Good evening, everyone. This is Sunita Sachdev. I'm Head Investor Relations and Strategy at FSN E-Commerce Ventures. It's my pleasure to introduce our management for the call today. On the call with me today is Miss Falguni Nayar, Executive Chairperson, MD and CEO. Mr. Anchit Nayar, Executive Director and CEO of Beauty E-commerce. Miss Adwaita Nayar, Executive Director and Co-founder, CEO of Fashion. Mr. P. Ganesh, Chief Financial Officer. Over to you, Falguni, for opening remarks.
Good evening. Thank you, Sunita. Thank you for joining us on the call today. It's always a pleasure to interact with all of you. I would like to start the presentation now and request that you bring the slides. Talking about the performance highlight, I'm really happy to say that for the fourth quarter of this year, financial year 2023, we have come out with a GMV growth of about 36% year-on-year at INR 2,045 crores. The revenue has grown at 44% standing INR 1,301 crores. Gross profit continues to be strong at INR 575 crores, which is a 35% year-on-year growth. The gross margin come out at 44.2% which is a 54 basis point improvement over the year ago.
On the EBITDA, the growth has been even stronger at INR 70 crore. EBITDA at INR 70 crore is basic growth of 44% year-on-year growth. The EBITDA margin has come out at 5.4%, which is 147 basis point improvement over year-on-year. Profit before tax is at INR 8.6 crore, 48% year-on-year growth and the PBT margin of 0.7%. I'd like to highlight the difference between EBITDA margin and PBT is all investment for the future, which I'll share in my next few slides. The PAT growth has come out at INR 2.3 crore, which is less healthy than expected. I think some amount of that is due to, you know, due to proper tax planning. Moving on. Looking on a full year basis, again, the GMV growth is at 41%.
GMV is INR 9,743 crores. Revenue is at INR 5,144 crores, which is a 36% year-on-year growth. Gross profit is at INR 2,278 crores, which is a 39% growth year-on-year with gross margin at 44.3% which again is a 73 basis point improvement on a year-on-year basis. EBITDA for full year is at INR 256 crores. Again, a 57% year-on-year growth and EBITDA margin at 5% from the year ago. Profit before tax is at INR 38.4 crores, a big 19% lower on a year-on-year basis, with the profit before tax margin at 0.7%, slightly worse than a year ago. Finally, the PAT is at INR 21 crores. Again, a degrowth and PAT margin of 0.4%.
Moving forward, I'd like to take you through some of the important items and composition of the GMV growth. Here you can see that our consolidated GMV growth was 41% for the full year. I will stick to the full year numbers while you can on our presentation, see the quarterly numbers too. On a quarterly basis, the consolidated growth is 36% on GMV, whereas 41% on a full year basis. As you are all aware that fourth quarter is a slightly seasonally lower quarter compared to third quarter in India, which is a strong quarter. Talking about the beauty category, again, the full year growth has come out at 33% on GMV basis, and the GMV stands at INR 6,650 crores. On the quarter basis, the beauty grew at 29%.
Beauty GMV grew at 29%. On the fashion side, the full year fashion growth on GMV basis at 47% with fashion GMV at INR 2,570 crores almost. On a quarterly basis, the fashion GMV grew 38%. Finally, as you're aware that we are building other businesses like the Superstore, which is our B2B business, Nykaa Man, as well as international businesses. These together grew at 204% on a GMV basis, on a year-on-year basis. Their GMV has come out at INR 525 crores. In the fourth quarter, the GMV for these businesses was INR 152 crores, which is about 170% year-on-year growth. Moving on the composition of the GMV.
I just wanted to highlight that our investment in fashion is paying off, with fashion GMV now contributing as much as 26% plus of our annual total GMV of the full business. The full business GMV is at INR 9,743 crores, of which beauty now accounts for 68%, fashion at 26.4%, and other businesses contribute 5.2%. As we said that we are trying to address larger addressable markets with a view to provide acceleration in our growth, and that is very evident from these numbers. From our, one of the important focuses here was to accelerate customer acquisition. Towards that, we have invested in each of the customer acquisition for each of the platforms.
If you look at the beauty platform, where we have acquired, our annual unique transacting customer this year are at 9.4 million, which is a growth of over 22% from the previous year, where our annual unique transacting customers were at 7.7 million. The next number, a small pink box, is for our stores. In the stores, we service about 0.6 million customers this year compared to 0.3 million last year. This is increase in 73%. On the fashion side, we had annual transacting unique customer base of 2.5 million this year compared to 1.8 million a year ago, which again is a 39% growth year-on-year.
Finally, the last element, which is, you know, like in Nykaa, like on Superstore basis, where again customers are not really the consumers, but retail stores and others. It also has Nykaa Man numbers where there are certain consumers. For all of the other category, our annual unique transacting customers are at about 500,000, which again is a 30% growth over previous year. With this, total cumulative customer base that Nykaa serves so far is about 24 million. A pretty large number. Moving on. I also wanted to say that it looks like we've been investing in our employee headcount, but I wanted to throw more color on that. While our employees have numbers of... This is the employee count.
While it has gone up from 2,764 in financial year 2022 to 3,177, what I wanted to highlight is that there is an increase in retail and sales employee as we rolled out our retail stores as well as we roll out our private label brands and many other brands into what we call a GTMT distribution. This particular category of employees now accounts for 32.3% of our total employees. Again, what you can see is that there was a large amount of investment in employee growth last year, but most of it was especially in the category of stores and sales employee count. We saw that post-COVID, after two years of COVID, there was an opportunity to expand our offline distribution, and that's where this big focus was made.
That we have here given all the four quarters of growth in what we call store and sale employee count. You can see even in fourth quarter, that continues to be at 42% year-on-year growth. On the other side, the core employee growth has now slowed down. After early investment in core employee growth of 27% and 25% the first two quarter, that growth has now slowed down to just 4% by the time the fourth quarter came. This result is evident in the fact that if you were to deep dive in our financial numbers, you'll be able to see that the employee cost for the fourth quarter has kind of remained flat on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
Moving on, even when we are investing in employees, which is the core employee figure that I talked about, removing sales and distribution employees, a lot of this investment is towards technology. From the core employees, which were 2,063 employees in 2022, that has grown to 2,150 employees in 2023. This is increase of 24%. Within that, the tech has grown faster, the tech employees have grown from 389 to 482, 24% is the growth for tech employees. Tech employees have grown at 24% on a year-on-year basis. On the tech cost, tech employee cost perspective, in fact, the growth has been even higher at almost 73% growth.
All of you are aware that there was inflation in tech costs last year, and the tech employee cost has risen from INR 2,280 crores to INR 435 crores. This particular increase amounts to almost 73% increase. Sorry, Moving on, I also wanted to show that I mean, the work that is being done by the tech team. This is the entire tech investment is investment for future capability building. Right now, there are a lot of very exciting projects which we've invested in the last year, and I would like to highlight some of those. Personalization has been a big priority and some of the work on that I'm sure we always say that our execution is an open book. You can see it on our apps.
A number of personalization features are being rolled out, and they're evident and very much visible on our website. We also are building seller panels to be able to service our sellers on the fashion side better. The seller panel, a lot of investment have gone to building this new technology. Similarly, ad tech is another big area of focus and improvement, as you're all aware that we've always enjoyed good ad income and we're now taking our ad platforms to best-in-class in the world, so that our brand partners have the best-in-class ability to manage their ad investment in our company. In addition to that, we built a B2B2C capability to help us manage our fashion image better, where we'll be able to get access to only the warehouse inventory of our brand partners.
With this capability, we are able to get, you know, the fashion inventory from our brand partners, be it to their warehouse, be it their, in their stores or, you know, wherever that inventory sits, we are able to get access and deliver from there. In addition, a lot of work being done on the attribution engine side, a lot of work being done on improving customer journey, huge investment in MarTech so that we can support complex journeys. Also fair amount of investment in AI and ML from a discovery and recommendation perspective and many more. Going forward, also we made the investment in infrastructure as well as in retail. Here we've given 4-year numbers so that you can understand why we're lagging behind.
Like you can see in physical stores in the year, financial year 2021, our stores grew only 18% due to COVID impact, hence we accelerated the growth in store, physical store, which is area in lakh square feet. This has grown by 59% in financial year 2022 and another 43% in the current year. Now our physical store area sits at 1.5 lakh square feet across all of India. On the warehouse, similarly, like you can see the investment was quite subdued in the year of 2021. On back of that, for two years, we've invested and grown our warehouse capacity by 41% and 79%. This year there was almost an 80% increase in our warehouse capacity, now our warehouse capacity stands at 6 lakh square feet.
On the office space, again, you can see that because of COVID work from home, we actually let go of some amount of space, and that resulted in minus 19%, you know, degrowth in our office space. On post-COVID, we are believers in everybody coming to work. We are encouraging our employees. We are believers that coordination, cooperation, all that is much better when employees come into work. With that philosophy, we have taken more office space, and that is now for this year, another 68% growth at 1.9 lakh sq ft. We do believe that investment in warehouse and office space is now at the last leg. Most of the investment is over. Very little remains for next year, though physical stores will continue to grow over a period of time on a more prudent basis.
With that, I hand over to Anchit to talk about the beauty business.
Yeah. Hi. Thank you very much. I'll kick off the section on BPC. If we go to the next slide, this is just to remind everybody about what is the total addressable market and how it looks today in 2022 and how we expect it to look by 2027. If you look at 2022, the Indian BPC market is about a $19 billion market in US dollar terms, and that's expected to grow at a CAGR of about 10% over the next five years to a $31 billion market.
Within that, you can see that the online share of BPC is the fastest growing channel within the segment, and that's expected to grow at a CAGR of 29%, taking the online BPC market from roughly $3 billion in size today to about $10 billion in size by 2027. That's where Nykaa.com is a key player. If I look at the organized sector, that is expected to grow from $5 billion-$9 billion, so 14% growth, that's where our specialty retail brick-and-mortar stores such as Nykaa Luxe, Nykaa On Trend, and Nykaa Kiosks are playing in that segment of the market.
Finally, for the unorganized beauty sector which has historically been the majority of the market, that is expected to grow almost around just about 1% or so, and that'll be about a $12 billion market. That's kind of where our Superstore business that we'll talk about in subsequent slides, that's the best market for that business. If I look at what are the major growth drivers for BPC consumption in India, it is there's a couple of factors. First and foremost is that the per capita consumption of beauty in India is still relatively low compared to other similar markets in other parts of the world. That number is set to grow on a per capita basis quite meaningfully over the coming years.
Second, what we're seeing is there is a shift from personal care to beauty. And as I said, these numbers are for both beauty and personal care, but we are seeing a shift of consumption behavior from personal care to beauty, and that is again, a trend that is seen in other markets, as their GDP per capita and their consumption per capita increases there is this shift that does occur, which is beneficial to a platform like Nykaa, which is predominantly a beauty retailer more than personal care. Finally, as I spoke about earlier, there's continuously a shift from offline to online. There was obviously an acceleration in this shift that had occurred during the COVID period that had normalized slightly post-COVID with a return to offline shopping as well.
We think the two will both grow meaningfully in the coming years, but online will continue to outpace the growth of offline retail. Finally, there's a shift from unorganized to organized, in terms of the channel mix of offline retail. Next slide, please. Just to remind everybody, one of the key core value propositions of the Nykaa platform, and one of the five main pillars on which we're focused, first and foremost, is, we're focused on acquiring new customers and equally importantly, retaining our existing loyal, premium repeat customers. I think Aspen had mentioned earlier in the deck that, you know, for the beauty business today, we had 10 million transacting customers on a 12-month basis.
That goes to show you that we now have a very sizable customer base. Second is we pride ourselves on deep relationships with our brand partners. For us, our brand partners are crucial to the journey which we are on to expand the BPC market in India, and we continue to work very closely with them to help them achieve their objectives in the market. Third, we continue to penetrate across the value chain and the channels in order to address the large TAM, and that has been discussed in the previous slide, basis our expansion into both physical retail as well as our B2B business. Fourth, we remain committed to creating, acquiring, and scaling a portfolio of independent new age consumer-first brands, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the subsequent slides.
Fifth, we are always looking at new ways of retailing, what we call as the art of retailing remains a key priority for us and our ability and desire to maintain a very holistic consumer connect is something which we focus on every day. Next slide, please. Just looking at some of the key KPIs around our business. You can see that in terms of visits, our visit growth was 11% year-over-year from FY22 to FY23, and we had almost 937 million visits to the platform in this past fiscal. If I look at the monthly average unique visitors, that number now sits at about 22.7 million for the fiscal year 2023. That was about a 21% growth year-over-year.
Clearly there has been a focus on increasing the quality of visits and visitors to our platform that's reflecting in a healthy increase in this number. If I look at average order value, despite a large number of customer acquisitions as well as an increase in the volume of traffic to the platform, our average order values have remained healthy and have remained constant at about INR 1,857. If I look at orders, you can see that we serviced about 35 million orders in this last fiscal, and that was a 31% growth year-over-year. If I come to now the second set of key metrics that we track, our annual unique transacting customer base has increased to 10 million, which is a 24% growth year-over-year.
Our order conversion, this is order conversion. This sits at 3.7%, which is almost 50 basis points higher than last fiscal. We're having meaningful improvement in this metric over time. Finally, if you look at GMV, our GMV for FY 2023 stood at INR 6,650 crores, this is 33% growth year-over-year. As you can see in terms of mix of GMV, 78% of it comes from existing customers and 22% comes from new. Again, a testament to a very loyal, sticky and high repeat cohort of existing customers who tend to transact on our platform.
Speaking a little bit about our brand mix, as I had mentioned earlier, we have very strong healthy relationships with our brand partners. Today we have almost 3,400 plus brands listed on the platform. These include both international and domestic. If I look at our top 100 brands, roughly 28 of them are what we classify as international. 31 of them are FMCG brands, 31 of them are direct-to-consumer brands. 16 brands are in the top 100 are what we classify as luxury brands. 6 brands come from our own portfolio of what we call the Global Store. These are basically international brands which we import into the country and tend to retail with very limited distribution. Mostly, distribution that is limited to the Nykaa platform.
A very healthy mix in terms of the top 100 brands that contribute to our business. There is not much over-reliance on any particular brand, and there is a good mix between both international and domestic. In terms of new brand launches over here, for this past quarter, actually, this is 2 core brand launches. There were more in terms of number of brands that were launched, but just a couple to highlight for the audience. First is we launched Lancôme, which is a very popular luxury beauty brand that is owned by L'Oréal Group, that launched in India with Nykaa both in our online platform as well as in our physical retail stores.
We also launched the brand Farmasi and Simply Nail, which are smaller, more niche brands, but are very popular with certain customers. Those two brands were launched on the platform as well. In terms of own brands, this quarter we launched two new own brands. One is Navya, which is Nykaa's own Ayurvedic brand, focused mostly on hair care and skin care. We also launched a brand called Nudge Wellness. Nudge is a wellness brand focused on beauty from within. Next, please. This quarter, Q4, we also had a Pink Sale. This was a very successful sale. We saw about 151% growth in GMV year-over-year versus a similar sale which we had done in February of last year.
We had over 2,000 brands participate in this Pink Sale. There was a lot of pre-buzz engagement activities that were done to drive traffic to the platform, and these are listed on the page. In terms of creating awareness and driving engagement for the sale, we partnered with a large number of influencers, and this allowed us to generate close to 144 million impressions during the sale period. We've also expanded our Watch and Buy. This is our social commerce feature where live streaming is conducted on the app itself. This proved to be very popular this sale with over 33,000 visits from customers watching the live streams on the app during the same period. Next, please.
If I look at our physical retail business, you know, we invested, I think, really for us to improve customer experience. We invested across building out our physical retail network. As you can see today, we have about 145 stores across the length and breadth of the country. We cover today 60 cities across India and this is up from about 104 stores last year, so 41 new stores were opened this year. The physical retail business grew at 67% year-over-year growth, Today that business in GMV terms sits at about INR 550 crores of business and contributes to about 8-8.5% of the total Nykaa's total BPC GMV.
In terms of some other key metrics for the retail business, same-store sales growth in FY 2023 versus 2022 stood at 36% roughly. This is the cohort of stores that were opened prior to March 2021. If I look at the GMV per square foot, that number has also improved to about INR 3,271. The total area that we cover in terms of square feet of retail space is now at 1.4 lakhs and is a 46% growth year-over-year. Now moving on to our distribution of our own brands. Today, our own brands are available across almost 2,750 tender trade and modern trade stores, and that is a 41% growth year-over-year.
This business now is accounting for almost INR 275 crores of revenue to the company. As mentioned in the earlier section of this presentation, there has been a meaningful investment also in terms of fulfillment centers. We have taken our fulfillment center count up from 25 in FY 2022 to 38 in FY 2023. Today we have fulfillment centers across 15 cities. All right? The area growth in terms of the fulfillment centers has been a 55% growth. This has been driven mostly by regionalization strategy. The push was to increase the coverage, the regional coverage of our warehouses. This has played a very meaningful role in improving the customer experience, bringing down the order-to-delivery timelines and also helping us to reduce our fulfillment expenses.
As a result, our shipment ratio has gone from 1.3 to 1.17, again, a testament to the fact that a regionalization strategy for our fulfillment centers has played out nicely. Focusing a little bit more on our house of brands. You can see that from our GMV, there's been meaningful GMV growth in our own brands year-over-year. Today, our own brands constitute about INR 790 crore of GMV. That's about 12% of our overall BPC business. We have 12 own brands, the growth to GMV has been about 41% year-over-year. In terms of our key own brands, Nykaa Cosmetics, which is our largest own brand today, is about INR 250 crore brand on GMV basis.
Interestingly, and I think the good news for us is that now both Kay Beauty and Botaniq was an acquisition, a brand which we acquired. Both of these. Kay Beauty is a joint venture brand which we have with Katrina Kaif. Both of these brands today have also scaled nicely to be about INR 150 crores in terms of annual GMV each. We have now 1,600 SKUs across our own brands portfolio, and these brands are now distributed across 2,580 selected stores of both general trade and modern trade. Additionally, our own brands are now reaching 5,400 retailers through our E2B superstore app and business as well.
This is just some imagery of some of the new launches within our own brands that we had in Q4 of this year. You can see across Nykaa Cosmetics, Kay Beauty and Gentlemen's Fou, there were meaningful new launches in very important L3s. Next slide, please. Even the brands which we either are, have an investment in or we have acquired, there has been meaningful new product development with their portfolios as well. Finally, just one additional new item we wanna share with the forum is, you know, we have a property that is known as the Nykaa Beauty Bar. The Nykaa Beauty Bar was an on-ground event where we invite our consumers to come and meet and interact with certain makeup artists and influencers as well as participating brands in a physical setting.
They're usually in malls where we have our own physical retail stores. After a period of about two years because of the pandemic, which, during which we have not conducted Nykaa Beauty Bars, the Nykaa Beauty Bar are back, and we are hosting them at a regular cadence. This is just one case study of one particular Beauty Bar which we held in Q4. This was conducted in Lucknow. This particular Beauty Bar generated almost 4 million impressions on social media. We had 1,300 customers in the Lucknow area who registered for the event. There were 16+ media houses and 11 influencers who covered the event to generate significant buzz and awareness for the event as well.
As you can see from the images, these are very well attended and are very, very highly sought after and anticipated by our consumers in the towns in which we host these events. Thank you. I think earlier in the deck we spoke about the investment which we've been making in technology, and on this slide we've just shown a few of the initiatives which were undertaken by the technology department this year that we thought is worth sharing with the broader audience. First is a big initiative around paperless picking. This has allowed us to basically move to zero paperization in our warehouses.
Importantly, what this enabled is, it has enabled us to increase the order fulfillment capacity and the productivity of our warehouse staff through this automated paperless picking technology that has been rolled out. Secondly, we've also launched an ability for us to nudge our consumers to complete incomplete shopping baskets through various interventions across both the PDP and PLP page. There's also been a big focus on personalization. One example which is pushing consumers to replenish certain products that they have bought in the past. Personalization has been a big area of development for us, where basically consumers' previous buying behavior or browsing behavior, we're able to personalize relevant assortment, the relevant product to show that particular consumer. Very beneficial for the consumer, very beneficial for our brand partners, and of course, for us as a retailer as well.
With that, I'll hand the mic over to Adwaita to take you through the fashion section.
Hi. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Anchit. I look forward to discussing the fashion business with everyone. To begin with, we remain extremely excited by the size of fashion market. The fashion industry is four to five times larger than beauty industry, and according to RedSeer, the fashion market was INR 77 billion in 2022, going to INR 147 billion, growing at a CAGR of 14% by 2027. You know, in terms of the key drivers that we see in the space, we think that the fashion industry is going to be driven by increasing digital penetration, the disruption by each brand, the definite willingness to try new brands, premiumization across the category, and then personalized experiences.
Customers are demanding more personalized experiences, finally, a shift from just raw fashion to lifestyle, including emergence of new categories like sport and leisure, technology, and the home category. When it comes to building Nykaa Fashion, I have five main focus areas. The first is customer acquisition and retention. The second is strengthening external brand assortment. The third is accelerating our own brand strategy. We see this as a real fashion-centric opportunity and a future moat for the business. Fourth, exploring new operating models and channels of growth. Finally, fifth, innovating via technology to constantly improve discovery, shopping, and post-order experience. Double-clicking on these. First, our total visits are up 14% year-on-year, hitting 504 million for FY 2023.
Our average monthly unique visitors are up 14% year-on-year to 17.3 million in FY23. In the bottom left table, you can see our AOV trends. On a year-on-year basis, we've seen a gradual increase in our AOV, and this is a reflection of our differentiated positioning. The FY23 AOV at MRP is INR 4,512, and at selling price, that's post discounts, it is INR 2,547. Overall, the majority of these discounts are funded by the brands. Moving on, we now see the bottom right. You can see that orders have grown at 40% year-on-year to 4.8 million in FY23.
Importantly, our conversion rate, which you can see below the bar line, has increased from 0.8% last year to 1% this year. This has been a really big focus area. Sorry, let me move back. In summary, we're really focused on finding and attracting the right type of customer. We're also really focused on improving the site experience to drive conversion. Driving visits for the sake of visits is really not the focus. It's this strategy which is now paying off. You'll see it later that our marketing spend has come down significantly. In quarter four, our marketing spend is at 27.3% of NSV versus 30% for the same quarter last year. Moving on to slide 32.
Our trailing 12-month customers, so these are consumers who transacted with us in the last 12 months, has increased to INR 2.5 million by the end of quarter four, and this is a 39% year-over-year growth. The fashion GMV grew from INR 17.5 billion to INR 25.6 billion, which is a 47% growth year-over-year. From a quarter perspective, it's grown 38% year-over-year, reaching a Q4 GMV of INR 6.6 billion. Finally, the chart at the bottom left shows the mix across women's, men's, home, and kids. While we are predominantly focusing on women and men's, you know, I am excited by the fact that kids can be a future opportunity that we tap into at the right time. On the next slide, I talk about assortment.
I really think that assortment is at the heart of our business, and providing curated and fashion-forward merchandise is our right to win. We look at assortment in a couple different buckets, and I'll walk you through that on this slide. The first is the bucket in the top left, which is the popular brands that already exist in India and have strong customer recall. These are your Puma, Biba, Marks & Spencer, Raymond, and Adidas. Being a strong partner for these brands is extremely important for us and will always be a focus. It's the next couple of buckets where our differentiation arises. First, we'll talk about Global Store. This is our portfolio of international brands that we've brought into India, often exclusively on our platform.
It's been our largest focus area over the last 12 months, and some key partnerships that we've had include Revolve, which is currently one of the world's most leading fashion retailers. We integrate with their entire site. They're a retailer, so they have over 500 brands, and we're able to bring those 500 international brands to the Indian consumer. Another big one is Alo Yoga. Again, one of the world's most popular leisure brands, which we've launched exclusively in the country. There's Cider, which is again, an exclusive launch that we've had, which is a very popular Gen Z brand. This whole offering is really resonating with the consumer, and today, the Global Store contributes 25% of our wear-to-wear sales. Moving on, in terms of differentiated offering, I talk about Hidden Gems.
This is a property I've spoken to you about before. It includes emerging Indian designers and labels, and it's really sought after. This is contributing 6% of Nykaa Fashion GMV coming from this assortment or 20% of the Indian wear assortment is coming from the Hidden Gems segment. Next, we have First In Fashion, which is really our new season focus. This is really what brands love us for, that we're able to sell their new season merchandise. In Q4, 23% of our sales came from new season merchandise, which is a fantastic metric. It's much higher than what we saw last year. Later I'll talk about some of the omni-channel technologies we've built, where we connect with brand stores, this is allowing us to get new season merchandise in a very timely manner. Finally, lastly, we have luxury offering, the responsible offering.
Smaller offerings, but again, provide that sort of layering and make our merchandise more interesting. Moving on, a key focus for us over the last few years has been to incubate and grow our own brand strategy. Our own brands portfolio is nurtured to occupy clear market and price positioning, and this slide here talks about the brands that we've acquired and then many that we have built internally. As you can see, we have 13 brands today, and we're trying to very systematically go after category by category, price point after price point, and at the same time, we're really trying to build brands that have great customer love and connect. These are not private labels that we're trying to build. In this year itself, we have launched 7 new brands, taking our count to 13.
Moving on, this whole private label portfolio, you can start to see some of the brands in terms of what they look like. you know, the point I'll make here is we have over 20,000 styles available across the brand, and every month we're launching 700 to 1,000 new styles. I think it is a very key ingredient of making Nykaa Fashion an interesting place and will be a very strong future moat for the business. Moving on. In terms of how this portfolio is doing from a GMV perspective, here you can see that the own brand GMV is at INR 3.3 billion for this financial year. It's a 141% year-on-year growth. It's something that I think we've done a terrific job with.
In terms of share of business, this own brands business is contributing 12.9% of the Nykaa Fashion overall GMV, up from 7.8% last year. If we look at this with penetration as an NFC perspective, it's even higher. From the 13 brands, the largest ones would be Twenty Dresses and NA-KD, which have crossed 150 crores and 85 crores respectively and are doing extremely well. Like I said, these are not private labels, but brands with true customer connect, and we aim for them to have their own identity. To this end, we retail on third-party commerce platforms, and we also have offline distribution visions. In terms of offline, here you can see that we've added MBOs for Twenty Dresses and RSVP. We're at over 112 MBOs. NA-KD by Nykaa has tremendous offline presence.
This is our lingerie brand. We've over 900 points of sale in terms of general trade and 4 EBOs, and we're expanding this. Overall, all of this third-party sales is contributing 48% of that, you know, 3.3 billion number. The point we're really trying to make is that these brands are really emerging well, and they do have traction far beyond just the Nykaa platforms. I think that's a great sign of customer connect. In terms of the quick new launch that we've done this quarter, I'm really excited about launching Mixo. This is a very Gen Z-focused brand. On the next slide, I'll show you a quick glimpse of what the imagery looks like. Moving on.
Here's a little glimpse of what our offline presence is starting to look like for some of these own brands. You can see the NA-KD stores on the top left. You can see some of the MBOs on the right. Can move on. Here I'm actually showing you this is not just private labels, but a multi-brand format that we've been experimenting with. We've spoken to you about it last quarter and quarter before. We've experimented with four stores this past year. They're ranging from 1,000 sq ft to 5,000 sq ft. A mix of own brands, but also a mix of curated interesting third-party brands. The idea is to create a new age format for multi-brand differentiated millennially focused fashion.
At this point, though, the intent is to get the format to work and to hone in on the size and the product market fit before we expand further. As and when we have more plans here, we'll update you. Here, just quickly, you know, we're always working on the operating model, so we're developing global drop ship, integrating with physical stores within the country. We've invested in warehousing space. Our warehousing capacity in fashion is on a 3.5x. While we remain super marketplace focused for our third-party business, as our own brands business becomes larger, we will need more space for that. On this slide we can show you a quick glimpse of what we're doing from a technology point of view.
Whether that's personalization, which the fashion platform has really embraced, that's a big part of our strategy going forward. Whether it's, you know, launching interesting customer features like be able to refund to wallet. A lot of innovation on the recommendation engine, which drives a huge part of our business, actually comes from these recommendation, which is what we recommend for the customer. On the next slide, you know, the ability to have live commerce, building a property called Editor's Picks, and then finally doing a bunch of events to engage with the customer and do right by the brands. With that, I'll hand over to Falguni to take us through the Superstore section.
I think on the Superstore section, just coming in on the size of market, I think this is a chart that is being repeated here from earlier chart that we saw on the beauty side. I think the GG&T market continues to be large at $12 billion. As a result, we saw the need to come in on, come in and have our offering there, and it comes in form of Superstore. This is a business we launched a couple of years ago, and like we said, that we want to serve the underserved, both in terms of brands, manufacturers, as well as the retailers. With that focus, we've been building a very specialist distribution channel.
Talking about, speaking about our performance in quarter four, like all of you can see here, that our transacting retailer count has jumped to about 1.1 lakh retailers, which is almost 5.8x jump from a year ago. The number of brands listed is also now at 190, and that's grown to 1.4x. I think there is interest from more brands, we're getting it slowly. We also have served retailers in almost 700 cities, which is 2.3x a year ago. Our order volume is at about 728,000 orders, which again has grown almost 15x from a year ago.
We have always believed that our technology footprint will allow us to succeed in the e-retail market and very differently compared to most of the markets. We have invested in our technology and this technology investment comes in 2, 3 forms. One is, we have developed features which are very retailer-centric, like one-click access to best price, because finally for a retailer, best price matters. Personalized recommendations for a retailer, again, very different from how the consumer will look at it. As well as on the BD, which are our feet on the street, we have now ability to have even lat and long check-in on sales and delivery, and that allows us to really monitor our networks much better for their efficiency. These are just some examples in scaling technology and infrastructure.
There are many more, but this is just to give you guys a flavor of the kind of stuff that is going on. I would like to now hand over to Ganesh to take us through the next section on financials.
Thank you, Falguni. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to take you through our quarter for FY 2023 and full year FY 2023 financial update. As you can see, slide number 48. Our revenue grew by 34% YOY during the quarter and at 36% in FY 2023. Gross profit grew at 35% YOY and 39% for FY 2023. Our gross margin was at 44.2% during the quarter and continued to be strong during the year at 44.3%. We achieved an EBITDA of 5.4% during the quarter, and for the full year this number stood at 5%, and this also benefited from the operating cost leverage. Our EBITDA grew by 84% during the quarter and by 57% for the full year.
Our PBT margin was at 0.7% in quarter for FY23, similar number for FY23. As Falguni mentioned, the drop between EBITDA and PBT margins on account of the investments we have been making for the business. There was also incremental impact of around INR 23 crores on account of India's lease a ccount here, which we'll dwell a little deeper in subsequent slides. Going to the next slide number 49.
I'd like to bring your focus on this slide in terms of operating expense as a percentage to revenue standing at 30.8% versus 16.7% in quarter four FY22, which is an improvement of 93 basis points YOY. Clearly, the regionalization of our fulfillment centers has enabled lower air freight and also rationalizing our marketing expenses. All of these have resulted in better leverage on this front. Fulfillment expense as a percentage of revenue was at 7.9% during quarter four FY23 versus 9.7% in quarter four FY22, which is an improvement of 180 basis points YOY.
marketing costs as a percentage of revenue was at 11% during the quarter versus 12.3% during the same quarter last year, an improvement of 130 basis points YOY. As Swati mentioned, while we have seen a slight increase in employee costs as we did hiring as I had referred to earlier. What I'd also like to share is that employee cost was flat during the quarter on a sequential basis, on a Q over Q basis. Going over to the next slide number 50. This slide will give you a better understanding of our EBITDA margins change YOY. As you can see, we have provided the EBITDA margin waterfall chart. Gross margins improved by 73 basis points led by change in category mix and change in factory label mix.
Fulfillment costs improved, this has been through our regionalization strategy, and this has seen an improvement of 164 basis points YOY during the year. Marketing efficiency attributes to improved marketing spend strategy resulted in an improvement of 129 basis points. Selling and distribution costs increased due to offline distribution of own brands and expansion of our B2 B business and increased by 80 basis points YOY. Employee costs increased due to investments into new initiatives and in-investment due to the tech function, and increased by 92 basis points YOY in FY 2023. Other expenses increased due to investment in infrastructure and technology. Going over to the next slide number 51.
This explains the waterfall from EBITDA margins to PBT margins, which gives a lot more color on the investments that we are making and its impact on depreciation, lease accounting, et cetera. While depreciation increased YOY on account of incremental CapEx in retail stores, warehouses, offices, lease cost increase has been due to additional retail stores, warehouses and offices as we ramp up infrastructure. Interest on borrowings increased YOY on account of incremental borrowings to fulfill working capital requirements. As I mentioned a while earlier, lease costs as per Ind AS was higher by around INR 23 crore for the full year versus the cash lease payout. Going over to the next slide number 52. Here we can see the vertical performance, which gives you a good insight into the economics across businesses. As you can see, the disclosure here is at a contribution profit level.
Many of the costs, for example, employee costs, et cetera, are used very dynamically across verticals, and it would be difficult to allocate these common costs on a quarter-to-quarter basis. I would like to bring your focus on the bottom part of the table as the cost items are calculated on an NSV basis as the three business verticals become comparable in NSV terms. Looking at gross margins, BPC margin was at 46.8% during the quarter versus 44.1% in Q4 FY22. Fashion gross margin was at 43.2% during the quarter versus 47.1% in Q4 FY22. Others gross margin was at 20.9% during the quarter versus 22.7% in the corresponding quarter last year.
We saw improvement in our fulfillment expenses for BPC because it's 7.4% versus 9.3% a year ago. For fashion, it was 10.4% during the quarter versus 11.7% a year ago. It was at 10.2% versus 14.8% in FY22. We have improved marketing expenses, as you can see, for BPC it was at 7.9% in Q4 FY23 versus 8.7% in Q4 FY22. In fashion, it was at 27.3% versus 30.1%. Others stood at 8.9% versus 23.2% in Q4 FY22. We have an interesting way on selling and distribution expenses, as you can see, for BPC it stood at 3.3% versus 3.5% corresponding quarter last year. Fashion, it stood at 2.9% versus 2.7% in Q4 FY22.
For others it was at 13.4 in Q4 FY 2023 versus 19.5 in Q4 FY 2022. Contribution margins have overall expanded by 360 basis points. For BPC, it was at 28.1% versus 22.5% in Q4 FY 2022. For fashion, it was at 2.6%, and for others it was at -15.6% versus -34.8 in Q4 FY 2022. Moving on to the next slide. Here we have the vertical performance for our business for the full year. Where again, we have demonstrated improved contributions despite investing in customer acquisition and incubation of new businesses which are fully deepening our moat. Gross pro-margins for FY 2023. BPC gross margin was at 46.4%.
Fashion gross margin was at 44.2%. Others gross margin was at 24.2% in FY 2023. Contribution margins have expanded by 280 basis points. BPC in FY 2023 was 26.5% versus 21.7% in FY 2022. For fashion, it was at 2.2% versus 2.8% in FY 2022. For others it was at -19.9% during the year versus -31.8% in FY 2022. Moving to the next slide. Here we have the full P&L account statement. As you can see, our revenue grew 34% YOY to reach INR 13,017 million in quarter four FY 2023. Our EBITDA margins stood at 5.4% during the quarter versus 4% in quarter four FY 2022.
Our PBT stood at INR 86 million in Q4 FY23. I believe we have continued to improve our scale efficiencies in this current macro environment and with the online, offline rebalancing, panning out. As is a major part of our investment across infrastructure and people. Moving to the next slide, which is the balance sheet. As we can see, our inventory days have been fairly stable. Also our receivable days. Payable days, when we look at it, I would like to also just point out over here that the trade payables and the other financial liabilities need to be read together to get a full picture of where the trade payables stay. Moving on to the next slide. Here we have summary of the cash flow.
As we can see, operating profits for the year stood at INR 283 crore. Working capital to support the increasing business went up by INR 309 crore, led by inventory build-up for the upcoming sale events as well as with the introduction of new warehouses during the year. CapEx for the year stood at INR 208 crore, while investments in subsidiaries and associates was at INR 70 crore. Cash and cash equivalents stood at INR 41 crore as of March 31, 2023. Thank you everyone for attending the Q4 FY23 earnings call. I would now like to request Brinda to kindly initiate the Q&A session.
Hi everyone. Please put in your Q&A questions in the Q&A box. We'll take about two minutes and then start the Q&A accordingly.
I think I had seen certain questions on physical retail. I just wanted to, you know, highlight that we give consolidated omni-channel numbers most of the year, and only at the end of the year we give the mix in terms of what % of our turnover is contributed by retail. I want to just, you know, share that as far as our retail business is concerned, it is able to cover all fully cost, like all of the costs. Like you can see that it now contributes for almost 8.3% of our GMV. It's been able to, I mean, cover its full cost of the business. The stores have been profitable throughout the year on a fully costed basis, which includes recovering the depreciation and interest costs also.
Okay, we move on to the second question then. What is the expected growth in personal and other expenses in FY 2024?
I think, we would not like to give very clear, I mean, too much of a guidance towards where it'll come out next year. All I can say is that, we were quite conscious about the fact that, last year the employee costs, kind of grew a lot, and we tried to explain it by how these investments were made in the area of technology, in the area of sales and distribution network, as well as well as, our new businesses that we were supporting. However, since then we have taken cognizance of the fact there was need to control these. The core employee growth in headcount has been brought down to as low as 4% in fourth quarter. I think this will continue, this emphasis will continue next year also.
We are being extremely prudent about our people costs in the core business. Of course, the retail and sales employee in the store roll-out will happen. Even as far as the store roll-out is concerned, we are being prudent and cautious about the store roll-outs from this current level of stores that we have. I'm not saying we won't do them, but, you know, the planned store roll-out is also prudent. I think given all of that, we do feel that our people costs will be, you know, under control in the coming year. I think people costs I've answered. I think general expenses also, we think they were a little bit out of control, and they are being brought under control, but it's harder to explain that.
The next question .
Sure. The next question is, when can we start witnessing fixed operating costs, capital leverage payout, resulting in higher P&L margins going forward?
Like we said that, we have been controlling all items of costs. First focus was on our fulfillment costs, and you can see we got it quite under control. Second is, of course it, we had to invest in warehouses to do that. Of all our investment below the EBITDA line, 25% of that investment was towards warehouse. We think that warehouse roll-out is at the end of the cycle, and there should not be too much investment in warehouse at least for next one and a half years. That's on the fulfillment side. I think on the, I think that's where some amount of curtailment of costs will happen.
I think from store perspective also, while we may roll out fair number of stores next year, but on a base of 145, that growth will be lower and have a little, again, you see some curtailment on that count. I think below from EBITDA to PBT line, it's this element of lease rentals and depreciation and amortization, which we are definitely controlling. We also see these as investments for the future. We are being very prudent about doing what is right for the business. I think we do believe that these are right investments for the business. As far as above EBITDA line is concerned, a lot of improvement had already come into fulfillment and marketing. The same focus on improving those will continue.
There was some amount of lack of focus on employee and other expenses and that you will see change this year and there should be, we are hoping that these, turn green next, in the coming year. I mean, the rate of change turns green in the coming year. Brinda, you want the next question?
The next question is, what will be the key margin drivers from here on? Do we see double-digit margin possible in the next 3-4 years?
I'm assuming you mean EBITDA margin, or are you talking about PBT margin? I think it's not very clear from the question, probably. Okay. From an EBITDA margin perspective, it is a mix of margin. I think that's why we give the sharing information for our businesses. Both our beauty business enjoys very good EBITDA margin and fashion business is at an investment phase. As we feel that one of the important element of cost there is marketing costs. As the mix of new customer to repeat customer ratios improve, marketing cost comes down. We've seen this in beauty business where over a period of time, as the repeat customer ratios improve, the marketing costs come down. That would be driver of profitability improvement. In the other businesses in, on Nykaa Man it would be a similar thinking out.
There is Superstore business, I think, again, with scale will come improvement in marketing and sales and solution costs, you know. I think the Superstore business has more sales and distribution costs, and there with, increasing scale, you'll see improvement in that cost. Yes, there is possibility of, you know, better, margins on the EBITDA level as more and more of our growth businesses turn to maturity phase, where the cost structure on marketing and other selling and solution costs improves.
Okay. Next question is, Fashion contribution margins continue to worsen year-on-year for full year, while similar for the quarter despite higher scale. How do we get benefits of scale in this business?
I think you know in this, please do remember that, all our businesses like beauty and personal care is a combination of beauty online, physical retail, which like we showed now is close to 10%. Obviously, e-commerce profitability is better than physical retail profitability, but we believe that right mix is needed because why should Nykaa customers go into third-party retail stores when they want to once in a while try out something like a foundation or lipstick? In my mind, physical retail is a certain investment that we need to make, even if it is adverse on overall profitability. The optimum mix of online, offline and beauty is what we are chasing. Beauty is supported by private label, which can grow faster, in which case again, the profitability can improve.
Similarly, fashion is also a mix of both, Fashion.com, which is a platform level profitability as well as private label brands. Like you saw in the organization that Rebecca shared, we have invested in a lot of fashion brands in the last year, and many of these are essential to success of the platform itself. These brands have all, as they come of, they become like some of our old brands, like Twenty Dresses and Nykd, which are at a higher scale, they are profitable. Obviously, as you launch the new brands in the initial time, initial years, first year, you end up making more investment in taking, getting brand get off the ground. I think the fashion margin also need to be seen in light of a consolidated fashion business, which has invested in lot of private labels.
These we believe next year, private label business for fashion will be kind of breakeven. The platform business of fashion also can break even anytime if you don't acquire new customer, but we want to continue to acquire new customer. As far as the mix of new to repeat customers, 50/50 or 60% are new customers being acquired, I think it is hard to bring down the marketing cost. As the business becomes large enough, where the new customer ratio versus repeat customer ratios are better, which happens in third, fourth and fifth year. Now we are entering fourth year of fashion. As that happens in fourth and fifth year of the business, we do feel we'll be able to bring down the marketing costs.
Yeah, I think just to add to that, I feel like, you know, building any new business, there's a year of sort of like peak loss, peak investment. I definitely feel FY 2023 was that year of fashion. The intent is, you know, you turn the corner, and you're coming down the hill from there. It was also sort of the peak year of investment and it is sort of the natural cycle of building a new business.
I think just to repeat what because I saw one of the question and to repeat what Ganesh said, just believe us when we say that a lot of our employee costs are for fixed platform, like on the technology side. As much as 65% of our employee cost is a fixed platform cost and platform cost, not one platform, but multiple platforms that are being shared by multiple businesses. Because of that nature, we don't allocate our employees across the 3, 4 business verticals. There is a, you know, fair amount of employee costs across the finance and tech and all, which is a central cost. Now these can be allocated on some basis of revenue or or or say revenue or NSV, which you...
I mean, I think most likely revenue or NSV, which I think all of you can also do because you have all the elements available there. That is the reason why we are going all the way up to contribution margin, which are all of the direct attributable costs, and we are not going below that in allocating the employee costs.
Okay. Next question is, FCF as well as OCF for the company continue to be negative and net cash on balance sheet seems to be zero. How do we manage our cash requirement? Do we need to raise funds, as a 52 group?
As far as the business is concerned, you would have seen that the beauty business is making significant amount of money. At the same time, Nykaa Fashion business, which is relatively newer, is still in investment phase. Same thing holds good for the EB to B business as well, which is actually the first year of business. In a sense, we are looking at all these businesses and the beauty business in a sense is actually also helping fund the growth of the newer businesses. When you look at the overall cash position, what you would see is that the operating profits have more or less gone to fund the working capital increase. That's what you're seeing in full year FY 23.
What I'd like to also say is that we manage our cash flows quite dynamically. We still have some amount of putting up the from the IPO, which will be utilized over the next one year. There are also banking lines which are available and in terms of credit lines. That's the way we look at the funding happening going forward. What I would also like to add on this.
is that while there has been a good amount of increase which we are seeing in working capital, as the scale increases, the working capital base will also start moderating, and that will also mean that the amount of funding which gets locked in working capital, we should see some moderation going forward.
Okay. The next question is from Mahal. Is the fulfillment cost and marketing expense readjusted to current trends permanently? Also, in marketing, is the focus on performance marketing like conversion more efficient from an overall spend perspective?
I'll take that question. I think from a marketing perspective, we've been the believers in performance marketing and I think about 85% to 80-85% of our spends are on performance marketing. I just say 80, 85 because there are certain enablement costs which fall between performance. They're also partly maybe towards performance marketing. That's how it is. We do non-performance marketing is, or you can say non-digital marketing is less than 10-15% for Nykaa. I think on the fulfillment costs, we do believe that these are new fulfillment cost number which are here to stay, and there we are very focused on really. There are big projects which are tech supported for improving, giving certain serious advantages to our warehouses and how they operate.
With that, their productivity and everything, productivity as well as efficiency would go up. We do believe that, these benefits will stay unless some huge inflationary pressures come on the courier networks.
Thank you. The next question is from-
We continue to again emphasize that our warehouse rolling network rollout is also almost complete, with the exception of one or two small warehouses, at least for next one and a half year period. That also will not lead to additional hits below the EBITDA line.
The next question is from Kapil Singh. Can you talk about market conditions that you're observing in beauty and fashion? Is there any divergence in trends? I ask because the NSV growth for fashion business has slowed down and lower than beauty business on a dollar basis. Do you still expect fashion to grow much faster over the next two to three years?
On the beauty side, I don't know if Anshul wants to come in and talk about the global. Anshul, do you wanna talk about the global, you know, what we learned about how strong the beauty business is from a global perspective?
Yeah.
I mean, these are both driven. Yeah, just come in for a minute. The two are driven from different perspective. I think beauty currently is doing very well globally, and we are seeing the benefits of that. Anchit Nayar will talk more about it. On the fashion from near-term perspective, the physical store network of domestic brand was very large, and as a result, as this domestic stores opened, there was some adversity in growth. We are continuing to build the international brand on our platform, and again, there's a lot of interest and that will help with growth. With that, I hand over to Anchit Nayar and then later towards Adwaita.
Thank you. Look, I think, you know, if you look at it from our global brand partners, their perspective on India is that it has become a key priority market for them, especially after everything that happened in China. You know, the kind of lockdowns that they faced in China, the kind of impact to their business they saw there. I think a lot of global partners are looking to diversify and de-risk from that market, and India is a clear winner in that scenario. I think, in terms of long-term strategic priority, India has emerged as probably top 2 or 3 priority markets for most global beauty companies. That is, of course, very good news from us and good news for players like ourselves.
That being said, I think, you know, if you look at some of the data that's out there in terms of the last quarter Q4, with regards to BPC volumes, that was slightly muted. Numbers that we have is around 11% volume growth for BPC online. But you know, we've obviously grown a lot faster than that. As you can see from our results, we've outpaced the online BPC growth that is currently being seen by other competitors in this space. I think there was a slight pressure on consumption of beauty in India in the short term in the past few months because of inflation and certain price hikes that brands had passed on to consumers.
We think we're beyond that, and we're past that now, and we do see consumption at quite healthy levels in the short term. I think long term, the picture is still very, very bright. As I said, a lot of global focus on India as a market. As I spoke about earlier, the per capita consumption is at some of the lowest levels in the world, and we are all seeing very early signs that this is improving in a very meaningful way. I think outlook over the next 12 months is positive. Yeah, there is some short-term pressure that we saw in the past quarter, that the industry saw, which didn't impact us too much because obviously our customers are more premium. We are on the prem...
on the slightly more premium scale when it comes to our customer base, and so we didn't feel that impact, to the same extent.
Yeah. I think I can come in a little bit on fashion. I think a couple of, you know, thoughts and points of view on what's happening. I do feel that last year and the year before that was an amazing period for fashion, given COVID and given the fact that there was this insane digital uptick in penetration and I do feel that fashion, Nykaa Fashion really benefited from that and grew extremely well for the prior 2 years. I think this year that we have just ended was working off, you know, a more normalized world where we did definitely see that demand wasn't, you know, definitely going back a bit offline, and the growth that was so easy in the first 3 years didn't feel as easy in this past financial year.
I think you also saw a bit of change in behavior when it came to returns. You also saw during COVID there wasn't much returns at all, and in this past financial year, returns picked up as well. That would be affecting NSV a little bit. I think the second philosophy I've sort of developed is that fashion is a massive market. Growth is not the challenge. Actually, one can grow very, very easy. We have some, you know, competitors out there who've shown us a playbook on how that can be done. I think there's a lot of bad noise in that type of growth. It can be very, you know, it can lead to a lot of pressure when it comes to profitability.
I think this year has also been a year of immense learning when it comes to understanding what growth comes at what cost, and being able to kind of decipher what growth of all that type of growth you could get that you really want. Which brings me to my sort of first order of philosophy, which is that we've really honed in on deciding that at least for the next six months, nine months, we wanna get the right quality of traffic and the right quality of growth. You'll see us really focusing a lot on the shape of the brands that we're selling, on the type of categories that we're selling, you know, the type of customer that we're acquiring. Everything from saying that we want more women.
You know, the retention of women is looking a lot stronger than a lot of other categories. We want X, Y, Z type of categories because their retention is better. We want these type of categories because their returns are better. You could say we're entering a phase of really trying to shape the type of business that we get, because we think that, you know, we'll then have the right unit economics in place, and from there it'll be easier to scale up.
That's kind of how I would summarize, that not just going after growth at any cost, but just really wanting to shape business in a way that helps us really get the right type of customer, the right quality, and not get distracted by high growth categories, but can have lower retention in the long run, lower long-term value in the long, long run, very bad return behavior in the short run, things like that.
The next question is from Sheila. One for beauty, one for fashion. Any guidance on the number of stores for beauty in FY 2024? For fashion, are there any headwinds you're witnessing in the fashion business? Do we expect growth rates to pick up in financial year 2024?
I think on physical store, I'll answer the question. We don't plan to do more than 50 stores this year for the beauty business. It will come off the base of 145 stores that we've ended the year at. That's one guidance I can give. As far as fashion is concerned, like Adwaita Nayar just said, that we are trying to pursue what we call as a right growth. I think the fashion industry is very large. Like, we always say that it's 5 times the size of the beauty market. There are a lot of brands in all categories where the business is fraught with high returns and high cancellations, as well as high costs of, you know... Like marketing costs are very high.
I think what Nykaa is doing is trying to work on basis that we build a business that is long-term sustainable with the right cost structure. Within that, the mix of new and repeat customer ratios drives the marketing costs. Till such time as, you know, we're still, like, we can say we started 4 years ago, but it's been 3 years of, you know, significant performance, in which case our ratio of new to repeat customers still is at, you know, 50/50 or, you know, slightly higher for new customer in fashion. Where is for beauty?
Um-
I think on beauty also I saw 1 question that, are we acquiring enough customers? I just wanted to say that while we don't give out numbers of new customer acquisition for different segments, but we wanted to just say that in the year we ended March 2023, we have actually acquired, more customers in 1 year for beauty compared to the previous 2 years. Yes, we are accelerating our pace of customer acquisition in beauty.
The next question is from Garima. Could you please give us an update on the Middle East business? What is the business? How much investment do you envisage, and timelines of the ramp up?
I think, what we were thinking is that, like we've announced, that we have a JV and it's, you know, we own 51% of the JV and we are working towards a plan to roll out the business in the second half of this year. I think there should be some interesting, you know, more, more detailed information on this business that will emerge, like as we do the planning and as we are working towards implementation. We are hoping that in our annual day later this quarter or very soon after that, we will share more details of the GCC business. It's an excellent market, very large market, high per capita consumption of beauty, high per capita income, very concentrated market.
Physical retail will have a very large share to play, and as a result, we do believe that it can be a market where investments pay off much faster than many other markets. I mean, when we talk about global brand partners, which Sanjeev talked about earlier, India and GCC tends to be their top priorities. Many of them are very keen to see Nykaa go into those markets and are supporting us in those markets. We do believe that with our strength in brand relationships, our strength in, you know, on technology and digital marketing and our partner strength in physical retail, getting the right location in those markets, knowing those markets geographically, we have a win-win partnership that can help us execute well. More details will come through next one of these quarters.
Next question from Kalan. Can you comment on the forward outlook for growth for each of the segments? Will slowing inflation help accelerate growth as some other consumer companies have mentioned?
Sanjeev, wanna take first for beauty?
Yeah, sorry, I didn't understand the question correctly. Can you just repeat that, please?
Do you think the growth in beauty business will accelerate next year?
Is that in relation to the inflation point? I didn't understand the connection.
Yes. That as inflation slows down, I mean, was inflation taking away footfalls?
Understood.
to a certain extent?
Yeah, I think as I mentioned earlier, there was some inflationary pressures. I think that has been commented on by some of the other publicly listed FMCG companies. There was a bit of inflationary pressure last year and certain price hikes that were taken and passed along to the consumers. We do see that trailing off this year. We think that it should be less of an issue for our consumers. It wasn't much of an issue for our premium consumers last year, and it should become even less of an issue for this year. I think, yeah, we are quite optimistic that that should help.
further fuel demand for both the online as well as the offline beauty business.
Adwaita Nayar, on the fashion side.
Yeah. I think, you know, with our size and scale, the platform is not necessarily facing pressure in this regard. I think there's enough room for us to grow quite comfortably without feeling necessarily the trends of inflation either way. I think, you know, the growth trajectory of fashion is a lot more dependent on the strategy we take in terms of how fast we wanna grow and where and when we want to grow, rather than external considerations. If I had to, you know, just give a little bit of direction, I think, if it's on a year-over-year basis, you know, that 47% GMV growth is definitely something we'd like to do again and hopefully with some improvements in NSV. Somewhere around that is what we'd like to achieve.
We're not giving up on growth at all, but I don't think there's gonna be some super dramatic slowdown at all. It's more just this year has been a lot about identifying the pockets, where one would like to grow.
I think if I may comment on the fashion side, I think there could be certain growth drivers through assortment, gaps that we may have in certain categories like maybe, denims or maybe T-shirts or maybe sarees, and there will be continued expansion of assortment in such selective categories where we may be lagging behind what we need to have. We are also extremely conscious to continue having this differentiated premium positioning in the market. We don't wanna be cluttering a platform with lot of low price affordable brands, which may give us quick conversion, but we believe that it won't allow the differentiation that we are keeping for the long term.
We are not chasing the highest possible growth in fashion, but we are chasing the right growth that doesn't dilute what the platform has to offer in terms of uniqueness. In fact, I think many of you may have read certain research which was recently published, what we wanna do is for those certain segment of the customers which you know Nykaa has always tried to approach customers from the top end of the consumption pyramid. For those, you know, our fashion platform is differentiated and preferred platform, that is the direction in which we're going, Aditi has described all the strategies right here.
I think within this, in fact, we make an extra effort to make customers aware of new brands, aware of, the more differentiated offerings and through that build consumption on our platform rather than try to, you know, try to build, revenue through, you know, going down the value chain. I think we're very conscious about the value appeal of the platform.
I think just to add to that, you know, I see a lot of questions coming through in terms of fashion growth. Really the priority is to break through from this, you know, 2.2%-2.6% contribution margin that you guys have seen in the past that it was at year-over-year. I definitely want to get that to a stronger place in the next couple of quarters before bringing the focus back to growth. I think being on this borderline kind of cusp, that to us is a non-negotiable, right? Our businesses have to be contribution margin positive. That's a non-negotiable.
Definitely getting into a much more comfortable place in terms of unit economics and cost structure before, again, further scaling up is the priority for all of us as teams. Like I said, shaping the business, renegotiating freight costs, fulfillment costs, working on a lot of these sideline items, lot of emphasis on marketing, bringing that efficiency, bringing S&P down. Just systematically going after every line, getting this contribution margin to a better place, and then scaling is probably what the next 12 months are going to look like.
Thank you. The next question is from Anand Shah. Any guidance on capping of losses in other verticals? Will it go lower in absolute terms from here on? Are you done with investments here? Any guidance here will be helpful.
I think we have said that we are hoping that for fashion this was a year of peak loss and from there the fashion losses will be lower for the vertical. We also shared this unit economics just to show where that improvement will come. We feel most of the improvement will come on marketing line as well as some improvement will come on the fulfillment expense side. This is a consolidated number, like I said, with the investment in new brands that we were launching is also built into this. As that investment goes down again, you'll see some improvement here. That's for the fashion. For the other businesses, opposition of number of businesses.
As far as the B2B is concerned, we do believe that the losses will not go up too much, but they may go up slightly in the coming year. It will be quite affordable from our overall, you know, overall earnings on the EBITDA perspective. From the EBITDA perspective, we are keeping an eye on that. We are controlling our rollout in B2B in a manner that doesn't lead to swelling of costs. I think we do believe that the B2B is strategically important business, which will be very valuable in the long run, and it is something that we want to invest in, but very conscious of making sure that we do it right.
Like fashion, it will first focus on being contribution positive, and after that it'll focus on achieving scale, which will help us lower both the marketing and overheads of the business. We are really controlling the overheads of the business quite tightly. Marketing expense in that business comes in the form of selling and distribution expense. We've taken a call to serve two concentric circles of areas that we service from our warehouses rather than going national. National will lead to much higher costs, and through that, we believe that we should be able to control our fulfillment costs in a way that we can make a difference to contribution profit for that business.
The next question is on fulfillment from Ravi Mehta. Would it be fair to expect per order BTC fulfillment costs seen in Q4 at INR 85 or so to be a new normal going forward on which we can see further productivity benefits?
Panchit, you wanna answer that?
Yeah. I think the question is the fulfillment cost on the BTC side sustainable? Is that correct at the current rates?
Yeah.
That's correct. Yes.
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, you know, for us there has been A lot of a focus on optimizing and bringing efficiency into that process.
You know, as we spoke about earlier, we have regionalized our warehouse footprint, which has helped to reduce the fulfillment costs. Albeit it has been, there has been a CapEx investment on that front. From a fulfillment cost perspective, it's helped us reduce the cost per order. I think the benefit should accrue in the coming years as well. I think there is more efficiency for us to drive within that cost bucket as we continue to focus on that as an area of cost initiative for the B2C business given our scale now.
A follow-up question. When you expect the personalization ad tech engine to be up and running, and when can we see the benefit in marketing support revenues in B2C?
Personalization is it has been launched on the platform and we are testing it and validating it. I think one must remember that, you know, personalization needs to be done in the right way. What I mean is that over-personalization or hyper-personalization too early on in India's consumption journey is also not the right move. You know, our whole goal is to increase the purchasing behavior of our consumers and to expose them to new types of products and new categories, and thereby driving an increase in the average basket size, helping them to premiumize their purchases and also increase the frequency of purchase in a year, right? I think those remain the key objectives, and so personalization needs to be done keeping that in mind.
If you over-personalize too early, then you are stifling the consumption journey that the Indian consumer is on. I think that is how we're looking at it. We have the ability to personalize, and we continue to improve and build out that capability. You will start to see benefits I think this year itself, but we will be doing it very cautiously. That is to address the personalization point.
I think if I may just add, you know, what is not coming out in our conversation is the kind of CRM and CLM focus we have now on, and we have a lot of information about our customers in terms of what they're browsing, what they're doing in terms of activities on the website or the app, and many things like that. All of those are being used towards individual personalized journeys. Some examples you can see here in terms of nudges completing the shopping or personalized replenishment nudges. Or, if they have tried the sample, then giving them coupons to convert it to sale. A lot of these are being used throughout the CLM, CRM journeys, and we are seeing big benefits of that.
If you see last year, we had a very strong growth in our repeat customers, revenues also. I think, yeah, somebody asked a question that are we relying too much on that at the cost of new customer? We don't see it like that. We see two different teams in our marketing, one working on new customer acquisition, and they have their own targets, and then the other is working on CRM, CLM journeys and they take all of the current customers and try to continue to make sure that they, like Harsh said, they buy more frequently, they buy, you know, they buy larger amounts and all of those. There were organic improvements in all of that, but we are also doing Nudge improvements in all of that.
Yeah. I think to address the second question on ad platform. To be clear, the ad platform is something which we are building to allow our brand partners, so the advertisers who advertise on our platform, to be able to make real-time changes and to see data on the performance of their assets on a more real-time basis. It's a lot more visibility to the brands which should help them to see better return on investment. Also what it does is a combination of personalization and ad tech allows us to actually increase the amount of advertising real estate which we're able to monetize. We are optimistic that that should play out nice this year. We'll see. A lot of work has already gone into it, and this is the year of realization of both ad tech and personalization.
This is Sunita Sachdev here. We do have plenty of more questions here on the chat box as well as on the Q&A, but we are definitely end for time, and therefore we promise to respond to each one of these to you. If there are any more questions, please feel free to contact us. With that, we'd like to call the call to a close. Falguni Nayar, would you like to have some closing remarks, please?
Yeah. Thank you very much, everyone. I think we've had a good engagement from a number of you all who've been on the platform, and just really, really happy to be able to come in and talk to all of you. Like Sunita said, we really value your support and interest in the company, and feel free to get in touch with us so that we can, if we can be of any help and, you know, to clarify any further questions that you may have. With that, thank you very much.
Thank you.