While you're the friend, I will, the friend, actually give you expert inputs when you ask for it. Not, not a nosy friend who will actually, you know, barge in when you don't want them to. And then the more, you know, plain vanilla kind of cases on the right side, what you see on the first image is just a browser. But today, AI makes it very easy to convert that kind of image into a video of a model which can actually be even an Indian body type. And that can be done without any cataloging proof actually happening. So that, more and more, you will see. It's very hard to tell today if it's a real stock which is thought or it's just AI which created, which sticks together something, out of thin air.
That kind of thing, we are already seeing great examples of, customers finding it more engaging to shop like this. We'll deploy multiple forms of AI going forward. Bringing all of that into what we think the business can get to in the next few years, we remain confident and we remain ambitious that, you know, on the back of just a lot, a lot of collaboration in brands and our own growth in branded assessments, continued new customer acquisition, which we are seeing, you know, very healthy, very healthily, growing, even as we speak. The content engine that we have built in-house, we believe that we can get to a 3x-4x scale in the next four, five years, and that continues to be our ambition.
While we do this, you know, it's important to reiterate that Nykaa Fashion being sort of, you know, following in the footsteps of Nykaa will have women as the core customer. We still believe that over a longer term, 65%-70% of our customer base will still be women, the most premium, the most high quality female shoppers in the country. At the same time, since it's a fashion platform which caters to all kinds of audiences, the natural shape of the category will take us to around 20%-25% share coming from men.
and 5%-7% possibly more from kids as a category, because this is again, you know, linked to the growth in salience for women who are in that age where naturally when they extend into, into family and they want to buy for kids, we believe that kids can be a very interesting business for us over the next five years. What you see on the right side is again a reflection of the macroeconomic trends that we spoke about earlier. Branded business overall is anyway going to be more prominent within fashion. We, given our strategy of working very closely with brands, believe that for us, an even higher percentage of our business, which is even inching towards 70%, will come from branded business. That will continue to be the strategy going forward.
Before I go into profitability, I wanna spend just a minute on marketing efficiency. You know, marketing is a meaningful percentage of our spending, given that we wanna continue to invest in new customer acquisition. I wanna highlight that we are following a similar trajectory to what we saw in the beauty business. We are five years into the fashion business. The way to read this slide, apologies, it's a little bit heavy. The top half of the slide talks about as we increase new customer acquisition, as we have increased the scale of business, percentage marketing spends are expected to come down. What you will see on the top is the percentage of revenue coming from new customers going from 91%, obviously in the early years when the business was very new, practically all revenue came from new customers.
That today, as we speak, is around 40%-42%. At that 42%, we are at around 29% marketing spend. That number, when beauty was at a similar scale, beauty was in a similar sort of trajectory that they were also. What you see below that is the same numbers for beauty. When beauty in 2019 was at 46% revenue coming from new customers, they were at 13.5% marketing spend. That now has come down to 8.6% as the 42% has come down to 21%. We believe that over the next five years, as while we increase absolute new customer acquisition, the flywheel of repeat customers and repeat retention kicks in, the percentage of business which comes from new customers will come down.
As a result of which, automatically, just going by the same curve, we believe that the marketing spend for us will also come down to the 15%-20% range. We feel quite confident about this because this is the trajectory it is already following. With this, we believe that, you know, we still continue to believe that in FY 2026, we will reach EBITDA breakeven. From there, we will keep on with growth. We will reach mid to high single-digit EBITDA by FY 2028. In steady state, we still remain confident that we are on track to build a 10% or more EBITDA business. Just to put the same numbers in the form of a waterfall.
From where we are now, which is FY 2025, ended at a minus 8% EBITDA, we believe that this year, as well as in the years to come, by steady state, around 1,000 basis points in contribution margin, which includes marketing efficiency gains. Then just with more scale, better utilization of overhead expenses, all put together will take us to 10% plus EBITDA by steady state. That is, thank you.
Thank you very much, Abhijeet. That was a great break, walkthrough of a business that's balancing scale with thoughtful curation. I'm happy to announce that we can now take a quick tea break and we will resume at about 11:40. Please enjoy some refreshments outside. We are also eager for you to experience our installation from Wanderlust, our travel inspired bath and body brand, a superstore, which will give you a quick sneak peek into the next session. Nykaa Cosmetics, one of our loved House of Brands, from our portfolio that Adwaita already took you through today, as well as our Derma Cosmetics team. We'll see you back at 11:40. Thank you.
I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini. I come and I go. Prove you got the right to please me.
Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. Time is passing like a solar eclipse. It's your moment, baby. Don't let it slip. Coming closer, are you reading my lips? They say I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini. I come and I go. Prove you got the right to please me. Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. If you're good enough, you'll find a way. Maybe you could cause a girl to change. Do you think about it night and day? Maybe you could be the one to make me stay. Everything you play is sounding so sweet. But do you practice everything that you preach? I need something that'll make me believe. If you got it, baby, give it to me. They say I come and I go.
Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini.
Guys, I'm at the Nykaa Cosmetics shoot right now, and I found the shade for me. It's Blushing Bellini from the Superl ight Lip Cloud. It's the perfect pinky nude.
Oh, Rasha, that shade looks bomb on you.
It's Blushing Bellini, guys. Blushing Bellini.
Lips so glossy, feeling real bossy. Standing on Bennis, take him out, kamikaze.
All vibes.
Yeah, I'm on mood.
I'm on mood.
They see I ate it, ate it up like food.
Yeah, yeah.
She came.
She came.
She ate.
She ate.
She ain't leave no crumbs up on the plate.
My little sunshine.
[Foreign language]
I just wanna know what's my fashion [could be], and what are the new trends I should be buying?
I see, I see polka dot dresses.
Spot on.
I see, I see frilly top.
Yes, yes.
Denim on denim.
Denim on denim.
Denim on denim.
Wear what's next on Nykaa Fashion. Latest trends all in one place. Download now. Shop polka dot dresses, floral cords, printed kurtas, and more than INR 7 lakh trending styles only on Nykaa Fashion. Shop now.
I just walked in and there's just way, way, way too many people and beauty enthusiasts here.
It's been the most incredible experience. I'm really blessed to be able to travel all around the world, but there's nothing quite like the experience here at Nykaal and. It's our first ever Nykaal and. Oh my goodness, it is unbelievable. I've worked in many countries. I've never seen anything on this scale before.
We love Nykaal and this year. We are so excited to be here. It's fun. It's high energy. Just everything's going on at once.
It's definitely a beauty destination everyone should be aiming for. If you haven't visited yet, please be ready for 2025.
Done! Everyone loves an icon. Unlock your inner icon. Charlotte Tilbury, available only on Nykaa.
Welcome to Nykaa Luxe, India's number one beauty destination for cult classic beauty brands, undiscovered global brands, and Nykaa Luxe exclusives. Shop the best of luxury beauty only on Nykaa Luxe. Shop now.
Cute dress.
Oh, thanks.
Where's it from?
I got it from Nykaa. Nykaa Fashion.
INR 7 lakh + influencer-approved styles.
Stay stylish with Nykaa Fashion.
Beauty is this look today for me, and it always will be now if anyone asks me. Beauty has a whole new definition. It's so many layers deep. It comes from how you feel about yourself, how you project that, and how the people around you make you feel. I feel like when you meet the right person, you just know that this is it.
I wanna just grow old with him, get great with him.
A scent transports us back to moments. Moments where our memories linger forever. The smell of a fresh bouquet of flowers. Crisp air in the mountains. A reminder of love, joy, a night out with your girlfriends. The way he smells in the morning. The smell of memory. Wear these memories close to your heart.
Dead to me, RIP buried. [Foreign language]
Dead to me, RIP buried. [Foreign language]
Milk and honey. Baby, it's my land of milk and honey. My chosen one, my one. With you, the sun is shining 24/7. 'Cause when we're together, it feels like we're in heaven. If it would get dark, you'll be my million stars. I know I can lean on you. Oh, you catch me like a leaf falling from a tree. If I'll be a shooting star. I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini. I come and I go. Prove you got the right to please me. Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. Time is passing like a solar eclipse. It's your moment, baby, don't let it slip. Coming closer, are you reading my lips? They say I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me.
I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini. I come and I go. Prove you got the right to please me. Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. If you're good enough, you'll find a way. Maybe you could cause a girl to change. Do you think about it night and day? Maybe you could be the one to make me stay. Everything you say is sounding so sweet. But do you practice everything that you preach? I need something that'll make me believe. If you got it, baby, give it to me. They say I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini.
Guys, I'm at the Nykaa Cosmetics shoot right now, and I found the shade for me. It's Blush & Bellini from the Super Light Lip Cloud. It's the perfect pinky nude.
Oh, Rasha, that shade looks bomb on you.
It's Blush & Bellini, guys.
Blush & Bellini.
Lips so glossy, feeling real bossy. Standing on Bellini, take him out, kamikaze. Oh wow, yeah, I'm on mood. They see I ate it, ate it, ate it up like food. She came, she ate, and she ain't leave no crumbs up on the plate.
My little sunshine.
[Foreign language]
I just wanna know what's my fashion kundali, and what are the new trends I should be buying?
I see, I see polka dot dresses.
Spot on.
I see, I see frilly tops.
Yes, yes.
Denim on denim.
Denim on denim.
Denim on denim.
Denim on denim.
Where what's next on Nykaa Fashion? Latest trends all in one place. Download now. Shop polka dot dresses, floral cords, printed kurtas, and more than INR 7 lakh trending styles only on Nykaa Fashion. Shop now.
I just walked in, and there's just way, way too many people and beauty enthusiasts here.
It's been the most.
Tell me all the ways.
Hi, everyone. We're about to get started in another one to two minutes. Could you please take your seats? Thank you.
You got the right to please me. Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. Time is passing like a solar eclipse. It's your moment, baby, don't let it slip. Coming closer, are you reading my lips? They say I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini. I come and I go. Prove you got the right to please me. Everybody knows. Catch me or I go Houdini. If you're good enough, you'll find a way. Maybe you could cause a girl to change. Do you think about it night and day? Maybe you could be the one to make me stay. Everything you say is sounding so sweet.
Do you practice everything that you preach? I need something that'll make me believe. If you got it, baby, give it to me. They say I come and I go. Tell me all the ways you need me. I'm not here for long. Catch me or I go Houdini.
Guys, I'm at the Nykaa Cosmetics shoot right now.
For me, it's Blushing Bellini from the Superl ight Lip Cloud. It's the perfect pinky nude.
Oh, Rasha, that shade looks bomb on you.
It's Blushing Bellini, guys. Blushing Bellini.
Lips so glossy, feeling real bossy. Standing on Bennis, take him out, kamikaze. Oh wow, yeah, I'm on mood. They see I ate it, ate it, ate it up like food. She came, she ate, and she ain't leave no crumbs up on the plate. My little
Hi, everyone. We're about ready to get started. If you could take your seats, please. All right. I hope everybody managed to get a quick coffee and a refreshment and experience all of the installations that we were excited for you to see. Let's now dive into a business that truly exemplifies scale, reach, and a broader impact: our eB2B Superstore business. To take us through this high-potential engine, please welcome our CEO of eB2B business, Vishal Gupta. Over to you, Vishal.
Hey. Thanks, Vishani. Hi, everyone. Hi. Okay, guys. What is Superstore all about? You must have read this term many times: serving the underserved via technology. What is this underservice? I can show many charts, which I will. Do you really understand what does underservice mean? In India, there are about 2 million physical stores which sell beauty products. Every store has a few hundred beauty products. Let's say 500. 500 into 2 million. That means there are 1 billion occasions every single day in terms of consumption opportunity. Do you think that the current distribution system will do justice so that every single day all of these hundreds of SKUs are available in every store? What do you all think? You are right. I have got your answer. Which is rare, so there is no underservice.
We believe that through technology and data, we can bridge that underservice and create a big business for us. You have seen this chart before in so many months' presentation. The individual market will be about $35 billion, both driven by e-commerce and retail. The offline piece, while we grow at 2%-3%, still remains a very big opportunity. It is still a $15 billion big business. Right? We believe that 7%-8%, maybe 10% of that business can actually move to eB2B systems. We are not here replacing the distributor. We are actually complementing the distributor system to ensure that the underservice is met and we actually grow the market even faster. That is a $1 billion opportunity. A lot of people have asked me that big FMCG brands, they have very good distribution systems. How is this underservice, etc.?
If you really see, Kirana's store has limited space. Big brands have hundreds and thousands of SKUs, but few SKUs are core. That core SKU is about 70% of the turnover, where also there is some underservice. Because of the 2 million Kirana stores every day, even big brands, the big SKUs, there is underservice. More importantly, like Anchit was mentioning, the beauty landscape in India is evolving. Habits are changing. People are getting into regimes. Innovation, new products, new brands, all that is coming in. There the underservice is much higher, 40%. Overall, there is about 20% underservice, which actually becomes a $3 billion, right, addressable market, of which we are saying at least $1 billion will go to eB2B. You can see a lot of D2C brands. They need a very economically viable distribution system to actually reach their customers.
Because the offline consumer is also evolving, just like the online consumer. The retailer is also evolving. They are also more digitally savvy, have apps. We are very much in line with the trend to serve the underserved. Okay? Who are we? We are basically a distributor in a box. Any brand does not need to, especially the new D2C brands, do not need to work with hundreds of distributors. They work with us. We have very high scale and reach. We offer them everything end-to-end. They just talk to our category team, and we do for them full inventory planning, forecasting, warehousing. We have people on the ground. We have retailers. From our warehouse, we go to all the retail shops. We collect payment. We leverage data technology, and we also help in merchandising.
In one stop, we can do full stack service to all the D2C brands, and they do not need to worry about receivables from hundreds of distributors. Everything we do, one-stop shop. Right? We are actually very relevant to them. No wonder. See, if you have great product-market fit, your results will be good. This is what we have shown. You can see, right, that we have become 3x in two years, almost, I think, INR 1,000 crore GMV, driven a lot by transacting customers, 276,000, a high growth in volumes. A lot of the underservice is in what we call Bharat, like tier three, tier four, tier two towns. As you go down, there is more underservice. Our business is also bigger than 89%, and a lot from beauty centers, pharmacies, etc. Right? We are really doing well.
Now we have reach and scale, which is relevant to our brand partners. Right? Therefore, we have actually better strategic relationships with them. We can demand more from them. Everything then comes back in terms of our business model and profitability. You can see we're spread all over India. We are in 1,100 cities. There is still scope of growth. I'll show you that in spite of such scale. Yeah? We now have 16 warehouses all over India. Because you have to be close to the customer, then you save costs. You have 250,000 capacity. You can see all that. We have really established ourselves well. We have over 200 brand partners, a lot of the national brands and the regional brands.
The reason why national brands participate with us is because even with the best distribution system, I explain, because of that $1 billion opportunity every day, there is actually underservice even for the best distributed brand partners. Especially when they have non-core SKUs, premiumization, innovations. There is a lot of underservice everywhere. Yeah? We cater to big FMCG brands and also the D2C brands. Because our interface, just like B2C, is customer-facing, like the retailer-facing, right? They can engage with us on the app. Therefore, ad income, right? For brands to actually reach those customers, right, on the platform becomes important. You can see that we are able to monetize that and help discovery of brands. You see our ad income is growing so far, which also contributes in a positive profitability. Yeah?
Coming to data and tech, because that is really serving the underserved by technology, right? How does data help us? Firstly, data helps us in the retailer discovering new brands. Yeah? We are able to ensure retailers, when they work with us, their earning potential goes up. I'll explain how. We get more from our customers in terms of retention. We also help our big brand partners with data and technology because we are able to leverage that data for very targeted customer interventions to meet their distribution objectives. It's all about partnership, what we deliver to our brand partners. Yeah? One by one, how do we ensure discovery of new brands? There are a lot of features on our apps. Like we do curations, like summer ready, then there's a lot of sunscreen, etc., winter ready, monsoon ready. There are local festivals.
We can do a lot of consumption-based curations. We have new launch, new launch section. We also have a very good AI engine data which leverages our data and which can give customized recommendations, right, depending on the retailer, depending on the PIN code of the retailer. That's the level of how we leverage data, right? We can actually keep nudging the customer to ensure that he buys the brand that will give him sales, yeah, and earning potential of the retailer. There are a lot of trade schemes, etc. What we ensure is that even the small retailers get full access to the trade schemes that a big retailer can typically get, right, because we are democratizing that. You can see there's lots of stuff like Aashka offers. I think there's a very unique feature that we have, which is best price.
If the retailer buys XYZ, and they buy more, they get more price, or they buy XYZ, so we can give them best price. They know. There is also the nudge that comes in. You have bought 10 pieces, but if you buy 12, you'll get extra. We can really leverage data and technology to increase their earning potential. Again, for our customer retention, we have loyalty wallets which we use. We drive loyalty schemes, buy QPS, quantity purchase scheme. You buy X in two months. I think because the retailer is directly connected to us via app, which is facing him, he can actually discover and earn more. There's full transparency. Yeah? Like I said, we leverage data for our brand partners so we can show them where they sell. Actually, I get data at an hourly basis.
I know today which brand is selling where, how many customers, what is the average order value per bill. I mean, are we acquiring new customers? Are we doing repeat buyers? Everything. That is the power of the data and technology pipelining that we have built. Brands find it very useful. For brand partners, we become very strategic because they get data from online, from e-com, and they get data from us. For the brand, they get a very holistic picture of their brand all over India, whether online or offline. We have a lot of synergies with dot-com. For brand partners, actually, we become really strategic between online and offline. Yeah? This is how we leverage data for our brand partners. Like we can write QPS for a certain brand.
We give specific offers, right, depending on what is the type of the retailer, etc., if the brand wants to target. Like people who are buying sunscreen, but have never bought my sunscreen. Then we can cohort them with an offer for the brand which is not present there. Yeah? We do lots of CRM. All the retailers are connected through us by CRM as well. This is, we spoke about Dot & Key. Advaita spoke about Dot & Key, amazing brand. As one partner, right, they do not need to go to hundreds of distributors. As one partner, you can see we are able to deliver actually in less than a year's time. We are able to deliver them phenomenal growth and coverage all over India. The job of the brand is to build demand.
Our job is to service that demand to hundreds and thousands of retailers and very easy for the brand to partner with without building a very heavy overhead structure. We have a very strategic role to play. That was D2C brand. Even for us, this is one of the top few FMCG brands. Even for them, you can see because we can leverage data. I spoke about core non-core. Typically, a brand can do reasonably good justice to the core SKUs, but not to their non-core premiumization kind of innovation SKUs. You can see that for this brand partner, 70% of the business we are giving them is SKUs which they find typically difficult to distribute. We have a very complementary role. Yeah?
No wonder, even from our retailer perspective, who's our customer, you can see that we have increased our spend by 20%. Every year, they buy more from us, which shows our product-market fit. Yeah? For some of our big brand partners in eB2B, they have a very high market share. We think average we'll have about 25% market share in the eB2B. You should look at this. Even on the right one, you can see that for the brand, only 30% sale is from the non-core SKUs. In our platform, it's 60% because our job is to play a complementary role and achieve their distribution objective. Yeah? Hope you got a sense of what is the size of the opportunity and how we are leveraging scale and data and technology to become a really strategic partner for our brand partners.
We all know it's a scale business, right? We have what we believe is that at 4x of our current size, we will actually be breakeven and get into profitability. We have seen that in the last two years itself, we have already tripled our business, right? We are on that path, and we are only covering, like I said, 370,000 outlets. There are 2 million outlets out there. We don't need to go to all, and we probably can never go to all 2 million. We can definitely increase our scale by 2.5x-3x in terms of reach. A lot of growth will come from that. We have already seen that at price our scale today versus two years ago, our EBITDA is now half in terms of unit economics.
If we increase by 4x, we will be breaking even. We have built confidence that scale actually delivers EBITDA. Like I said, there is so much space yet to geographically expand. From 12,000 PIN codes, we can go to 19,000, from 1,100 cities to 3,000 cities plus. Our business will shift more and more to tier two, tier three, tier four, because that is where the underservice is even more, yeah? Also, what we are also, and further growth will come as we complete our category portfolio. A lot of brands are there with us, and many more are coming. We are also developing categories like Anchit talked about, beauty, wellness. A lot of the Indian consumer is evolving. New categories are getting developed because consumption for capital is increasing, right? That will also then flow through in the offline channel.
You can see a lot of growth will come from beauty and health and wellness. Even from brand perspective, a lot of our growth will come from the newest B2C brands and our own brands. Yeah? A lot of scope of growth. Very quickly, path to profitability, we have already improved our gross profit per order. We will improve more as we scale. Our fulfillment cost will come down. Warehouse cost will come down. S&D cost will come down. All the levers are there, which is basically scale gives you a strategic advantage. You leverage that in both margins and cost. Yeah? Productivity keeps going up. Yeah? Last slide.
No wonder this slide makes all of us happy that INR 3.5 lakh retailers, we are playing some role in improving their livelihoods because they get access to new brands, their business goes up, they can manage their working capital better, their earnings go more. Actually, we are playing a small, but I hope important and growing role in improving the livelihoods of our Kirana friends. Yeah? That's it for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Vishal. It's energizing to see how tech meets distribution in such a scalable and impactful way. Speaking of tech, behind every seamless app experience, every personalized recommendation, and every product you choose is a robust technological backbone. Let's now hear more about our tech philosophy, innovations, and priorities. Please join me in welcoming our CTO, Rajesh Uppalapati.
Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for this opportunity.
You guys can hear me fine, right? It's a privilege to represent Nykaa and the technology firm. For the title of the presentation, yes, we called it to infinity and beyond. This title, we believe, actually summarizes our ambition to go from where we are today, which is a digital native company, to a fully AI native company. Over the next 20 minutes, I'm here to talk not just about the ambition, but how we are already making very concrete progress, how we made some good progress in FY 2025 and even in Q1, and more importantly, how we are going to end the year on a very, very strong note. Before we get started, it's important to understand what do we mean by a fully AI native company. What are those three or four defining characteristics that tell us that we have truly arrived when we reach there?
In my opinion, it boils down to three things. The first thing, the most fundamental thing is that the experiences that we are going to build when we are fully AI native will be a marked difference. There will be a lot more conversational. There will be very, very context-driven, and there will be very proactive. It is unmistakable. The second thing that we see is it is not just a linear improvement in productivity. We will start seeing a step function improvement in productivity. Overall, decision-making moves from dashboards to post-facto to more real-time and more autonomous decision-making. All of this happens right now. You can notice these shifts happening. In fact, I am already noticing a very, very quiet shift. The other day, we had a hackathon, and then one of the team members, they were demoing a front-end application that they have built.
What struck to me was this engineer who built this application for the hackathon in a matter of hours told me that he has never written a front-end code in his life. That is the magic and the quiet difference that you can see happening. Okay. I mean, when you're embarking on a journey like this, it's important to ground yourselves in certain tenets or principles. We have identified three core themes that we want to latch our journey on and keep us honest. The first one is organizational agility. One of the things we want to keep in mind is the ability to change at a rate that is faster than the environment itself that is changing. The second thing is to place AI at the core of every experience. What do we mean by that, right? I really like this simple anecdote.
It's moving from literally plus AI to AI plus. We'll talk more about it. I already talked about the massive unlock in productivity that needs to happen. Think of it as we want to use AI to build AI, which means every team starts using Copilot so that there is a massive improvement in productivity. We already talked about the decision tools and stuff like that. If you see Nykaa's journey over the last 12 to 13 years, you will notice that there have been fundamental technology seismic shifts. We started our journey way back, and one of the first big shifts that we did was to move on to cloud. This gave us an ability to scale elastically for peak holiday seasons. All of this happened while we were running a growing business, and we had to do it very carefully.
The second major shift, if I would say, is to control our destiny by in-housing a lot of technology and talent. We went from deprecating a very legacy third-party e-commerce platform to building our own microservices architecture. In fact, a major, major part of our software in the initial days, the warehouse management systems were third-party, and we had to in-house it. One of the most crucial surgeries we had to do without disrupting the existing business. Those calls helped us control our destiny, and we started doing more and more innovations. Similarly, when I talk about our entire personalization journey, Anchit briefly talked about it, it required us to do investments in data lakes and build some foundational AI models and stuff like that. We embraced that journey as well.
Most recently, all the innovations we did on our technology stack, we started creating a white-label.com merchant, and using that, we started enabling new businesses. Abhijeet mentioned about SIPLOCKA.IN, the Nykaa launch. All of them started happening on our core enterprise tech stack, giving us a lot of tech leverage. The point I'm trying to make is, I think past behavior is a good indication of how we can play out in the future, and we believe that we have the organizational muscles to adapt to this fast-changing environment. We will talk about how do we make AI the core of every customer experience. Essentially, it boils down to three things, right? We bring all of this to life through some of the work we have already done and what we are building. There are some exciting demos that we have lined up for you.
Fundamentally, it requires us to go back and humbly revisit every customer journey and see how we can place AI at the heart of it. Whether it is in terms of personalized customer experiences or our customer service or even how we plan our inventory allocation, all of these need to be visited with the AI plus mindset. The second and the most important point I want to make here is it is not AI that sets us apart. Don't get me wrong, the technology is amazing. Some of the things that we couldn't even imagine a few years back is becoming the reality. To me, the true differentiation is what really fuels that AI. It's all the first-party data sets, the behavioral and the customer signals that we have on the platform that the customers have shared with us with their concerns.
How well we use all of this to make the models intelligent. The final thing is, as customers start interacting with these AI experiences based on our first-party data, we are also getting constant feedback from them that will make the AI models better and better. All of this requires us to invest in a certain AI and data platform. We need to probably invest more and more in foundational models, make our data lake even more sophisticated, build AI agents. To me, all of this becomes like three things we need to do to be truly at the core of every experience. Let me start by now sharing some real things that we have done in FY 2025 and we are building now. This first one is my favorite. It is one of our big wins in FY 2025. It is called Semantic Search.
What you can see here is the conventional search is there on the left side of the screen, and the right two screens represent Semantic Search. I'll talk briefly about what it is and what it's doing. It has been a good win for us. We have seen a significant improvement in the orders for search once we moved to Semantic Search. In a nutshell, conventional search relies on what we call as lexical mapping, which means if a customer searches for something, those phrases or keywords exist in the catalog, those products start showing up. Semantic takes it completely a notch above where it starts understanding the intent of the customers. Let us take the same query here. If you can read, there's lip balm for dark lips. On the left side, conventional search was returning for the same query.
I remember this was, I know the pre and the post-quality is roughly returning around 30 results. Semantic Search returns about 130 results for the same query. Of course, it is not the volume that matters, but if you see carefully, you will see the results are very, very powerful. You start seeing ingredients in the results that highlight ingredients like kojic acid, vitamin C, niacinamide, and stuff like that. It is amazing, right? Because neither did the customer specify any of this, nor did the original catalog have these descriptions. How did this magic happen? The first thing that happened and we did was we used AI technology to read the catalog images. Within those images, there were these labels that talked about the ingredients. We extracted those from those images.
We encoded it, and we put it behind the products in a digitally encoded format. The second magic is the LLM magic or the GenAI magic. When customers use a word like lip balm for dark lips, what LLM does is it browses this entire universe of the web, all the catalogs, all the blogs, all the routines written, and it starts associating that people tend to use dark lips with pigmented lips. Typically, some of the blogs and articles talk about treating it with these particular ingredients that we talked about, right? It starts mapping a lot more meta information behind the same queries. The same thing is digitally encoded. Now we have a very, very interesting matching at our hands, right? The same seamless query has a bunch of meta information, and our catalog has meta information.
Semantic Search starts matching these and bubbling up products which were not even shown before. That has tended to be very, very relevant for the customer. I think I really like this quote, "The best technology is the one that is totally invisible." I feel Semantic Search is one such thing. With that, we will now go to something we are currently building as we speak. My team is working hard. I'll first play the demo, pay close attention to what is happening, and then I'll talk briefly about it. This is what we call conversational search. As you can see, a bunch of things have happened in the demo. That is pretty much the end of it. The first and the foremost thing is the customer started with a query, right? Which serum should I use in the morning?
We responded by integrating content with the search results. It is no longer just a product search. That has been very organically woven into the search experience. These are small feedbacks. The customer reads about the content. We show a bunch of recommendations. The important thing to keep in mind about the recommendations is these are personalized based on what we know about the customer, whether they have a particular skin condition or a certain affluence. After the recommendations, the customer asks for help to choose the right product. This is where it gets interesting, right? This is the power of the first-party data set. Here, what we go and do is we have a bunch of rich customer reviews over the years, but we did not just go and show all of those reviews.
We looked at people who are similar to the customer using a machine learning technique called collaborative filtering. Similar customers who are the same affluence, who like the same brands and stuff like that, we have pulled only those customers. We have used machine learning to extract the sentiment out of those reviews, and we have shown it. Finally, we understand the persona of the customer. Maybe they are a deal seeker. We dynamically generate a brand-funded coupon. That really is the magic where the customer makes the purchase. To seal it, we show a nice routine. I think Anchit talked already about CSMS routines. It tells them how to apply this in product. I think the interesting and the important takeaway I want all of you to take from this is while the technology is cool, we are able to do conversational search.
I think the real power comes from the first-party data sets and our knowledge of the customer and their behavior. With that, let's move to the next example. Abhijeet in his fashion presentation, he briefly talked about Nykaa MUSE. It's a very self-explanatory demo. Let me just play it for you, and then I'll just voice over it in the end. Okay. The demo was pretty clear, I hope. Once again, I want to reiterate the same point. I think the virtual try-on technology is super amazing. There's no doubt about it, and it opens up an entire horizon of imagination. To me, the true differentiation comes from our understanding of [Sophie]. Like Abhijeet mentioned, MUSE is positioned as a confident, personal styling buddy. There are two things that you can notice, right?
Like in the entire conversation, when MUSE was throwing those recommendations, [Sophie] was gently giving feedback saying, "Can you tone it down?" That is the feedback that the model uses to become progressively more and more better. That is the true differentiation. The other convenience I want to talk about is these agents and here Muse, it has memory in it. It will remember all these conversations, all the inputs that [Sophie] gave, so that next time in the next new session, [Sophie] does not have to start from scratch. Okay. With that, we will move to the third one. So far, we have been talking about a lot of things we are doing for the end consumer. We always believe that partners are also our customers, and we need to cater to them. This is something for our brand partners. It is called Nykaa Pulse.
Why don't I play the demo, and then I'll voice over it? Okay. When I look back at how fast the world has changed, some of this technology was unimaginable almost seven to eight months back. At the core of it, what is happening is natural language input is fast. It is converted into very, very sophisticated SQL that would require analytics and BI engineers to otherwise do it. Of course, all the charting and graphing that comes along with it. What we really like about this is that we are empowering our partners to succeed on the platform. The same insights that would otherwise take our BI team like weeks to generate decks and then share it with the brand partners now is democratized. This is something, by the way, it's in beta.
As we speak, our internal analytics team is already using this tool, and it's saving a ton of their time. When we make sure that everything is working fine, we'll start externalizing it. The thing that I like about this whole demo is it's not just an insights tool, right? It's also giving diagnostics on how if the particular L3 is not doing well, what is the root cause? It gives a corrective action as well. In this case, for example, it was showing how to invest in ads, PLA ads to increase the bids for this particular subcategory. All of this creates a nice virtual cycle for us. Brands keep growing on the platform. As they keep growing, more and more brands will come on the platform. With that, more consumers will come. Again, like you know, that will create more brand surfaces.
It's a nice virtual cycle. Now we'll move to the third and the last slide. It's all about productivity. Obviously, we talked about using AI to build AI, how we want every team, every department to be using AI copilots and doing their work a lot more smarter, a lot faster. It's not siloed also to any one department. The decision-making is also real-time. While these are more concrete things, there are certain intangibles that we want to focus on, largely around culture to make such a transition. There are three things that we are very consciously doing. Number one, we are investing in aligning mental models. It's very important in this AI world to lose the human aspect. It could very easily come across as human versus AI. We want to position it as human plus AI.
Our goal is to make sure that we use AI to remove drudgery in the work and empower people to do more higher-order tasks. That is super important. The second thing that I want to focus on is evangelization and training. I have personally seen it. Like you know, initially, we had all the tools, but we were struggling to see the right kind of productivity with developers. We had to invest a lot in training, conducting hackathons, and creating the right spirit around it. That is also super important. Finally, not leave it to good intentions. Falguni Ma'am is here. Like you know, there was one particular department where we wanted to take a productivity goal. The cost savings were not going to be huge. Falguni Ma'am said, "Rajesh, this has to be a culture.
We have to be AI first. We are investing in the right capability. That culture and mindset is very important. With that, we look at, like, you know, a few exciting things. The most important thing is how software development itself is getting a lot more quicker and faster with AI copilots. What you'll see here is a very real example. Anchit talked about skin analyzers, where you can upload a selfie and then, like, you know, the base of the selfie, AI will analyze the skin. This is the video recording of the code that is getting generated for the AI skin analyzer. None of this is made up. This is a real example. The best part about a technology like this is you are no longer siloed or bottlenecked by a small front-end engineering team. Everyone can build front-end, back-end applications.
That unlocks a lot of productivity. I think this graph shows here how the percentage of code that is AI-generated is steadily increasing. We are inching close to the industry benchmark. More importantly, we have a very, very audacious target to reach 50% of the code being generated by AI by December. We are bullish about it. We are on the right track. Before we go into the next use case, I wanted to talk about our journey with regard to customer service last year because we made some good progress. There is a certain nuance. We call it emulation versus assistance. Last year was largely about assistance. There are CS agents who are answering queries. We have built technology to assist them so that they can do their work faster.
Three things that we did that caused a 20% improvement in their productivity. We used AI to smartly and intelligently route the right query to the right CS agent who is well-versed at answering it. We also started using AI to summarize the popular resolutions and provide them handy to the agent whoever is resolving it. We also created like a GPT kind of tool for them to quickly refer to documentation. All of this was assistance. It resulted in a 20% productivity. This year, I'm super excited to say that we are taking it a notch above. We are moving from assistance to emulation. We are having an AI agent completely mimic and speak like a customer service agent and resolve the query. The first use case is already in beta. We have an interesting scenario where the audio will come from there.
I hope it's in sync. I'll start playing the video here. Please walk through, please look at the demo. Then we'll talk about it. You can play the audio.
Hi, this is Nena from Nykaa Support. How can I help you today?
Hi, I'm calling to check the status of my order. It's a gift for my wife and should arrive before Monday for sure.
I can check that for you. I can see many active orders against your mobile number. Is there a specific order you are inquiring about or perhaps some order against a different number?
[Foreign language] YJK [Foreign language]
[Foreign language] Luck For Lipstick [Foreign language] Dot & Key [Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language] 48 [Foreign language]
No, I am still worried. It might get late. Do one thing, you cancel the order and get me full refund.
I can certainly cancel this order on your behalf, but would you like me to raise a request to our team to ensure delivery before Sunday?
Okay, you know what, sure. Just get me my order in time, please.
Don't worry, our team is working hard to ensure a timely delivery. Anything I can help you with?
No, thank you.
Okay, thank you for calling Nykaa Customer Care. Have a good day.
Y eah, so one of the things that we are very nervous about was with this technology, like you know, understanding English context, switching between English to Hindi, Hindi to English. Then the latency itself, if there is a lag in the agent's response, it is totally kill the customer satisfaction. We are doing internal beta and soon, we will put it out in front of our customers. But all the foundation blocks are in place, so we believe, like you know, with this, we can start very quickly launching more and more use cases. The thing to keep in mind here is that this is a complete AI agent, and I like the way it has done a dive and save. The customer was initially paranoid and wanted to cancel the order. The agent said that it can place a request to the logistics provider, asking for a priority delivery. It actually went ahead and filed that request ticket with the courier partner and ensured that there was no cancellation in this case. We have a very ambitious target and we are very confident, we will meet it. We want to automate 70% of our CS load by the end of the financial year. With that, we will move to the last demo for today. Again, very similar to CS, like you know, we have done a bunch of AI stuff in the warehouse to improve our productivity last year by around 23%. We have used AI to figure out, like you know, how to smartly optimize the path that the warehouse ops travels in the warehouse to prioritize the order so that the order with the right, the immediate cut off are picked first and stuff like that. Here, we are trying to pilot. We are going to work with vendors, robots in our warehouse to create a semi-automated warehouse. I will play this video and then I will quickly talk about the scope of this automation. These robots, they can go vertically high. They can both store the inventory as well as pick them back. There are the smart conveyors, which route these containers throughout the warehouse floor. This is what we call as the sortation process. We do not pick for individual orders for efficiency. We pick a batch. This is the process where we are sorting the batch into individual customer orders. It used a special technology, sort to light, to do it in a super efficient manner. This is a laser scan technology. It is scanning the packages and identifying the dimensions and also all the manifestation needed to depart these packages on the courier. It is happening automatically. The last leg was how the packages are automatically sorted based on which carrier partner they need to go to. Obviously, what we see here is a simulation. It is not even a pilot. Based on the simulation, we believe that this can give us significant savings in terms of warehouse space utilization. Even productivity of manpower towards the tune of 40%. Obviously, when we build the pilot, we will know more. But yeah, with that, we are coming to a close to the presentation. I wanted to leave you guys with three powerful thoughts. I think when we started this presentation, we talk about our ambition. I wanted to very very strongly underscore that it is not a distant dream that we are talking about. All of this is very tangible. The ships have already started happening. We are going to see a lot more in the coming few months. The second thing I wanted to highlight is, we have taken strong and bold. We are literally swinging to the fences. Whether it is in terms of the number of experiments to change or fundamentally all the customer experience or the productivity. You can see like you know, there is a 70% CS productivity. All by department wise, we have taken a 30% productivity goal. All these are super stretch goals, but we are confident that we will meet them. Finally, we believe that with this strong commitment to steward to a fully native AI, we believe that not only will we fundamentally change the e-commerce experience, but we will also unlock a lot of shareholder value over the years to come. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rajesh. From AI to our infrastructure, it is pretty clear that CX is not just a function at Nykaa. It is a force multiplier that basically enables us to be leaner, faster, quicker and more efficient. Speaking of efficiency, let us start numbers. To walk us through Nykaa financial performance, please join me in welcoming our CFO Ganesh to the set.
A very good afternoon everyone. We have had a proper fact session so far with riveting business presentations and also a smooth piece into to what is happening in the world of tech, which is moving as Rajesh said and in terms of leaps and bounds. What does it all translate in terms of financial performance?
Let's get to that. Let's start with FY 2025. Has been another excellent year as we can see. We will talk about both top lines, margins as well as what does it mean in terms of balance sheet. In terms of revenue, it was again a robust growth of 24% for the year at one life level. Margins also expanded handsomely with EBITDA expansion of 64 basis points, going up to INR 474 crore and PAT coming in at INR 72 crore, which is a growth of 81%. Now, in terms of balance sheet, what this has done is that as we can see, we are a strong balance sheet today with net worth close to INR 1,350 crore. Working capital has also been another area of focus and we will talk about it in greater detail as we go along. As we can see, there has been a good amount of optimization over there with working capital base improving by 10 days. All of these have resulted in higher ROC, with ROC now moving, it's a double digit at one life level, coming in at 11 point. Just getting back and looking at how are each of these parameters, whether it is top line, whether it is margin or whether it is in terms of balance sheet. How was it turn out over the last few years for Nykaa?
As we can see, this performance has not been a one-off. It's actually been a consistent performance year after year. Top line, as we can see, five-year CAGR came in at 35%. EBITDA grew even faster at 41%. That's what you see, the smart update in terms of balance sheet metrics. Specifically on ROC, which was less than 5% five years back, it is now into double digits, coming in at 11 percentage points. You know, spend a bit of time doing a bit of a deep dive, looking at each of these. That is the top line, the margins as well as in terms of balance sheet. Spending a bit of time in terms of our business verticals. We started off as a color cosmetics company. Today, we are much bigger than that. We are near businesses in the pharma, fashion as well as super space, both of which we had presentations earlier in the day. Diversification of our investment has actually also accelerated growth opportunities for us. When we look at the business verticals, we can see that GT continues to grow strongly with a five-year CAGR of 36% on GMB. Fashion, while obviously on a lower base because it's a new business, has continued to grow quite strong and five-year CAGR coming in at 83%. This growth has been good across various channels, whether it is the online platform, whether it's physical retail stores, the GT as well as third-party channels. Across both, the growth has been strong. As Advaita covered earlier in the day, we have also along the way built a strong portfolio of owned brands. As Advaita rightly mentioned, it's not private label, it's actually owned brands that we are building. It has been scaling up quite well and has crossed INR 2,150 crore now at 8:01. Now, this is how the top line has moved over the years. Let us look at how the margins have moved. Here again, across the verticals, the margins are expanded. Beauty, which was 6.5% five years back, has moved up significantly. Also, fashion, where obviously the new businesses start off with a far higher, far higher negative EBITDA, which was close to 30% four years back. Now, it has come to 8.3%. As we saw in Abhijeet's presentation, we are well on close to getting to EBITDA base even five. What this actually brings about is the culture of deep focus on unit economics. Therefore, even in a year where industry scenario in fashion, for example, there were headwinds and the unit economics has continued to improve. I think the relentless focus on unit economics is what has contributed to margin expansion year after year after year. We will dive a little deeper in terms of the operational effectiveness, which has brought about the margin expansion. We have spoken in the past about our regionalization strategy and tax bringing down our fulfillment cost. In the process, as you can see, the order to delivery timelines have also been consistently improving for beauty as well as fashion. We also saw earlier in the day about Nykaa. All of this augurs very well in terms of not just optimization of cost, but in terms of better customer experience. Marketing spends, while these have remained fairly steady and some amount of update seen in the last year. It's a reflection of our focus on building and answering the new customer acquisition remain the priority. We also saw the size of the opportunity in all the business presentations. Overheads, needless to mention, have come improved. The leverage benefits start showing up. That's what, whether it's in terms of BMA or in terms of employee cost, we are seeing those benefits. Now, let's spend some time on the balance sheet. FY 2022, FY 2023 were peak years in terms of our CapEx. Coming out of COVID, we had significant investment going into office space because we had given up a lot of office space during COVID time. We have taken all of that back and we had significant increase in warehousing space. FY 2023, it was more than 70% increase in capacity. Versus that, over the last couple of years, we have seen that this is now moderating in terms of coming to less than 2% of revenue in terms of total CapEx. While we continue to focus on and invest behind expanding our physical retail stores, as well as investing behind second automation. All of this has actually contributed to an increasing strength as well as the balance sheet goes. We saw that ROC has moved to double digits, coming at 11.3%. Working capital is something that has been, that has been a significant amount of efficiency, which has come through over time. Better CapEx efficiency has also meant that fixed asset turns are increased. All in all, it's been a good performance both on the P&L front as well as on balance sheet. That brings us to the question on how sharp are we when it comes to capital allocation. What you can see over here is that the core businesses have continued to grow handsomely and profitably. In terms of investment, whether it's in for new customer acquisition, whether it's in terms of answering faster order to delivery, in terms of investment on tech and automation, all of that have been really up there. The focus on profitable growth, which means there have been margin expansion as well as greater efficiency on the balance sheet items, both on fixed capital as well as working capital. What this has meant is that the free cash flow generation has got better over the years. If you look at the current year, even after working capital and CapEx, the free cash flow generation was about INR 150 crore for FY 2025. Along the way, as I mentioned, we started off as a color cosmetics company. Today, we have a fairly large fashion business. We have the Superstore business, which Vishal spoke about. There has also been investment in new growth businesses. There have also been strategic acquisitions, which have done very well for us. Dot & Key is one example, which Advaita spoke about. Earth Rhythm is also a recent acquisition. All in all, when you look at it, there is continuing investment for growing the core businesses. There is investment going into growth businesses as well as into starting capital. This slide actually summarizes the overall picture. Today, the Nykaa ecosystem has already grown to a consolidated GMB of close to $2 billion in terms of GMB. All of this has been achieved by raising just about $140 million in Nykaa entire lifetime. This is really a reflection of the focus of Nykaa, where we are quite sharply focused on unit economics, growing profitability. All of this has ensured that with raising a capital of just about $140 million, what we are actually doing is that the strong cash approvals, which are generated by the beauty business today, have actually gone into strong growth of the growth businesses, which is Superstore as well as fashion. Key takeaway, just to summarize, as an organization, yes, we continue to remain razor focused on unit economics. That's something which is very much in our DNA. Funding for growth businesses coming out of internal approvals, efficiency in terms of CapEx utilization has resulted in consistent improvement on ROC. The point to note over here, and I would like to sum up by saying this, is that as the growth businesses also scale up and mature over time, the efficiency will only see further traction. That's really the summary of where we are headed from here. With that, I would like to give it back to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ganesh, for taking us through what it takes to build an organization with consistent growth and simultaneously prioritizing long-term value creation. With that, we come to end of the presentation section, and we will begin the Q&A section after a quick five minutes reset. Hang in there while we sort of get all of the leadership on stage, and then we can get started the Q&A.