh, just in case you want to take them.
Okay. Let me just take a look at them.
There's a question from Vishakha Jain.
Two questions. Two questions, basically.
Vishakha Jain actually has come onto the call. I may have not-
Okay, I'll take these questions. Impact on billing due to Covid for Naukri, mainly do you still enjoy 8 x premium pricing to your competitors? Highlight on other ventures like Happily Unmarried. We never charge 8 x of our competition. Covid has not impacted our leadership. In fact, if anything, our leadership has got strengthened during Covid because we've gained share over our competition. Hopefully that will translate into more pricing power also in times to come. Advertising on 99acres generates revenue from Karan Jariwala. We are mostly focused on real estate advertising. We don't want to digress into sort of other areas. We've done that in the past in Naukri. It never became a substantial part of our business, and you need to invest in multiple other things to make it happen.
For the near future, we are going to be focused mostly on real estate advertising on 99acres. Yeah.
On Happily Unmarried, like I said, it's back to what? 70%, 80% of pre-COVID. Most of our companies bounced back nicely. There's Zomato, Policybazaar, Shop Kirana, Gramophone. They're bouncing back nicely. Some have bounced back above pre-COVID levels. It's doing all right. Hitesh, there was a question on advertising in 99acres and other stuff.
I took that.
Yeah.
We are focused mostly on real estate ads. We're not looking to go outside real estate.
Understood.
Via revenue. We don't think it can be material from this outcome.
I guess we're done.
Vishakha has raised her hand again. Vishakha, you have any questions? Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Sorry to interrupt. As Hitesh just mentioned that it is not eight times, I don't remember, like in one of the earlier calls, I read that you enjoy premium to your competitor's price. Could you just highlight, what is the premium pricing you enjoy right now currently in Naukri, specifically?
To be honest, we've not been, because we believe we have a close to 80, 85% share of the market. We don't really face any competition when we go out and sell to our clients. Actually don't even know what competition pricing is like. I'm sorry. Right now.
Okay. Thank you.
These are the questions. You can go ahead now.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, everyone. On behalf of Info Edge India, we conclude this conference. Thank you. You may disconnect your lines now.
Thank you, everyone. Have a great evening.
Thank you.
Okay. Bye, guys.